More on Balthazar's Name

So I thought more about Balthazar’s name.

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Anyway, “Balthazar” comes from Chrono Trigger. Belthasar is the sage from the Kingdom of Zeal who built a whole bunch of cool stuff (including the final dungeon and your time travel plane) but then slowly lost his mind after he was cast into the distant postapocalyptic future when the Mammon Machine was activated. Aside from two very old stories that are best forgotten, I never really got into Chrono Trigger fandom, but I still think about that game all the time.

A Tale of Times Now Past

I was looking for grants to support critical writing about comics, and I followed a link and followed a link and followed a link, and I ended up at David Brothers’s old blog on Tumblr, of all places. This is specifically where I landed...

https://tumblr.iamdavidbrothers.com/post/126517772217/the-harpy-agenda-august-2015

...and there’s some other good stuff there too (although, based on one thing and another, I think a lot of the posts on the blog have been deleted).

Following a few more links on Tumblr made me remember how good essays on the site used to be before mid-2016 or so. Rising and aspiring writers and artists were making fresh and brilliant posts about representations of difference as an abstract concept, as well as super useful (and non-judgmental) posts on best practices for how to handle specific representations of specific cultures.

I really miss what Tumblr used to be, but there’s no going back, I guess.