- Super Mario World (video game) (allthetropes.org)
Super Mario World is a 1991 video game produced by Nintendo as a launch title for their sixteen-bit console, the Super Nintendo. It features their iconic mascot Mario taking a vacation alongside his brother Luigi and Princess Peach (then still referred to in America as Princess Toadstool) to the faraway Dinosaur Land. There, as is prone to happen, Princess Peach is captured by Bowser and kept in his castle, this time located in the deep underground. Of course, Mario must journey through the entire continent to get to her, beating down Bowser’s loyal lackies/children, the seven Koopalings, along the way.
- Socrates (plato.standford.edu)
The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived. All our information about him is second-hand and most of it vigorously disputed, but his trial and death at the hands of the Athenian democracy is nevertheless the founding myth of the academic discipline of philosophy, and his influence has been felt far beyond philosophy itself, and in every age. Because his life is widely considered paradigmatic not only for the philosophic life but, more generally, for how anyone ought to live, Socrates has been encumbered with the adulation and emulation ordinarily reserved for religious figures – strange for someone who tried so hard to make others do their own thinking and for someone convicted and executed on the charge of irreverence toward the gods. Certainly he was impressive, so impressive that many others were moved to write about him, all of whom found him strange by the conventions of fifth-century Athens: in his appearance, personality, and behavior, as well as in his views and methods.
