Favorite is not the right word.

I think there are different Ghibli movies for different questions.

Which is the most rewatched in my home? Probably Porco Rosso since it’s light-hearted and easy to consume. Miyazaki’s Magnum Opus? Mononoke or Nausicaa. Best to watch with your kids? Totoro, Kiki, and Ponyo. Most emotionally impactful? Grave of the Fireflies.

“Favorite” though? No idea. Depends on how I’m feeling.

You don’t have to speculate, my dude.

I’m saying go look up ANY product made by co-ops or unions… whether it’s clothing like Thorogood Boots, or even fucking cheese and dairy makers like Tillamook, unions and employee-owned type outfits just literally make better products.

Actually, traditionally unions have pretty much universally resulted in better quality products. Union made products usually are crafted by well-paid artisans who apprentice under masters of said craft.

See publicly traded companies only care about short term gains and maximum profit margin. They squeeze from every angle until everything sucks. Fire expensive experts with experience, outsource everything to the cheapest places, lower the quality of the materials, increase the price, milk every IP.

On the other side, union workers want to keep their jobs, and the best way to do that is to make sure people like their products.

They are not “perfect,” but they care about more than profit margins and short term gains.

The same way Digimon, Monster Hunter monsters, and every other unique IP looks nothing like Pokemon. Make completely original designs that don’t look like fan art or knock offs of another artist’s specific trademark style.

Let me be clear :

Copyright law as it stands right now is stupid, and should only benefit individuals from large companies looking to use their resources to steal from them without compensation.

I’m just talking about not letting junk companies pretend they made a game for your favorite IP in a way that lets them trick less-informed people.

It seems most of the actual copyright law benefits big companies as it is interpreted now… which is kind of the opposite of how it originally was intended.

I think that’s a pretty generous interpretation.

It’s like you are trying to pretend that character does not look like a Pokemon because their appearance WAS technically different… even though it uses identical parts from several actual characters from the IP.

So it should be counted as non-infringing because they simply re-arranged / mixed and matched those character parts like they were a Mr. Potato-head-esque / ransom note magazine assembly / amalgamation of interchangeable similar puzzle pieces?

And I just grabbed one of the first results from when you search Pokemon Palworld similarities… I’m not familiar enough with every single one to find a more egregious example, but again - let’s be honest. This is the IP equivalent of saying “I’m not touching you” while a sibling holds their finger right next to your eye as if to poke it.

I’m a little torn on this.

On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himself.

Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.

There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.

But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.

Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.

Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.

Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…

This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.

Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.

Yep. Best way to get a TV that will never sell your data or show ads is to literally blacklist its MAC address at the router level, and then assign the “smart” functionality to a device environment you control, like a Shield Pro with a custom launcher or an Intel NUC media PC or NAS or something similar.

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Snake? SNAKE?! SNAAAAAAAAAKE!

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Let’s be honest : the love is from one single thing - Nintendo’s game design.

Shigeru Miyamoto, and all the other major design leads at Nintendo like Masahiro Sakurai have been at this singular company for most of if not their ENTIRE careers and have done nothing but make video games for 40+ years now.

The game industry at large is riddled these days with 20-somethings and interns who’ve never shipped a game, or who are in survival mode and trying to just keep their heads above water employment-wise.

Many older game devs get burned out and change industry, or quit after a decade or so, and even the ones that stay never stick with the same company because so many cut staff after any game ships… except Nintendo and maybe a couple of other companies out there.

And it SHOWS. Nintendo’s game designers - like a 60 year old master carpenter or woodworker or a dwarven master blacksmith - have honed the artisanal craft of game design to a level of mastery otherwise unseen.

Yes Nintendo sucks at pretty much everything else not related directly to game design, but there’s a reason everyone tried to make their open worlds more like Breath of the Wild, or why Astro Bot seems to share so many platforming similarities with masterful 3D Nintendo platformers like Mario Odyssey, and why so many companies tried to copy Wii Sports at the height of its popularity.

Even games like Smash Bros have no comparable equal. Yes Sony did their own melee game featuring their IP, but to even try to compare the 2 games is a joke.

Outside of their masterful gameplay design… Nintendo IP is on the same level as Disney. Everyone else isn’t even Warner Bros. Animation Studios. They’re Hanna-Barbera.

It sucks that Nintendo is being greedy, but that Donkey Kong game DOES look fun and charming as hell and that Mario Kart game is something everyone will still go bonkers for.

Everyone knows what Steam does better, but there are a few things I wish they’d improve :

• more granular touch display
• higher resolution screen + larger higher res touch pad surfaces
• TMR sticks
• a REAL dock with simpler connection of some kind that doesn’t require a weird USB-C connected cable dangling off the top (but still would support 3rd party docks with that USB-C port)
• better vibration motors
• pressure sensitive face buttons (this hasn’t been done standard since the PS2 era, but would open up the possibility of PROPER PS2 emulation for games like MGS2 and MGS3, which STILL hasn’t been done right thanks to the disappearance of pressure sensitive face buttons)
• hot-swappable batteries that can be charged in the Deck or externally if needed
• haptic triggers
• NFC
• built-in microphone array to allow voice chat + isolation
• built-in simple web cam / IR sensor array for face tracking / video chat / streamer setup
• advanced optional stylus with pressure sensitivity / pointer function similar to a wii-mote that can be stored / recharged on top magnetically / wirelessly

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Hey I saw this episode of Silicon Valley!

Agreed with Costco… and used to agree with Bosch… until seeing this recent video.

I just kept an eye on Micro Center’s refurbished cards for a few weeks and was able to snag a 3090Ti late last year with a 3-yr warranty for the same price I paid for a 980Ti in 2015.