The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

IDGAF about Palworld as a game, personally. I’ve never played it and I don’t plan to. But that doesn’t make Nintendo’s behavior not bullshit, and I still hope the Palworld developers win this battle.

I am positive prior art could be claimed for most if not all of those. Square Enix could cry afoul of the “mounting creatures” one as well as I’m sure many, many other earlier games on a plethora of platforms.

You could mount and ride Chocobos in Final Fantasy 2, i.e. the real “2,” the JDM only one on Famicom, which was released in 1988. The aforementioned patent was only filed on Nintendo’s part in 2024.

They can, to use a technical legal term, get fucked.

It never has been, and if it ever were we wouldn’t have needed all those statues of the chick with the scales and the blindfold as propaganda.

Seems to be missing “hole,” “canoe,” and “whistle.”

There are retro revival consoles that aren’t deliberately made to looks like the original incarnations. I think the issue here was that the consoles being sold were deliberate counterfeits of otherwise valuable original retro machines.

For instance, litigious as they are Nintendo has either been unable or unwilling to snuff out things like the RetroN machines which play original Nintendo and SNES cartridges (and Genesis, and some others) but don’t claim to be a Nintendo machine or look like one in any way.

That said, I personally would totally buy a fake OG JDM Super Famicom just to have on the shelf, or even a shell just that looks like one.

Water heaters are also stupidly easy to install.

For some reason, in my locale you have to apply for a permit to replace a water heater. I strongly suspect the compliance rate with this asinine scheme is very near to zero. (For anyone reading this, yes, I will totally pay the state for the privilege of installing my own water heater in my own home when I switch mine to hybrid. Scout’s honor.)

$0.50 per kWh is absurd. Where we are, the power company charges $0.1065 on peak and $0.1001 off. (As in, about a dime.)

Note that this is still about 33% more than at the start of the pandemic. We were around $0.07 per kWh prior to 2021.

Chinese immigrants

I used to work at a Chinese restaurant an the number of people who came in there blithely asking me if we “really” cooked and served cats was astounding.

I got tired of answering the question so often that towards the end I gave up and my standard response was, “No, we only cook and serve idiots who go around saying we cook cats.”

I think the very low percentage of lost business was worth it. And this only because my boss told me that this kind of thing did not meet the criteria wherein I was allowed to roundhouse kick patrons in the teeth. If you’re going to be a dumbass, at least try to be original.

And for those of you not in the know…

Gradius, right? Konami’s many-sequeled, side scrolling shoot-'em-up game? They made a spin off series called Parodius (parody + Gradius, geddit?) and it was utterly bizarre.

I’ll just leave this here as an example:

This is the 2nd level boss from Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, one of the SNES incarnations. You are a cat wielding a loaf of bread as a shield, fighting not just a kaiju sized schoolgirl wearing bunny ears, but two of them, one standing on the other’s shoulders. Who attack you by throwing angry Moai heads at you riding on paper airplanes and stuff. This is after you fought your way through a shmup stage that’s a Japanese high school based on Konami’s visual novel property, Tokimeki Memorial.

In the first level you ultimately fight your way through a disco, blasting at, among other things, multicolored penguins who are wearing afro wigs. While a SNES chiptune rendition of KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way I Like It” plays in the background. The boss of that stage is an opera singing panda. I promise you I am not making this up.

Just… Just look at this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDEl1-tuzc4

And while we’re at it, a physical tactile keyboard.

That’s because on some ranges the drawer is a dedicated warming drawer, with its own heating element and independent temperature control from the oven. But some people see that once and then assume every range in the world is like that, but they aren’t. The feature appears to have been more common historically than it is now, as well.

Gas ovens pretty much exclusively these days, and that’s a cost cutting thing for anyone wondering. On cheap models, the manufacturer uses the same burner for both broiling and baking so they don’t have to pony up to include two separate burners, valves, and igniters. In broil “mode,” you just put the food item immediately below the burner in the drawer so it’s much closer to the source of the heat which is now also conveniently above it rather than below it.

My grandfather never really used his oven for anything, only the stovetop, so he stored boxes of cereal in his oven. You know, cardboard ones.

But when he hosted for the holidays, other people would show up and use the oven… We figured that out PDQ, but not before at least one box of cereal went up in flames.

I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.

So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…

But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.

We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.

As Dave Barry famously observed, the box a Water Pik comes in bears the warning, “Do not use while sleeping.”

Guns already have lengthy safety warnings etched into them. Unfortunately, there definitely isn’t enough space to describe every moronic thing people could do with them.

Recharging isn’t the issue, refilling is. The disposables are designed not to be refilled, so the manufacturer can turn around and sell you another entire one instead.

When deciding what to do, the order of trumps is legal, then prudent, then right. Do what is legal unless what is prudent is illegal, then do what is prudent. If doing what is right is neither prudent or legal, do it anyway because it’s right.

Never start fights with people. Always be prepared to finish a fight someone else starts with you, quickly, without posturing, hesitation, or mercy. Regardless of their size, shape, color, creed, or uniform, bullies can never be allowed to win.

When solving a problem, always start with the simplest possibility first.

Never lend anyone: Your truck, your pen, your chainsaw, or your wife. No matter what, they’re going to do something with them that you’re not going to like.

You can never have too many pens, flashlights, knives, or bullets.

That’s always been my take. I would also much rather be able to easily refill the thing with whatever I want – and have control over what’s going into it (insofar as anyone can, via buying through trusted sources).