It's probably a good idea, I can see why they're doing it, but the "Popular Searches" function still instinctively annoys me. Look, here's an easier way to conform! Jump on the bandwagon and join the herd today!

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These days I'm starting to wonder if Death Road to Canada won't turn out to be kind of prophetic . . .

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I have nothing against stories where there is no clear-cut villain. But the things is that Miyazaki will sometimes set things up with a clear villain to provide spooky atmosphere and then decide he just doesn't want what goes with the setup he just did. Howl's Moving Castle is a perfect example of this--the Witch starts out both very frightening with her weird creepy shadow-ooze minions and stuff, and a pretty horrible person--completely self-centred, clearly willing to kill on a whim, and shallowly materialistic. Then they sort of defeat her but then take her in and after a brief interregnum of being almost a vegetable, suddenly she's a kindly, wise old lady. I somehow don't mind, I love Howl's Moving Castle, but it makes no sense in daytime logic.

There's a lesser version of this in Spirited Away, where Yubaba, whose whole gig is using magic to enslave people and actually takes the main character's name away, sort of, gradually comes to seem like just a grumpy old employer who the main character embarrasses by calling her "granny" at the end. But it's not like she actually reforms, it's more of a shift of how you see her. And, maybe she's getting a bit softer from the influence of the MC. Maybe. At any rate, it pretty much works in the story--it's not like there had been any expectation that Chihiro was going to somehow defeat Yubaba.

This kind of antagonist personality shift I think happens in a few movies because Miyazaki seems to like creepy scary setups but does not so much like the violent conflict resolution that those creepy scary setups would logically point towards. It lets him have his cake and eat it too, and the imagery and sense of wonder are so strong, and the uplifting not-violent endings are typically so inspiring, that he can get away with it. But it doesn't mean that inconsistency isn't there, he just generally makes me not care very much.

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Reminds me of Merchant of the Skies. Even the Majestic Carrot probably wouldn't be out of place here.

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Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Clever concept, but I too wondered if their reach exceeded their grasp.

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There are key benefits if Linux goes mainstream. Hardware (and the software attached to hardware, so basically complete control over specialized complicated hardware), anti-cheat, and software. Only the last of those is very mixed as blessings go: On the up side, all the software that we're missing, like Adobe stuff, will run on Linux. On the down side, software like Adobe stuff will run on Linux, and be just as annoying and subscriptiony and all as they are on Windows . . .

I don't think it will make a huge difference to the desktop experience otherwise.

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So you don't get complete control over your troops, but it's probably still not nearly as frustrating as that WW I game where you just get to look at maps and reports and you have to yell orders through a WW I style radio.

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I liked Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, I found it very impressive in certain ways, but at the same time it was one of the bigger examples of some of Miyazaki's weaknesses. Like, Miyazaki has a tendency to let the story sort of trail off because he's set up a conflict and he either doesn't know how to resolve it or he gets to liking the bad guys and so he just doesn't want to resolve it. A lot of the time I actually find it kind of charming. But in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind it bothered me . . . the issues and mysteries set up were so big and ominous, and then it just kind of didn't deal with them. Just sort of goes shrug, never mind.

Spirited Away is perhaps less ambitious, but it's much more of a complete movie. It's still weird, it still raises some issues (not all that subtly, but I've never really been into subtle anyway), it still has distinctive Miyazaki approaches to characters and things go in some odd directions, and it has perhaps the most gorgeous, rich and strange visuals of any movie I have ever seen--perhaps the fullest flowering of that Miyazaki "look". But all the stuff works together, the strands get pulled together and the movie has a resolution. Every so often I re-watch Spirited Away, just because I want to. I might re-watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind someday, but if so it will be less because I really want to and more because I think I should.

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Yeah, Miyazaki. Not the game itself, just that trailer, has a feel that goes beyond general "anime" style and more into the specific animation style of the studio Ghibli films of Hayao Miyazaki, like "Kiki's Flying Delivery Service" or "Spirited Away" (which are awesome; if you haven't seen Spirited Away, just bloody go and see it). I don't think that's a problem.

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Here's an idea--access to the law as a public service. Someone wants to sue, they go to the government and get a lawyer assigned to them--and that includes megacorps. Defender gets a lawyer assigned to them as well, everyone's even. If the government assessor deems that it's a really complicated case, they both get the same size of team assigned to them. If there's a fee, it's proportional to the entity's income. Voila, big companies cannot come after you with teams of lawyers and bankrupt you with fees.

Secondary benefit: The government now has a motivation to make the law simpler, because the more complicated it is, the more lawyers they have to pay.

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