Honestly, most of my time is spent simply watching the scenery going by. I'll often bring puzzle books and some games with me (usually just my 3DS), but it's rare that I actually use them. I think across my whole rail vacation in June I spent maybe 30 minutes total on my 3DS. I've always been fascinated by the varying scenery across the country, even the more mundane kinds like desert or plains. I do have other methods to pass the time though depending on the method of travel. In air travel I'll probably just stare out the window most of the time, but if they have in-flight entertainment available I'll sometimes use that instead. I learned this way that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King extended edition is almost exactly as long as a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles! If I'm traveling by car, I find simply watching traffic going by to be very cathartic for some reason, as odd as it might sound. When doing a short hop on rail I usually just stare out the window the whole trip, while on long distance trips I would try to strike up conversations with the other passengers. I have a sizeable playlist of mostly video game music that I'll sometimes listen to on long trips as well.
1. My favorite Mario character would have to be Luigi. I've always preferred him over Mario, but his depiction in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga as well as my first playthrough of Luigi's Mansion on GameCube helped solidify is position as a favorite. I just love the way his character is depicted in the games he plays a major role in.
Funny you should ask this, I was having this exact conversation with someone at work a couple days ago! It started because I found a box of some kind of dog treats that was labeled as a new recipe that was supposedly "more delicious" or something along those lines. It had me wondering just how they were able to make such a claim unless they had some unfortunate soul compare the two! I would hope that any taste-tester was paid higher than minimum wage for such a position, though I certainly wouldn't expect it. And if they don't have testers, I suppose we just have to trust that whatever is in the can is in fact the flavor that's being advertised. I'm inclined to just believe them though without attempting to verify it myself!
My full collection, you ask? I was going to take your second option and just show the favorites, but then I remembered that I've been looking for an excuse to get pictures of the whole thing anyway. Besides, even though I do have a few favorite pieces within the collection, I do like every piece of it. So why not show it all off! I've never actually had the whole collection out at once, so seeing just how many pieces I had kind of shocked me a bit. And that's not even the entire thing anyway, since I have 3 or 4 other pieces currently stored away. But here it is!
There are only two games I'm looking forward to at the moment, but I'm really excited for both. One is Fantasy Life i: The Girl who Steals Time." I'm a huge fan of Fantasy Life game on 3DS and was both shocked and happy when they suddenly announced a new installment in the last Nintendo Direct. It does look like the developers are taking a bit of a different approach to the game compared to the first one, but I am hopeful that the game will still retain that same kind of charm that the original had. The second is Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. When Breath of the Wild released, it ended up stealing away weeks of my time. I was beyond obsessed with the game, and it ended up finding itself in second place on my list of favorite games of all time, only behind Zelda: Majora's Mask. It looks like a ton of care and polish have gone into this game (as is typical for Zelda games), and I can't wait to see how they expanded upon Breath of the Wild's map which was used as a base for this game. Enemy variety seems to be massively improved too, which was one of my very few complaints about BotW. But I'm trying to go into this game as blind as possible, I guess trying to sort of recapture that same kind of feeling of exploration and discovery that I had with Breath of the Wild since virtually everything I found in that game was new to me. But we're quickly approaching the release date and it will hopefully be here before we know it!
1. Buizel is actually a fairly recent favorite of mine. I did like him back when Diamond and Pearl were still new, but at the time he wasn't anything special to me. But a couple years ago I started a new playthrough of Platinum and caught a Buizel for my team. I decided to look up his move learnset online and saw a few pictures of him from the show which I found to be rather cute (I'm a huge sucker for cute things!). I started looking for more shots of him from the show which brought back scattered memories of the episodes of the show I've seen him in, so I tried looking for clips on YouTube. I ended up finding a video of the Manaphy Pokemon movie that was edited down to only the moments Buizel was on screen (linked in the spoiler below), and it was that video that kickstarted my extreme obsession with him and placed him at number one on my list of favorite Pokemon by a country mile.
