 Alright folks, we gotta do a follow up video here because I feel like it is, I guess, journalistically integral, I suppose, to follow up on this update. Now I don't consider myself a video game journalist, not anymore. I used to do video game journalism, I was editor-in-chief of a fairly popular Nintendo website called ZeldaInformer.com no longer exists. I've temporarily worked at other Nintendo related websites like NintendoEverything.com. So I have a long history, I mean literally it's like almost 20 years, to be honest, of being a quote unquote self-made journalist, didn't go to school for it or anything, just kind of a self-taught years and years of experience, honestly if I would just finish off a journalism degree it might not actually be that hard for me to get a journalism position if I wanted one at any video game outlet and or newspaper or whatever. Just not something I'm interested in. But we talked about a story that makes me, I don't have to make this video, because you can just move on. But I want to cover this for, I guess, my own peace of mind, because I was going to make a video about the Etacons again, if you guys remember Nintendo fired off a cease and desist letter over these Joy-Cons made up for Etica that were made for charity because of the use of the word Joy-Con and the Switch logo, which if you guys know the Joy-Con boys logo from the Etica days you'll know that it has a slightly modified Switch logo in it and obviously the word Joy-Con. And Nintendo fired off a cease and desist letter and it made Nintendo look bad at the time. We've come to learn the cease and desist letter was sent months ago and there's been a lot of back and forth over the maker of these Etacons and whether or not what he's doing is right, whether or not he's clout chasing, there's a ton of misinformation out there. So we're going to go over, first off, some of this stuff that's misinformation. And then what has happened since, because he ran another campaign. I was going to make a video about this campaign. And to be honest, at the time of recording this video, so there's 8 hours left, I might put a link down to this campaign, we'll see how I feel when I'm editing this video. Because I feel like this person who's responsible for all this, Captain Alex, is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. I don't think there was any ill intent in anything he was doing, but people are obviously wary of any time that you put something out there that makes Nintendo look bad. But we need to go over this stuff, because I think it's important, I'm going to drag this one over here, because first we're going to go over some of the accusations thrown his way, such as he didn't actually make the donations, which he has provided proof that he has made substantial donations. But it says Captain Alex, the person on the Etacondroicons, is shady as hell. Well, you should probably not buy anything from this guy. Now remember, because he's running a second campaign. That's also charity driven. I don't like to make a post like this, and there's already another post talking about this, but it's not clear enough, and I just can't remain silent about the actions of this guy. To be frank, I think this dude is using Etacons suicide as a marketing tool to promote his brand. Now this guy does make other custom shells, other things for other systems through a brand, so there is that. He is using the everything is donated to charity to protect his arse from criticism, and he is using the Nintendo fans as his personal army against legal action from Nintendo. He's not actually doing this, but we'll get into this in a bit. This, of course, is my speculation, but I'm going to give some reasons why I think this is true. He got the season descends months ago before the free melee event. He decided to conveniently release this information when the outrage was at his peak. Technically, he's not the one that brought this up. It was a different fan that was making hay about this. And then he just provided the receipts of the CND. He did not bring this back to light himself, but we'll get into that in a bit. He has been asked by Nintendo and possibly others to stop selling trademark products several times before. Not actually true. So he links to this place where there's a supposed source here about putting up these shells, these things here. These sideplates for the PlayStation 5, and here context about all this. Reality is he's not the original maker of the shells that Sony put a stop to. Sony put a stop to sideplates on PlayStation 5 that featured the PlayStation logo. His sideplates do not have the PlayStation logo and thus likely aren't going to be copyright claimed by Sony. Because the cease and desist sent by Nintendo wasn't around the shell itself. It was around the word joycon and the switched logos. And then there's a couple other things thrown in that copyright because he had a couple other shells through his brand that had some Pokemon branding and stuff. So he had to remove all of that. Understandable. Basically, he's just like a fan making stuff on Etsy that Nintendo busted and said hey stop using our logos and stuff. Like understandable how that happened and he is not the person that's associated with the PlayStation 5 sideplates that were being sold that had the PlayStation logo. He created new sideplates that do not have the logo so it should not have a brand issue. So this is actually misinformation, just trying to associate him with something he's not actually connected to. Sounds like I'm defending the guy. Not saying that he's an angel, but who of us really are. Unless you're Jesus. Are you Jesus guys? Like oh, you watching right now? Maybe your name really is Jesus, I don't know. He does not have permission from Etica's family to use him as the face of a product. He is not associated in any way and has the guts to antagonize Etica's family. Also he is not a stranger to use other people to promote his brand. Like where he uses Iwata. So to talk about this thing quick, it is correct to state that he did not have permission from Etica's family when he did the original run of Eticon. He did this all the way back in 2019 by the way, this is all old news. When he did the Eticon stuff. But his family, basically his brother went on Instagram and was like I'm not going to stand for this because there was all this peripheral evidence coming out that basically Captain Alex never proved publicly that he made the donations. And that was the big thing. Etica's brother was mad when this whole Nintendo C&D thing came to light because there was no public evidence of the donations being made. This has been since changed. He sent this long private chat to Etica's brother because he was having an issue with the charity drives. And as you'll see here, Etica's brother responded and said before me and my family making any decisions, I would like all solid receipts of all donated proceeds, since my brother's death, please and thank you. So he was very polite in how we responded to it and he said here you go. Here's a proof here for a donation was that $10,320 or so. So proof that the last donation drive really was donated. And then he mentioned there was another smaller donation that he didn't really take a screenshot of, but he's willing to go back in his credit card statements or whatever and get that information. All right, so basically the brother overreacted over the fact that there just wasn't publicly available donation information. Here's the proof. Okay, kind of move on. The family probably isn't really that upset now that they know the money was actually given to charity and he has since stated that this new one, that this new money, he's in talks with the family, that he might be giving the money to them instead of giving it to the charity. Because it kind of depends on what the financial situation is with the family, because maybe the family might have a hard time being like, hey, you're raising this money for charity when we're actually struggling and you're using his branding, we would like to maybe get some money. I don't really know. I don't really know that situation, because that's all private conversations he's had, but he's talked about it here. Just so you know, there's a strong chance that charity funds will be redirected to etiquette family. So there you go. He's trying to do everything he can to make it right by etiquette family. Should have got permission, definitely should have got permission, but the intent and the heart was in the right place, I think in regards to the etiquette stuff, wasn't trying to really profit from it. We'll get into that in a moment. Because it's going to mention in here, you know, that you can profit from nonprofit activities. That's actually next. So as people are not aware, when I'm donating the charity is a very convenient way to reduce taxes, specifically if you own a business like he does. I'm not from the U.S., so I'll let Omni explain this video for 20. Now it is true, you can get a tax break for your donations, but let's put it this way. Whatever he makes here, like right now on this current one where he's made like 7,439 bucks, I don't know what it is by the time you guys see this, he goes into what the stuff is. So 30% of that goes to the Jed Foundation, right? Or to Attica's family. Either way, whatever it gets donated to, 30% goes there. 30% goes to employee and operation costs, 40% in the production costs in Indiegogo campaign fees. So Indiegogo has a fee. In addition to that, there's production costs to actually make it. And now you might be like, what about that employee and operational costs? He actually breaks this down. It talks about how there's actually packaging involved, there's shipping and all this stuff. That basically, he's not really paying himself. He might be paying potentially other people that are helping him package all the stuff and get it shipped out. The thing is, all of this is a tax write-off. The donation itself is a tax write-off, but all you're writing off is money that you were donating anyways. People paid money knowing that 30% of what they paid was going towards a donation. That's not actual revenue that he gets. So as I said, why wouldn't he write that off on his taxes? Because it's not his money. It's money that people specifically bought the joy cons for that 30% to go to that donation. And when you look at it, all this other stuff, I can tell you right now is someone who, this is a business, my YouTube channel is a legal business. Anything I buy that's for this channel, whether it's a game, is a write-off. So what he spends on the product is 40%, that's a tax write-off. Operation cost is a tax write-off. All of this is a tax write-off. What's not is the profits. There's no profits in this. In this for him. There might be profits overall in his brand. Get into that in a bit. So he says he is not transparent with his charity stuff. He's now transparent. So we can kind of skip over that. He's been fully transparent, publicly transparent. So that's all taken care of. I don't know why he didn't post it way back when. Maybe he really wasn't worried about it. This was all water under the ridge to him for a long time until it started coming back to the public light and then he started talking about it. He has a lot of disrespect in bad tasteful posts. It's not hard to point out, I can't believe this person is making this stuff in good faith. This is just, this looks like his marketing of stuff. This run at Edecon's will be incredibly special. Not only will the Edecon's be made. I'll include stretch goals for console black lights, pro controller as well. Edeco won't just have his own controllers. They'll have a full custom console. People are taking issue that he's really pushing at a little far, right? Like he couldn't let it go at the cease and desist. He's now using it to make additional profits for himself. Although I kind of already explained he's not really profiting directly, indirectly maybe, but not directly off of this. I'll get into that in a bit too. But again, I don't think this guy has ill intent in any of this and I think he's having a hard time dealing with the criticism that comes with a story blowing up. So he got some updates to this. He says, honestly, if you want to donate to a charity, donate yourself, look for a personal group that has more credibility than this guy. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm willing to apologize and take the heat. So he ended up kind of apologizing basically. So edit, by the way, this is my interpretation of the situation and is not fact, okay? This is a post that's caused a ton of criticism going his way and he's doing this in good faith. Also do not harass Captain Alex. Nothing good comes from aggression, okay? Cause he was getting harassed, which led to some of the distasteful stuff he put out there. At a two, I want to say I regret making this post because I fed the drama. This was my interpretation of a Twitter feed. I'm not an internet detective. I do not claim to have proof. I'm just a dude that was very mad by the handling of Attica and Iwata because to me, something I'm very sensible, profiting from suicide makes me die inside and it looked like this person is doing that. But I don't know, maybe it was all in my head and I just made things worse. I wish people would take this with civility. No one deserves hate. I apologize, Captain Alex, if my assumptions were wrong. Edit three. Captain Alex has contacted Attica's brother and showed the proof of the donation. He said this is great news and shows that things are getting resolved. I don't care if I'm a moron for overreacting, but this gives me hope it's a misunderstanding. So essentially, this entire post that blew up and got him a whole bunch of hate and a whole bunch of criticism and I even had people tweet it at me. See, he's not that good of a guy. He's not this. It is a complete misunderstanding. The only wrongdoing in here, to me, anyways, is that Captain Alex should have contacted Attica's family first. Beyond that, I think he actually had well-intentioned means. Here is his direct response on Twitter. Captain Alex is on Reddit, his response. If you're gonna make a threat about me, at me next time. The amount of misinformation this Reddit post is absurd and if you continue to spread this misinformation and slander my name and business, he'll have to take legal action. So he's just saying, hey, you know, he probably shouldn't have been that harsh in response but you have to understand, the internet was in full force kind of coming down on him. First off, I did not bring up the cease and desist. A community member did. This went viral and he was not part of it. So after the community member brought it up and it went viral, which is a fact. I double-checked, he had nothing to do with that. That's when people started asking him if it was true and then he provided the cease and desist screenshot. So he just responded to something that was already going viral that was about him. Second, I didn't mobilize anyone. And no, I got a single cease and desist from Nintendo. I didn't get one from anyone else. So this is like the Sony side plate thing that wasn't him. That was somebody else who got in trouble for that for using the PlayStation logo. So you're just making up information because there was a report about a side plate company getting shut down, but it was just because of the PlayStation logo. Third, the fans asked for this campaign. Not me, I did not in any way antagonize Attica's family, offering to give the funds to his family instead of antagonizing him. So he's trying to say, hey, and this is public now. He publicly offered to give the funds to Attica's family. He is claiming, and I think this is fair, I went through his Twitter feed and went through responses. There were a lot of people saying, man, I really wish I could have bought these. Oh, I didn't know about these Attica's until this story blew up. I missed my opportunity to get them. And there was demand and then the, hey, maybe you can make some modifications and do another run. And here we are, he made some modifications and he's doing another run. So there was demand that did exist for him to make these again. And you'll see there's a difference in the design. You'll see that he got rid of the Joy-Con boys that was the infringing part and replaced it with FRFX, which if you're a true Joy-Con boy, you understand what FRFX means. All right, which, by the way, is not infringing in any way and is fine. He says, the only tax rate I get is the same amount I take in from the charity. If my business takes in 5,000 and I spend 2,500 on production costs, it looks like I profited 2,500. However, if that money is donated, I do not pay taxes on it, rightfully so. Why would I pay taxes on money I didn't take? This is what I was trying to explain is that, technically, you pay taxes on profits. So you can, a non-profit organization, can still end up taking profits. Like he had a really bad take, ah, where he's put out there, like someone was really attacking him and he put out there, oh dude, the goodwill CEO makes 2.3 million, leave me alone. And that's a really bad example because it shows like how charitable organizations or non-profits can still find a way to have some people massively profiting through employee salaries versus business profits. A lot of smart businesses, and our president, Donald Trump, knows this to a T, you don't really wanna run at a profit, you wanna run net, net nothing. If you run at net nothing where you didn't make profits or you didn't lose money, you basically don't get taxed because there's no like profits to tax. That doesn't mean you didn't make money. It just means that there's nothing to tax. This is how you're able to have these tax returns that show that you didn't pay anything. It's very interesting how that works. But as I said, that's not the case here. I'm claiming that he doesn't pay taxes, but he should pay taxes on something that he's not actually profiting from. As I said, I have to pay taxes on every penny I make here on YouTube, but I do get to write off some of the money I bring in. I get to write off for expenses on the microphone or the stand, these cameras I'm using, this monitor that I use. I literally, this $1,000 monitor that my fiancee bought, she technically used my card for it. If I need to, I can write off this entire monitor as a business expense. I typically don't make enough money on YouTube for it to matter between my other job and my kids, because kids alone, you get a huge write off because of kids. I typically am not anywhere close in needing to write off anything anyways, but if I do need to write off things, there's a number of things I purchase. I bought this, where's the pro controller? Oh, it's dead. I think it's charging right now. I bought a pro controller specifically so I could review these RGB board and buttons for it. All of that is a business expense. That's the only reason I bought it. I didn't buy it for personal use. I bought it to make a video on a product that was sent to me. So, yeah, there's a lot of nuances here. You get to write off the business expenses that you spend on the business. You don't get to write off the profits you gain. Now, he says, you really have no idea what you're talking about in spreading false information. Also, the fact that you guys are harassing me and putting me on blast while I'm raising money for mental health and for Erica's family, your harassment and bullying is really out of line. Again, I don't blame him for this. So, you know, he's got some kind of a spicy takes on you. Some people were criticizing him because he's running this campaign through his business. But there is a reason, there's a legal reason to run it through a business. So he has a business that sells controller shells and a whole bunch of other gaming accessories. And there's a reason you wanna run this through a business. That's the same reason that I need to get my YouTube channel switched over as well. So, if he ever gets sued, he already was C and D by Nintendo. So let's say Nintendo, he has something else he puts up there that infringes and he breaks the law because yes, the original Etochons broke the law, infringes and Nintendo says, you know what? We sent you a C and D once. You went and broke it again. We're gonna sue you. Running it through a business prevents him from personally being sued. It makes the business get sued. What's nice about the business getting sued is it protects your own assets. So as an example, right now if someone sues this YouTube channel, it's legally under my name. Under my name is a sole proprietorship. So if I get sued and someone takes me out and now that I'm saying this, someone's gonna go do it, right? Of course, that's the way it goes. Welcome to the internet. If I get sued, they could seize everything, okay? Yeah, business assets, of course, this monitor, everything that I could claim is a business asset. Yeah, of course, you could seize that anyways. But they could take my car. They could take my new bed set that we bought upstairs that has nothing to do with the business. They could take this house. They could sue and if I don't have the money to pay if I lose, they could take everything. Because as a sole proprietorship, anything that I own under that sole proprietorship, which is my name, so anything I own that's in my name, like my car that I use for my family has nothing to do with work. This work anyways. They could just take, okay? So that's not good. So you wanna run it under a separate business, whether it's an LLC, LLCs are commonly what you would, limited liability company is commonly what you would do it if you're running it on your own. That limited liability is important. That makes it so only business assets are liable in this case. So if someone came out from my channel but it's registered as an LLC, they could seize this computer. They could seize this monitor. They could seize the cameras, right? But they can't seize my personal assets. They can seize my consoles or whatever, right? But they can't take my TV upstairs. They can't take my house. They can't take my cars. Can't take anything that I bought from my children. They can't take all the appliances in the house that have nothing to do with work. They can't even take this office space because it's attached to a greater house. They could just take all of the equipment basically and liquidate it to pay the lawsuit or whatever. So that is why you run things under an LLC because, well, yeah, you can still lose stuff related to the business, you're not gonna lose personal belongings. Right now, because it's a sole proprietorship, technically if I ever get sued and I lose, I could lose literally everything. And I've known this for a number of years. And as my channel grows, if it continues to grow like this in 2021, I will officially be registering it as a separate LLC. And you'll be wondering, well, how does that work for your own profits? It gets more complicated, but essentially you are at that point, you're like CEO of your own company, you are given a salary slash paycheck. And then you do have to pay taxes on that, of course, like anything, you have to pay your income taxes on it, all that jazz, which is, it's just a more complicated to file taxes because then you have to file your personal tax return, then you have to file your business taxes. Right now, my business taxes and personal taxes can all be put on one form because my business name is my name. I hope that makes sense. I hope that makes sense. And Google pays you out as a 1099 contract employee. So that's kind of, everything just kind of melds together under my name. So it's one form, or wow, one form, but one tax filing. That's another reason why it's nice not to have a LLC because then you have to file two different tax things, but anyways, that's neither human or there. And then it's up to me, if I want to write all the profits off as, oh, they all went to me because maybe the income taxes are cheaper, or if I want to leave them in holdings with the company, which then you got to pay taxes on holdings, it gets really complicated from there. I don't make enough money for it to really matter in the end. Anyways, most YouTubers run under a silver pride or ship and don't even worry about it. Pretty hard for us to get sued for much. It's far more likely we just get our YouTube channels shut down and our social media accounts taken away if we do anything bad. Most people don't really care to come after you and take away your computers and your cameras and your microphones and all that jazz stuff that you could just easily replace on your own anyways. They're more interested in taking away the brand that you built up, if they want to take you out, they want to report you or whatever the case might be. Anyways, so I'm just bringing this up because I wanted to follow up and give some transparency on this whole thing. And I wanted to be fair to the people that were both criticizing Captain Alex, but also be fair to him who seems to be running a rather innocuous campaign at this point. Don't know, it's up to you if you want to get these shells. They have different things, you can just buy the shells, 35 bucks, you just get the shells. I think that's the only perk he's offering right now is just buying the shells on their own. He's not selling the Joy-Con with it, which it wasn't illegal to sell the Joy-Con with it anyways because they're already bought. But yeah, honestly, I feel bad for Captain Alex. Having been in the public eye for as long as I've been in the public eye, I'm well aware of how easy it is for things to get misconstrued, misinformation to get out there. How easy it is to be criticized without people having the full story. Yes, bad on him. He should have been in contact with Erika's family through all of this, but he is now and things seem to be going okay. Yes, I don't think Nintendo should have shut down the sale of the spillover that was still going to charity. I don't think that Nintendo needed to get that involved. Nintendo was obviously well within their legal rights to do it. And to be fair, we actually got a positive out of this. We're either about 30% of this money, of the 7,000, 4,000, 30,000 or whatever it ends at. Maybe it ends up hitting 8,000 by the end of the campaign, I don't know. Whatever this hits, 30% of it's either going to a charity or it's going to Erika's family. Either way, it's gonna go to people that need the money. So that's just, that's a positive to come out of this because without this going viral, without this thing blowing up, this second run would have never happened. So if you're comfortable going to buy these, go for it. He's in contact with the family now and there doesn't seem to be any major issues with anything happening. Obviously, everything will be smoothed over before these are ever made. And if it needs to be refunded, they'll be refunded. But I'm pretty sure it's just gonna go through. I just think there was misinformation flying out there about the whole campaign, about him not actually making the donations and now the receipts are provided and he clearly did it. So I know some people might have expected this update video to maybe, oh man, you're gonna blast them and you're gonna say, Nintendo was in the right. Nintendo was always within their legal rights. And I said that in the original video, Nintendo didn't legally do anything wrong. They just didn't have to. Nintendo kind of blanket convenience, I don't know. They kind of decide when they wanna push their legal rights. Nintendo does not go after everyone they can. They should be going to etsy.com and blasting every Nintendo product on there. But they don't. They should be going to Amazon to come and blasting all the products that are using Joy-Cons and switching their name. And they're not. Nintendo is really picky and choosy over what they decide to go after because they don't go after everything. It's not true that Nintendo, if they did nothing was going to lose their trademarks and copyright it. Legally not true at all. But, obviously, there were questions around the original run. We now have answers to those questions. If you would like to go get these new custom Etacons, be my guest. I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I guess I'll put a link down in the campaign. I guess I decided before I even edited this video. You know what? Having seen all the evidence myself and gone through this all, I just think Captain Alex is misunderstood. I don't really think there's anything in here to suggest it's anything other than he's just getting attacked by people that don't have all the information. So, all right, I'll catch you guys in the next video.