important for anybody following this topic to also know that "hundreds of trademarks" can sometimes just mean that there's a few trademarks in each class. Trademarks in the US are divided into classes, so that two companies that do different things can still be named the same or similar.

The article still has a point, in that similar software companies like Meta and Microsoft have trademarks for "X," but if your PVC pipe company is called X, you might not have a good case against Twitter because who is getting confused between PVC pipes and social media?

Google is definitely iffy for me, which is why I've been bouncing between alternates. A lot of people like to complain about how google is filled with ads and spam results like Pinterest, but even then it just doesn't really seem to give accurate results anymore, and even when results are accurate it's very surface level. From what I found, it loves to push listicle articles and such when googling a new topic, as opposed to say, Wikipedia or an encyclopedia article. Like if I search about Barbie, I'll probably get a bunch of ScreenRant-esque articles before I get the IMDB page. There have been dozens of instances of me searching for controls for video games and getting clickbait-y articles, some of which barely even make an attempt to answer the question, before getting an IGN or GameFaqs article that's to-the-point and answers my fucking question.

There are definitely better search engines out there, but they all have their own flaws. DuckDuckGo is pretty bare bones and can also give poor results if your search is too vague. You have to adapt to that one. Others like Brave have AI to help out with summaries and stuff, but Brave's management is "problematic" and so some people might not want to support them.

TL;DR: on google, not only is there ads and spam, but it's just hard to find answers anymore. Everything is clickbait. And with other options, they are good but they also have their own major flaws that some might find unappealing.

I really don't want to use this comment to shame people for getting their start in game design.

But it's really weird to me to see a semi-major internet publication like this highlight comments from a guy with a youtube channel that has 508 subscribers and who has only been a professional game designer for 2 years as head of an indie studio, according to his LinkedIn. Sure, anybody can teach game design and even teach it well. You don't have to be the next John Carmack to do it properly, but it's weird that this guy was highlighted for an article in this way.

Also his first game with the indie studio is some sort of indie MMORPG that's a parody of RuneScape.

it sucks when people are mean to you though? I've had cars full of teens laughing at me for being overweight and I honestly cried afterwards. I don't think it makes me fragile for that. I feel like we should normalize being hurt by these kinda things and growing for it, rather than just further insulting.

it feels like you just used that as a chance to shit on people you don't like. I don't like the wealthy either, but that doesn't give me a free pass to act like a douchebag.

edit: I am NOT saying that anybody who buys this garbage human's products has a free pass either. But what YOU WROTE is an absurd hyper generalization. There's really no way for anybody to know whether you mean this specific car or whether you saw it and CHOSE to extrapolate into something else you hate. So, if you wanted to come across as less like a douchebag then maybe either be more specific or don't be a garbage person.

the amount of times I've read an internet article about this topic only to be met with a shockingly trivial mistake present front and center is staggering. the differences between patent, trademark, wordmark, etc. are all easily googleable and yet pretty much every article I've read on this has been using them interchangeably.

incoming rhetorical question: are these editors orangutans? (before anybody answers, i know editors & authors want to be the first one out the door so they get the most clicks and all that, but it's really not hard to make sure you're at least using the correct word. It seriously took me 20 seconds to find an answer on the difference between patent and trademark)

As always, this is why peer-review is taken in such high regard. Replicate, replicate, replicate.

pot calling the kettle black are we

(I just googled this phrase since to be honest I didn't know its origins and I really prefer the 1639 version "Pot calling the pan burnt-arsed" now)

Threads has all your favorite social media users, such as corporate brand accounts, annoying Instagram influencers, and minor internet celebrities who aren't funny.

What bubble does the author live in where this is considered standout journalism? Like, congratulations on discovering the internet. What rock have they been living in since 1995?

Its so funny calling him just "florida man." If you ignore the fact that he was president, you can construe it as another one of those "gosh darn dumbass florida men" stories lol

capitalism is the best system

guy who made lots of money under capitalism expresses that capitalism is the best system

Sorry that may sound mean, but for me that’s the definition of beeing fragile.

Apologizing before you say something doesn't suddenly negate the mean-ness of it. You're still an asshole.

if history has taught us anything, we should not let any elderly british men near this

Really love the idea that "cis" (which means you're the same gender you were at birth) has anything to do with heterosexuality. It's truly groundbreaking. /s

There are many many many cis people that are not heterosexual.

And by the way, cis is the opposite latin prefix of trans. Trans means "other side," cis means "same side." That's literally it. It's not complicated.

yes but he built it in las vegas. It has a few stops and relies on teslas, each with a driver, and it functions as a very basic "public transit" system. Almost none of what he initially promised are present in the final design. Originally it was going to be his "hyperloop" thing. Then it was "autonomous vehicles." Now it's "teslas driven by people"

this is the guy who decided to build a tunnel under LA to skip traffic and then instead built one in las vegas that gets traffic jams

I think it would be very funny if the game came out and was good. Like Bg3 level good. Just the irony of everybody going "not Todd doing his bullshit again" and it turns out to be a perfect game or something.

And for the record I'm not a huge Bethesda fan.

Edit: I'm astonished I even have to say this, but this is just a stupid joke comment. I'm not trying to make comparisons between baldurs gate 3 and a game that hasn't even come out yet. Don't dig that deep.

Not just plagiarism, he was also a Nazi fetishist.

I'd be fine with not hosting images entirely. I don't think people come to beehaw primarily to look at pictures

I hate when games try to make you feel like you have player agency when it's really just a cutscene and you're pressing a button. Whether it's a QTE or "Press F to Pay Respects." Recently RDR2 was a huge offender of this, featuring probably half a dozen cutscenes where all you do is press W or up on the controller to walk forward or whatever you're doing. Like there's one where it's probably 5 minutes of walking forward interspersed with dialogue. I understand why the developers made you walk that far. It adds to the tension and it adds to the feeling of despair that the character is currently going through. But I think it would've been fine if it was just a regular cutscene instead of "Press W to walk" and if you let go you stop walking, meaning you can't even take a break.

edit: also I dislike stealth games with unrealistic "alert" systems. In a good example like Metal gear solid v, you get a solid 5 to 10 seconds if a guard is outside hearing / sight range of other guards, so even if you're spotted you're still fine as long as you take them out quickly and silently. And even if you dont take him out quickly, he'll still only be able to alert people nearby or he needs to take some time to alert on the radio. On the other hand, in cyberpunk 2077 if just one guard saw you for even a fraction of a second, the entire base would be alerted. I guess lore-wise it makes sense, but from a gameplay perspective it was the least fun I had in that game. Trying to stealth my way through an entire place only for the whole thing to come crashing down because somebody saw my shoulder from 15 meters away. It came to a point where I was just going in guns blazing because stealth just wasn't worth it.

Spider-man from 2018 was also like this. The enemy hideouts or whatever were based very heavily around the game's stealth mechanics, but if just 1 guard became alerted, everybody would become alerted and it would start its stupid wave system. The game heavily encouraged you to take out guards silently so it didn't send in wave after wave of them, but it was just so incredibly punishing to be silent in that game.

from trademark (note registered in 2003)

for: providing on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games; providing on-line electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games, in class 38

for: entertainment services, namely, providing interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefor via the internet, in class 41

in short: basically what they did in the ensuing years with Xbox and Games for Windows - Live

Half the people I’ve met who use the word ‘based’ have nothing to do with 4chan, they’re just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don’t think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.

Also probably important to note that even being connected to 4chan isn't always a bad thing. The web (particularly youtubers) have made 4chan as a whole to be some boogeyman website full of hackers and nazis, but it's a loosely connected web of forums (known as boards), many of which don't have anything to do with another apart from being anonymous. It's kind of like lemmy in that regard. I've browsed it in my time, and while it is definitely quite a toxic site, most if not all the toxicity originates from a select dozen-or-so boards, and only 3 or 4 of them are even popular (b, pol, r9k, x). Hell, if you go right now to /a/, you'll probably just see a bunch of weebs discussing anime like any other forum.

note: this isn't to say 4chan is safe like beehaw. The whole culture of the site is very archaic and a lot of people on there are still there saying slurs and being generally offensive, but when you stay away from hellholes like /b/ or /pol/, I've seen worse on reddit.

If some stranger on the street told me they used 4chan, without specifying what board, I mean I might be suspicious of which boards they're using (depending on context clues) but it's not a buzzword that translates to "white supremacist"

It's similar with movies and TV. I think a lot of people see a 50% rottentomatoes or a 5.0/10 on IMDB and automatically assume it'll be unenjoyable, but that isn't always the case in reality.

"degenerates?" Really? Are you 14 years old? We can use other words that aren't neo nazi rhetoric, thanks.

Also:

GTA doesn't have that so I made up my own scenarios.

Congrats. You're playing a sandbox game how it was meant to be played.

I am so incredibly sick of posts about starfield.

I'm willing to nominate Charles II, King of Spain as a formerly alive blunder. The result of decades of Hapsburg inbreeding, he had a number of health and intellectual issues from birth and he was notably infertile. If you live in a monarchy where succession is passed down through children, it's REALLY BAD to be infertile and be King. His death directly caused the War of the Spanish Succession, a 13-and-a-half year war that eventually involved pretty much all of western Europe and likely led to the deaths of over 1 million people.

Literally could have avoided this if the Habsburgs decided to have sex with other people.

yeah I think a lot of people who haven't actually done it are misconstruing it as something far more than it was. I wrote 3 sentences for each but a commenter on another instance thought I needed to write "3 essays"

I'm not a payday person so I have no horse in this race, but this is still such utter horseshit. The more games that continue to do this where it is completely unnecessary, the further away the date is when devs stop doing this bullshit.

but I do believe you will have to have a connection in order to play cause it's made in the Unreal Engine, it's using cross-progression, crossplay, I do believe we need you to be online," said Listo.

this person should be a politician

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to posting the personal phone number of a Twitch streamer because I found out that she has a boyfriend in real life.

this made me lol

god I hate wikipedia abuse. It even happens from non admins. There's this one movie I watched and I realized that it wasn't on the lead actor's filmography so I added it, and within minutes it was removed without reason. I go on this guy's talk profile and it's full of people claiming that they religiously remove edits on a number of random articles. Probably 80% of edits in the past year alone on that filmography page were from this one guy and almost all of them were removing tiny contributions from other users. Some people just like to act like an article is "theirs"

nothing says "i protect children" like "I am disturbingly interested in children's genitalia"

Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.

Not everyone is making something for you to consume.

Important to note for any readers that the suit by the US government is related to digital advertising. they're not alleging monopolization when it comes to search engines.

This wasn't wholly your question but you might like to look into what NOT to do with LA Noire. Originally the game's dialogue options were labeled, "Coax," "Force," and "Lie." You play a 1940's police detective who has to solve crimes, so dialogue naturally comes up when you are interviewing witnesses or interrogating suspects. However, Rockstar as publisher made a shock change late in development where the devs had to change the options to "Truth," "Doubt," and "Lie." These options, however, don't actually quite fit with the actual dialogue of the game. Something I noticed a lot when I played the game was when I selected "Doubt," to theoretically doubt what I thought was an obvious logical error or a half-truth, phelps instead just started screaming at the top of his lungs about executing people. Or other times I'd select "Truth" because the witness wasn't lying but just being cautious with their words. It turns out that option was 'wrong' because I didn't force out the key info I needed.

It wasn't until I learned later on in my playthrough of this fatal publisher error that I instantly became way better at the game. Just had to switch around the words in my mind to what the original devs intended. Later releases of the game had "Truth" and "Doubt" changed to "Good cop" and "bad cop" but both of those also don't really fit too well. Phelps isn't always bad cop when forcing the truth, sometimes he's just yelling because the witness is an asshole.

The reason Lie was never changed is because when you select Lie, you're doubting their version and coming up with evidence to prove the contrary, like in Ace Attorney.

Just a little thing to keep in mind about dialogue options. Even though the words "Coax" and "Force" sound a little... advanced I guess, they still work way better mentally just because they actually describe the options. Truth and Doubt might help you reach a younger or less intelligent audience, but they don't work because they don't actually describe what the options give.

Geocaching used to be really big but now is pretty low key and niche.

A lot of people I talk to have no clue what it is, and the rest know what it is but have some wildly wrong preconceived notions about it. Stuff like "It's only for hikers" (no it isn't) or how the geocaches are only in the woods. I had a friend who literally did not trust me to go geocaching with her because apparently she thought somebody would be waiting at the location of the geocache to murder us. I had to sit her down and show her that a large majority of geocaches are located in bustling cities and on the sides of major roads.

Sucks that a lot of people also just did not understand it. I once told a friend that there's no monetary reward and they looked at me slackjawed. Like yes you just go find things and then when you find it you have the satisfaction of having found it and shared your find with your friends online. You don't make money doing it lol.

It feels like a lot of people missed that the movie is about the guy and not so much about the Manhattan project. It seems like a lot of that is due to misleading marketing though. I'm guessing many people watched it because of the bomb.

I saw it and los Alamos takes a bit of a backseat and plays more into the plot as opposed to being the plot.

Edit: I read the article all the way through and I see now it's less of a complaint about a lack of scenes and moreso about the complex history being shown in quick and succinct metaphor. I'll leave this comment up though because I think it's related, despite what OP seems to think (weirdly enough)

Sure, but do comedians do multiple netflix specials filled with mocking one group of people? I'd say his material is pretty trash if he has to stoop to this repeatedly.

when you pair finances (a realm filled with scams and con artists) to gamers (people who are notoriously more gullible than the average person) then it's not a great mix.

"You can make real money by playing this game" is genuinely one of the oldest scams on the internet, like at all. And gamers keep falling for it.

Otherwise, states like Kentucky, Arkansas, and Alabama would kick Democratic candidates off the ballot non-stop.

I'm sorry, did I miss the part where Democratic candidates incited an insurrection against the Capitol?

Not a single mention of discord despite it being a haven for neurodivergent people... I know the article is mainly about forums but IRC-style chats are very very closely related to forums.