Olantern

Yes, it's a word.

Trivia note: "Serendipity" is derived from a story by a guy named Horace Walpole about the "Three Princes of Serendip" (Serendip being an archaic name for Ceylon, which is is itself an archaic name for Sri Lanka). The princes always set out to solve various problems but got distracted by things that turned up by fortuitous accident. (An alternative definition attributes the term to "a Persian fairy tale.")

This has been your Word Moment for the day.

Heck, for all we know, Positron is still female ... anyone ever seen any part of Positron, other than the head?

I propose Praetorian Infernal for the fourth grandparent.

It's been a while since I read up on this, but as I recall, the evidence for the "Hero One as Ms. Liberty's father" theory boiled down to:

1) Lore piece: Hero One gave her Excalibur for safekeeping before he left on his suicide mission. Theory: Why would he give it to her in particular unless he had some special connection to her?

2) Lore piece: Ms. Liberty's father is not specified. Theory: The special connection that made Hero One leave his sword with her is that he's her unidentified father.

Note that Ms. Liberty may not have any idea who her father is (under this or any other theory).

I don't recall any other evidence to support this theory, and since CoH characters rarely seem to have more than one romantic interest, Hero One's strongly implied relationship with Lady Suicide- er, Jane- seems to cut against it. On the other hand, you never can tell.

Personally, I consider this theory to belong in the same pile as the forumite belief that "Ms. Liberty is a bloodthirsty, militaristic, borderline-villain maniac," which has been contradicted by the contention that "Ms. Liberty is an unrealistically forgiving neophyte who thinks anyone can be redeemed" that we've seen in a number of places, notably in-game and in the comics.

To put it more simply, the fora have their ideas about characters, the devs have theirs, and players always seem surprised when the devs choose their own. This is only further complicated by the fact that the devs tend to leave ideas sitting around in their heads or in design documents and then seemingly assume they've made their way into the game, only to be surprised when there's a reaction against them when that finally happens for real, due to the years of ingrained forum theory about the character or characters.

Soap opera-ish, and thus probably anathema to Forum Story Preferences, but I kind of like this ... if nothing else, it ties up a loose plot thread.

(Yes, I'm aware General Forum Belief is that Ms. L's father is Hero One, and that there're things in-game that support this belief.)

I happened to read of this particularly weird meme (and that's saying something) for the first time not a week ago in Brian Cronin's Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellant? I knew that someday my voracious reading would be useful in real life!

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Perhapse Lord Recluse could steal the cakes. He probably wouldn't need a dolley to transport them, with all those extra arms.

I'll take this opportunity to renew my request for the actual release of the tricorner hat. I'd also like to request, unlike the last hat we got, that it be made available for more than a few days, since I have a sinking feeling that if we do get it, it'll come during a week that I'll be away from the computer for a while ...

Additionally, I'd still like to see a sash for male and huge models, as well as ... whatever I included in my last post in this thread.

Also, kudos to Dink and the rest of the art gang for the Retro Sci-Fi pack. It delivered what it said it would.

Same. It was the first TF I ever did, too.

It continues to surprise me that I ever did another TF again after that.

And yes, both Citadel and Synapse need reworking. I'd argue Synapse needs it just a little bit more, since at least you normally have some fun powers by Citadel level, but both are top contenders for reworking.

Nor are the pleasantly goofy ringed gloves available for Male, though there is one style of ringed boots. This disappoints me a bit.

It's still a good set; it's nice to have a new, elaborate set option that isn't suit of high-tech armor.

Too many forumites, especially in the past several years, have taken to viewing the fora as a means for reshaping the game, whether through complaining about development decisions they dislike or, more constructively, by proposing different development ideas. Those things are fine to do, but when we do them, we should recognize that we are doing so to receive validation (or rejection) from other players, not because we expect the game to change based on them.

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Aside from Elusivity, here are some other Suggestions from the S&I forum (circa 2006) that made it into the game:

- Revamping Faultline, Dark Astoria, and the Rikti Crash Site.

- Putting a contact who gives repeatable missions in Rikti Crash Site.

- Rikti Pylons that can be destroyed to knock down the shield around the Rikti ship.

- Fighting a Riktified Hero 1 at the climax of the Rikti Crash Site story.

And those are just off the top of my head.

I can believe some of these were independently thought up by players and developers, but I remember posts discussing systems so similar to, say, the pylon system we have now that it leaves little doubt in my mind that the devs got them from this forum.

It is good to hear that it is being read (again?).

The impression I had was that they'd been raised as Septists (is that a word? an unfortunate one, if it is!) at Catelyn's insistence, though Ned Stark remained a devotee of the Old Gods. Jon Snow's open adoption of the Old faith upon his joining the Night's Watch seemed to imply his aspiration, conscious or not, to be like Ned, as well as an apparently genuine religious conviction. Note, too, that while Sansa generally seems to be a follower of the Seven, when she's carrying on clandestine meetings in A Storm of Swords, she visits a weirwood grove.

While we've never seen even a hint of a suggestion to this effect, I get the impression that for some inhabitants of the Seven Kingdoms, there's no particular contradiction in hanging out meditating in a weirwood grove for an evening, then going to services at a Sept the next day, in much the same way that an ancient Roman might make official sacrifices to the Olympian gods but privately be a devotee of an Eastern mystery religion. I get the impression that Catelyn's religious rigor is the exception, not the rule.

Characters who I think are "minor" based on that definition but need to be included:

-Coldhands.

-That guy who's part tree now whose name I can't remember. Might be possible to combine him with Coldhands.

-The guy, who or whatever he is, disguised as Paet not-the-Pig-Boy-from-that-story from the fourth book.

-Maegor the Mage. (This is merely a guess; we'll have to see if he does anything of significance in the next few books.)

-Viseryon and Rhaegal the dragons. (Already included.) So far in the novels, Drogon gets nearly all the good scenes, and he generally "represents" the dragons. I suspect this will change now that they're split up. (As an aside, has anyone else noticed that when a fantasy setting features multiple dragons of various colors, the black-scaled one is usually the one that gets the spotlight? I'm thinking of, among other things, Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series, the story "Tea with the Black Dragon" from some years ago, and a few others, as well as A Song of Ice and Fire.)

-The Mountain That Rides. Has this guy shown up in the TV show yet? I find it hard to imagine some of the best scenes in the story without him, and he has the entertaining attribute of being utterly without redeeming features.

-The giants. They don't really do much of anything, but I think they're necessary to show just how otherworldly the region beyond the Wall, and thus the world outside the rational sphere of the Seven Kingdoms and the Esteros civilizations, really can get.

Everyone else I can think of offhand is either a "major" character by the definitions above or can be combined with other characters, condensing what's in the books into something shorter with a similar upshot. (Many of the slaver cities characters fall into this category, as do the Sand Snakes and nearly all of the rest of the Dornish royal family, including the Red Viper, despite the fact that I found him pretty entertaining.)

I agree; your analysis of the Cende facts was correct. As for your second point here (and the reason I posted again), one of my favorite cases about trademarks involved the John Deere tractor company's attempt to trademark that shade of green for farm implements. Another implement manufacturer had gone out of its way to duplicate that shade of green on their implements, probably (though of course they never said so) to imply a similarity or relationship with Deere. Deere obviously wanted to stop this.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. John Deere lost on what I've always considered a bizarre argument by its opponent. One of the many exceptions to what can be covered by trademark is that "functional" aspects of something can't be trademarked. That is, you can't hold a trademark on round wheels because wheels must be round (or, okay, pendants, round-ish) in order to function as wheels. Deere's opponents argued that by matching the color of Deere's implements, their color had "aesthetic functionality." The Supreme Court bought this, stating that having implements that matched across manufactuers was obviously something that was important to the functioning of implements for farmers.

When I tell this story to farmers, I have to stop there, because they always start laughing and can't stop.

I've never seen an "aesthetic functionality" argument anywhere else, let alone seen one succeed, but then, I am not an IP lawyer.

This is a common misapprehension (and the first one I've seen in one of Chase's posts in this thread, so that's good!). Trademarks do not need to be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office in order for the trademark to be protected, but registration is common and preferable to non-registration. Even in the present climate of IP nervousness that permeates the content-production world, many character names and similar designations are not registered trademarks. You can tell the difference between a registered trademark and a non-registered, or common law, trademark by the presence or absence of that "R" in a circle; the "R" stands for "registered."

Registration, however, is prima facie evidence of a mark's validity. Referring back to my Taco Bell example from my first post in this thread, imagine Taco Bell the restaurant sues Taco Bell the bellmaker for violating its "Taco Bell" trademark, but the trademark is not registered. In that case, the restaurant would have to present evidence in court that its mark was actually used and recognized to distinguish its restaurants before even reaching the issue of whether the bellmaker's use of the same name resulted in a likelihood of confusion. If the trademark were registered, that first step of presenting that evidence wouldn't be necessary.

Why, then, don't entities register every single potential trademark? First, as this thread has hopefully demonstrated already, a particular trademark is generally limited in scope. This can run into a lot of registrations if, say, Lucasfilm tried to register the name of every single one of its characters in ever possible medium of as a trademark. I should add that most content creators above a certain size tend to stick a "TM" (designating something as a non-registered trademark) after every distinctive name in their IP's. I'm not aware of any cases where someone tried to litigate the validity of such a trademark extensively, so the "TM" may ultimately establish more for the trademark asserter's peace of mind than for his actual, legal rights.

While I'm discussing registration, I should also mention registration of copyrights. When discussing a work, it's something of a misnomer to say it is "copyrightable." While geekdom likes to attack the more recent iterations of copyright protection (the ones with terms of "life plus X years"), one thing that they did for both large and small copyright holders was to make copyright protection inherent. Once a work is set in some fixed form, copyright protection attaches to it automatically, without any registration necessary. For these purposes, even a draft or a work in progress counts as "fixed," by the way; "unfixed" works are essentially just "ideas."

Registering a copyright with the Library of Congress (not the PTO) again provides prima facie evidence of the existence of the copyright. In some industries, such as publishing, it is accepted that works aren't registered upon creation by the author (early in the creative process) but upon publication by the publisher, in the author's name (late in the process); the inherent protection of copyright law is seen as sufficient. In fact, budding authors are often told NOT to register copyrights in their works because disreputable scam artists of various stripes may use the registration information to target them.

I always thought it would've made a good Elseworlds one-shot set in the '30's and dealing with how radio influenced the Superman mythos, given that (1) lots of what we take for granted about Superman came from the radio show and (2) two of the major radio networks were NBC Red and NBC Blue. The major problems with this idea are that the Superman show didn't air on (either) NBC, and modern-day DC ended up affiliated with one of modern-day NBC's rivals.