The Gaming Den

You only have to protect Trademarks, not Copyright or anything else.

The Tolkien estate wanted TSR to stop using Hobbit (etc) because they wanted to charge a decent sum for the licence, which they did after they got a court ruling that various words in context were unique to the middle earth stories even when translated to an RPG.

Though, it turns out, some of those were not unique at all, just obscure. Hobs are normal enough farm worker spirits and Hobbit is an obscure version of the same.

True, if they wanted the tie-in, they could have licensed for 1$. It was most likely to prevent dilution of the branding.

Now though, Hobbits seem to be public domain. Which is pretty awesome for other IP creators. Especially now that it's been made clear in other TGD threads that Orc & Drow are also public domain words.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Let us take a moment to appreciate that picture caption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocorism#English

My wife is training a coworker who must have English as a second language because she is driving mrs erik crazy by asking repeatedly about names like Will and William as though it is an error that people may have one as the name on their checks and another as their name in a directory. So I gave her that link to just give her coworker next time.

And now for a new game: Guess the legend!
(what do red and blue signify in this case)

I was gonna say "British empire at the start of WW1" but Canada isn't there so...left-hand drive countries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele%27s_Green

It's left hand drive: the only thing Japan, Australia and England have in common that isn't being an island.

Too right. Shoot, I meant to include in my post "mouseover image for the answer"

The link in the Non-US news thread about left-handed whorled snails led me to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus

Judging__Eagle wrote:The link in the Non-US news thread about left-handed whorled snails led me to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus

Heh, I was familiar with this because we very, very, rarely had patients that I monitored via EKG telemetry that basically had dextrocardia, which called for placing the leads in a mirror image as well, if I recall correctly.

I did the numbers once upon a time, and I think over the years I probably watched about 40,000 unique hearts. So 1/10,000 sounds about right for how rare they were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophonius

Sometimes it feels like the only reason I keep playing Fallen London is its archaic diction.

Sword wielding martyrs were responsible for significant parts of firearms history, but defeated through the use of pork:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juramentado

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Mahals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_ ... etherlands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_underground_horror

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_French_Extremity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-biddy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumblecore