You’ve got the vaguest beginning of an outline of a setting. If you want it to be great entertainment, you’ve got to give it a story and characters. You’ve got to figure out what it is really about, what makes it thought provoking. It takes a lot of work to create all of that. You can’t just hand off this initial description to the world and act like other people are going to pick it up for you. Don’t tell me it’s better than Star Trek, show me.

The rule is essentially hidden if what I think are innocuous images contain a some image violating TOS. Which image is in violation? Which section of the TOS is it violating? I have no idea, therefore no idea how to follow the rule in the future.

They are not legally binding

So they have no duty of care with user’s personal data or privacy.

I don’t recall making a legal complaint. Something can be legal but mildly infuriating.

I use a variety for different things. My point isn’t imgur specifically, but how these hidden rules exist on different sites.

Myth: “The Polish military committed suicidal cavalry charges against German tanks in WW2.”

The myth was originally spread by Germany as propaganda to emphasize how Germany was technologically superior. The myth has largely stayed alive because it has become romanticized into a heroic act.

The truth is that Polish cavalry charged German infantry, successfully taking ground against them. German tanks counter-attacked and Polish cavalry sensibly retreated but some were killed. Images of the aftermath were used to start the myth.

“Stupid cats need the most attention.”

My Steam recents:

Everything that’s got a finishable campaign here I’ve completed, with the exception of MCC where I only played Halo CE and ODST to completion.

I figure that the Swiss Army knife my dad got me for Boy Scouts is really up there. Self explanatory why I suppose.

I could have sworn Discovery was connected with Bad Robot, but it looks like I was wrong.

It still has a “JJ Abrams sensibility” - frantic space combat, overly emotional characters, a lot of flashy but meaningless tech (the hologram communicators as an easy example) and visuals (the way the bridge was often shot). It was very much trying to be loud and new, while throwing in a lot of surface level references to try and give it some franchise credibility (this USS Discovery is a rejected Phase 2 concept design).

It all came together in a loud, unlikable soup that felt inauthentic to the franchise. There was some course correction later on, but too little, too late. Strange New Worlds went the right direction, while the Section 31 movie tripled down on all the worst aspects of Discovery.

In any case, I agree - the D&D movie was a lot of fun, and while I wouldn’t want a ST movie to strike that tone, I’m interested to see what they cook up.

I don’t want the Trek movie to have the DND movie tone either, but more like when that movie was made they understood the correct tone to match the franchise. It felt authentic to what DND players experience. If the Trek movie has the same care in figuring out what long time fans want, it will be good.

That’s good. The repercussions of the Bad Robot era have really derailed Trek in a way it’s just started healing from.

While Discovery wasn’t in the Kelvinverse, the connection to Bad Robot probably gave it that similar style. The Section 31 movie wasn’t connected directly to Bad Robot as company, but it did share a writer.

Strange New Worlds has been a huge step in the right direction, though it came directly out of Discovery, making it kind of a prototype for modern live action Trek trying to both be “gritty” and classic Trek at the same time. I think it has mostly succeeded, but now that it’s proven there’s an appetite away from Bad Robot era Trek, I hope the new series goes further.

While I hope whatever they make doesn’t share a tone with the new DND movie, I appreciate that the DND movie was obviously well versed in the setting and knew what fans were about. Applying that same mindset to Trek would be great.

Respeccing. It shouldn’t be infinitely free, but I like games that allow you to pay (usually increasing amounts) to respec.

Related to this, in older games without this it was common practice to save up your skillpoints and just sit on them until you’d gotten a little further into the game and hopefully had a better idea how to spend them. What was massively frustrating in older games were when leveling up forced you to immediately spend the points instead of sitting on them.

I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don’t like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.

What I can’t stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.

It’s very obnoxious. What’s worse is when the secret areas provide armor or weapons that feel mandatory to beat the level with. If the secrets are just for a score I can at least ignore them.

Level scaling. It’s a mechanic designers put in because they think the game needs to stay challenging, which is true but I’ve never agreed with level scaling as the answer.

The least bad implementations (but still not good) at least replace low level enemies with different kinds of enemies entirely. The worst, most lazy implementations just increase existing enemy HP and damage.

I think it is much better to have different locations or zones where different ranges of enemies spawn, with more powerful enemies tuned to the expected level of a player character for the quests in the zone.

And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.