Schools reopen 2019

Later this month, clothing from the fashion marketplace Depop will be available in an expansion pack for The Sims 4 called High School Years ( via Polygon ). Depop describes itself as a “circular” and “community-powered” online resale site and app that allows users to buy and sell vintage clothing items, mostly at discounted rates. The expansion pack will feature Sims characters experiencing “the rollercoaster of puberty,” complete with events like prom, school pranks, and the ability to cut class. Teenage Sims now have a chance to become a fashion “Simfluencer” and earn Simoleons, the game’s in-app currency, using an app like Depop called Trendi. The Simfluencer will be able to purchase their items from an in-game thrift store named Thriftea and curate their own outfits to set trends. The clothes featured in the game will be designed by real-life Depop sellers like Lapoze McTribouy ( @judaku ), Sha’an d’Anthes ( @furrylittlepeach ), and Selena Williams ( … [Read more...] about The Sims 4 High School Years expansion adds a Depop-created ‘virtual thrift store’

Something to look forward to: Skyrim's famous mod scene is still thriving after over a decade. This week, a mod bringing online co-op to the game will emerge from closed beta after years of development and significant setbacks. Players can now complete quests together with almost all gameplay features synced. The mod team behind Skyrim Together Reborn has set the project's full release for Friday, July 8 (noon EST). The online co-op mod allows for groups of two-to-eight players, synching quest completion, experience points, NPCs, items, difficulty, and other features. Players can also manually enable PvP, but the modders don't recommend it, as that wasn't their main design goal. The Skyrim Together team has been developing a co-op mode for Bethesda's single player mega-hit since 2016, completely scrapping it and beginning a rewrite in 2019. The team warns that the full release will be quite buggy since it bolts online multiplayer onto a complex single player RPG, but … [Read more...] about Skyrim online co-op mod reaches full release this week

The US government seems to be worked up about cryptocurrency scams. On Thursday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Justice all released news that they were taking some form of action against people accused of carrying out multimillion or billion-dollar schemes. One of the cases involves knock-off apes, one is the “largest fraudulent scheme involving Bitcoin charged in any CFTC case,” and one involves someone nicknamed “the Cryptoqueen.” The wave of enforcement is happening against a backdrop of plummeting crypto prices . Let’s start with the CFTC — the regulator has filed an action against a company called Mirror Trading International (MTI), which was run by a South African man named Cornelius Johannes Steynberg. The commission says MTI pitched potential investors by saying it had a bot that invested a pool of Bitcoin into opportunities individual investors may not have access to. Allegedly, people ended up … [Read more...] about The government’s going after alleged crypto scammers as market crashes