The Ferris Bueller spinoff was set to follow the same-day adventures of the valets who took the Ferrari on a joy ride.
Source: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off spinoff movie has been scrapped
The sequel should have been Ferris’s kid taking the day off, giving the school AND Ferris the slip, and foxing the master in the process. Ferris himself would have stood in for Rooney’s foil, and should have given him props at the end. Now with schools being what they are post-COVID, it can never be done.
On February 14, U.S. District Court Judge Chief Tanya Walton Pratt sentenced Marie Carson, 72, of Indianapolis, Indiana, to two years in federal prison for wire fraud.
Court documents said that from 2008 to 2021 Carson illegally transferred $573,836.59 from the business accounts of St. Matthew Catholic Church and School to her personal bank accounts.
The actual loss was higher as Carson admitted in December to stealing as early as 2004. The investigation only covered 13 years due to limited available bank and church records.
Source: Woman Embezzled $600K Spanning 19 Years from Indianapolis Parish – MinistryWatch
Rookie mistake. The pros just put the church’s money directly into personal accounts.
ZeniMax Online Studio’s Combat Team shares their core philosophies, goals, and planning surrounding the future of ESO’s classes.
As it stands, subclassing is objectively stronger than “pure” classing by a large margin for several reasons. This is mostly caused by the vast differences in individual skill line designs. ESO was not built from launch with subclassing in mind, and the system highlighted issues with the current class skill line design that were not previously a factor but are untenable going forward.
This is a major, comprehensive initiative that will span several updates. We are prioritizing classes that require the most modernization and balance work first. For some classes, this will be an exercise in refinement, for others it will mean a more thorough reconfiguring, and for some classes it may be a mix of both. …
Each class will be addressed one at a time and receive impactful mechanical and balance changes in addition to any needed updates to visuals and audio. … These class-by-class updates will run alongside ongoing support for the game, and timelines may shift as needed.
Source: Developer Deep Dive—ESO’s Class Identity Refresh – The Elder Scrolls Online
Well… wow!
I have many thousands of hours in both ESO and Fallout 76. Once again, I’m struck by how similarly they are being run, at a high level. Their monetization is exactly the same. Their stores sell the same sort of reskinned cosmetic items. The monthly memberships work the same way, with the craft bag and scrap bin. The way rewards are handled is also very similar, with weekly bonuses for expeditions (and now the raid) lining up with weekly bonuses for trials. There’s also a similarity with the way transmute gems work like legendary modules in crafting gear. There are others, but if you’re getting upset over the comparison, just bear with me.
My point is that the Bethesda devs just spent the last year completely revamping the skill perk cards in Fallout 76, re-engineering literally every type of weapon in the game, melee, heavy guns, shotguns, rifles, pistols, etc. I would dare to speak for the community here: These changes have been very welcome. Every style of play is more interesting and fun now.
In ESO, I have 10 characters, but I mainly played a sorc DPS, an arc DPS, a templar healer, and a DK tank. In 76, I have leveled up 4 characters, and I love playing all of them in their own ways: a bloodied heavy, a feral ghoul melee, a full-health stealth (bow), and a ghoul shotgunner.
It feels like someone deep in the bowels of Microsoft has been calling shots with overarching systems in both games, and it feels like today’s class rebalance announcement means that this person has directed the ESO team to do what the 76 team has done, and rework the whole thing. But I’m also saying that 76 got it right, and — if my hunch is correct, and the recent gutting of the studio has cleared the way for this mystery person to start calling gameplay-changing shots at ZOS — I’m betting ESO will also get this right, given the time to do so.
I quit playing ESO about a year ago. I briefly came back to look at subclassing, got tired of re-grinding skill lines, and re-quit. If these balance changes wind up being as well-received in ESO as the ones in 76 have been, I may have to give it another try.
Total time spent on this: about an hour and a half. Expletives uttered: several. Dents in my table from throwing my phone: one.
This case isn’t really about child trafficking or pedophilia. It’s more than even that, as if that’s not big enough already. It’s about holding people in power accountable to uncontroversial and unequivocal laws. It’s about the supposed blindness of our justice system, and the equality that was supposed to be a fundamental assumption of our Constitution. The Trump administration just demonstrated that the problem hasn’t been a party issue. They’ve proved that we live in a two-tiered society, the bourgeoisie is untouchable, and the proletariat is powerless. That’s a terrible lesson to force people to learn.
I need to point out this fund exists, and that JP Morgan was forced to pay.
I need to point out that Ghislane is in prison.
I need to point out that Virginia Guiffre was hit by a bus, made a press announcement that she “wasn’t suicidal,” then supposedly committed suicide a week later.
I drafted this post 4 months ago. Time has not been kind to this story. It’s worse than anyone will ever know, and we will never get the full explanation. The deep state remains undefeated.
“Reddit is a CCP-funded deep state psyop against a very specific demographic, and nothing on it should be taken at face value.”
We’re coming up on a year since the general availability of public LLM’s which are supposed to make everyone master coders. Where are all the amazing new apps in the App Store that have been created by just describing what you want to “AI?”
I see people on X almost every day claiming that they just tell an LLM what do, and they let it run for an hour, and then they tell it something else to do, all day long. Meanwhile, I have to very carefully describe what I want, correct it over several more prompts, let it work, and then clean up what it did. There’s value in that, but the breathless hype over LLM capabilities is constantly confounding me. I just don’t see it myself.
Don’t get me wrong: It’s highly useful. It’s Google and Stack Overflow on steroids. On the other hand, it has to be, at this point, because Google and Microsoft have utterly broken their search engines in favor of it.
Seen on Reddit…
Years ago, I went through a “merger of equals” of two Fortune 250’s which turned out to be a corporate raid on my company. In one meeting, people were discussing the problem that people getting fed up and quitting. I wasn’t there, but one of the best managers I ever knew allegedly said: “I’m not worried about the people who quit and leave. I’m worried about the people who quit and stay.”
I can’t believe how often I get reminded of this simple concept in modern corporate life, these 25 years later.
How stupid do you have to be to write an email like this? How stupid do you have to be to not respond by leaving or just slacking off? Except, of course, the person who sent this is not stupid. They’re being incentivized to send it.
The people who found the capital to try whatever this is are running the ship aground. The problem is that everyone that they hired to man the ship and going to be thrown to the ground on impact.
A special investigation by the Indiana State Board of Accounts has found that former Columbus Township Trustee Ben Jackson amassed more than $1.12 million in personal expenses on a township credit card over an eight-year period.
Everyone is out to get theirs, apparently. When people doing similarly illegal and unethical things see stories like this, do they think, “Shame on him?” Or do they think, “Yeah, brother! Get yours! It’s just too bad you didn’t leverage your relationships to prevent this from coming back on you?”
Elder Scrolls Online launched way back in 2014, if you didn’t know, and Zenimax has plans to put the ‘underdog’ MMORPG on your radar.
The Elder Scrolls Online has enjoyed a bit of a second wind recently, with Lambert and game director Nick Giacomini telling me at Gamescom about how the much-hyped Oblivion remaster replicated the effect that Amazon’s Fallout TV show had on Fallout 76.
Source: ESO dev “befuddled” that some still don’t know the decade-old MMO is out
In April, they made the announcement that subclassing would be coming to the game, which is a total game-changer. For months, I’ve attributed the bump in the numbers (below) to that announcement, and people coming back to get their characters ready for it
ESO Bump
If this gaming journo wants to attribute this bump to the Oblivion remaster release? And compare that to the Fallout TV series’ effect on Fallout 76? Uh… no?
Fallout 76 Bump
The Fallout TV series bump was a 6x multiplier for engagement, if only briefly. The Oblivion remaster bump — if that’s even what it was — was only 1.2x.
So much for a “resurgence.” User activity levels are at 7-year lows in the game. I quit last December, and while I keep tabs on what’s going on, I’m glad I re-re-retired when I did. By all the complaints on the forums and Reddit about bugs, lack of depth, and poor rewards, this year’s “content” has been a disaster. So now they’re going to have to come up with something to redeem the brand in the next content cycle, with a studio that’s been cut to the bone. It’s going to take a miracle to salvage this game.
