Cool Stuff: Disney’s Internal Star Wars Weekends Posters

/Film:

“StarWars.com has posted four posters created to promote Disney’s Star Wars Weekends among employees at Disneyworld’s Hollywood Studios theme park. For those of you who don’t know, Star Wars Weekends is an annual summer special event at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park that celebrates George Lucas’ Star Wars. Disney presents special shows, presentations, memorabilia, as well as appearances from actors from the Staw Wars films.”

New Tab King Adds Recently Used Items to the New Tab Page

Lifehacker:

“Firefox on Windows only: Firefox extension New Tab King adds a useful dashboard with recently used bookmarks and links to the Firefox blank tab page, so you can quickly access frequently used web sites.

Using the extension is simple enough—just use the Ctrl+T shortcut key, and the new tab page will show up with shortcuts to launch applications, the most used web sites and recently closed tabs—very similar to Google Chrome’s new tab page, but in a list instead of a grid. Although you can customize the background image, there aren’t a lot of other options to choose from—but it’s an interesting extension that will hopefully get better over time.

New Tab King is a free download, works in Firefox for Windows only. If you’d rather have the Google Chrome new tab page in Firefox, you can do so by grabbing the latest version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox.“

New Tab King

Cablevision loves you, will offer $99 101Mbps uncapped internet service

Good lord…

Engadget:

“It’s been a rough week or so for Big Cable, but it looks like the East Coast’s Cablevision’s decided to play things a little differently than Comcast and Time Warner: it’s just announced that uncapped 101Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 service will be rolling out on May 11 across its entire service area. The best part? It’ll cost $99 a month, making it faster and cheaper than any other high-speed package we can think of — 50Mbps service from Comcast and Verizon is around $140. Not bad at all — let’s hope the competition picks up on it.”

[Via Electronista]

Pronounce Names Saves You from Embarrassment

Lifehacker:

Search engine Pronounce Names—perhaps unsurprisingly—contains a database of names complete with proper pronunciation, saving you from embarrassment next time you face a challenging name.

Pronounce Names is very similar to previously mentioned How to Say that Name, a site that offers only audio pronunciations of user-submitted names. Pronounce Names appears to do audio as well, but we weren’t able to find any recordings on the site (so How to Say that Name wins out on that front). However, How to Say that Name doesn’t offer any phonetic pronunciation guides (Pronounce Names does), which is annoying when the submitted audio isn’t that good or you need help sounding it out yourself. Either way you slice it, both services can come in very handy in a pinch. Thanks EstaApplesauce!

Pronounce Names

Premiere video of Capcom’s Dead Rising 2

Offworld:

With the veil now lifting on the games revealed at Capcom’s blowout ‘Captivate 09′ event last week comes the first full trailer of their previously mentioned Dead Rising sequel, every bit as tongue-in-cheek parodic as it is horrifying (very much in the vein of Romero’s legacy).

The trailer doesn’t get into much of the underlying gameplay other than returning to the panoply of usable objects that will aid in staving off the undead hordes, but with some of the most creative chainsaw work I’ve seen in ages, I suppose that’s not to its detriment.

Dead Rising home [Capcom]

King of Kong Jr: Wiebe takes DK Jr crown ahead of E3 DK challenge

Offworld:

“If you’ve seen Seth Gordon’s unforgettable documentary King of Kong (and if you haven’t, close your browser now and stream it via Netflix), you’ll know just what’s at stake here.

Ahead of his upcoming attempt to officially claim the Donkey Kong crown at this year’s E3, Twin Galaxies has just announced that documentary star Steve Wiebe has warmed up by claiming a world record score on its sequel, Donkey Kong Jr, with 1,139,800 points.

The score not only puts him ahead of Ike Hall, who took the DK Jr crown last year, but also of Billy Mitchell himself — Wiebe’s rival in the film — who still holds the contentious first-place record in DK proper and set the original DK Jr record in 1983.

Wiebe’s DK rematch will take place on June 2nd at E3 in Los Angeles, and will be broadcast live via G4.”

Steve Wiebe Takes Donkey Kong Junior World Record With Score of 1,139,800 [Twin Galaxies]

Dolph Lundgren Scares Off Armed Burglars (in meatspace)

/Film:

“We usually don’t report on the real life going-ons of actors, but I found this story to be somewhat amusing.

Masked burglers broke into a home near Marbella, Spain, where they tied up and terrorized the woman of the house. But when the attackers noticed a family photo featuring 80’s action star Dolph Lundgren in one of the bedrooms, they decided to make a run for it. According to the Daily Mail, Lundgren’s wife was unharmed but emotionally traumatized by the incident. Police are still looking for the three attackers.

Lundgren is probably most famous for playing the Russian boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, playing He-Man in the 1987 live-action Masters of the Universe movie, and as the star of Universal Soldier. He’s definitely a scary dude who you don’t want to mess with, even at the age of 52.”

Ridley Scott is Considering Alien Prequel/Reboot

Hot d@m….

/Film:

“20th Century Fox head Tom Rothman revealed to IESB that there is “some talk” of an Alien “prequel” to go along with the recently announced Robert Rodriguez-produced Predator reboot Predators. Rothman confirms that director Ridley Scott is “toying around with the idea.” And the Fox head gives the impression that another Alien movie, be it sequel, prequel or reboot, would only happen with Scott’s involvement.

I remember reading an interview with Scott where the filmmaker expressed interest in making a prequel that would explore the origins of the space jockey and the Aliens. At one point James Cameron was working on an origin story for a fifth Alien film, but abandoned the development when Aliens vs. Predator was announced. Sigourney Weaver has publicly expressed interest in doing a sequel, but it wouldn’t make sense to include her character in an origin story. But who knows, maybe Ridley is “toying” with some kind of reboot/prequel combo.”

G.I. Joe – Resolute – part 1

Warren Ellis’s reimagined G.I. Joe cartoon on Adult Swim is awesome (it’s online only right now). Here is Part 1 – the rest of them can be found on youtube or Adult Swim’s site:

XBMC Babylon Beta 1 Available for Download

Lifehacker:

“Windows/Mac/Linux/Etc: XBMC has just released the first beta of XBMC 9.04 (codename Babylon), packed with several impressive new features and fixes.

New-to-this-release features include support for more filetypes, some crazy Karaoke features, improvements to the skinning framework, better music and movie scraping tools for artwork, and support for PowerPC Macs. The release is available on Windows, Mac, Linux (shortly), AppleTV, and original Xbox. It’s a hefty download, so get started! While you’re enjoying your new XBMC install, check out these five awesome themes for customizing XBMC.”

XBMC 9.04 Download [via XBMC Blog]