Jaredlieberher

Disney+ arrived with seven chapters of the Skywalker saga, but people have started to notice something strange about the first Star Wars film, A New Hope: it has an entirely different edit than the ones fans have seen before.

The change was “made by George made prior to the Disney acquisition,” a Disney representative told The Verge. The new edit, which was first spotted by the Star Wars Visual Comparisons Twitter account, features an entirely new insert of the Rodian bounty hunter Greedo saying something while talking to Han Solo in the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine.

The famous scene, which depicted the two characters having a tense conversation about the money Solo owned, was originally filmed and edited to feature Solo shooting...

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Disney+ is going live today, and it includes an unexpected perk: the first 4K versions of several Star Wars movies, including the original trilogy. Episodes I: The Phantom Menace through VII: The Force Awakens are all available to watch with Dolby Vision HDR and Atmos support. There’s also a 4K HDR version of Rogue One, though Solo and Episode VIII: The Last Jedi aren’t yet on the new service.

“We have actually been spending a lot of time getting the movies and TV shows as appropriate, upgraded and ready to be viewed in that format,” Disney streaming services head Michael Paull said at a media event attended by The Verge in New York City last week. “We are working very very hard at making as much a selection as possible of our...

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Alaina Gassler is the sort of kid that, were my parents have heard of her when I was growing up, would have caused an immediate and unflattering comparison between myself and her, with lots of glancing back and forth between me, on the floor losing at some Atari game, and whatever newspaper article or TV segment about…

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“F” in a moment of internet tragedy, when a YouTuber confesses they were mercilessly dumped. In a flash of live, online embarrassment, when an Overwatch player misclicks their ult, “F.” The internet is a graveyard of “FFFFFFFF,” with some uncountable number tossed off every hour, everywhere, to pay respects.

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A new Chinese law that went into place on Tuesday has placed extreme limits on the screen times of the nation’s youth, with everyone under the age of 18 now restricted from playing video games for longer than 90 minutes a day, or between the hours of 10pm-8am.

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If you’ve ever been to Japan, maybe you’ve visited one of the country’s numerous gardens. They are wonderful places to enjoy nature and contemplate life. What if you could make your own Japanese garden? Out of candy? And then eat it? You can!

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The post The Treat appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.

Sébastien Matos has built a fantastic interactive trip through the history of one of the most important UI elements we encounter every day: the scroll bar. He’s recreated, as faithfully as possible, 30 years of scroll bars from some of the top desktop platforms of their day, from Xerox Star to Windows 10.

Take a minute out of your busy day to enjoy the zen of playing with old UI design. Then come back here and read The Verge’s very serious review of scroll bars through history.

Xerox Star: 2/10

Unclear design. Arrows counterintuitively move the scroll bar’s position in the opposite direction.

Lisa OS: 6/10

Clear design, but a bit wide. When dragging, the ghost of the scroll position gives you great interactive feedback.

S...

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Starting today, Amazon will no longer charge a $14.99 monthly fee for Amazon Fresh on top of your Prime subscription. Now, if you already pay $12.99 a month (or $119 a year) for Prime, you’ll also be able to get Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market grocery deliveries free of charge. Existing Fresh subscribers can benefit from the new pricing immediately, while new customers will have to register their interest and wait for an invite.

Vox notes that your order will need to be of a certain size before Amazon will allow it to be delivered for free. In most places the minimum order amount is $35, but in New York City it rises to $50. Amazon Fresh is currently available in over 2,000 cities across the US.

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HBO has ordered a Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon, straight to series.

The new prequel is written by Ryan Condal (Colony), with George R.R. Martin set to co-executive produce. The project is based on Martin’s 2019 book Fire and Blood, and is a history of House Targaryen (the ancestors of Daenerys) as they fight through a civil war. The 10-episode project is set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones.

HBO executive Casey Bloys made the announcement at an event for HBO Max, AT&T’s streaming service coming May 2020. The news comes just hours after news broke that HBO canceled a previously announced Game of Thrones spinoff series.

It appears part of the reason HBO pushed forward with House of the Dragon is because the...

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In a galaxy far, far away...

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Quip, the electric toothbrush subscription service, is launching its second product today: a floss dispenser called Floss. The metallic dispenser will sell for $20 and refillable floss canisters, which are automatically delivered every three months, will sell for $5 each. The floss is pre-marked in green every 18 inches, the “dentist recommended amount to give each tooth its own section”.

At first glance of the photos, I thought the tube was meant to go into your mouth, like one of those floss picks that come in packs of 100. But that’s not what this is at all. All the weighty applicator does is house the refillable tube of floss, which emerges when you click the tube like a ballpoint pen. The amount of floss is tiny in comparison to...

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DeepMind today announced a new milestone for its artificial intelligence agents trained to play the Blizzard Entertainment game StarCraft II. The Google-owned AI lab’s more sophisticated software, still called AlphaStar, is now grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game, capable of besting 99.8 percent of all human players in competition. The findings are to be published in a research paper in the scientific journal Nature.

Not only that, but DeepMind says it also evened the playing field when testing the new and improved AlphaStar against human opponents who opted into online competitions this past summer. For one, it trained AlphaStar to use all three of the game’s playable races, adding to the complexity of the game at the...

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There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

What to watch

“The Entire History of You,” a season 1 episode of the science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror. The story is set in a near-future society where the hot technology is a skull implant that turns memories into first-person video clips, which people can either rewatch themselves or share with others. Toby Kebbell plays Liam Foxwell, a...

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Disney’s foray into an online streaming subscription service, Disney+, is set to launch globally on November 12th, and we’ve updated this post with the company’s full launch lineup ahead of its imminent debut — including some of the missing Marvel movies and animated series, along with the first three Home Alone movies.

The company initially used a massive Twitter thread — more than 300 tweets in total — to make the announcement. The thread included obvious titles like Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Frozen, alongside older titles like Three Men and a Baby, Three Musketeers, Swiss Family Robinson, and Fantasia. Disney also used the thread to name some popular TV series that will be available on day one, including Lizzie McGuire, Recess,...

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Rob Wyatt, the system architect of the original Xbox, has launched a new Kickstarter for the Gameboard-1, a 16-inch by 16-inch tablet designed for tabletop gaming. Wyatt launched the campaign as part of The Last Gameboard, a company which he co-founded along with its CEO Shail Mehta, and where he currently serves as CTO.

The Last Gameboard launched its Kickstarter campaign just days after reports emerged that Wyatt had ended his work as the architect of the Atari VCS retro console project. Wyatt claimed that he hadn’t been paid for his work on the project for six months, and an investigation by The Register claimed that the troubled project had scaled back many of its original goals, with the machine now resembling more of a Linux PC...

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AMC Theaters, the largest movie theater chain in the US, is launching an on-demand video service, according to The New York Times. The service will let customers rent or buy movies, much in the same way Apple’s iTunes Store and Amazon’s Prime Video have operated for years.

AMC Theaters on Demand, as it will be called, will launch tomorrow as an online store with approximately 2,000 films available, with new releases to be added after a standard theatrical run. Unlike the direct-to-consumer subscription streaming services that companies like Disney, Apple, Comcast (NBCUniversal), and AT&T (WarnerMedia) are preparing to launch, AMC’s is specifically video-on-demand (VOD).

Studios like Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony...

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Riot’s using its multiplayer experience from League to make a new competitive shooter

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Analogue is known for creating sleek and modern takes on classic video game consoles, and now it’s moving into the world of portables. Today, the company announced the Analogue Pocket, which is essentially the most advanced Game Boy ever made. The gorgeous device has the form factor of the original Game Boy and can play cartridges from the GB, GBC, and GBA — that’s more than 2,700 games — with a display that has 10 times the resolution of Nintendo’s classic device, according to Analogue.

“We’ve wanted to do a tribute to portable gaming since the beginning,” Analogue’s Christopher Taber tells The Verge.

The Pocket features a 3.5-inch, 665ppi, LCD display, with a 1600 x 1440 resolution and built-in backlight. It’s powered by a rechargeable...

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I love creating a character whenever I start a new role-playing game. I also love stressing myself the hell out over it. I find the question that they often pose—How would you like to play this game?—fundamentally ridiculous. Man, I don’t know! I’ve never played this game before! I truly don’t get how anyone is…

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You may not associate Jimi Hendrix with board gaming, but as you’re about to find out, the former (and very brief) member of the 101st Airborne Division was a fiend for military strategy classic Risk.

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There’s a pretty common assumption that racing drivers and motorcycle riders aren’t actually athletes in the sense that a machine does most of the work for them. Bunk. As a counterargument, I present to you: Alex Marquez’s frankly ridiculous upper body strength as he saves his bike from imminent disaster at the Moto2…

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I have some bad news for those of you who enjoyed watching box trucks get sardine can’d on Durham, North Carolina’s most famous unforgiving bridge: the brutal 11 Foot 8 bridge. Miserably but rationally, the cruel, truck-roof-hungry bridge will be raised, to 12 feet four inches. This rail overpass has been a meager 11…

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Pizza Hut is cautiously testing out the plant-based meat trend, starting with a new Garden Specialty Pizza that’s topped with MorningStar Farm’s “Incogmeato” Italian sausage, which will only available for a day in one Phoenix location. The pizza will also be served in a round pizza box, which is industrially compostable and interlocks with other boxes for stability. After the event, the company says it’ll look for more ways to roll out the box more widely in the future.

The round box was developed in partnership with Zume, an automated pizza delivery startup with a focus in sustainable practices. Compared to a normal, square pizza box, the round box uses less overall packaging. “This revolutionary round box—the result of a two-year...

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Australian Airline Qantas is running tests on a planned direct flight between Sydney, Australia and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. If it happens, it’ll be the longest commercial flight in the world, a marvel of aviation engineering and—based on early reports—an absolute nightmare.

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The film will be re-released with new material added on

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What if Aunt May died? What if the Punisher joined SHIELD? What if, what if, what if?

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Nintendo’s successor to Wii Fit will make you sweat

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The rumored iPhone SE 2 is back in the news after Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst with a reliable track record, recently stated that Apple will purportedly launch the phone in early 2020. While previous iPhone SE 2 rumors have been scattered, this release window, along with other details regarding its supposed design from Kuo (via 9to5Mac), corroborates a recent report from Nikkei that echoes similar information.

The successor to the 2016 iPhone SE may look more like an iPhone 8 than an iPhone 5, Kuo predicts, which would give a more modern look to Apple’s small, midrange phone. Should it absorb that design, some older iPhone features will be sticking around a little longer, like its Touch ID fingerprint sensor and thick top and bottom...

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Like many people, Jeff Kaplan spent much of March 3rd, 2017, lost in the fantasy realm of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch. As the game director for Blizzard’s colorful team-based shooter Overwatch, Kaplan’s fascination with the device naturally turned a bit more serious: he wondered what his own game would be like on the handheld console.

“Literally the day the Switch came out, we were thinking about it,” Kaplan tells The Verge. “I remember immediately talking to people around the office saying, ‘What would it take for us to be here?’” It took some time for that to happen. Blizzard started by porting Diablo III to the Switch late last year, and work on a portable version of Overwatch started a little over...

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