Gareth J Richards

It looks like the Ender's Game movie is really moving forward, with Gavin Hood (Wolverine) as director. The film put out a ton of casting calls a couple weeks ago, including all the major characters.

The casting calls appear to be from a draft of the script, written by Star Trek's Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, and they give a pretty good idea of just how closely this film will stick to the book's story. Here's our exclusive look at the Ender's Game casting calls.

Spoilers ahead...

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So there are ten characters being cast in all, and the script pages we read seemed pretty solid. All of the book's themes, including the brutality of warfare and the need to understand your enemy, remain intact. And the "feel" seems pretty right. (Disclaimer: these may not be pages from the actual shooting script, since sometimes casting calls use earlier script drafts. And a lot can change during filming, too.)
We read casting calls for:

Ender Wiggin: He's depicted as smart and sensitive, but also incredibly ruthless. And he's ten years old — older than in the book, but not as old as Hollywood was trying to make him at one point. There are a few scenes where he worries about being like his cut-throat brother Peter, and confides in his sister Valentine. Just like in the book, he dishes out a rough treatment to Bonzo Madrid, his former platoon leader, when Bonzo tries to bully him too much. And then he feels bad about it. The screenplay also includes some scenes where Ender has weird nightmares about the buggers — and he tries to understand where the buggers are coming from, and what their children are like. Ender is pissed at Graff because he keeps changing the rules in the war "exercises."

The scene where Ender finds out that his final victory was not, in fact, a game is pretty intense, and features Ender and Graff both trying to talk at the same time. Ender is saying "They came to establish a colony, we chased them away... in fifty years they have never returned," while Graff is saying, "It makes no difference now," and then Ender is saying "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," at the same time as Graff is saying "What are you talking about?" Finally, Ender is saying "I will bear the shame of this xenocide forever," at the same moment as Graff is saying, "You will be remembered as a hero." It ends with Ender getting an injection, knocking him out.

Bean: We get to see Bean watching a heavily edited video of Mazer Rackham's famous victory over the formics, in which Mazer fires his nuclear warhead into the formics' exhaust system. And Bean is so thrilled he throws his hands in the air and shouts with joy — until Ender bursts his bubble, explaining that the video is edited so we don't see Mazer die. (And later, Ender also hints that Mazer's victory might have had a darker side, that's also edited out.) In another scene, Graff shows Bean and Ender to the famous zero-gravity training room, where they float around with a bunch of other kids. Ender explains to Bean that there's no "up or down" in zero-G, and then they discover their weapons actually freeze anyone they shoot at, by causing the spacesuits to swell up. They team up to go freeze some of the other kids.

Peter Wiggin: Ender's brother is fully a psychopath in this version of the screenplay. He's insanely jealous that Ender was chosen for the battle school, and completely enraged when it seems like Ender has washed out of the program. At one point, he locks their sister, Valentine, out of the room and forces Ender to put on a Formic mask so they can play Formics and Astronauts, which basically consists of Peter beating the crap out of Ender.

Valentine Wiggin: She's the gentler, sweeter member of the Wiggin family, who's always there for Ender — except for when the people in charge of the school won't let Ender communicate with her. She tries to protect Ender from Peter, but mostly fails — and just like in the book, she convinces Ender to return to the school when he tries to drop out after he hurts Bonzo Madrid. She explains to Ender that what makes us human is our brains, and we didn't evolve those brains so that we can lie around lakes — we evolved them for killing, or else we wouldn't still be around. We'd have been killed by wild animals. She alone grasps that Ender has to understand his enemy to defeat them, and in understanding the enemy, he grows to love the enemy — right before he destroys it.

Bonzo Madrid: Just like in the book, he's a swaggering idiot whose platoon has won most of its most recent battles, and he resents being saddled with a useless, untrained snot like Ender. He orders Ender to stay out of the way during battles, and not even use his weapon. Later, he takes a group of his homies to try and ambush Ender in the shower.

Rose the Nose: The commander of Rat Army, where Ender gets traded after he leaves Bonzo's toon. Rose has a high opinion of his own leadership skills, even though he knows that his platoon leader, Dink, is "God." Rose has a terrible fear of losing, but can't face the fact that he's winning thanks to Dink and Ender.

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Dink Meeker: In the script pages we read, Dink is one of the characers who befriends Ender in the Rat Army, helping to protect him a bit and showing him how to go float in the zero-G chamber to relax.
Petra Arkanian: The only girl in Ender's first toon, she also befriends Ender and tries to protect him — and when Bonzo decides to keep Ender out of combat, Petra offers to help him train in their spare time. Later, she and Dink are both in Ender's Jeesh, and she's a key part of the final assault on the bugger planet.

Alai: Just like in the book, he's a gentle Muslim boy who moves Ender with his friendship and his professions of peace.

Mick: He's a heavyset boy who just wants to make it through this school in one piece and get home — and he's happy to help himself to other people's desserts.

All in all, it's a good sign — the script pages we read felt pretty solid and pretty true to what we remember of the book. Let's hope this movie actually starts shooting soon!

via io9.com

I seriously can't wait for this movie to come out. I hope it does the book justice. Enders Game is one of my all time favourite books. HT to Ron Tuffin for lending me his copy to read.

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A Million Virtual Monkeys Randomly Mashing Typewriters Have Almost Written Shakespeare

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:42:00 -0700

via gizmodo.com

I find this "study" somewhat amusing.

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HTML for Babies via ChurchMag

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 03:35:00 -0700

via churchm.ag

I need to order this book for my child!!! It must be done!!!

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24 Week Scan

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:53:49 -0700

Well this scan wasn't as interesting. Just checking the heart and that all the arteries look normal. But I'll add some pictures anyway.

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My Sexy with her baby bump

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:20:44 -0700

Taken with picplz.

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Fifa 12 Bugs

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:51:04 -0700

I died laughing while watching this video on Kotaku --> http://kotaku.com/5841632/fifa-12-has-the-best-bugs

Best I share it with the world!!!

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Bottled in 1990 and still good.

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:18:23 -0700

Taken with picplz.

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Rocksmith Hands on Preview – Fake Plastic Rock

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:59:00 -0700

After writing about Rocksmith back in July, I was invited to the Ubisoft offices in San Fransisco for a hands-on preview of the game. How could I turn that down?

I took the opportunity to invite a friend of mine, Martín Marconcini, who happens to be a decent novice guitarist, far far beyond my meager guitar skills. Together we spent about an hour playing the Xbox 360 version of the game.

The official Rocksmith bundle guitar, the Epiphone Les Paul Junior ($129 MSRP) was the guitar we used to play the game — you can see Martín holding it in the picture. Remember, this is a 100% real guitar, no game elements whatsoever! (In fact, the game comes with fret number stickers to place on the top of the fretboard, and our guitar had them applied.)

I was a bit skeptical going in, but I have to admit: Rocksmith definitely works as advertised!

Rocksmith truly does reliably detect what you’re playing on an analog guitar, and in real time. Both Martín and I agreed on this; at no point did we think the game was screwing up, any time we made a mistake it was clearly us playing the wrong notes. There was no real compromise that we could see with the analog detection approach. Even subtle little mistakes like being off by one fret or one string were displayed correctly.

Because of the analog approach, you get a significantly different and arguably more musical experience compared to Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar mode:

You can’t even play the game without begging, borrowing, buying, or stealing a real electric guitar. Everything starts with putting that electric guitar in your hands and plugging it in to the provided USB interface. It feels good!
Every time you touch the guitar, you are making actual guitar sounds. This is in stark contrast to almost every other rhythm game where if you play correctly, you get the original audio track, and if you get it wrong, you hear generic guitar mistake noises. What really, really struck me when playing was that I was learning to hear when my notes sounded wrong. I wasn’t just learning about finger positioning, there was a very direct correlation between what my ears heard and what my hands were doing. Once I got a good basic pattern going, I could tell when I screwed up because I heard it before I saw it. That’s HUGE!

(Also, I was concerned that tuning the guitar, which is required before each new song, would be a tedious chore. But I was fascinated to discover that these pre-song tunings were kind of, dare I say, fun? Or more like … something I needed to learn to do properly because as a musician, of course you want your guitar to sound in tune!)

I was very worried about latency going in, and I’m happy to say that latency of note detection was not a problem. But there is a latency issue — it’s just not what I thought it was. When you play electric guitar in Rocksmith, the console is your amplifier. That is, the signals have to go from the guitar, to the console, and then back out through your sound system. It’s no different than the latency problem in vocals in Rock Band 3 which have to go through the same path: out of your mouth, into the mic, through the console, then back out of the speakers. This takes time, and you’ll notice a bit of lag between “playing a sound” and “hearing the sound you played”. But the advantage is that your console is in some ways the ultimate super flexible guitar amp in Rocksmith. You can apply effects, pedals, different guitar sounds, etcetera. It’s really cool and it even works during loading screens in the game, you can noodle around on the guitar while you’re waiting. Great stuff.

One permanent workaround for the audio latency is to get a real amplifier and hook it up, like for example the Roland Micro Cube Guitar Amplifier I have. Maybe not for everyone, but it’s definitely authentic, will solve the audio playback latency completely, and heck — shouldn’t you have a guitar amp anyway for your electric guitar?

Another thing I was very interested in is the automatic difficulty scaling in Rocksmith. That is, the more notes you play correctly on the guitar, the more notes it will give you — if you’re totally nailing the song on beginner mode, it will eventually scale you on up to medium and hard and beyond completely automatically. This also worked seamlessly for me, as I mastered the very simple beginner phrases they slowly got a tiny bit more complicated and more representative of the actual song. This did not last, because I truly suck at guitar, but the scaling up and down of difficulty was very gradual and smooth; not disruptive at all.

Now, not everything I saw in Rocksmith was great. For example the navigation UI in the game was pretty darn abysmal in my opinion, and the track list was solid, but can’t possibly compare with the hundreds of Rock Band 3 tracks available even if you just limit to the Pro Guitar capable tracks. There’s definitely enough room for improvement that I can see a Rocksmith 2 in there already. But the important bit is that Rocksmith does what it says it does and it is a very satisfying experience when playing the songs. For any music game, that’s really the only thing that matters in my book.

I also learned a few nuggets of news worth mentioning:

Two player guitar will be supported though I didn’t get to see it; it will be a splitscreen top/bottom sort of affair and will of course require two real guitars and two USB interface cables. Definitely looking forward to that.
An aggressive weekly DLC schedule is planned, though details on specifics were scarce. That’s very encouraging to hear.
The obvious where’s the bass guitar support? question came up. Apparently they have special plans to deliver bass guitar support through DLC and this may include unlocking bass guitar charts for the existing songs in the game.

I was already tentatively excited to play Rocksmith and had it pre-ordered before I got hands-on time with the game. But now that I have, I went back and pre-ordered the full guitar bundle, which is now available for $199. (That bundled Epiphone Les Paul Junior we got to try is a surprisingly solid axe, and the game is $79 alone … so I figured why not.)

Bottom line, Rocksmith rocks! It offers a uniquely musical, hands-and-ears-on approach to the rhythm genre that we haven’t seen before. It isn’t perfect, and it’s no party game, but it totally works as advertised for learning guitar and having fun while doing it, too. I have no problem recommending it highly to anyone who has an electric guitar gathering dust somewhere in their house — or anyone who is serious about learning electric guitar in general.

Rocksmith should be available later in October, and comes in either a $199 full guitar bundle, or a $79 game and USB adapter bundle for Xbox, PS3 and PC.

via fakeplasticrock.com

I really would like to get this but my wife would kill me. What to do? What to do?

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Scar your children with the delightful book Sorry Your Mother is Undead

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:34:00 -0700

via io9.com

So want this book for my kids.

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Leffe blonde. Not as nice as Bofferding.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:19:24 -0700

Taken with picplz.

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A fountain or two

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:54:24 -0700

On the way back from Schueberfouer saw some interesting things. Like a fountain and images projected onto a building. So basically the walk back was pretty boring.

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