It’s time for the Lost Badass List to reappear. We last examined the question of the island’s badassery after the seaon finale. This list categorizes badasses over time, but is heavily weighted towards the current storyarc. This year, since the Others are regulars and since I cannot deny the force of nature that is Benry (credit for neologism to S.), Others are eligible for the list. Without further ado! 1. Benry (aka Ben Linus, aka Henry Gale){{ double-space-with-newline }} 2. Sayid{{ double-space-with-newline }} 3. Jin{{ double-space-with-newline }} 4. Sawyer{{ double-space-with-newline }} 5. Juliette Comments and spoilers after the jump.

As of September 24th, the first two Skylark books by E. E. Smith are listed on the Distributed Proofreader site’s list of Silver E-Texts. This means that they’re gonna hit the Project Gutenberg (original) archives soon. This is awesome. Sadly, the Lensman books look like they’re still a few decades out.

You guys catching this Keith Olbermann stuff (original)? Oughta be.

Spirit of the Century (which is cool, buy it if you like pulp gaming) has an interesting character generation system that reminds me a tad of Lexicon. Hm, Wikipedia has failed yet again; there’s no page for Lexicon. That one, I might actually fix. Anyway. Spirit’s character generation is a group activity that ensures pre-play connections between characters. I think it can be played out in blog entries. Let’s try it. ...

The MacArthur Fellows always cheer me up, as much for the people I don’t recognize as for those I do. It must be such a neat surprise to be named. And look! David Macaulay. I love his books. Josiah McElheny! I don’t know you but you’re not Dale Chihuly. Terence Tao, way to be smart. Luis von Ahn, thanks for inventing CAPTCHA. I love that people invent stuff that seems obvious afterwards. And John Zorn, yeah, there’s a lot right about that. ...

Hey, are you hiring sysadmins in the Boston area? Do you have a NOC position for someone with a few years of experience in desktop support and NOC work (first-tier monitoring and response) or a position for a solid mid-level Windows sysadmin with a ton of hardware, EMC, Veritas, and Windows work under his belt? Let me know; I might know people who would fit your needs.

Not that it’s likely we’ll forget. That string of pictures has, for the last five years, meant the most to me.

Opinions: do vampires (specifically, Vampire: the Requiem vampires) leave fingerprints? Also, what are the odds of rolling 25 ten-sided dice and not getting anything above a 7?

Sorkin D20. Classes: Leader, Advisor, Star, Writer, and Technician. Toby Ziegler is a dual class Advisor/Writer. Sam Seaborn was a Writer, but in season 4 he decided to multi-class to Leader. The control room guys in Sports Night and Studio 60 are Technicians. Nancy McNally (the National Security Advisor) is dual class Technician/Advisor. Danny Tripp is a director, which I think means he’s a dual class Advisor/Writer, emphasis on the Advisor. Hard to say, though.

If you look around a little on the Internet, you can find copies of the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s new one hour TV drama. It’s about a weekly sketch comedy show unsurprisingly like Saturday Night Live, with the expected Sorkin-load of interpersonal drama and principles and so on. No Joshua Malina yet, although I expect him to show up in the second season as the remarkably bright yet socially slightly inept wunderkind. (It’s a fair prediction. Come on.) ...