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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.) ...

I’ve talked about Lost badassery, but I’ve never created a comprehensive list of film badasses. That’s why I’m not Vern. Here it is.

Hey! (original) Manny is a goof A big fat goof, but we love him David Ortiz having a ton of fun Yeah, might as well jump! Once again: old enough to drink? That’s our general manager! (They’re thumbnails. Follow the links. Celebrate!)

Seoul’s defeated me. Ten San Franciscos, a dozen Bostons, the third largest urban sprawl in the world. I’m in the megacity, and it has no reason to bother speaking my language. Coming in from the airport, driving at sixty miles per hour, it wasn’t more than half an hour before the apartment buildings began. Buildings? High-rises: concrete masses rising fifteen or twenty stories into the sky, with three story high logos painted on one side. Samsung, Hyundai, others I don’t recognize. We pass high-rise after high-rise in rows along the highway, stacked close together and stretching far back from the road. It’s another twenty minutes before we get off the highway and enter the district where my hotel is. The apartment buildings continue the entire way. ...

Zombie Smackdown. In stores next week (original). I wrote the Japan chapter. This makes it perfect for everyone who ever wanted to roleplay zombies and wrestlers in conjunction.

Blah blah blah, Joe Lieberman’s web site went down. Lieberman said it was a DoS attack. Maybe it was something else. The quick Daily Kos response was that it was due to cheap hosting. Now, that response makes no sense. On the one hand, Kos says the server was overcrowded. But MeetNed.com, which Kos says was hosted on the same servers, was up. So OK, not an overcrowded server. The hosting provider’s own site is down. Obviously some kind of technical screw up, probably not a DoS attack, but the blithe snarky “this could be fixed in an hour by a competent sysadmin” crap… nah. Kos doesn’t know what’s going on and there’s no obvious explanation. ...

(Back! Back in the saddle again!) Evil Aliens is the goriest film I saw all week. You know what you’re getting when a rotating spiky probe hits someone’s delicate rear end within the first five minutes of the movie. Sploosh! It’s also a total riot. Everyone’s comparing it to Evil Dead, which is exactly accurate. You get all the gore in the world, a wickedly nasty sense of humor, plenty of self-aware parody, and evil alien monsters. I laughed all the way through when I wasn’t cringing in shock. There weren’t any really scary bits; the aliens are gonna do damage and people are gonna die and none of that comes as any kind of a surprise. There are a couple of jump scares, but the point is definitely blood, a bit of sex, and funny stuff. Also, the scene with the harvester is the best use of music in a horror movie ever, no really. ...

I’m blithely reading Daily Kos, and there’s another post on a Congress race that’s looking like it might be competitive for the Dems. Not unusual this year. Huh, that name rings a bell for some reason. Wait. Darcy Burner (original)? That’d be the same Darcy who I knew at Harvard; who filled the co-chair spot at HRSFA after I stepped down; and who was one of my four roomates at the House on the Borderlands back in whatever year that was. (And then I bumped into her again while I was working at Alexa, which is not a very interesting company unless you know that the non-profit side of Alexa was the Internet Archive before Alexa was bought by Amazon.) Well, cool. She’s an awesome person and I have a huge amount of respect for her.

I would like to call attention to some foolish people and some people who are abrogating their responsibility. Representatives Bob Ney (R-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC) arranged to remove French fries and French toast from the House of Representatives cafeteria menu. This is about the stupidest symbolic act ever. Duh. But heck, why stop with Ney and Jones? Ney is Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, which is responsible for this change. The other members of the committee are certainly culpable: Vernon J. Ehlers, (R-MI), John L. Mica (R-FL), John Linder (R-GA), John T. Doolittle (R-CA), Thomas M. Reynolds (R-NY), John B. Larson (D-CT), Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), and Robert Brady (D-PA). (Apparently being named John is one of the criteria for being on this committee.) ...