Most everyone seems to like the geeky Japanese guy Hiro on Heroes. A fan site trying to be the definitive spoiler/conspiracy theory site has even named itself SuperHiro.org. Hiro is not only a great character, but Masi Oka, the actor, is a pretty neat guy himself. In addition to acting he continues to moonlight for his first job as a programmer for the special effects house Industrial Light & Magic. Masi Oka had a hand in the water effects for the Pirates of the Carribean films, among other projects. There is a Wired article on Masi Oka and I got a big kick from the article's tail:
Should Heroes' early success continue for NBC, Oka said he would love to be able to direct an episode in season three or four and bring all of his ILM cronies in to help out.
"I'd make use of my employee discount -- buy two effects and get one free," joked Oka.
In other news, the upcoming run of my Assassin's game code (Assassins! on 2006-Oct-27) currently has 67 people signed up, with about 16 hours remaining to sign up. This is the largest game since the code rewrite and already places it as one of the biggest games ever run by the council. Unfortunately, until the code rewrite no one kept much in the way of historical data, so I don't have any exact data on that and am relying on others' memories for this. (Thus the historical largest game I got back was "70-something players"...) I'm pretty impressed and I'm hoping the game will be a success (bugs will result in people yelling at me) and I'm interested in watching this "stress test" play out.