Joy of Tech quite overloads our geek circuitry by combining sci-fi nerdery with tech journalist microcelebrity insideriness.

The venerable tumblog DC Women Kicking Ass has gotten a hold of the casting sheet for David E. Kelley‘s Wonder Woman pilot, revealing what looks like the majority of the major characters of the show.

The new show will portray a Wonder Woman who is a “powerful C.E.O.”, and most of the characters named fall into the category of a CEO’s entourage.  A press secretary/best friend, a personal assistant, and a second-in-command-CEO.  Those who don’t fall into that category, naturally, are love interests.

Honestly, our favorite part?  Liberal use of the phrase “open ethnicity” when used to describe casting requirements.

After banning 5,000 players for using hacks, mods, and other tricks that are against the StarCraft II terms of use, Blizzard is now suing three of the people who created and distributed those hacks, mods, and tricks in the first place.

The game maker filed suit last week in a Los Angelos court against three programmers going by the handles Permaphrost, Cranix (both Canadians), and Linuxawesome (from Peru). Their suit alleges that:

Just days after the release of Starcraft II, Defendants already had developed, marketed, and distributed to the public a variety of hacks and cheats designed to modify (and in fact destroy) the Starcraft II online game experience. In fact, on the very day that Starcraft II was released, representatives of the hacks Web site advised members of the public that “our staff is already planning new releases for this game.”

That takes chops. (And a little bit of obsessiveness.) Engadget associate editor Darren Murph has been recognized by Guinness World Records Ltd. as the professional blogger who has written the most blog posts ever: 17,212 as of July 29th.

Engadget puts things into perspective:

That’s single posts on Engadget, Engadget HD, and Engadget Mobile, not duplicated work. We obviously couldn’t be more proud of Darren and the work he’s done (and continues to do) here, and we think this is an amazing feat for one writer. Of course, this is the guy who did 59 posts in a single day at CES 2008. Seriously. To put it in perspective, his current word count is at 3,389,148. That’s War and Peace about six times over.

Congrats, Darren!

(Wonder how far Andrew Sullivan and the Daily What dude are from catching up?)

(via Engadget | Darren Murph’s author page)

Rumors about the release date for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm abound, mostly from Amazon.com, which keeps hedging its pre-order bets.  But some information from a more solid source has surfaced, or rather, been laboriously uncovered by data miners.

Evidence hidden in the files of the latest patch to the Cataclysm beta servers indicates that Arena Season 9 will begin on December 14th, which indicates that Cataclysm will launch around December 7th.

Does that sound insidery as hell?  Don’t worry, it is.  Allow us to explain.

The Harvey Awards, the American comics industry’s in-house awards show, was last night. For the second time, the MC was the internet’s own Scott Kurtz, writer and artist behind PVP, occasionally known as the granddaddy of webcomics.

There was even a bit of controversy, after Mark Waid‘s “impassioned speech about copyright and what its intent truly is” which contained a reminder to the comics industry to “not make the mistakes of the RIAA and the movie industry.” According to Bleeding Cool,

Sergio Aragonés was later to counter Waid’s theme face-to-face which led to a rather loud contre temps between the two and a bit of a storm off on Waid’s part, with Aragones acclaiming that you don’t just give your work away.

Aragonés, if you’re looking for a contextual touchstone, is a veteran of Mad Magazine and the creator of Groo the Wanderer, while Waid wrote The Flash for eight years, and was the writer behind Kingdom Come.

But enough of that! See the award winners and their competition below:

There are many people out there for whom the idea of more games like Defense of the Ancients (affectionately known as DotA) is very exciting, and so gamemaker Valve‘s announcement that it had acquired some of the developers of DotA so that they could do just that has been greeted optimistically.

However, Valve is planning on calling their Defense of the Ancients Allstars, and Riot Games, maker of the DotA inspired (something of an understatement) League of Legends, feels that the use of the name Defense of the Ancients should not be restricted. Steve Mescon of Riot Games told PCGamer:

The idea that one single company is taking control of the name of something that hundreds of people have contributed to is surprising. I believe DotA should always remain a community-owned product that modders, independent developers and game fans can continue to modify and play as often as they’d like. Guinsoo and I had hoped that the DotA name would live on in perpetuity as a community project that is both free to play and free to modify and expand.

What is DotA? If it’s so popular, why isn’t the name already trademarked? The answers are really quite interesting, and are rooted in unique aspects of the industry and culture of online PC gaming.

Scott Pilgrim may be good at fighting exes, but not at fighting middle-aged action heroes, Julia Roberts, or Will Ferrell.

At least, according to current estimates of his movie’s box office pull for this weekend.

Spinoff Online has a provocative article chronicling Marvel Studio‘s frequent clashes with its talent, not only asking whether this policy is intentional, but whether it will become a problem for the studio later on.

The most recent manifestation of this trend is of course the outright dismissal of Edward Norton from the cast of The Avengers, despite a performance as Bruce Banner that was motivated by a real personal love for the character. Other examples include Terrence Howard being replaced for Iron Man 2, and Samuel L. Jackson nearly walking from the same production over salary arguments.

MGM has been staving off bankruptcy and looking for a buyer for going on a year now, and the process has just been extended. The studio’s new deadline to either pay off its creditors or go bankrupt is September 15th.

Why is this relevant to our interests? Well, because until MGM gets its act together, it’s very unlikely that The Hobbit or the next James Bond movie will see production.

Read on...