Superheroes, classes, and math, part 2

So after the first week of classes, and the character creation session for the superhero game, here is what has happened:

- I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about Stephen Bond yet.

- Steve LaValle is kind of a funny professor. The first day in class he said that "normally I try not to stay too close to the book, but in this case I am kind of confused as to whether I should do that, because I wrote the book." Also he had us look through the book and vote (by email) on which chapters we want him to focus on for the class. Not everyone turned their vote in on time, so he said that "just like real elections, we have low voter turnout here" and joked that "actually, I'll just ignore the voting and do whatever I want, just like the real government."

- Jeff Erickson called me a "great graduate student" on his web page.

- At Armored Gopher Games we had our character creation session for the superhero game. I had to take a cab there because my bike got a flat tire. But it was really cool and people had lots of funny superhero ideas. One of the superhero ideas was an alien who was given superpowers and sent to Earth to live among the humans as part of a "reality show." One of the character's disadvantages is that occassionally the "producers" will teleport him to a "more interesting" location, or teleport him back to the mothership to alter his powers. My idea was a "gadgeteer" type character who has an army of robotic UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that will help him - like a "combat" one that has powerful attacks and a "scout" one that has stealth and detection powers. Dave said that this was a good idea for a character, but warned me that the focus of the game was on the heroes, and if the robots took up too much of the spotlight, he would find ways of disabling them.