I am a persuasive French wino that can stun people with insults and convince policemen that he and his party were in fact not responsible for the mutilated bodies tossed out of a window into an alley. All with the flick of a d20.

The BU Role-Playing Society is one of the three clubs I’ve joined. Right now the only campaign I’m dedicated to is a post-WWII spy adventure set in Vietnam. There are lots of other games in many different non-D&D settings, but my schedule often conflicts and I honestly don’t have the time anymore. That said, it’s a fun and often hilarious way to spend a weekly evening.

Wizards is a community service group that teaches science experiments to kids from kindergarten all the way to early high school. A friend in my computer science class invited me over to a meeting one day, and I figured that it was a weekly two hour committment that might be reminiscent to the fun time I had volunteering with 1st graders at P.S. 89 right next to Stuyvesant. I noted this on my app, and lo and behold, I got one of the spots in the group that works with kindergarteners and 1st graders 😀 . We’re driven by van to the Young Achievers school, what seems to be one of many Boston pilot public schools for new learning strategies. The distinction wasn’t exactly evident though, as it reminded me a lot of P.S. 89 despite it being a regular public school. Not that it mattered, because the school was charming and the kids were cute and wonderful. The kindergarteners have their current curriculum based around butterflies, so our activity focused on symmetry using butterflies as examples. Few children remembered the word when the day was done, but all of them had fun seeing their folded paper cutouts become butterflies. The colored versions were all pinned up on the window afterwards.

The BU Massively-Multiplayer Online Gaming Society is a club that a couple friends and I founded after seeing interest on the BU Livejournal group. We rotate through new MMOs every two weeks or so, playing games like Gunbound, Rakion, Albatross18, and Ragnarok Online. We’re all encouraged to play games on our own and stick with ones that we like, but we often meet up with other MMOGS members so that there’s a sense of familiarity when in unfamiliar territory. After each game’s rotation is finished, we each write a review and give it a grade, both of which are posted on our soon-to-be-created forum. We’re hoping to have generated enough of a track record to warrant attention from non-MMOGS members, perhaps non-BU members, and hopefully game developers looking for effective beta testers. The pinnacle of success for the MMOGS would be either getting access to a highly anticipated game in closed beta testing or getting enough funding to provide paid accounts to some of the newer, hotter games on the market. As it stands, we’re just a bunch of college gamers. But next semester, we’ll be gamers with university funding for snacks.

I am vice-president of the MMOGS. The president, secretary, and treasurer are all juniors, which means that in all likelihood I’m going to be inheriting the club after two years. Oh man it’s like Excalibur all over again. Luckily the club’s survival doesn’t depend on my (lack of) gaming skill, but rather my enthusiasm, which I have plenty of. For now I’ll just chip in where I can and learn a few things along the way. And have fun with ultra-high angle shots on a mammoth while I’m at it.