WIP app for reimsacademy
( fandom faculty/teacher application )
PLAYER INFORMATION
PLAYER: Kevin
AGE: 24
CONTACT: AIM: Arxilius
PERSONAL LJ: dickable
CHARACTERS PLAYED None
CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Dr. Hal Emmerich (referred to by the codename “Otacon” in canon, though he won't be using that here)
CANON: Metal Gear
CANON REFERENCE: http://metalgear.wikia.com/wiki/Hal_Emmerich
AGE: 31
GENDER Male
TENURE: Four years.
SUBJECT/POSITION: Computer Science, high school level. Furthermore, he'll be serving as the Systems Administrator for the school intranet.
RESIDENCE: On-campus.
APPEARANCE: Here he is, in what I consider his typical Fall/Winter attire.
PERSONALITY: First and foremost, you need to understand that Hal's smart. Now, some of this is just a predisposition for intellectual pursuits, but... by and large? He's worked for it. He was a smart kid when he left home, but nothing outside what one might expect from a high-school student. After that, though? He worked and worked and worked, because there was no other way. He wouldn't let himself fall back on his family, he had no personal fortune... his only option was to succeed; for someone without physical inclinations, that extreme, rigorous intellectual growth might actually be considered the path of least resistance. Sure, to many, it might have been simpler to not even bother with a G.E.D., to do retail or construction or something, but, realistically? These paths weren't open for Hal. He's got no physical strength, fortitude, or agility worth mentioning, and his people skills are... weak, at best; he just had to be brilliant, and let the rest fall into place. And, once he was in school? It was easy to just keep going, as long as scholarships kept paying for it. He had room and board paid for, and he was praised for his efforts; really, what more does a person need? In fact, if the FBI hadn't aggressively recruited him, he might have just kept going to school!
But, you see, this man just can't say no... which kind of leads me to another important point: Hal has no spine. None. He wasn't able to say no to the FBI recruitment (though he didn't have much LOGICAL reason to), he wasn't able to say no to his step-mother's advances, even though he knew it was wrong on SEVERAL levels... he's just whipped by life. Being in a position of authority has only done a very MARGINAL amount to help this, too; he's still likely to retreat like a kicked dog if his students talk back to him in any important way. Confrontation isn't something he can handle, sadly. Now, granted, this has had the side-effect of making him awfully darn nice, but... worth the cost? Probably not.
But, really, he'd rather not deal with people at all. He's not too fond of the fact that he has no spine (given what it's led to in the past), but has basically resigned himself to not being able to do anything about it; so, unless it's absolutely necessary for his goals, or the tasks set forth for him by others - both are true of interacting with students - he'd just... rather spend his time tightening the code on the intranet, or tinkering with one of his pet projects (generally robots, generally adorable ones), or watching the newest episode of “Mobile Armour Gunfighter”, or whatever. It's not that he dislikes people, though, so please don't get that impression; he simply understands how his interactions with them generally go, and prefers to avoid that.
He's politically conscious (due in large part to the political power-plays that resulted from Project Metal Gear), but not overly active; he's largely disillusioned with the US government, and, while he does keep track of the political climate in France, he's not filed for citizenship yet, so he figures he has no real place taking part. That said, he has one hot button, political and otherwise: nuclear weapons. This is more or less the only way to get him worked up about... anything, really; he hates, absolutely hates, nuclear weapons, and really cannot even begin to imagine why the UN hasn't ordered the immediate disarmament of absolutely every nation on Earth. Well... okay, he's not quite that foolish, but, sometimes? He lets himself dream of a world that isn't always technically moments away from nuclear holocaust. These are good dreams.
Underneath it all, Hal is not a happy man; he has hobbies he enjoys, certainly, but... in all likelihood, no-one he currently knows has ever seen him give an honest, genuine smile (with the possible exception of whoever extended him the job offer originally, if it was in person). He hurts, and, worse than that, he's quite certain that it's mostly his own fault; he couldn't save his father from drowning or his sister from trauma, because he was too busy fucking his step-mother. He didn't see what was going on at AT Security, due to (he thinks) his own stupidity and hubris. He's convinced that he can't save anyone, not from anything... but, at the same time, he has to. He can't, but he must; that's the point of view from which he operates.
Makes your head hurt, doesn't it?
COMPUTER APTITUDE: Extremely high; as stated in his history, he was a high-level programmer on a project in which DARPA was involved, and hacked several FBI databases out of simple curiosity.
AU HISTORY: Hal was born in 1980, the son of a pair of engineers. They divorced while he was still quite young - 5 or so - and his father quickly remarried, to a widow with a daughter just a bit younger than Hal. Said daughter's name was Emma, and she and Hal were quite inseparable as children, playing together nearly constantly (including games of House that may have been unsettlingly realistic, but I'll leave those speculations to any potential Emma applicant, as - in canon - any childhood infatuation was likely entirely on her part).
Things were near-on idyllic for a time, but... when Hal was around 14, he was subjected to something really quite horrid. His step-mother, you see, had become dissatisfied - sexually - with Hal's father (who was a paraplegic since birth, and, as such, necessarily had some difficulty in the bedroom, if only due to maneuverability problems), and the boy was reasonably handsome and adult-looking, for his age. So, what does she do? She seduces him. And he's basically powerless to resist, due to having nothing even resembling a spine. They have an affair, one that lasts about six months... and then, of course, dear old dad finds out. He doesn't shout or threaten, doesn't even tell them he's found out; instead, he simply grabs up Emma, and wheels himself into the pool, trying to commit suicide and (what he perceives as) a merciful murder. Emma screams for Hal to help her, but he doesn't hear her... and why? Because he and his step-mother were in the middle of a liaison at the time.
Emma survived, but only barely, and Hal blamed himself for the whole thing. He ran away from home, and dropped out of high school... though he realized, rather quickly, that the latter was a damn fool thing to do. Thanks to the glory of the internet, he was able to teach himself enough to get a GED, and enough PAST that to not only be accepted at MIT - and, later, Princeton - but also to get full scholarships; genius mixed with hard work is a hell of a combination. To take this absurdity a step further, by age 23 (after starting college at around age 16), he had the following: a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in Computer Science, a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, and a master's degree in Robotics. It's little wonder that he was scouted by high-level people; by the (last) time he graduated, he had been offered dozens of positions by dozens of organizations and software firms. However, in the end, the choice wasn't really his; you see, when one of the groups scouting you was the FBI, it was hard to see other choices.
He ended up doing data security work for the FBI for a while, but, after about a year, he ended up getting canned. The thing about hacking into the databases of an organization for whom your meant to prevent such intrusions (out of sheer, stupid curiosity, no less): if you get caught, you're basically done.
But he wasn't! Most employers would look unfavourably on such a record, but... there was still one group, a company called ArmsTech Security - one of the USA's more prominent weapons manufacturers - who thought it was the mark of the sort of man they were looking for. They hired him, and - after a few months spent rapidly proving his worth - ended up naming him one of the head programmers for a project they codenamed “Metal Gear”, which they were working on in tandem with DARPA. The idea, you see, was to create a heavy weapons support option for situations wherein tanks could not be deployed, due to terrain issues; an idea which, I should add, originated from Hal. He was a long-time otaku, and basically lived and breathed mecha anime; to him, they were as logical a choice as any to base this new weapons system on.
Here's the thing, though, the thing he didn't know: Hal just intended it to be a newer, cooler sort of tank. However, the higher-ups saw a hell of an opportunity; they had another, smaller team focused on turning the Metal Gear that Hal's team was designing into an all-terrain nuclear launch platform, the sort of thing which would be seen as a horribly aggressive act by the rest of the world, should word get out.
Word got out.
Okay, no, sorry, that's misleading. Certain whistle-blowers got their hands on the information, and basically ransomed the government into forcibly ending the project. DARPA claimed no knowledge, so AT Security was left with egg on their face; Hal, along with every other employee assigned to the project, was fired and blacklisted. He'd never work in science again... and, really, at that point, he wasn't certain he wanted to. It's a bit late to be mentioning this, but his family has a bit of a history, when it comes to nuclear weapons: his grandfather was one of the scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project, and his father developed several systems for easing the conditions under which ICBMs could be launched.
At this point, he was at wits' end, horrified by what he'd nearly done, horrified that there were people who would try and use him - and science - for such purposes. But there... were. There always had been, and there always would be, and no amount of moping was going to make it otherwise - though he did do quite a bit of moping. That meant there was really only one thing left to do: cut it off at the source. This generation was already pretty well fucked, and he hadn't the influence or the chutzpah to change that. But, the next generation? Still in production. Still being shaped. Still had time to set 'em right.
So, what did he do? Took some classes, got certified as a teacher in a few countries (to keep his options open), and - after a hell of a lot of searching, begging, revising of his resume, and general oh-god-this'll-never-work-why-did-I-think-this-would-work-out - eventually ended up landing a position at Reims, in late 2006; a surprising twist, one might think, given the number of rejections he'd received, but... well, in a moment of desperation, he may have broken the NDA he was forced to sign, which covered the specific terms of his dismissal. The truth (rather than simply the fact that he was involved in events that violated federal law) would have cast him in a much more sympathetic light, after all, though this little fact has been kept secret since then. Contracts are contracts, after all.
Anyway, over the four-and-a-bit years he's worked there, he's... well, not made many waves as a teacher. He does his job, and does it well, but hasn't really had the chance to... counsel students. Not the way he hoped to, anyway (which might simply be his own foolishness at fault; after all, a computer science teacher is NOT a guidance counselor). Still, he's not been discouraged, and keeps on watching for students that remind him of himself: talented, and too eager for their own good. If he can set even one of them right, teach them to guard themselves against people who would use their talents for horrid purposes? It'll be a job well done.
JUSTIFICATION: Let me say, right at the beginning, that Hal is not a great leader of mankind. He's not charismatic, and he's not overly well-spoken. Why, then would he be hired as a teacher, I am asking myself as a form of rhetoric? There are a couple of reasons.
First of all, to put it bluntly, he knows his shit. Computer science, more than many fields, is something that absolutely cannot be taught with any success without knowing the field inside and out. Some of the nitty-gritty stuff might be managed by a math teacher, but the logic, data structures... the way of thinking that's inherent to the field is not shared by many others, and he's got it. More than that, he wasn't just naturally talented: he worked for it. He knows the difficulties and pitfalls average students can fall into, and how to overcome them, which is... fairly ideal, for a teacher. Furthermore, as as the SysAdmin for the school intranet, he (ICly) has the opportunity to use his experience to create a better learning/socializing tool for the students, and (OOCly) makes a pretty hilarious target for characters' complaints, when things go wrong.
The clincher, however? The clincher is that he just wouldn't work as a student. As I detailed in the history section, his high-school life? It was, in short, utterly fucked... and, a lot of the trauma he suffered, trauma which wouldn't be feasible to work in if he were away at a boarding school? It's essential to his character. Indispensible, really. He wouldn't be nearly so intelligent, his self-loathing and pain would be GONE, his obsession with/fear of nuclear war would be gone... he just wouldn't be recognizable as Hal Emmerich.
SAMPLES
INTRANET/1ST PERSON SAMPLE [Video, public]
[The video's a bit shaky; from the angle, it seems that it's being recorded from a handheld device of some sort. Given the poster, probably his iPhone.
Hal pushes up his glasses, and gives his audience an unamused look.]
Students... I'd like to take a moment to talk about, ah... forums. Um, methods of dispensing information.
I mean, I understand that clubs and athletic teams have to spread information, and I, ah... I suppose there are situations where a printed poster or flier might work better than a notice sent out over the intranet!
But... where you post your notice is kind of important. There are corkboards, and, with permission, you could probably use hallway walls, or even doors. But... there are some forums that are always inappropriate. Say, for example...
[He turns, and points the camera down at his desk; he's been in the classroom all along, so why wasn't he just posting from his lap..........
….....oh. It seems his MacBook has been plastered shut with posters. Whoopsie.]
...my laptop. ...it's gonna take ages to get those off.... and it'll scratch...
[...he gives a solid 'kicked puppy' face for a moment, before getting back to business.]
In the future, please... consider the ramifications of what you're doing a bit more seriously.
...ah, incidentally, those of you in my third-year class might be getting the grades from your last assignment back a bit late. The grades are all ready, but... well. Circumstances arose.
...regardless, have a great day, everyone, and thank you for your time.
[He can't shut off the recording fast enough. WHAT IS TALKING TO PEOPLE AUTHORITATIVELY.]
LOG/3RD PERSON SAMPLE Every. Single. Person.
Hal sat back in his chair, breathing a small sigh of irritation; he hadn't been cryptic, had he? It'd been on the syllabus, right? But, still, every last student had made the same, stupid, easily avoidable misstep.
Maybe, in a way, it was his fault; maybe he shouldn't have said that, if their programs ran perfectly, every time, that would be that. Still... to assume that your product was perfect was beyond foolish; it was hubris. And, yes, he still remembered the natural inclinations towards hubris that youth imparted, but... but, come on.
'Attach a .txt file with your source code,' he said. 'That way, even if it doesn't work, I can give you partial credit for being on the right track,' he said. But, did they listen? No. Not a one. And it wasn't that he couldn't disassemble the programs, anyway, or that doing so was too much work (doing your job? Too much work? HERESY!), but... he shouldn't have to. Students should take some interest in their grades, right?
…
Maybe he should just hand out an F or two, just to get people's attention. To make them understand that this wasn't a course you could basically sleep through. But... he knew that quite a few students were on academic scholarships, that a low enough grade could jeopardize that; was it worth endangering their future, just to prove a point?
It... well, no; or, at least, he thought not.
...he heaved another sigh, and pushed the lid the of MacBook closed. Was he too nice? Was he not nice enough? Neither one seemed right, but...
“...don't have the wherewithal to teach them. Don't have the guts to guide them.” Hal rubbed at his temples, the quietly-voiced thoughts directed at no-one. “What good am I doing here, then?”
There was no answer.
There never was.
HAVE YOU READ THE FAQ? Yes, and I'm fine, just as long as no-one's put any enchantments on the Rabid Wombat. Or, like, if there's a Glorious Anthem or Coat of Arms or something out. That would suck. That would basically ruin my day, dude.
PLAYER INFORMATION
PLAYER: Kevin
AGE: 24
CONTACT: AIM: Arxilius
PERSONAL LJ: dickable
CHARACTERS PLAYED None
CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Dr. Hal Emmerich (referred to by the codename “Otacon” in canon, though he won't be using that here)
CANON: Metal Gear
CANON REFERENCE: http://metalgear.wikia.com/wiki/Hal_Emmerich
AGE: 31
GENDER Male
TENURE: Four years.
SUBJECT/POSITION: Computer Science, high school level. Furthermore, he'll be serving as the Systems Administrator for the school intranet.
RESIDENCE: On-campus.
APPEARANCE: Here he is, in what I consider his typical Fall/Winter attire.
PERSONALITY: First and foremost, you need to understand that Hal's smart. Now, some of this is just a predisposition for intellectual pursuits, but... by and large? He's worked for it. He was a smart kid when he left home, but nothing outside what one might expect from a high-school student. After that, though? He worked and worked and worked, because there was no other way. He wouldn't let himself fall back on his family, he had no personal fortune... his only option was to succeed; for someone without physical inclinations, that extreme, rigorous intellectual growth might actually be considered the path of least resistance. Sure, to many, it might have been simpler to not even bother with a G.E.D., to do retail or construction or something, but, realistically? These paths weren't open for Hal. He's got no physical strength, fortitude, or agility worth mentioning, and his people skills are... weak, at best; he just had to be brilliant, and let the rest fall into place. And, once he was in school? It was easy to just keep going, as long as scholarships kept paying for it. He had room and board paid for, and he was praised for his efforts; really, what more does a person need? In fact, if the FBI hadn't aggressively recruited him, he might have just kept going to school!
But, you see, this man just can't say no... which kind of leads me to another important point: Hal has no spine. None. He wasn't able to say no to the FBI recruitment (though he didn't have much LOGICAL reason to), he wasn't able to say no to his step-mother's advances, even though he knew it was wrong on SEVERAL levels... he's just whipped by life. Being in a position of authority has only done a very MARGINAL amount to help this, too; he's still likely to retreat like a kicked dog if his students talk back to him in any important way. Confrontation isn't something he can handle, sadly. Now, granted, this has had the side-effect of making him awfully darn nice, but... worth the cost? Probably not.
But, really, he'd rather not deal with people at all. He's not too fond of the fact that he has no spine (given what it's led to in the past), but has basically resigned himself to not being able to do anything about it; so, unless it's absolutely necessary for his goals, or the tasks set forth for him by others - both are true of interacting with students - he'd just... rather spend his time tightening the code on the intranet, or tinkering with one of his pet projects (generally robots, generally adorable ones), or watching the newest episode of “Mobile Armour Gunfighter”, or whatever. It's not that he dislikes people, though, so please don't get that impression; he simply understands how his interactions with them generally go, and prefers to avoid that.
He's politically conscious (due in large part to the political power-plays that resulted from Project Metal Gear), but not overly active; he's largely disillusioned with the US government, and, while he does keep track of the political climate in France, he's not filed for citizenship yet, so he figures he has no real place taking part. That said, he has one hot button, political and otherwise: nuclear weapons. This is more or less the only way to get him worked up about... anything, really; he hates, absolutely hates, nuclear weapons, and really cannot even begin to imagine why the UN hasn't ordered the immediate disarmament of absolutely every nation on Earth. Well... okay, he's not quite that foolish, but, sometimes? He lets himself dream of a world that isn't always technically moments away from nuclear holocaust. These are good dreams.
Underneath it all, Hal is not a happy man; he has hobbies he enjoys, certainly, but... in all likelihood, no-one he currently knows has ever seen him give an honest, genuine smile (with the possible exception of whoever extended him the job offer originally, if it was in person). He hurts, and, worse than that, he's quite certain that it's mostly his own fault; he couldn't save his father from drowning or his sister from trauma, because he was too busy fucking his step-mother. He didn't see what was going on at AT Security, due to (he thinks) his own stupidity and hubris. He's convinced that he can't save anyone, not from anything... but, at the same time, he has to. He can't, but he must; that's the point of view from which he operates.
Makes your head hurt, doesn't it?
COMPUTER APTITUDE: Extremely high; as stated in his history, he was a high-level programmer on a project in which DARPA was involved, and hacked several FBI databases out of simple curiosity.
AU HISTORY: Hal was born in 1980, the son of a pair of engineers. They divorced while he was still quite young - 5 or so - and his father quickly remarried, to a widow with a daughter just a bit younger than Hal. Said daughter's name was Emma, and she and Hal were quite inseparable as children, playing together nearly constantly (including games of House that may have been unsettlingly realistic, but I'll leave those speculations to any potential Emma applicant, as - in canon - any childhood infatuation was likely entirely on her part).
Things were near-on idyllic for a time, but... when Hal was around 14, he was subjected to something really quite horrid. His step-mother, you see, had become dissatisfied - sexually - with Hal's father (who was a paraplegic since birth, and, as such, necessarily had some difficulty in the bedroom, if only due to maneuverability problems), and the boy was reasonably handsome and adult-looking, for his age. So, what does she do? She seduces him. And he's basically powerless to resist, due to having nothing even resembling a spine. They have an affair, one that lasts about six months... and then, of course, dear old dad finds out. He doesn't shout or threaten, doesn't even tell them he's found out; instead, he simply grabs up Emma, and wheels himself into the pool, trying to commit suicide and (what he perceives as) a merciful murder. Emma screams for Hal to help her, but he doesn't hear her... and why? Because he and his step-mother were in the middle of a liaison at the time.
Emma survived, but only barely, and Hal blamed himself for the whole thing. He ran away from home, and dropped out of high school... though he realized, rather quickly, that the latter was a damn fool thing to do. Thanks to the glory of the internet, he was able to teach himself enough to get a GED, and enough PAST that to not only be accepted at MIT - and, later, Princeton - but also to get full scholarships; genius mixed with hard work is a hell of a combination. To take this absurdity a step further, by age 23 (after starting college at around age 16), he had the following: a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in Computer Science, a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, and a master's degree in Robotics. It's little wonder that he was scouted by high-level people; by the (last) time he graduated, he had been offered dozens of positions by dozens of organizations and software firms. However, in the end, the choice wasn't really his; you see, when one of the groups scouting you was the FBI, it was hard to see other choices.
He ended up doing data security work for the FBI for a while, but, after about a year, he ended up getting canned. The thing about hacking into the databases of an organization for whom your meant to prevent such intrusions (out of sheer, stupid curiosity, no less): if you get caught, you're basically done.
But he wasn't! Most employers would look unfavourably on such a record, but... there was still one group, a company called ArmsTech Security - one of the USA's more prominent weapons manufacturers - who thought it was the mark of the sort of man they were looking for. They hired him, and - after a few months spent rapidly proving his worth - ended up naming him one of the head programmers for a project they codenamed “Metal Gear”, which they were working on in tandem with DARPA. The idea, you see, was to create a heavy weapons support option for situations wherein tanks could not be deployed, due to terrain issues; an idea which, I should add, originated from Hal. He was a long-time otaku, and basically lived and breathed mecha anime; to him, they were as logical a choice as any to base this new weapons system on.
Here's the thing, though, the thing he didn't know: Hal just intended it to be a newer, cooler sort of tank. However, the higher-ups saw a hell of an opportunity; they had another, smaller team focused on turning the Metal Gear that Hal's team was designing into an all-terrain nuclear launch platform, the sort of thing which would be seen as a horribly aggressive act by the rest of the world, should word get out.
Word got out.
Okay, no, sorry, that's misleading. Certain whistle-blowers got their hands on the information, and basically ransomed the government into forcibly ending the project. DARPA claimed no knowledge, so AT Security was left with egg on their face; Hal, along with every other employee assigned to the project, was fired and blacklisted. He'd never work in science again... and, really, at that point, he wasn't certain he wanted to. It's a bit late to be mentioning this, but his family has a bit of a history, when it comes to nuclear weapons: his grandfather was one of the scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project, and his father developed several systems for easing the conditions under which ICBMs could be launched.
At this point, he was at wits' end, horrified by what he'd nearly done, horrified that there were people who would try and use him - and science - for such purposes. But there... were. There always had been, and there always would be, and no amount of moping was going to make it otherwise - though he did do quite a bit of moping. That meant there was really only one thing left to do: cut it off at the source. This generation was already pretty well fucked, and he hadn't the influence or the chutzpah to change that. But, the next generation? Still in production. Still being shaped. Still had time to set 'em right.
So, what did he do? Took some classes, got certified as a teacher in a few countries (to keep his options open), and - after a hell of a lot of searching, begging, revising of his resume, and general oh-god-this'll-never-work-why-did-I-think-this-would-work-out - eventually ended up landing a position at Reims, in late 2006; a surprising twist, one might think, given the number of rejections he'd received, but... well, in a moment of desperation, he may have broken the NDA he was forced to sign, which covered the specific terms of his dismissal. The truth (rather than simply the fact that he was involved in events that violated federal law) would have cast him in a much more sympathetic light, after all, though this little fact has been kept secret since then. Contracts are contracts, after all.
Anyway, over the four-and-a-bit years he's worked there, he's... well, not made many waves as a teacher. He does his job, and does it well, but hasn't really had the chance to... counsel students. Not the way he hoped to, anyway (which might simply be his own foolishness at fault; after all, a computer science teacher is NOT a guidance counselor). Still, he's not been discouraged, and keeps on watching for students that remind him of himself: talented, and too eager for their own good. If he can set even one of them right, teach them to guard themselves against people who would use their talents for horrid purposes? It'll be a job well done.
JUSTIFICATION: Let me say, right at the beginning, that Hal is not a great leader of mankind. He's not charismatic, and he's not overly well-spoken. Why, then would he be hired as a teacher, I am asking myself as a form of rhetoric? There are a couple of reasons.
First of all, to put it bluntly, he knows his shit. Computer science, more than many fields, is something that absolutely cannot be taught with any success without knowing the field inside and out. Some of the nitty-gritty stuff might be managed by a math teacher, but the logic, data structures... the way of thinking that's inherent to the field is not shared by many others, and he's got it. More than that, he wasn't just naturally talented: he worked for it. He knows the difficulties and pitfalls average students can fall into, and how to overcome them, which is... fairly ideal, for a teacher. Furthermore, as as the SysAdmin for the school intranet, he (ICly) has the opportunity to use his experience to create a better learning/socializing tool for the students, and (OOCly) makes a pretty hilarious target for characters' complaints, when things go wrong.
The clincher, however? The clincher is that he just wouldn't work as a student. As I detailed in the history section, his high-school life? It was, in short, utterly fucked... and, a lot of the trauma he suffered, trauma which wouldn't be feasible to work in if he were away at a boarding school? It's essential to his character. Indispensible, really. He wouldn't be nearly so intelligent, his self-loathing and pain would be GONE, his obsession with/fear of nuclear war would be gone... he just wouldn't be recognizable as Hal Emmerich.
SAMPLES
INTRANET/1ST PERSON SAMPLE [Video, public]
[The video's a bit shaky; from the angle, it seems that it's being recorded from a handheld device of some sort. Given the poster, probably his iPhone.
Hal pushes up his glasses, and gives his audience an unamused look.]
Students... I'd like to take a moment to talk about, ah... forums. Um, methods of dispensing information.
I mean, I understand that clubs and athletic teams have to spread information, and I, ah... I suppose there are situations where a printed poster or flier might work better than a notice sent out over the intranet!
But... where you post your notice is kind of important. There are corkboards, and, with permission, you could probably use hallway walls, or even doors. But... there are some forums that are always inappropriate. Say, for example...
[He turns, and points the camera down at his desk; he's been in the classroom all along, so why wasn't he just posting from his lap..........
….....oh. It seems his MacBook has been plastered shut with posters. Whoopsie.]
...my laptop. ...it's gonna take ages to get those off.... and it'll scratch...
[...he gives a solid 'kicked puppy' face for a moment, before getting back to business.]
In the future, please... consider the ramifications of what you're doing a bit more seriously.
...ah, incidentally, those of you in my third-year class might be getting the grades from your last assignment back a bit late. The grades are all ready, but... well. Circumstances arose.
...regardless, have a great day, everyone, and thank you for your time.
[He can't shut off the recording fast enough. WHAT IS TALKING TO PEOPLE AUTHORITATIVELY.]
LOG/3RD PERSON SAMPLE Every. Single. Person.
Hal sat back in his chair, breathing a small sigh of irritation; he hadn't been cryptic, had he? It'd been on the syllabus, right? But, still, every last student had made the same, stupid, easily avoidable misstep.
Maybe, in a way, it was his fault; maybe he shouldn't have said that, if their programs ran perfectly, every time, that would be that. Still... to assume that your product was perfect was beyond foolish; it was hubris. And, yes, he still remembered the natural inclinations towards hubris that youth imparted, but... but, come on.
'Attach a .txt file with your source code,' he said. 'That way, even if it doesn't work, I can give you partial credit for being on the right track,' he said. But, did they listen? No. Not a one. And it wasn't that he couldn't disassemble the programs, anyway, or that doing so was too much work (doing your job? Too much work? HERESY!), but... he shouldn't have to. Students should take some interest in their grades, right?
…
Maybe he should just hand out an F or two, just to get people's attention. To make them understand that this wasn't a course you could basically sleep through. But... he knew that quite a few students were on academic scholarships, that a low enough grade could jeopardize that; was it worth endangering their future, just to prove a point?
It... well, no; or, at least, he thought not.
...he heaved another sigh, and pushed the lid the of MacBook closed. Was he too nice? Was he not nice enough? Neither one seemed right, but...
“...don't have the wherewithal to teach them. Don't have the guts to guide them.” Hal rubbed at his temples, the quietly-voiced thoughts directed at no-one. “What good am I doing here, then?”
There was no answer.
There never was.
HAVE YOU READ THE FAQ? Yes, and I'm fine, just as long as no-one's put any enchantments on the Rabid Wombat. Or, like, if there's a Glorious Anthem or Coat of Arms or something out. That would suck. That would basically ruin my day, dude.