Articles filed under “Internet”

TGGCertain books lend themselves to video game adaptation. (Lord of the Rings? Hell yes! Who doesn’t want to tromp around Middle Earth slaying orcs and what not?)

Other literary classics? Like, say, The Great Gatsby? Not so much.

Or so we thought.

Turns out someone decided F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of high society in the Roaring Twenties would also make a passable platformer. Not the decision we would have made, but still. Check the game out in all its 16-bit glory!

(Could a This Side of Paradise MMO RPG be far behind? Stay tuned …)

The holidays may have come and gone, but the USG is still taking votes on what Princetonians are wishing for. While the USG hasn’t officially commented on the results, voting information from the “Which do you want more?” survey that’s been available on Point for the past month is available at the USG’s All Our Ideas page.

Bet you can't guess who sent in the one on the left ...

Bet you can't guess who sent in the one on the left ...

As always, there are two things on our collective mind: food, and grades.

While the number one pick was making the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week a holiday, Friday night late meal and letting juniors and seniors use their two free meals a week at late meal rounded out the top three. Seven of the top 25 picks were food-related, from to-go boxes in the dining halls (#7) to an email or SMS roundup of free food options on campus (#25).

The other recurring theme, unsurprisingly, was grades. “Less mystery around grading” came in eighth, with “exam database” right behind in ninth. A deadline for returning final and midterm grades, asking professors to post previous exams, and compulsory midterm evaluations were also popular picks.

But there were some surprises, too. While we’d love to end our grade deflation angst, improve Wi-Fi quality, and be able to use PawPoints at the Wa and other off-campus spots, we’d be even happier with a couple of staplers.

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likealittle.com picRemember GoodCrush? Well, newcomer LikeALittle.com bears a striking resemblance to Princeton’s last “missed connections” website.

Started by students at Stanford and expanding to schools across the country, LikeALittle combines ease of use, anonymity, and mild stalker tendencies into one Internet platform, making compliments to that cute girl in Frist much easier to make. (We all know the community was sorely lacking an outlet for awkward anonymous flirting since GoodCrush was taken down.)

Presumably, LikeALittle could be used as a dating site: there’s a feature that lets you message the author of the flirt post if you think it’s about you. But in reality, this would only work if a substantial percentage of your school’s student body uses the site. Given the number of posts on the site, that’s not entirely true right now.

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Mediterra sponsored the evening's multi-course dinner

Last Friday, nearly 170 people gathered at Princeton’s Trinity Church for the inaugural dinner of its new restaurant, One Table Café.

The One Table Café is a once-a-month fine dining experience for working class individuals who cannot afford to frequent fancy restaurants.

The dinner is completely free– sponsored by local restaurants who volunteer their chefs to provide guests with a high-quality, healthy meal. The January 21 dinner was sponsored by Mediterra.

The event also featured speaker Dr. Cornel West, Princeton professor of religion, who commemorated the Café’s outreach and community-building goals.

Registration for upcoming meals can be found here.

Read more about the unique efforts of the One Table Café on AllPrinceton.com.

Recently, bloggers have gotten ahold of President John F. Kennedy’s old college application essays, and boy, were standards different back then.

EDIT: JFK’s Harvard essay reads like this: (Source)

“The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I felt that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a “Harvard man” is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.”

But wait… they found his application essay to Princeton was nearly identical.

Hey now, cut the late Mr. President some slack. It’s not like we all didn’t do a little tweaking on our Common App. (“Sure, Yale’s my top choice…”) On the other hand, he only spent 6 weeks at Princeton before going to Harvard.

Critics argue that if Kennedy applied today, he would not have been admitted to an Ivy League school with these essays. But honestly, if JFK could reapply knowing everything we do today, wouldn’t his essay be entitled “How I’m Going to Become a Pimpin’ Ladykiller/President of the United States Before My Untimely Assassination That Will Go Down in History as a Government Conspiracy”?

That’s what I called mine.

Moral of the story to Princeton students aspiring for elected office: guard your college apps.

…is out on the Internet! Posted by photographer Adrian Nina on his Tumblr.

A suitable end to our semester of Jane Randall coverage? We’ll be checking in with Jane throughout the year as she begins her modeling career with IMG.

tumblr_lfcax9aIJy1qzw9gco1_500

No, really, what do you think theyre doing?

No, really, what do you think they're doing?

Would you study on Facebook? Not study as in Facebook stalk your cute sophomore lab partner (or, let’s be honest, yourself), but study as in, like, prepare for an exam?

The answer to that question, found Ingrial, the company behind the now-defunct Facebook app “Courses,” is no, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We found that Facebook was not a popular place to engage with course content,” says Michael Staton, Inigral’s chief executive.

Students preferred using it for things like looking at friends’ photos.

Surprise! But that doesn’t mean tech entrepreneurs will stop trying to make the academic aspect of college more social.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has the run-down on the newest “social-studying” sites, including one that pays you for sharing your notes, here.

Elections redux: USG commander-in-chief Yaro this afternoon sent the student body a link to the runoff vote for next year’s USG vice-president and for the hotly contested hummus referendum.

First up, sophomore Catherine Ettman faces off against junior Austin Lewis Hollimon in the runoff for USG vice-president. Second on the ticket, the ballot introduces a referendum, presented by the Princeton Committee on Palestine, that reads as follows:

On behalf of the student body, the USG will make a formal recommendation to University Dining Services that it offers an alternative to Sabra Hummus in all University retail locations.

If you haven’t been following the debate surrounding the hummus referendum, you can read up on it here.

Cast your votes here and read candidate statements here; elections run through Wednesday.

image source: huffingtonpost.com

image source: huffingtonpost.com

The Huffington Post recently created a list entitled “If Rappers Were Colleges: Analogies You WON’T Find on the SAT,” which pairs universities with famous rappers. Comparing Princeton to Eminem, the rankings say that he (or we) are “The whitest of the truly elite.”

Our friends at PrincetonFML are ambivalent about the comparison.

One student writes, “If rappers were colleges, Eminem would be Princeton. OLAG?” Another says that “Jay-Z should be Princeton.” Unfortunately, the year Princeton loses its #1 spot on the U.S. News & World Report rankings is also the year that the HuffPo gives Jay-Z to Harvard.

But we think the analogy is apt beyond our pigment challenges. In 1896 our school changed its name from the College of New Jersey to Princeton University. Born Marshall Mathers, Eminem similarly assumed his rap name because it sounds cooler (M and M are his initials. Get it?). The first five Presidents of Princeton had untimely health issues and died within 20 years of one another. Eminem was abandoned by his father when he was 18 months old. Despite these tragic beginnings of contested nominal identities, both Princeton and Eminem have stood up as the real Slim Shadys.

So here’s some advice from our rapper/school (Princeton even has its research hands in #3).

(source: paw.princeton.edu)

(source: paw.princeton.edu)

Think of this piece as an introduction to Princeton FML, your virtual window into the life of a Princeton undergraduate.

It might not be the most graceful — or eloquent — way to complain, but it’s probably the easiest. “FML.” The last two letters stand for “my life,” and it shouldn’t be too hard to guess what the “F” means. The phrase popped into existence in 2008 with the website Fmylife.com, where anonymous users post “FMLs” to be voted up or down. Soon after, a freshman at Harvard launched a network of college-specific sites.

But PrincetonFML, which has seen more than 80,000 unique visitors so far this year — and almost 2 million page views — may be the most popular.

Read on in the latest issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

image source: http://userlogos.org/files/logos/sjdvda/fml.png

image source: http://userlogos.org/files/logos/sjdvda/fml.png

Given the surge of FML college spinoffs, The Ink thought it’d be helpful to look at some of the FMLs produced around the Ivies. As finals period casts its darkness across the Ancient Eight, here’s what our peers are complaining about:

Harvard: “I am so sleep-deprived that upon reading a paragraph of a paper I wrote, my roommate asked me why I had chosen to discuss the argument submitted by a member of the Prostitution to the point posed by a member of the defense in the legal case I was writing about. FML”

Yes, yes… we’re no stranger to stories of sleep deprivation and papers written on all-nighters. We have a sneaking suspicion, however, that this piece would have received one of the many generously-awarded A’s that Harvard permits, even if “prostitution” had made its way into the final round. Get some sleep, Harvard, and we’ll check in on the Elis:

Yale: “People bitch and moan about the stupidest problems on this website. FYL”

Ah, the characteristic glimmer of self-referential awareness (lest Triangle remind us that Elis love to “Deconstruct! Deconstruct!”) and brilliantly executed wordplay that transitions the f**ked life from “my” to “your.” Well played, Yale.

And what’s our Providence sister—home of “Sex, Power, God”– doing as her peers chew their way through exams?

Brown: My unused and first vibrator broke right before I was about to use it for the first time. Why during finals? FML”

Add this depiction of “finals activities” to the list (which includes unlimited pass/fail courses and “The Emma Watson Effect”) of reasons why you should have gone to Brown.

[UPDATED BELOW] The Princeton Tiger, our resident humor rag, has been absolutely tearing up the internets lately. Their latest video, “Discussions in Contemporary Poetry: A conversation with Paul Muldoon,” features some erudite commentary from our beloved Professor of Creative Writing. The unlikely subject: Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok.” See the deep poetic genius in action:

Juxtaposition of high and low culture! (Especially enjoyed the Lear reference.) It’s funny! Apparently, it’s this funny. And this funny. And this funny. They throw up an adorable shoutout to their poetry editor: “Oh Paul, you totally make it pop.”

So, Tiger Mag, a tip of the hat — for making this video, for making waves. And for enriching the vocabulary of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. (Notable additions: “crunk,” “junk.”)

UPDATE: These guys picked up on it too. Viral status is imminent.

UPDATE II: And also the Village Voice and the New York Times (!).