Tag Archives: metablogging

FEATURED
Repost: A Very Wesleying Recrootment

This is a repost of our fall recruitment post. Same rules apply. Our blog could be your life.

Hey, readers. Wesleying’s pretty low-staffed lately (update: just kidding, we have some underclassmen now), and to make matters worse, a whole bunch of us are graduating this coming May. So it goes. Wesleying underwent a pretty wild generational shift back in 2010, when Sheek exited and handed over the reigns, and as it finishes up its seventh academic year, it’s going to have to weather another one in 2013. That’s where you step in.

We bloggers exited the WiFi confines of our cyberspace existence yesterday in September to get some sunlight and schmooze in flesh-and-blood form at the Student Activities Fair. Frankly, it was pretty weird. People don’t really think of Wesleying as a group of humans, as normal students—we’re just a thing that’s out there, online. And it turns out there are a lot of freshmen reading. One girl bragged that Wesleying is pretty much why she applied ED. Another declared, “I’ve been reading this blog for so long, and I’m only a freshman!” Another claimed to have read every Wesleying post, which is pretty impressive, considering there are over 11,000. We’ll be materializing again tomorrow, and here’s your chance to keep the blog alive.

There’s a whole lot of text below the jump, so here’s the short of it: Wesleying is recruiting. We’ll be having a formal recruitment meeting tomorrow, February 2, at 3:30 p.m. in 41 Wyllys, Room 112. We’re looking for bloggers, journalists, writers, photographers, interviewers, social media types (help run our Twitter!), homespun Wes historians, videographers, internet addicts, Photoshop fiends, and web design wizards—whatever. Frosh especially welcome. If you love Wesleying and want to help make it the weird, irreverent, and colorful media space it has become—or if you just like blogging in your underwear—please stop by. In the immortal words of The Great Sheek, “All you need is Internet access, the ability to string sentences together coherently, and an interest in life at Wesleyan as it is, was, and might be.”

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FEATURED
Trustee Occupation Aftermath: SJB Charges, “Roth on Wesleyan” Shout-Out

Trustee: “Students barging in is a long and time-honored tradition at Wesleyan.”

On Sunday, a coalition of about 40 students occupied a closed Board of Trustees meeting in support of need-blind with a sign reading “BRING US INTO THE CONVERSATION.” The action was brief, it was respectful, and—most impressively—it resulted in a pretty thoughtful exchange between occupiers and occupied, all caught on video. “Just to be clear, students barging in is a long and time-honored tradition at Wesleyan,” one trustee opines about six minutes into the footage. “Some of us did it ourselves!” another chimes in. (Maybe even during the myriad of need-blind protests that took place in 1992, if any of them are on the younger side.) (By “younger side” I mean under 46.)

Turns out the Student Judicial Board isn’t quite as enamored with the time-honored Wesleyan activist tradition. According to tips, at least five students have received SJB notices in association with the 15-minute occupation. These students were captured on Public Safety’s camera (in the video, one P-Safe officer calmly asks students to exit the doorway and not “disrupt the meeting”), and their actions  have been described as “failure to comply” and “disruptions.” It’s a pretty harsh follow-up on a protest that spurned more thoughtful dialogue than it did mutual resentment, but who’s surprised? Here’s what the charges look like:

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FEATURED
A Very Wesleying Recrootment

Interested in auditioning for Wesleying, Wesleyan’s “sassiest and most WordPress-savvy online singing group”? Scroll on, dear one. Our blog could be your life.

Hey, readers. Wesleying’s pretty low-staffed lately (BZOD is abroad, and frostedmoose has floated on into the great abyss), and to make matters worse, a whole bunch of us are graduating this coming May. So it goes. Wesleying underwent a pretty wild generational shift back in 2010, when Sheek exited and handed over the reigns, and as it finishes up its seventh academic year, it’s going to have to weather another one in 2013. That’s where you step in.

We bloggers exited the WiFi confines of our cyberspace existence yesterday to get some sunlight and schmooze in flesh-and-blood form at the Student Activities Fair. Frankly, it was pretty weird. People don’t really think of Wesleying as a group of humans, as normal students—we’re just a thing that’s out there, online. And it turns out there are a lot of freshmen reading. One girl bragged that Wesleying is pretty much why she applied ED. Another declared, “I’ve been reading this blog for so long, and I’m only a freshman!” Another claimed to have read every Wesleying post, which is pretty impressive, considering there are over 11,000. We’ll be materializing again tomorrow, and here’s your chance to keep the blog alive.

There’s a whole lot of text below the jump, so here’s the short of it: Wesleying is recruiting. We’ll be having a formal recruitment meeting tomorrow, September 16, at 2:30 pm in Usdan 110. We’re looking for bloggers, journalists, writers, photographers, interviewers, social media types (run our Twitter!), homespun Wes historians, videographers, internet addicts, photoshop fiends, and web design wizards—whatever. Frosh especially welcome. If you love Wesleying and want to help make it the weird, irreverent, and colorful media space it has become—or if you just like blogging in your underwear—please stop by. In the immortal words of The Great Sheek, “All you need is Internet access, the ability to string sentences together coherently, and an interest in life at Wesleyan as it is, was, and might be.”

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FEATURED
WesStuffed: Sophomore Foodies Launch Campus Food Blog, Use “Wes” as Prefix

“On WesStuffed, students can read about anything from the new sandwiches available at Usdan Café to a review of a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese noodle house on Main Street.”

Stop the presses, there’s a new food blog on WordPress! This one isn’t a cooking blog, like For The Love of Food (Lauren Rothman ’08) or Bread and Butter Press (Leah Campbell ’09). It’s not a recipe blog, like The Intrepid Cook (Maren Ellingboe ’10). It’s not just a bunch of pictures of salads, like Ryan Makes Salads, or consolidated menus, like the apparently defunct WesFood, and it’s certainly not as episodic as the sorely missed Lunchtime with Mark and Scott.

It’s WesStuffed, a learned, entertaining, and gastronomically informed guided to “the culinary jungle that is Middletown, Connecticut.” Roughly comparable to The Wesivore, which has been discontinued, the blog has so far featured rundowns of Middletown eateries, reviews of Pi iced tea and Red & Black cheese selections, and a pretty illuminating take on Usdan’s continued relationship with Ronnybrook dairy products. (The authors even spoke with the farmers and distributors of Ronnybrook products, both Wesleyan alumni.) It has also championed the hell out of Sweet Harmony Cafe and Bakery, a little-known hole-in-the-wall Middletown joint “laden with trinkets and treasures of every variety.”

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A Plea For Culture: Send Us Your Abrogs

“Then we all went to Granada and checked out this nightclub opened by this other guy they all knew. It was cool: They had pretty good paella there, but otherwise it was pretty much just like any bar back in Bloomington.”

There’s a changing-of-the-guards going on in Junior Village. As over 170 juniors return from abroad experiences all over the freakin’ globe, another 120 juniors (plus a handful of 2014-ers) embark this month on travels of their own. Some of you may even be reading this very blog post from your street cafe in Bodh Gaya or Buddhist temple in Paris! So it goes.

Last semester, Wesleying sent out a call and put the spotlight on some of these abroad blogs (read: abrogs), which mostly seemed base in France, France, France, Australia, and Pearl Street, respectively. Then came a second edition, which featured Blogspot- and WordPress-hosted forays into Bodh Gaya, Israel, and—my personal fave—one student’s epic quest to discover her namesake among elephants in Tanzania.

The point of all this? If you’re maintaining a blog/Flickr/Twitter/Friendster/Xanga/LiveJournal while abroad, it’s something to write home about. Send us the link and a bit about what you’re up to. Email staff<at>wesleying<dot>org, and put “ABROAD BLOG” in the subject line. Thanks!

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Procrastination Destination: Masochistic College Student Completes Journey Through Hell

You think I’m kidding? The guy watched the movie “Julie & Julia” every single day for a year while blogging about it. If that’s not hell, I don’t know what is.

Remember Lawrence Dai from Zach‘s post last year about the blog, the Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project? For those of you who don’t, Lawrence is a college student at Northwestern who, in a moment of temporary insanity, decided to watch the movie Julie & Julia every single day for a year – that’s 365 viewings. The movie itself is about a woman named Julie Powell cooking all of Julia Child’s recipes within a year and blogging about it, so you can kind of see where he was coming from when he started this thing, although how (and whether) he maintained his sanity are still questions up to debate. 

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America, Occupied: Ezra Silk ’10 and Friends On The Road

From Argus to OWS: liveblogging (and touring) the Occupy movement with Wes ’10-ers.

Thursday, November 17. Two months since the OWS first occupied New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17. (At Wesleyan, it seems like only yesterday.) The Occupy movement declares a “day of action”—across America, worldwide, and at Wesleyan, where a demonstration in solidarity with the Occupy movement begins at Olin at 4 PM.

Meanwhile, Ezra Silk ’10 takes on the Occupy movement firsthand: the former Argus editor and founder of Big Dog barbershop is is traveling around the country to write about the Occupy Wall Street protests and writing about it on America, Occupied, along with Ashik Siddique ’10, Gianna Palmer ’10, and Ryan Villareal. We’ve blogged about various Wes alums weighing in on the movement, but this is different. Silk writes:

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Rothupy Wall Street: Roth on OWS, Education, Equality in Academia

“In big lecture halls, students can’t buy the best seats or arrange for extra help sessions with their parents’ checkbooks.”

Above, a group of Occupy Atlanta protesters link arms on Peachtree Street as city police move in to make arrests. Hours earlier, Mayor Kasim Reed revoked an executive order permitting the protesters to remain in the park. In Oakland, police resorted to tear gas and a stun grenade to disperse over 1,000 protesters marching on Oakland City Hall. In Lower Manhattan—where this whole party originated over a month ago—protesters continue marching through the streets “denounc[ing] for-profit healthcare.”  Wesleyan came, saw, and got arrested.

From DR’s Himanshu to Daniel Handler ’92 to Tenured “Claire Potter” Radical (newly hosted over at the Chronicle of Higher Education), a colorful grab-bag of WesCelebs have weighed in. (And really, what’s a party without Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler?) So where’s everyone’s favorite BOF (Blogger Over Fifty) amidst the chorus—what’s Michael Roth’s take on all this?

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WESLEYING! BLOG FOR IT!

Did you miss the Wesleying recruitment meeting today? Are you still interested in joining Wesleying to post about events, post generally about campus life, take photos, or photoshop Michael Roth’s face onto semi-nude students in Olin?

Send us an email at staff[at]wesleying[dot]org. In your email, include your name, class year, and a little bit of information about yourself. Include any past blogging experience if applicable (it is not necessary) and how you got interested in blogging for Wesleying. Be sure to include the word “recruitment” in the subject line!

EVENT
AUDITION FOR WESLEYING!

“Real Student Life at Wesleyan University. And ‘N Sync Medleys!”

Audition for Wesleying! Get psyched to join Wesleyan’s premier online-only a capella group by auditioning this Saturday—in person—in Allbritton 304. Come learn about Wesleyan’s sassiest, and most WordPress-savvy, singing group. Bring a song to sing (preferably a 13-16 minute medley of outtakes from Rent), a virtuosic display of shark dance motions, and a bottomless command of HTML. Dress sharp (eyeliner welcome; pixelated costumes forbidden), and dazzle us with your doo-wop backup grooves and crippling carpal tunnel syndrome. Serenade us of site meters and JPEGs, spambots and reCAPTCHAs. Join Wesleying: Real Bop-Shoo-Wop at Wesleyan University.

Let us know if you have what it takes to, um—blog in your underwear. All students and class years welcome. Giant joints, too.

Date: Tomorrow, Saturday, September 17
Place: Allbritton 304 (conference room, third floor of Allbritton)
Time: 4:30 pm
JOIN: US

(Note: no actual singing. In the words of Sheek: “All you need is Internet access, the ability to string sentences together coherently, and an interest in life at Wesleyan as it is, was, and might be.” More from past recruitments after the jump.)

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