Hi friendos. Today, I’m going to talk about knitting. Nobody in my life ever loved me enough to teach me how to knit, so I learned exclusively through videos like this. Now, I’m a straight-up string freak, up to the point where I have a folder of downloaded Ravelry patterns on my computer.
But here’s the secret: It’s easy. Too easy. What you need:
Welcome to the third installment of Procrastination Destination, where Wesleying provides you #content to get you through finals!
If you’re the same type of perpetually stressed as I am, then you also decide to bake/make/chef-it-up during finals season to take some productive time off from studying or staring at Netflix, pretending to study. Baking is a ~thing that I do~ while blasting some dramatic music because at least I’m doing something, even if it isn’t homework.
I have a slightly well-known recipe for Mocha Spice cupcakes that I came up with after experimenting in the kitchen a few years back. They’ve made their way to Wesleyan a few times, notably when I baked over three dozen and delivered them to students after spring break. I normally try to bake a batch while I’m home and share the ~goods~ with friends, and it’s quickly become a favorite treat.
The thing is, I don’t *really* have a recipe. I follow this Turkish thing called göz ayar?, which directly translates to eye measurement, which completely makes sense (I hope). Essentially, I know how much to throw into the measuring bowl after making these cupcakes time and time again. The point is, the recipe’s ingredients are always in a dynamic flux depending on what I have laying at home.
The “recipe” I’m going to share is meant to be broken; it’s meant to be experimented with. If you don’t like a particular ingredient, literally just take it out. Wanna add something? Go for it! This recipe is supposed to look like absolute freakin’ chaos…because it is. This is essentially the cupcake in its core, and sometimes I play around with some ~extras~, which I’ll let you know about after getting that not-so-stable cupcake foundation set.
from Yanko Tsvetkov’s Atlas of Prejudice
Here at Wesleying we’re so fucked for finals that we haven’t even been keeping up with our procrastination. If you’re like me, all you really need to procrastinate is a floor to sit on and the ability to stare into space. If not, I’ve got you covered. I’ve long been a fan of geography, ever since I learned that the maps in the back of middle school planners were an excellent way to not pay attention in class. The internet, however, has brought geography-fueled procrastination to new heights. Read past the break for lots of fun geography-related ways to screw yourself over.
Why waste all your time procrastinating on the internet when there are so many lovely places in nearby central Connecticut ripe for exploration? Two Middletown experts, Manon Lefèvre ’14 and Piers Gelly ’13 write in with a pretty spectacular list of places one could visit while procrastinating or not procrastinating.
Does a goldfish really have an attention span of three seconds? Sometimes it feels like Wesleyan’s lasts just under four years. I’ve now lived in Middletown for six years, and my girlfriend, Manon Lefèvre ’14, has been a Nutmegger since she was nine. As such, we’ve put together a list of a few of our favorite places in CT. It’s neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but maybe you’ll learn something from our experiences.When it gets really hot out, you can tube down the Farmington River for a 2.5 mile scenic ride (and some mild rapids). It’s a little steep at $20, but totally worth it. Last time I went, there was one particularly scary bit of rapids and we were warned that if you went straight down the middle you would get stuck in what they call the “washing machine,” where you get sucked into a whirlpool and just spin around like a washing cycle. It happened to my friend Nicole, who panicked and had to get talked down by a lifeguard wearing nothing but a tiny speedo.—ML
A sci-fi podcast created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome To Night Vale takes the form of a current-events radio show. Each episode centers around one specific event that’s happening throughout each 30-minute show, and your charismatic host is Cecil Palmer, the voice of Night Vale (played by Cecil Baldwin). Sounds good, right?
Fink has said that WTNV should be “hard to describe to your friends,” and oh, how it is. Essentially, WTNV is a show about weird shit that happens in a small town in the desert that is the American southwest. It’s, you know, just like every other town — pervaded by the corporate megalomania of a company called StrexCorp, monitored by a vague and nameless government agency, and full of people who think this is completely normal.
Like, totally! The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home can definitely run for mayor against a literal five-headed dragon. Totally normal. Station management at Night Vale Radio is just a vague rumbling from behind a door. The weather is just a song. Following every subplot in WTNV is a conspiracy theorist’s dream come true. My guess is that if you’re into Twin Peaks, you’d probably be into this too.
Today, Procrastination Destination brings you “This or That?” quizzes, which are exactly what they sound like – you see a name and then use your excellent logical (and/or guessing) skills to put it into one category or another.
You might have seen a couple of quizzes like this before, but today we bring you even more. Do you know your IKEA brands from your death metal bands? Fonts from cheeses?
Find out:
Just in time for finals week, my favorite underclassmen introduced me to an incredible app called “Trivia Crack.” The premise of the game is that you challenge your friends to games of trivia. There are six different categories that are divided on a wheel which you spin for each round: Art, Entertainment, Science, Sports, History, and Geography. The objective is to obtain every character on the wheel, by answering three questions correctly and then answering a fourth in your selected category. You can, however, supersede the three questions by spinning a “crown” on the wheel. Although the game is so addicting it runs the risk of making you less social in actual social environments (please see image to the left for evidence), I speculate that it could help you buff up for activities such as Wednesday crosswords and Tuesday night trivia at La Boca. I find the game very compelling especially since the questions run the gamut from somewhat obtuse to absurdly inane to a pleasurable trivial question to which YOU KNOW THE ANSWER!
Plus if a question even mildly pertains to one of your classes, you could pass it off as “passive studying.” For example, under the category of “Art” I was recently asked the question “Who wrote Mansfield Park?” The answer to which is Jane Austen. It just so happens that I read a Jane Austen book (Sense and Sensibility) for one of my classes this semester and will be writing a paper about the novel this coming week. BOOM. STUDYING FOR FINALS ALREADY. Kind of. Anyway, if you enjoy trivia, procrastination, being competitive in a joke-y sort of way with your friends, and questions like “What is a ‘kilt’?” (?!?!?!?), Trivia Crack is the game for you. Add me!
Sometimes, you just need a good cry.* If your finals or impending graduation aren’t doing it for you (or, in my case, my delayed flight and consequent 5 hour day trip to Bradley yesterday…. thanks, Chicago), here is a collection of things to get your tear ducts working.
Hold on to your binders and beg for mercy: The writers of Wesleying are bringing you our critically-acclaimed biannual Procrastination Destination feature, where we post a frenzy of addictive, pointless, and/or awesome links to help you get your procrastination on every day for all of finals (today + reading period + actual finals week). Have an idea for what you think would be a rad Procrastination Destination? Email us at staff(at)wesleying(dot)org.
As the first stop on your trip away from productivity, I bring with me Weird Versions of 2048. Don’t lie and say you haven’t played it yet, because even if you haven’t yet tried to smash together brightly colored, numbered tiles in pursuit of that elusive “2048” tile (or, if you’re a seasoned pro like myself, maybe even “4096”) you soon will be. But just as a start, you can find the original—built by Gabriele Cirulli—on GitHub and the Apple and Android stores—swipe up, down, right, and left to smash together tiles of the same number, double them, and move up exponentially until you reach your goal! (Pro tip: figure out a way to keep your largest block in one corner and keep it there as if your life depended on it!) Now that you’re acquainted, let’s get weird.
Okay so first of all, I would like to apologize in advance because I am about to freak you out a little. This isn’t even “the weird part of YouTube”, but still pretty weird. Unfortunately I am also familiar with the really weird part of YouTube but I will not traumatize you with child birth videos (do not watch them, or you will cry) or tutorials on how to use a blow up doll (also might make you cry).
So last week I came across TLC’s “My Strange Addiction” videos on YouTube. I really do not remember how, “the recommended videos” part on the right side is like a black hole; it just sucks me right in and I find myself having spent an hour watching completely random videos on YouTube.
So, My Strange Addiction is a documentary series focusing on abnormal compulsive behaviors, obviously all you need to watch while you should be writing a paper on Hegel. I honestly don’t know if some of them are even real….Like, how do you think TLC finds these people? Do they contact TLC and say something like “Hello yes I am addicted to drinking pig blood, hmu” ? I mean, I guess…
So here we go. This is one of my favorites because I actually relate to this woman:
