Love, electrodigital
<b>It’s Sunday afternoon on OkCupid.com, and 27,942 people looking for love on the Intertubes. They are shooting digital winks and kissy missives into the ether, trying to chat up that cute girl who loves Nabokov, or Mr. Tall-Dark-Handsome-Good-Job-Outdoorsy-on-the-Weekends. It’s humanity’s oldest social ritual, now 110 percent electrodigitized.</b> Is there really love out there? Can two-dimensional interactions on an LCD screen really substitute for brews at the Thirsty, or an after work softball game? The four former math majors from Harvard who founded OkCupid.com aren’t completely sure, but the social experiment unfolding on their website is already changing everything you thought you knew about dating.
BROUHAHA RHYTHM Rain, rain, go away
What Boston rain lacks in intensity, it seems determined to make up for in persistence. Even if downpours are few and far between around here, three straight days of halfhearted rain will turn a grassy field into a swamp and a sidewalk into an archipelago of vaguely connected islands. Avoiding pneumonia being the reasonably high priority that it is, after submitting psets on time and a full eight minutes of sleep every night, it only seems intelligent to dress appropriately for the occasional minor flood.
VARIOUS STATES OF UNDRESS Zeroes and ones
As MIT students, there is no doubt we spend a lot of time in front of a computer. We check our e-mail compulsively and procrastinate by IMing and Facebook-stalking former flames instead of writing that paper or finishing that pset. Naturally, the fact that we live with fingers glued to the keyboard affects our relationships.
How to ruin your three-day weekend
When you spend as much time indoors as an MIT student during a Massachusetts winter, cabin fever isn’t the only ailment that’s likely to break down your immune system’s barricades. Just the other week, several staffers at <i>The Tech</i>, including me, were beset by some of the nasty bugs that have been floating around campus as of late.
You reel me out, then you cut the string
I recently figured out that the boy I dated last semester was a total fucking waste of time. I kind of already knew that, but hearing the truth to all the lies he fed me when he broke things off was a ground-breaking moment for me. While I am over the whole thing now and glad he’s not around, there’s no getting around the fact that I suffered in the aftermath of the event just because he didn’t know how to ditch me with some finesse. Guys, please learn how to properly dump a girl.
When it’s said and done, <br />will she spit it out or swallow?
I was recently talking to a male friend about sex and what-not — you know, the usual — when he told me that he would never kiss a girl who had just gone down on him.
And The Vibrator Goes To…
<b>V</b>alentine’s Day is this Sunday, and regardless of your relationship status, you should learn to “love” yourself properly.
All my single ladies
This weekend is Valentine’s Day, which is pretty awesome if you’re coupled up but kinda sucky if you’re single — and especially shitteous if you’re a single gal. For single girls, Valentine’s Day serves mostly as a reminder of how much we fail at life that we don’t have a “special someone” to do cute things for us and buy us flowers and take us to dinner. Can we get Hallmark working on some “You (don’t have a dick to) suck” cards that I can buy for myself on the 14th to supplement my romantic evening of watching <i>Pretty Woman</i> and feasting on some Chubby Hubby?
The ethical <br />merry-go-round broke down
The other night, I was with some friends and watching a Looney Tunes marathon (3 DVDs from four-disc set, $3 at the thrift store), when the question arose of why we, one of many generations who grew up on cartoons, aren’t more messed up than we are. What went on television when we were young would have today’s parents up in arms and at the doorsteps of the production companies before you could say “That’s all, folks!”
I Don’t Need No Minute Man
I’m horrible as far as introductions go, so I’ll say this: For someone who got tapped to write the sex/relationships column for The Tech, I sure have been having a crappy sex life as of late. Pathetic, even. I used to have pretty good sex, but at some point, it all went to shit.
Sex toys: Two can play at this game
<i>Christine:</i> Sexually adventurous as I am, I managed to talk a partner into trying out a vibrating cock ring. From his initial hesitation, I should’ve known better.
The Tech’s 2010 Sex Toy Giveaway
<b>A</b>nother sad, single Valentine’s day? Not this year! This year, <i>The Tech</i> is here to ease your loneliness...with sex toys and lube! (What did you expect?) If you’d like to win one, write in to <i>cl@tech.mit.edu</i> with “Sex Toy Giveaway” in the subject line, and tell us why you deserve a particular item. Unrequited love? An incompetent partner? An inconvenient mole? Share your pain.
Brouhaha Rhythm
I’ve never been very good at grocery shopping. For one thing, I’m constantly snacking, which means that walking down the chips and cookies aisle is just asking to load up on more munchies. For another, there’s so much variety in products that I can’t tell what’s inexpensive and what’s a ripoff. Music and movie shopping are easy by comparison — anything under fifteen dollars is a bargain (except perhaps <i>Plan 9 From Outer Space</i>), anything under five dollars is a steal — but groceries are a different beast altogether. Even considering that I’d watched <i>Supermarket Sweep </i>as a child, I was much more interested in the “run like a maniac around the supermarket” than the expected retail prices of anything. For instance, the Oreos at Shaw’s are in yellow-tag Purgatory, meaning that it’s always the same price every time I go, and seemingly have been for the past three years. Whether that means they’re actually never on sale or perpetually on sale, I leave to you to decide.
Brouhaha Rhythm
I’m not precisely sure when the word “awesome” was first used to describe something indefinably spectacular and/or amazing, but it seems as if in recent years, it’s gone from the upgraded, superlative version of “cool” (itself a reissue of “groovy”) to the heavily-used catch-all adjective of our generation. I don’t have anything against the word “awesome” in and of itself, but I do have to wonder at what point we stopped demanding more than “it’s awesome” as justification for holding something in high regard.
East Meets West
During the first week of January, a class of 90 MIT MBA students traveled to Silicon Valley as part of the annual MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship and Innovation Class Trek. Our purpose was to cast a deeper glance at the entrepreneurial ecosystem on the West Coast by engaging entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the Valley. We met with successful companies such as Genentech and LinkedIn, hot Web 2.0 startups such as Aardvark and Yammer, and premier venture capital firms (VCs) from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel and more.
Brouhaha Rhythm
If you asked me what possibly could have compelled me to stay up until five in the morning to trudge through Cambridge for a Black Friday sale, I would have given you exactly two reasons. One is the age-old excuse, “my friends were doing it.” The other is that I managed to justify it to my nerd self by going to the electronics store first. A few DVDs, a set of Rock’em Sock’em Robots, and more self-restraint than any human should ever have to exercise later, here I am pondering the significance of the experience.
To Kill a Creative Bird
It’s 4 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and I want to paint. I haven’t had an urge this strong to reach for my brush and palette in a long, long time. And I haven’t been this swamped with work in a long, long time. Psets, midterms, make-up midterms, quizzes, make-up quizzes (I was sick for a while), essentially make-up on all my to-do lists. Oh, and “e-mails requesting extensions.” My only concern (while rearranging items on my to-do list) is, when do I get to absorb all this new information and to let it really sink in? When and how do I reflect on my newly acquired knowledge and think of real world applications?
Evening Walk
Many students come to MIT Sloan not because of the business school itself, but because they want to be part of the MIT community at large. I was one of those students, and I wanted to apply what I learned in the classroom by working side by side with outstanding engineers on bringing new technologies to market. To me, that seemed like a great way to prepare for and anticipate the future evolution of business and society, as opposed to treating business school as just a springboard for a job.
Brouhaha Rhythm
In last week’s edition of “Frivolous Dissertations on Breakfast,” in which I discussed my thoughts on the ideal cereal shape, it occurred to me that one edition simply wasn’t big enough to contain the sheer mass of frivolity on the subject that I wanted to share. More than that, it seemed terribly prejudiced of me to assume that cereal was the only breakfast food worth talking about. After all, non-college students eat breakfast, too (I think) and if I expect to be taken seriously in debates on the subject of breakfast, I should have an informed opinion on more than just the issues that matter to me.
Ask SIPB
This week’s column covers the upgrade of Athena clusters to Debathena from Athena 9.4, and details some of the main new features that are now available.