Wesleying is Here to Recruit You

We're launching the new Wesleying soon. For real. Very soon. It will be on the Internet and you will go to there instead of here.

In the meantime, we’re stepping up our game.

It’s halfway through the semester, and half of our active contributors are graduating in May. Wesleying needs some new talent.

Of ways to get involved at Wes, being a regular Wesleying blogger probably requires one of the most minimal time commitments. But it also has possibly the greatest potential to shape student discourse, provoke discussion, and keep people informed and entertained at Wesleyan.

At least, that’s the goal. We get a shit-ton of emails, and over the past year event submissions have become the vast majority of the emails we get. Don’t get us wrong, we love posting what you send in, and really appreciate that so many of you think of Wesleying when advertising events - keep them coming.

But right now there are only so many of us and the more time each of us spends posting events, the less we have to write actual content about things you care about.

So to lighten the load on us and to better serve you, the readers, we’re opening up.

If you:
a) are interested in things,
b) are literate,
c) have an insufferable need to share information, and/or
d) have an especially keen sense of what goes on at Wesleyan,
we want you!

Any combination of these qualities will suffice. But that last one will make us really, really want you, because what goes on at Wesleyan is at the core of what Wesleying is, has been, and will continue to be.

If you just recognized yourself in any of these general criteria, shoot us an email at staff(at)wesleying(dot)org and tell us a little about yourself and why you're interested in joining Wesleying. No pressure.

We'll be taking applicants all semester, but hope to hit the ground running with a larger blogging staff when classes start after spring break. If you're interested, don't wait!

Best Alternative Media Outlet Results

U.S. News and World Report's Best Alternative Media Outlet contest is over, here are the results.

Wesleying came in third at 11.75% of the vote, to Penn State's Onward State's 24.58% and Yale's Timothy Dwight's 19.05%. We barely edged out Middlebury's MiddBlog (10.3%), but pulled comfortably ahead of IvyGate, Columbia's Bwog, Berkeley's The Daily Clog, Mads Vassar, Gerogetown's Saxa Speak, and Wisconsin's Critical Badger.

Not bad, considering that Penn State is gigantic and Timothy Dwight seems to have an endearingly (if incongruously) passionate fanbase. And besides, more than a few of the competing blogs were inspired by Wesleying to begin with.

But this might have been a deciding factor: no Wesleying blogger was committed enough to this thing to whore ourselves out as Green Man from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as Mark from Onward State has promised as a concession for winning. Awesome:

New Argus Site Online

The Argus launched an impressively revamped website this week, with a fresh new layout, comment capabilities, an automated Wespeak submission form, and even a blog featuring online-only content, the aptly named Blargus.

Already the Blargus has a style column harking back to the heyday of Well Dressed Wes, an economic analyst, and a lively political debate involving campus conservative Mytheos Holt. I'm curious to see what else will come from this expansion of the non-zero-sum game of online Wesleyan media. Looks good, Argus.

Numbers to Know

You might notice the "Numbers to Know" section in the sidebar seems longer than before. That's because we've just added a handful of additional numbers to the list. Also, remember that the format for all on-campus numbers is 860-685-xxxx.

For whatever reason, none of these numbers are be printed in the '08-'09 directory, even though they're all listed in the '07-'08 directory (which is where I found them). If you have any other extensions that you think should be added, place them in the comments and we'll throw 'em up.

Future of Film Hall in Jeopardy; Our Bad

Film Hall's ability to show films seems to be in some kind of administrative limbo, due to its regular film viewings violating intellectual property laws.

The film distribution company responsible for treasures like Black Snake Moan found the post made on this site advertising the Sept. 12 viewing of said film, and complained to Wesleyan about this apparently illegal event. Which is too bad, because according to the Argus, the University will now require Film Hall to acquire the rights to show films:

“Swank Motion Pictures Incorporated - it’s an enormous distribution company - was apparently scouring the Internet,” [Rose Agger '10, Film Hall's house manager] said. “They saw on Wesleying that someone was showing their movie, and I didn’t have any kind of rights.”

The University was fined and Residential Life (ResLife) informed Residential Advisors (RAs) and house managers that they could no longer publicly show films. Tim Shiner, the University’s Director of Student Activities and Leadership Development, is responsible for helping student groups get the rights to movies. He stated that he and the rest of the administration were unaware of Film Hall’s previous activities.

“They should not have been publicly showing movies, ever,” Shiner said. “If they have been showing movies for several years, I did not know about it. They never registered their events.”

...Administrators such as Shiner did not previously know about the intellectual property violations by student groups because Wesleying is not affiliated with the University.

This is bullshit. How was the administration unaware that a student hall has been screening films for three years, when film viewing has been its express purpose from the beginning? And do they never walk around campus and notice the flyers regularly posted all over the place by student groups, advertising informal film viewings?

Also, how is a showing of a film defined as public? Does it mean that groups can't advertise to the student body at all, or just not through public media? What if a large group of friends is watching a movie together, and friends of their friends hear about it and show up? Must the necessary licenses be acquired?

Apparently this incident doesn't bode well for all the other student groups who regularly show films, who are ostensibly now at greater risk of having their Google-able event advertisements on Wesleying seized on by litigious film companies.

It could be difficult for Film Hall to get legal rights to show movies. Shiner said that four or five student groups have legally shown movies this year, but the bulk of those were documentaries, which are usually free to show. Rights for Hollywood films can be extremely expensive, and Film Hall has a limited budget. Shiner and Agger both said that Film Hall would apply to the Student Budgetary Committee (SBC) for more funds to continue its programs legally.

...For the moment, Film Hall’s status is unresolved. It will not be screening movies until it can afford to buy legal rights. Consequently, it may not be able to conduct enough programs to remain a program hall.

It's just a bunch of students in a lounge in the basement of Nic 6 putting on a legally-obtained DVD, without altering or profiting from it in any way. Why is this illegal? Debate on the finer points of intellectual property law aside, this sucks. Sorry Film Hall.

Argus: Copyrights Complicate Film Hall
Argus Editorial: Get with the Program

Blogger Maintenence

Blogger seems to be scheduled to perform maintenance in about an hour and a half (4PM PDT), although it shouldn't last more than 10 minutes or so.

This seems to be happening more than usual lately (or maybe it's just me?), so don't worry if we're down for a few minutes here and there.

Wesleying Reaches a Million!

Fueled in no small part by the surge in visits due to coverage of the Fountain Avenue debacle, Wesleying can now boast of 1 million visits since the dawn of its existence! According to Sitemeter, our millionth visitor accessed the site at some point in the past hour.

No prize for this statistically significant but ultimately irrelevant honor except our intangible gratitude. Xue and Holly brush your shoulders off.

Wesleying: Visits over the past week

Interesting:

Wesleying is Argus'd

The latest issue of the Argus features an article about the future of Wesleying. I think it's an interesting read, but then, I'm pretty biased.

Without a set plan of action for the future, it’s not clear what will happen to Wesleying. Ultimately, however, the founders fully realize that the little blog they began as a guide for wide-eyed incoming freshmen will most likely go through many more changes in the future that they will have little control over.

“Whatever the next evolution of Wesleying is going to be, that’s completely in their hands,” Sun [ishuku] said. “That’s the beauty of it."

I'm a little scared. But only because Holly & Xue > *. You guys better keep posting :)

Date tags on Wesleying (or how to find out what's going on today)

You might have noticed from funny numbers in the tags of Wesleying posts lately. These are actually date codes - structured in the format YYYYMMDD - to make it easier to find all the events and deadlines that were posted about for that day.

So how does this work? Let's say you wanted to find out what events & deadlines were posted for today, May 1st. Then you go to http://wesleying.blogspot.com/search/label/20080501 and all the events/deadlines that have been posted with the date tag 20080501 will be listed.

So to find out what's going on some day - say, MM DD of YYYY - you just go to wesleying.blogspot.com/search/label/YYYYMMDD.

The Wesleying posters are still getting used to this, too, so bear with us if we mess up a little bit and forget to date tag things for a little while!

"Ghost Machine" More Than Ghost Machine

The ghostly senior art project of Matthew Valades '08 in a basement tunnel of the Art Studio (artist and art pictured above and below) is featured in today's Hartford Courant, as is the Wesleying post about it.

Buried in a dank corner of Wesleyan University's art studio, it hangs from the ceiling, bathed in cold blue light and aimed into space. Sometimes, it turns itself on, purring with loud, rhythmic thrums. Its purpose? Speculation on campus swirls. The machine might cause you to hallucinate, someone posted on "Wesleying," a student-run blog, maybe even see ghosts. Students and professors who paint and sculpt on the floors above it don't know who put it there or what it does.

...There's no sign posted to explain where the installation begins or ends, or any advertising to draw an audience. News of it spread on campus by word-of-mouth and the Internet. "It's viral," said Kuivila.

Valades thinks that reaction suits the installation's guerrilla nature. He's a bit miffed that some people boil it down to the "ghost machine," but added, "If it gets people down here and thinking about [the hallway], I guess that's the point."

...When he's not adjusting the installation's decor, Valades enjoys seeing how people react to it. Some take it in stride. Others, not so much — as one recent post on the Wesleyan student blog attests.

"how does it work??" the anonymous poster wrote. "ugh i pass it all the time but never know what to do."

Yeah what's up, this is Wesleying and legitimate news sources source us. Check out this sound installation, maybe you will hallucinate or something!

Full article: A Strange Machine's Making Noise at Wesleyan

Getting Events Posted Quickly

Little tiny bit of meta-blogging here:
If you'd like your events posted quickly, please provide:

• relevant information (times, dates, etc.)
• a relatively brief but informative summary of the event

I don't want to have to do a mini research project to write a description for your event, and you don't want my burnt-out-on-homework-and-studying-and-therefore-procrastinating self to be trying to pick a few paragraphs out of your several page event description to post--gigantic posts push others down the page, and people tend to skip over large blocks of text. On the other side of things, a post with dates and times but no real description isn't going to get many people to come to your event.

Most of the stuff we receive is fine, but there are a few events I don't have time to post right now because they don't do all of the above.

Pictures also make for much nicer posts, although they're not necessary.