creds to Allison for the post title <3 

welcome to today’s episode of m*thbusters!⁠01 censored bc idk if it's trademarked or not today, we’re clearing out some classic misconceptions that you may hold about Bloggers, Boston, and the Great Beyond. 

claim: mit students grind all day and do nothing but studying

fact: we work hard, but we do a lot of other things too! eating, crying over problem sets, and idk like the 200+ clubs that exist at mit need to have people running them or something

claim: boston weather sucks  

fact: well, only a little bit if you’re not used to not seeing the sun every day (yes looking at you tropical climate enjoyers). there are also very lovely clear days with 70 degrees⁠02 and i must clarify with the pain in my heart that i now also fahrenheit... but this is 21 deg celsius or ~294 Kelvins, whichever your preferred temperature meter is weather, as you will soon see :) 

claim: the bloggers are a collective hivemind who hang out every week and all live together and are besties ⁠03 some people might be like wOW clearly this is an UNREASONABLE CLAIM that NO ONE WOULD EVER BELIEVE but look you gotta support me for the plot or something. also who knows maybe spiders georg (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spiders_georg) is again the exception who holds this belief

fact: so like, technically not true. we have a surprising number of blogger roommates⁠04 </span>jebby & fatima, kai & uzay to name a few which is very cool, but many of us only see the others at blogger meetings and occasionally wave hi in the corridors. 

however, this does not stop us from trying to make the claim into a fact. Angie F. ‘28, Ellie F. ‘28 and i were talking the other day about how the bloggers are actually really cool and based and it was kinda sad how we didn’t really all know each other that well. therefore, because we are energetic independent college students who tAke AgEnCy with our lives, we decided to organise a blogger hangout! and this is the point when we cut off our short-lived episode of m*thbusters and bust out the party music because WELCOME TO BLOGSTON COMMONS EP. 1 EVERYONE!!! 🎉🎉🎉

it began, as many MIT things do, with a when2meet.

in true mit fashion, this attempt turns out to become 13 people filling out the when2meet, a slot that only 11 people⁠05 </span>RIP ANGIE our og... you were missed dearly hope u enjoyed your retreat sob we'll see you next time!! said they could tentatively make, and ended up with 5 people who actually met up at Kendall square to do our scheduled hangout idea. honestly this is probably a record retention rate already

we’re ready to go!

organising hangouts is hard. finding an activity to do is also hard. thankfully, we share the common theme of being bloggers who have experience with yapping about random stuff, so after some consideration we decided to do a little race where we will blog all the way to boston commons ⁠06 a gorgeous city park in downtown boston, complete with a lake and geese and bridges and large lawns and cute dogs. also when i was looking it up apparently it's the oldest city park in the US which is pretty cool and back, and call it a day. the day was crisp, the skies were clear, and the bloggers were BLOGGING!  

typing away

as you can see we were all very locked in

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i had planned out a google doc of logistics the day before. due to A Series of Unfortunate Events ⁠07 </span>to be explained in a later installation... some day... one day we had to uphaul most of the logistics and play it by ear. what we did have were some random ideas that i threw down as random blog prompts the day before, so we took these ideas and kinda ran (or trained???) with them. 

boston commons came much earlier than expected, so we rushed out of the traincar at the last moment like manic wolves. we found a nice bench with a bunch of squirrels nearby that kept on distracting us,⁠08 ok so by us i may mean mostly me but were successfully able to lock in on the park bench and slam out our blogs.

sooooo locked in

jebby was the first to finish. actually, she was so based she finished a prelim version about 5 minutes after getting off the train (which was maybe like 15 minutes total??), but it was so wrought with shaky train-based typos that she had to fix* those before the post was fit for publishing. (*read annotation please)⁠09 CORRECTION: she did not fix the typos. instead she was doing annotations to make the false parts of her blog actually become correct. just like how i am fixing the facts now oops fortunately, she had a slam-dunk margin on the rest of us so she decided to spend most of her victory lap drawing sad faces on MS paint (which you can marvel at in her blog). 

ms paint in progress (D:)

i finished second; i think once i took my blog a lot less seriously i was able to churn out words at the same pace at which i used to bs in debate speeches and essays about roman mythologies. is it quality? like, no, absolutely not. was it quantity? yes, enough for me to get second place. i also had to do a lot of revising after my first round of word vomit though. i spent the rest of the time marvelling at the squirrels on the street. 

THEY'RE SO CUTE credit sara for this photo

why it looking at us like that.... also pc sara

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ellie was a very close third. aside from the squirrel distractions i think she was very consistent in the pace at which she was writing. i think this also shows in the impressive cohesion of her blog when compared to mine and jebby’s, so i think she wins on combined quality and speed ☠️

ellie finished!

after this point all of us were getting a little cold because apparently the sunny day could not compensate for the wind chills. i decided to take us to bakey, a really cute bakery that’s super close to commons! people have apparently not been there so i got us a yummy strawberry broissant and cinnamon babka. delicious, especially when piping hot on a wintery day. 

these are SO GOOD you should try them if you ever go to bakey

yay for getting warmed up!

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we continued editing blogs and frantically writing them, but eventually ellie and sara had to dip to other commitments, and then jebby also had to leave to, and i approximately quote, “take a nap because [she] haven’t slept since yesterday oops.”⁠10 had sleep schedule screwed up by daylight savings... oops my memory was really tweaking here my bad (*also corrected in annotation) sara and allison fully finished their blogs later (on a timer still for the sake of the game :P), but at this point we were ready to go.

bye bye :(

allison used the phone a friend option i guess :P

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allison and i were both planning on getting friends flowers for the concert choir performance that we were going to watch that night, so we walked to the trader joes in boylston and bought flowers + misc other groceries. we then walked all the way back to mit because it was a jobless saturday afternoon for the both of us and we wanted to enjoy the view. boston was glowing that day :)

boston is so beautiful sometimes

of course, this is only primarily my side of the story, so we shall let the writers speak for themselves about what they thought about blogston commons. without further ado, i welcome our blogston commons participants to give their own thoughts and reflection on their blogs!

winner: jebby 

To be clear, I was completely sober while I was writing. All I cared about was being the fastest person to write a blog post, not a good blog post.

I chose the prompt “Write about a useless fact” for two reasons:

1. I know many useless facts, so it would take minimal energy to come up with something to write about.
2. I usually overthink when I write. I fuss over details and rewrite the same sentence in five different ways. I’m the kind of person who edits my messages at least twice. I picked a prompt that wasn’t personal, so I wouldn’t waste time worrying about how to convey a thought that actually means something to me.

I already had MS Word pulled up on my laptop. The second we started, I just pulled out any unfiltered thought and blasted them all over the page. I was quite successful, being the first person to hit 500 words.

But, winning came with a cost. I have autocorrect turned off, and my accuracy drops significantly when I type too fast, which really shows in the final product. For the last several hours, I’ve had to carry the burden of first-hand embarrassment that comes with committing to the bit too hard. I bet there was a high schooler out there who was scrolling eagerly through the MIT blogs, only to see my post-modernist Ulysses-esque rambling about Boston history, and quietly decided never to step foot on MIT’s campus.

This is what a winner looks like, whether you like it or not.

second place: janet

idk i feel like i’ve said enough on this post LOL in all honesty i was not prepared to choose a topic at all so after i said i would do dinner conversations i regretted my decision for a solid 15 mins because i was like uhhh i literally don’t remember what i ate for dinner. it’s okay though i scrolled through my calendar and recollected the events so now you get to see three days of my unfiltered interesting food consumption habits??? enjoy??? at least it was candid. i also wanted to do this speed blog challenge to help me take blogging less seriously and i think mission accomplished on that front so i’m pretty happy about that. also HANGING WITH THE BLOGGERS WAS SUPER CUTIES and everyone was so fun to hang out with so we must do this more… it will happen trust  

third place: ellie

I thought writing about the T was very thematic lol. As I said in my blog, I really love public transport and just being able to go places. Also on another note the bloggers are the coolest people in the world (and MIT) so I was really happy to get to spend time with y’all, doing cursed things on the T and saying cursed thing in the commons and eating really yummy babka. I also loved the freedom of just writing without thinking too much about all the word choice and phrasing – its like drawing in MS paint,⁠11 lol shoutout to jebby moment where you can’t be perfect, you just want to get the ideas and content down. the silly contest/time limit thing also helped me just word vomit on the page, in a way. overall I really loved it and I hope we can do smth similar soon >:) redline challenge when???

fourth place: allison

Writing quickly is… not my strong suit, so I needed a prompt that was relatively simple (clear plot line, nuclear, minimal introspection, etc.). Pumpkins fit the bill, and for once I am not several months too late for posting something [specific time period]-themed! Writing with other people was also super fun. Plus getting out and seeing Boston!!  Yay Blogston Commons :D

last but not least: sara

Just going in, I knew this challenge would be a struggle for me – I tend to get stuck on details. For context, it took me around ~10 hours to write my first blog post, not counting the nearly two weeks of ideation & six handwritten pages of outlining that came before. I spent hours playing around with sentence structure and the ordering of paragraphs and each individual word choice. It was a process that I loved, but also one that I realize often gets in my way while I’m actually writing. One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever gotten – from an English professor I had in high school! – is to learn to detangle the creator and critic inside me, to learn to let the critic rest so that the creator can… create. That’s something I’m working on, and this fun, little challenge felt like the perfect way to practice getting out of my head while writing.

I tend to use writing as a medium of introspection, kind of like a fluid and confessional way to explore the big ideas I have floating within me and to consolidate them into something more cohesive. Taking my subject matter less seriously for a change helped me think about my life in new ways, though. My prompt was to write about my favorite eating utensil, but since our blogs had to relate to our given prompts only tangentially, I chose forks as my starting point and let my mind wander. Putting together the story I tell in this latest blog helped me notice some of the finer details of my life. I’m the girl who loves instant noodles, the girl who still has to look up whether something is microwave-safe every single time, the girl who calls her mom at 1am on the regular. In a way, these small details are more meaningful and more telling of who I am then all the big philosophies I can compose in my head. And I’m a rambler at my core, so it felt good to just let all that out while writing rather than trying to be economical with my words.

I’ve still got a long way to go with writing under a time limit – if Jebby can be declared the absolute winner of our little challenge, then, as the last person to finish, I guess that makes me the absolute loser. It took me over an hour to write my first eleven words, but then I wrote the remaining eight hundred under a twenty-minute timer, so I think I’m making progress. And I loved, loved, loved spending time with the other bloggers. I say this all the time to the people in my life, but I am truly in awe of the other bloggers, who are some of the most fun, interesting, and creative people I know. I love spending time with them and getting inspired and soaking up their genius via osmosis. Counting down the days till the #RedLineChallenge 🤤 ⁠12 to be revealed at a later date...

thanks for coming to our little adventure episode <3 see you next time!