The Mercury 03 28 22

MARGARET MOORE Copy Editor

While Ukraine is physically distant from UTD, Russia’s continued invasion hits close to home for some Comets. Computer science sophomore Tayisiya Chernenko, who emigrated with her parents in 2007, fears for family members who have stayed in the country.

“My parents, uncles and almost all of my extended family is still there,” she said. “My grandparents are…working as volunteers, distributing aide that’s being sent deeper into the country.”

They previously lived near Zaporizhzhia, which is Chernenko’s birthplace, as well as the site of the nuclear power plant recently taken by Russian forces. While the family had originally sought cover near the Romanian border, Chernenko’s grandparents “couldn’t sit back” and decided to return to a larger city to help where they could. She hears from them every couple of days.

“I’m very proud of them for their bravery and choosing to stay, but I’m also very scared for their safety,” she said. “It’s been incredibly painful.”

Athenaeum approved

COM ET CO N '22

people are wearing cosplay, and the booths are popping, and I’m just outstanded.”

Tayisiya Chernenko

Jessica Hanson-Defusco, an EPPS assistant professor and former Peace Corps volunteer, is similarly concerned about a close friend living in Ukraine. She met Viktor in Liberia, where he was working with the United Nations Mission in Liberia to train the nation’s police force to function in peacetime. He served in a similar capacity in South Sudan, among other regions recovering from war, before retiring, returning to his wife and family in Ukraine. While he’s not currently in an area with

TYLER BURKHARDT Editor-in-Chief

After receiving approval from the University of Texas System Board of Regents, UTD is looking to move forward with construction on the Athenaeum project.

Projected to be built in three phases, the Atheneum is an expansive undertaking for the predominantly STEM-focused university, which University president Richard Benson said is much-needed to better integrate the arts into UTD’s campus culture. The finished complex will occupy the undeveloped space to the southeast of JSOM, and is highlighted by plans for the fourth-largest Asian art mu-

CURIOUS COMETS

Walking past ECS North’s courtyard, you might have noticed a new monument – one that seems to have shown up overnight. What is it and where did it come from?

This new structure, introduced on Feb. 11, 2022, belongs to UTD’s recently-created chapter of Tau Beta Pi, a prestigious national engineering honors society. Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Robert Hart and Associate Professor of Bioengineering

Todd Polk are the new chapter’s advisors, who worked to get this monument to commemorate the honor society’s entrance into UTD. The sculpture, referred to as “The Bent,” represents almost 140 years of tradition and honor that are associated with the organization.

Tau Beta Pi is the nation’s second oldest honor society and the only honor society that represents every engineering field. UTD’s chapter was established in 2020, when 41 individuals were inducted. There are currently 251 colleges with a chapter of Tau Beta Pi, and The Bent is a symbol that each of them showcase to represent the society.

“[This organization] is meant to provide opportunities to our students,” Hart said. “Almost every engineering school has a chapter, and as we grew the engineering school here, supporting a chapter here was just the logical thing to do. There are opportunities for leadership development, scholarships,

seum in the US, a new performing arts center and an additional parking structure to increase access to those facilities. Benson said that construction on Phase I – a $56.8 million project, funded entirely by private philanthropy – will begin within the next month.

“We’ll walk through the doors (of Phase I) almost exactly two years from now: March 2024,” Benson said. “The first phase deals with the visual arts and the anchor piece is the Crow Museum of Asian Art. We'll have other display spaces, study spaces and the like, but that'll be

Ukraine-Russia conflict impacts several Comets Finding

Comet Con just celebrated 10 years of student passion and nerd culture with one of their biggest events yet, bringing in students from all backgrounds to admire colorful art, fantastic cosplays and big guest speakers.

Students were welcomed by SUAAB on March 23 in a series of events throughout the convention. From the free arcade games, to the student vendors selling their art, to the screening of “Dune,” there were countless activities to keep students engaged whether they were there for the esports competition, the cosplay competition or even the pancake art provided by St. Louis’ Dancakes.

One of the most prominent events attracted not just UTD students, but even a local high school field trip: the guest speaker panel that featured alumni from Funimation’s Viz Media, the creators of “Borderlands” Gearbox Studios and a producer of the comic classic “Cyanide & Happiness.” Each guest panelist provided insights to their respective industries and ageless wisdom they had gained since graduating from UTD, and discussed what it means to be a UTD alumnus.

Godswil Ugwa, the community manager from Viz Media, and Adam Nusrallah, a producer from “Cyanide & Happiness,” discussed how Comet-Con has stood the test of time and reflected on what it has now grown into. Ugwa, who was also the founder of Comet-Con and the ANIM3 Club while at UTD, reflected on how passionate and massive the event has grown since he first started it.

“We used to use another building that was falling apart and was old. It was humble beginnings for sure, just everyone lining up the walls—artists, vendors, everyone trying not to disturb other classes,” Ugwa said, “That CometCon was do-or-die- if it didn’t work out then it’d be over forever- but now it’s awesome, because in the first hour it’s already pretty packed,

Ugwa mentioned that this project grew beyond anything he could imagine and that he’s proud of what it’s become as a free space for students to express themselves and have fun.

“Walking in here and seeing people getting set up, those vendors and some people in cosplay before even the convention has officially started, we were seeing people already wanting to come inside,” he said. “That was pretty exciting, and then after the panel, seeing this building getting filled up—that was very endearing.”

Nusrallah, who forever impacted the course of ATEC history with his CGI, 3D-animated short “Sticky,” was impressed by the students attending Comet-Con, and discussed how the event can inspire students to do and be more, whether that was in their industry, their daily life or even just at the convention.

“If you’re sitting there wondering if you should or shouldn’t,” he said, “just know that five years from now if you didn’t do it, you’ll think ‘I should’ve done it then’ as opposed to now.”

Nusrallah encouraged UTD students to continue to grow and adapt in today’s everchanging world, just as Comet-Con has changed through the COVID-19 pandemic and in the many years he’s attended as a guest speaker.

“I can only speak to my experiences, and whether it's a good experience or not, everyone will have their own experiences,” Nusrallah said. “It’s part of that path of staying true to who you are and what you want to do and taking a chance, seeing what happens. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean it can’t later on. There is nothing but time in the world, and time doesn’t stop.”

Comet-Con brought together students to express themselves freely and make new friends, providing opportunities to explore their hobbies and fields while having fun at the same time. For the last 10 years, this has stayed true, and students can expect to be a part of the convention once again in the next year.

Freshman uses Taco Bell as basis for new social club

FATIMAH AZEEM Opinion Editor

Walking across campus a few weeks ago, you might’ve seen flyers posted here and there about the ”UTD Taco Bell Club.” This club – in the process of getting SOC approval – is no joke.

UTD Taco Bell Club’s founder, marketing freshman Aidan Hawkins, said he originally made a Taco Bell club at his high school “to fool around.” But, wanting to make friends at UTD, he decided to pick the organization back up in college this semester under the premise of a social club.

“I think about all of my STEM major friends specifically, and they’re always working, always studying,” Hawkins said. “I know there's a lot of people on campus who joke about how people here don't go out and they don't really do too much. So, I thought this would be an opportunity to bring people together over some fine dining.”

Hawkins said there wasn’t much to putting the actual club together – it was something that he’d flesh out once people joined –but he was having trouble successfully contacting an advisor to make it an official, joinable organization. So, he went ahead and printed out 230 flyers to post around campus for a first meeting.

“We were seeing signs pop up in places they weren’t supposed to be.” Mike Saenz, associate director of the Student Success Center and eventual advisor for the Taco Bell Club said. “So, once I eventually became his advisor, one of my first duties was informing Aidan about the process and rules regarding advertising for student orgs on campus – like, you can’t put up posters randomly across academic buildings, for

example. He knows now, and now we’re working on getting the org finalized with the SOC.”

Saenz was Aidan’s former public speaking professor, and he’d agreed to advise the Taco Bell Club because he was a fan of thinking outside the box – no pun intended. As a professor, he wanted to help students innovate the campus and feel like a part of something bigger in a fresh, fun way.

“I think coming from the pandemic, a lot of students felt isolated, and they felt like they didn't have a place to talk to their friends,” Saenz said. “If students don't have a particular interest – like if they're not into a dance club or they're not into a music club or a science club or engineering club – hope-

MANYA BONDADA Mercury Staff

ANNA PHENSAKMUEANG | PHOTO EDITOR Freshman Aidan Hawkins initially advertised his club with unapproved flyers.

The Athenaeum is being designed by the architecture firm Morphosis, designers of the iconic Perot Museum (above).

PEROT MUSEUM| COURTESY

ANDRE AVERION Mercury Staff

Two Comets play an old school Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade fighting game at Comet Con.

ANNA PHENGSAKMUEANG | PHOTO EDITOR

Tyler Burkhardt editor@utdmercury.com (972) 883-2294

Managing Editor Ben Nguyen managingeditor @utdmercury.com (972) 883-2287

Graphics Editor Alesandra Bell graphics@utdmercury.com

Photo Editor Anna Phengsakmueang photo@utdmercury.com

From The Mercury Archives: March 28, 1994

Warning: Scholarship Recipients may owe IRS

Richardson, TX 75080-0688

What do you mean I owe the IRS? It may be news to many on scholarship that certain scholarship benefits are viewed as taxable income. The freshmen on the UTD Academic Achievement Scholarship were mailed a statement breaking down the amount of rent, tuition, and the living expenses stipend (for semi-finalists only). What the letter neglected to mention is that the living expenses and rent are taxable. According to IRS Publication 520 entitled Scholarships and Fellowships, “Only amounts for tuition, fees, books, supplies and equipment are not taxable. Amounts for other expenses, such as room, board, and travel are taxable.” The publication also states that “The part of any grant that represents payment for teaching,

research, or other services is taxable.” The publication goes on to explain what is considered a scholarship or fellowship and why books, fees, supplies and equipment are non-taxable.

Other useful information inside the document includes cancellation of student loan debt, and how taxes differ if students are claimed by their parents as dependents. Another useful tool is “Table 3” on page six which is a worksheet to find out how much a student on a fellowship or scholarship might owe.

IRS Publication 4 entitled “Student’s Guide to Federal Income Tax” covers topics including where tax dollars go, how taxes are computed, how taxes are paid, if a person has to file a return, which incomes are taxable, what items can be deducted, how to file, when a refund is available, and how to get

free help. This publication also includes sample 1040 tax forms with the numbers filled in and the steps explained. By dialing 767-1792 on a touch tone phone in the local Dallas area students can obtain recorded tax information about 140 topics or automated refund information through Tele- Tax. The automated refund information is updated every seven days and is available Mon. – Fri. 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. If you call, be sure you have a copy of your tax return in front of you or be able to enter the first social security number on the return, the filing status, and the exact whole-dollar amount of your refund. Outside the Dallas area the number is also toll free, 1-800-829-4477. Some of the Tele-Tax topics are also available in Spanish. In conjunction with the release of this article the library has

worked to make Publication 4 – “Student’s Guide to Federal Income Tax”, Publication 520 – “Scholarships and Fellowships” and an excerpt from Publication 17 = “Your Federal Income Tax” which contains the code numbers for the Tele-Tax Topics, available on reserve under the name “Student Tax”. If you want an original copy you can pick up the publications at the Earl Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas at 1100 Commerce Street on the street level. All that is required is to give a list of the publications you need to the person working in the publications office. Or, if you’d rather order the publications by mail there is an order blank at the back of some of the IRS publications including Publication 4. It usually takes two weeks to receive publications by mail, but the only cost is the envelope.

David W. Rude Mercury Staff

Room, board, and housing taxable are taxable under the Internal Revenue Code

Overwatch team prepares for playoffs in the game's last season

After swapping a new support player to the roster, Comets aim for top 4

SOC policies hinder student organizations rather than helping

BEN NGUYEN Managing Editor

Dance club Contra Corners had followed all the rules. Forms submitted on time, a vendor account set up with the university and all costs accounted for. So why did it take the club over three months to be reimbursed over $300?

After finishing the swiss stage of the Overwatch Collegiate Championship 7-1, the Comets have their sights set on the last trophy there will ever be.

The Spring 2021 semester is expected to be the last semester of competitive collegiate Overwatch play as the sequel, Overwatch 2, is anticipated to come by the end of the year.

After swapping in Bella “Soba” Last_ name_pending, the first woman to be on a competitive collegiate Overwatch roster, and only dropping a series against favorites Redbird Esports, head coach and MBA student Christopher “Bani” Benell said he’s ready to push the team to meet his goals for them from the beginning of Fall 2021.

“My goal from the start of the year was to hit top four for our team. And you know, we didn’t quite make it this last semester but we did have that upset against Northwood, the number two team in the country. And I think if we just improve our consistency on the different matchups we run into in the university collegiate scene, then we easily make top four,” Benell said.

Bringing on Last_name_pending did shake up the roster to some degree going into the swan song semester, but the team is confident in their ability to integrate her in.

Benell said her ability to play most of the support line up let her take the main support role while Fawaz “NoneType” Ahmed stepped up to play the flex support role with the current lineup.

“We were looking for a third support player, and we were looking at the talent we had at UTD still available. And she ended up being one of the best options. So we tried her out, and she was great, a little quiet, but that’s the point of coaching. We kind of work on that, and she has great mechanics,” Benell said. “She came in saying that she’s comfortable on Mercy, [Baptiste], and [Brigitte], but

Multi-campus survey reveals Honorlock remains unpopular

SMRITHIUPADHYAYULA

MercuryStaff

opinions of 156 students on the continued use of monitoring software like Honorlock post-quarantine.

I feel like she’s really good at basically every support hero.” More than their new support player, the UTD Overwatch team has found a new confident way to bring the pain to the competition: getting to the enemy as fast as possible and killing them basically at the enemy’s spawn. Originally just a fun idea, it became more than a clippable moment for the team’s social media. ATEC Senior and tank player Garrett “Jukebox” Porter said that it became a new defined playstyle that was unique to them.

“We came up with one strategy and we’ve really been enjoying it now … we just like to run it all the way down as fast as we can. That’s been our entire strategy is just, “Have

The delay was due, in part, to the multistep, recently adjusted reimbursement policy set up by the Office of Budget and Finance (OBF) and enforced by the Student Organization Center (SOC). The OBF policy requires that student organizations register as a vendor within UTD’s PaymentWorks system to receive reimbursement, as opposed to getting a check to deposit into an organization’s bank account. On top of having to obtain a tax ID and set up a club bank account, the club also had to register for an account with PaymentWorks. That process, biomedical engineering senior and Contra Corners VP Talissa Chapin said, forced the officers to rush after being given a five-day deadline to register.

“We have to do that within five business days of receiving that email. And once again, it’s software we’ve never used before. There’s a lot of paperwork. We have to get bank information, tax ID, it’s just all over email. They’re like, ‘oh, let us know if you have questions’, but then it takes a while to get back to us. And the frustrating thing is when it’s not really a two-way street, our organization had less than five business days to get this done. Whereas the SOC, even though on some documents they say they’ll take 20 business days to get our refunds back. They took, in the case of our December dance, all the way until February 9 to actually reimburse us, which is over two months,” Chapin said.

While Chapin said that SOC dragged its feet with reimbursement, that was only one part of the full reimbursement process. Yet another delaying factor is the requirement that OBF process the reimbursement after

SOC verifies the request. Pair that with winter break, and it becomes clear how the process can incur additional delays on top of the 20 business-day wait outlined in policy. This reimbursement inefficiency isn’t new to student organizations. Math doctorate student Jonathan Popa, an 11-year Comet, recalled waiting for reimbursements in his time as Pokémon League and Math Club president nearly a decade ago.

“Oh, the reimbursement process was so slow,” said Popa. “I think three to four months was the worst.”

But the reduction in SOC responsivity has been aggravated by staffing shortages since the pandemic. During that time, the number of organizations grew to over 400; meanwhile, in the fall of 2021, SOC only had one full-time staff member. That staff member, Assistant Director of Student Organizations Tineil Lewis-Moore, said that while they may be late to respond, SOC is still doing their best to help.

“One: We take ownership of that. If we were late to respond, we were late to respond. We definitely apologize for not responding in a timely manner. But then two: if you’re not able to get a response from us, whether it be through email or phone call, again, our doors are always open. This is exactly what we’re here for, to support these organizations, to make sure that they’re successful, to walk them through the process and to develop ways, to make sure that our communication is clear,” Lewis-Moore said.

But students say SOC’s ability to help is essentially neutralized by the combination of delays and inefficient policies, and it’s not just the policies of the OBF that came under student criticism. Computer science senior Alex Obenza said that the timeline for submitting SOC reimbursement forms is both unclear and unrealistic.

“The handbook (Student Organizations

SEE SOC, PAGE 9

Exploring the weird world of meme UTD Instagram accounts

She began posting as a way to engage with campus life and culture.

@utd_dwaynation: ‘I'm always happy to answer fan questions. Feel free to disclose my name, Dwayne Johnson.’

The anonymous creator of the survey was inspired by a news article about Honorlock and wanted to quantify users’ opinions on the software. They made their results publicly available online, and there are some clear takeaways.

More than a third of UTD respondents said they had seen this prior Mercury article

Classes at UTD have returned to their normal modalities, but some still retain a ves-tige of pandemic-era instruction: Honorlock. Some instructors have chosen to keep their exams virtual for scheduling flexibility or to set exam lengths that are not limited by 50- or 75-minute class periods. An online survey of four universities – UTD, the University of Maryland, the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida – was con-ducted by an anonymous party to SEE HONORLOCK, PAGE 9

From statues to squirrels, from parking blunders to “Bruh Moments,” Instagram is filled with UTD-specific accounts dedicated to covering various aspects of the Comet experience. Despite their differences in content, they share a sense of community that goes beyond any snappy caption.

Because of the anonymous nature of the accounts, most of their managers spoke on the condition that they would not be named. Their structures vary, from an individual or a team collecting submissions to curating posts. Comets Can’t Park (@cometscantpark), for example, has two moderators looking for vehicles that break more than one parking rule at once. UTD Sunsets (@sunsets_at_utd) was an inherited account, whose current administrator shares both their own nature photography and others’ on the page.

Cecil H. Green’s account, previously featured by The Mercury, is run by neuroscience senior Rohini Kallianpur. Kallianpur posts portraits of the statue’s head outside Green Hall, along with the various accessories with which students and community members decorate it.

“UTD is pretty new, so traditions that you’ll see at other schools don’t exist here yet. I thought it would be fun to start something that might continue on beyond me,” Kallianpur said.

Other accounts focus on the University’s meme potential—or, to hear “UTD Wrestling” student Dwayne Johnson (@utd_dwaynation) tell it, documenting their day-to-day experiences. “The Rock” cites his inspiration as UNT’s similar John Cena account (@unt_cenanation) and hopes to bond with fellow Comets while making them smile.

“I think UTD as a whole lacks energy and school pride. Instagram accounts are an easy way to bring some extra joy into the lives of students, so it's really no wonder there are so many of them,” @utd_dwaynation said.

Nine accounts responded to direct messages; 12 did not, most without recent posts. The oldest page still on the app is UTD Squirrels (@squirrelsutd), which ran from May to Oct. 2016. It was followed by Cecil H. Green in 2018, then Bruh Moments (@utdbruhmoments)- which surpasses many official University pages at over eight thousand followers, pursed by Affirmations (@utdaffirmations) at just over two thousand. Tobor Sightings (@tobor -

sightings) takes the medal for shortest shelf life, with posts that span only two days, beating out the brief Nicki Minaj fan-page’s 15 (@utdbarbzz).

“Man, those jabronis make me laugh!” @utd_dwaynation said. “I've been thinking about making a joke account myself actually, but between wrestling classes, movie shoots, and lucrative Fortnite deals I just don't have the time.”

Both UTD Chairs (@utdchairs, not to be confused with the discontinued

Q&A: Addressing self harm in college student population

The month of March is dedicated to awareness of self-harm, or non-suicidal selfinjury, a behavior that is particularly common among college students. To increase visibility for this issue, the Mercury sat downwith Dr. Regina Ybarra, a professor at UTD who has done research on self-injurious behavior among college students.

Q: Can you start by giving a definition of what self-harm is?

Self-harm is defined as any behavior that

seeks to cause injury on the body...without suicidal intent. So, you can have all kinds of different self-harm behaviors. Most of the time people are most familiar with cutting. But you can have biting...there is sometimes rubbing things on the skin to scratch, so sometimes like glass or sandpaper and things like that. I mean, it can go all the way to breaking your own bones, punching yourself, more severe damage.

Q: Do you have any ideas as to why selfharm is so common in this age group?

So some of the research that I have done

in the past, when we looked at self-harm, we were actually particularly interested in why people are doing it and specifically what's going on for people right before, during, and right after...people who self-harm multiple times, they tend to show some sort of change in their experience. And this might be feelings of relief to, I felt numb before, but I was feelingsomething. And for a lot of people, numbness can be kind of a disturbing thing. And so physical pain kind of breaks through that. Other people sometimes feel relief because they experience a lot of psychological

pain and a lot of things that they don't have a lot of control over. And if I cause physical damage to myself, that's something I'm in control of. And it's something tangible... that's easier to deal with than the psychological pain that they might be feeling.

Q: What kind of treatments might you pursue with a client who self-harms?

You can't just address the self-harm, you have to address what's causing it. What's the pain? It might be loneliness, it might be depression, it might be anxiety, all kinds of different things it could be. So first of all, figur-

ing out what is driving that.And secondly, it's really important to give people tools to know what to do...one of the things that we would do is we would also brainstorm different strategies. And I'd have my clients sometimes list five strategies are going to be their go-tos, in that order...And for most people who have been self-harming for a long time, self-harm is on that list. And it's hard to get them to agree right off the bat to say, oh no, I'm definitely not going to. So we would start with an agreement—you're going to try all these other things first, before you get to [self-harm].

ANNA PHENGSAKMUEANG | PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

NGUYEN Managing Editor

Christopher "Bani" Benell

Garret "Jukebox" Porter

DANIELLE BELL | MERCURY STAFF

PurPose brighter utd

Purpose focuses on three main goals for Student Government next year: Making an impact, ensuring accountability, and advocating for student demands. In order to make an impact, we want to refocus Student Government projects to be bigger-picture and higher-impacts in efforts to make a visible change at UT Dallas.

— Purpose Ticket

My passion is simple: I want to build a brighter UTDallas for all and equip every Comet to succeed.

— Grace Sogunle

COMET COMMENTS

What did you do over spring break?

"Me and a few of my friends went on a hike and then we spent the night at a lake house. We spent most of the days just hanging out, playing video games, eating food. It wasn't super exciting but I had a really good time just being here and chilling."

-Meah Ahmed, computer science sophomore

"I tried out different restaurants I hadn't tried before around the Dallas area, like barbecue, Asian food, Mediterranean food."

-Nam Truong, sophomore, computer science

"I went down to Houston and spent time with my family. We celebrated a traditional holiday, so I met a lot of people, ate good food, and went to art museums with family and hung out with friends."

-Dariga Abzalova - Freshman - Animation and Games

What is your favorite food and why?

"I think my favorite food has to be French fries just because they are so versatile and no matter where you go, they are kind of always really good, especially if they are salty. No matter what time of day it is or who I am with, I can always go for French fries."

"Beef Wellington because it is Gordon Ramsey's signature dish, so why not?"

-Srinandith Sanipini, finance freshman

"My favorite food is fried rice because it's so versatile and it has been iinfluenced by so many cultures and it can vary and it is easy to make."

-Venkata Servani Mannava, biology freshman

I’m the nerd that’s determined enough, well-connected enough, and particular enough to make it work.

— Margaret Moore

"I went to Austin for about 3 days and on Friday I went to six Flags with my friends. I just enjoyed and relaxed."

-Nishant Naresh, graduate student, Business Analtyics Data Science Track

"My favorite food is idli because it tastes good!"

-Maurya Gouni, neuroscience sophomore

Vote for your favorite food truck on our survey!

-Jessica Bergeron, biology sophomore

Kruthi Kanduri Ishmerai Gonzalez

Computer science senior Nathan Breen glides past blossoming trees behind Green Hall, grinding a bench and treyflipping the deck of his board as he rolls across smooth concrete. Now that spring is here, he and many other students have come out to get back into their favorite hobby: skating.

Breen has been rolling for 12 years. He first picked up a skateboard when he was 10 years old, riding on and off noncommittally. After the pandemic started, however, he found himself bringing his board to campus more frequently.

“There was just an urge to do it,” Breen said. “And after a while skating, I felt the need to go and [skate]. It pulled me in –I couldn’t not do it.”

Since he’s gotten back into skating, Breen said he’s done some introspection, examining why the activity is so captivating to him- aside from it being

skate fast, have a blast

“a hell of a lot of fun.”

“One of the main things is it’s freeing have something to yourself,” Breen said. “It’s not a team thing where you need to work with other people to achieve a goal. You just pick your board up whenever you feel like it and improve on this thing that you like. Having control over this wooden board with four wheels is kind of dope.”

Even though skateboarding is an individual activity, Breen said he’s made a lot of friends through UTD’s skate community. Many of the skaters Breen’s befriended or observed often ride together outside of the Sciences Building, Green Hall, the SLC, ATEC, ECSW and ECSS –which are all sustainable areas for tricks such as ollies and grinds because of smooth concrete, bends and benches. There’s even an informal skateboarding GroupMe, with over 180 members, where trick skaters share videos and schedule times to meet up.

This is the only food website you'll ever need

Richardsoneats.com provides a diverse, delicious restaurant list curated by a local for Comets looking for nearby eateries

BEN NGUYEN Managing Editor

If you had to recommend places to eat around Richardson to a friend, what would you send to them? A texted list? A spreadsheet? How about an entire website?

That’s what UX designer Stephen Edmonson did when he heard one of his friends was moving to Richardson.

Simply called richardsoneats.com, the website has a simple layout of clickable squares with restaurant names and summaries, which directly linked to the google maps link to the restaurant location. He had previously built out D Magazine’s directory of food and beverage, and alongside writing reviews for a D Magazine food blog called the Side Dish was friends with the publication’s food critics.

“I’ve always been interested in that sort of stuff. So it’s kind of been something that I’m not necessarily new to,” Edmondson said. “At the same time I was playing around with some of the technology that I was using on that page. I wanted to get more familiar with flexbox, which is what I used for the front end development of it.”

At the time of interview, the contact form was broken, but Edmondson has since fixed the bug. With that form, and other locals reaching out on social media after he posted it in various Richardson groups, he’s been updating the site for four years.

“It just kind of came together as a perfect storm. I was like, ‘Hey, let’s just throw this together. And it’s something I often do in terms of just, people ask me for recommendations cause they know I’m into food. And so it seemed

like a fun little project and I’ve maintained it ever since,” Edmondson said.

The list contains a variety of places with different cuisines and origins, from familiar chains like Torchy’s Tacos to more local favorites like Jeng Chi and Ricky’s Hot Chicken. These choices are by design, and when he put together the list for his friend all those years ago, he wanted to highlight the diversity of foods on offer.

“One of the reasons we moved to Richardson in the beginning was just, it’s a really great melting pot of all these different cultures. That’s often expressed through the restaurants here. You know, there are other areas of DFW that have, you know, blown up in terms of like certain types of Asian food or Mexican food. But I feel like Richardson is, an interesting [place], we've got middle Eastern, we've got all different types of Asian. Um, you know, we've got all these different ethnic foods that are available to us and that's one of the things that drew us here. And so, uh, it just kind of made sense to, to have fun with it, with the website,” Edmondson.

If you want to check out the list, suggest a new restaurant to the list, or let Edmondson know that a place is closed, you can check out the website at richardsoneats.com and use the contact form embedded into the page. In the meantime, you can use it like Edmondson does, as a quick and easy way to tell people what’s good to eat.

“Anytime somebody asks for a recommendation, “Oh, by the way, here’s this website!”” Edmondson said. “It’s just kind of been a fun little side project, and that’s kind of the origin story of it.”

“So, many people are into the same thing and we all like to learn from each other,” Breen said. “The social aspect is really chill because everyone that you meet who skateboards is open. It doesn’t matter what your background is, everyone is there hanging out because they like to skateboard. We don’t care about your major, or race, or gender or whatever boxes people want to put you in- we’ll skate with you anyways. The only thing at hand is hanging out with your homies and having a good time.”

Rob Cahill, co-founder of the 4DWN Project – a skateboarding nonprofit based in South Dallas –and a first-generation streetskater, describes skateboarding as an inherently “alternative and out there” activity, accepting of all “weirdos.” Many of the features that attracted Breen to skateboarding, such as freedom, community and inclusivity are traits that Cahill said are ingrained in not only the Dallas skate community, but the nature

of skateboarding itself.

“’Normal’ people – the police and most people that were better well-off, generally weren’t fond of street skaters,” Cahill said. “[Street] skating emerged as a way of rebellion against skate parks becoming inaccessible – it was born as this rebellious thing, and it continues to become even more and more rebellious. It’s inherently an ingenuity, bent on being progressive, freer and

open to anyone.”

Even with skate culture’s intrinsically rebellious, progressive nature, Cahill acknowledges the obstacles it had to overcome in order to become a real community.

“One of the negative stereotypes of skaters … is that we’re a homogenous group of kind of stand-offish people that keep to ourselves, and it makes sense,”

SEE SKATE PAGE 10

Retrograde Reads: Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

Kai

Running away from home, reinventing yourself and encountering roadblocks along the way - it’s a typical structure for a typical coming-of-age novel. However, “Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir” is far from a typical story.

“Fierce Femmes” follows a young, first-generation Chinese-American girl’s journey of self-discovery and recovery with glittering prose. Every sentence feels like a Baz Luhrmann blockbuster or the Harley Quinn dream sequence from “The Suicide Squad”, with descriptions leaping off the page to pull you into their fantastical world.

“Instead of kicking, I blew a kiss at the TV,” the novel’s unnamed narrator recounts. “A spark jumped from my lips, skipped off my palm, and darted…The screen exploded in a glorious symphony of electricity and shattering glass, and a thousand razor shards flew through the air and turned into crimson butterflies that danced through the room on their way out the window.”

The story doesn’t pull punches on discussions of trauma and violence. Readers may want to be careful around Thom’s descriptions of assault, police brutality and self-harm. Even so, I found it more of a healing book than a hurting one. This book bucks all stereotypes of a transfeminine victimization narrative: when the main character is tailed at a bus stop, for example, she beats the snot out of the creep with martial arts mastery, and every subsequent fight scene matches it for power and tension. Thom’s action is hair-raising and cathartic, which serves the story she’s telling well.

After the titular fierce femme leaves her childhood home for the “City of Smoke and Lights”, she finds family in mentors like Kimaya and Rapunzelle who help her get a shoebox apartment and a shady doctor. Despite their desperate circumstances, she’s overjoyed to be surrounded by women who understand her -

and that emotion is incredibly understandable, with the way Thom renders them in fairytale prose. There’s alchemy in the way she takes these women’s shared pain and turns it to gold, a collective healing that takes place once they find and support one another through the events of the novel.

whole truth, nothing but the truth—someday soon, I promise,” our narrator writes to her sister back home. “I’m still just figuring out what exactly the truth is, you know? Sometimes fiction is truer than facts, and the trouble is knowing which fictions are facts and which facts are fictions, if you know what I mean. I’m not sure that made sense, but whatever.”

Still, I hesitate to call her an unreliable narrator, as she’s fairly reliable in telling you when not to trust her. Her letters to her younger sister, claiming that there’s “nothing to worry about, definitely no violence or murders or anything” are transparent, with the paragraph before them describing just that, and an outright lie is swiftly followed by an apology and a retelling. Now, if that retelling includes elements like zombies and magic, well… it’s more about the emotions involved, anyways.

“Fierce Femmes”, while labeled as a memoir, smudges the line between truth and fiction beyond recognition. The exact events of the story are - as its subtitle suggests - confabulous, meaning it fills in gaps in the details with fabricated facts and experiences. The author cites author and activist Audre Lorde’s concept of “biomythography” as inspiration for the tale, weaving together history and mythology. It reminded me of Tim O’Brien’s ever-relevant “The Things They Carried” and its interplay between “happening-truth”, or verifiable events, and “story truth”, understood as genuine experiences, even if the details are somewhat fictionalized. “I will tell you everything—the truth, the

Even with that element of unreality, the world built up throughout “Fierce Femmes” feels solid and grounded. There’s not too many settings overall, with the main body of the novel occurring in the City of Smoke and Lights’ downtown district, but every sparkling turn of phrase and neon-glow descriptor has me forgetting that this wasn’t a graphic novel. The magic here is tangible in a way you don’t find in many other books and frankly, I much prefer the glorious Alzena the Witch to any witches offered by an Author Who Must Not Be Named, whose writing is soundly beaten here in both skill and politics. I’ll admit to being skeptical at the start. Any story that begins by proclaiming itself “the story of…” is suspect in my book. Thom’s debut novel, however, proved me wrong with every page. This is the story of a dangerous girl, one who learns how to stop hurting herself and fall in love. And if it’s mythologized, so be it: she puts the “fabulous” in confabulous, subverting and breaking free of all expectations.

Because, at the end of the day, her experience rings true. After all, “…maybe what matters is the story itself: what kinds of doors it opens, what kinds of dreams it brings.”

FATIMAH AZEEM Opinion Editor

VIET KHUE VU | MERCURY STAFF

MARGARET MOORE Copy Editor

METONYMY PRESS | COURTESY

Fierce Femme's titular narrator "puts the “fabulous” in confabulous, subverting and breaking free of all expectations."

Adam Melchor takes audiences on a ’Joyride’ throughout the US

Indie opener combines deep tunes with great personality for a terrific show

Indie folk-pop musician Adam Melchor opened for Chelsea Cutler’s “When I Close My Eyes” tour along with ROSIE at the House of Blues Dallas.

“Melchor Lullaby Hotline

Vol. 1,” Melchor’s latest album, was inspired by his ”Lullaby Hotline” (973-264-4172) project, which was intended to connect with fans and test-drive new music by sharing a new song every Sunday. The hotline was created amidst COVID-19 lockdowns, Melchor’s soothing tunes contrasting greatly against the heartache of quarantine. This hotline is still in use; texting it gives updates about the artist and his current works in progress.

Melchor opened his House of Blues performance with “Last Time,” a somber song expressing the sadness and anxiety that comes with goodbyes. Melchor’s sweet guitar playing was backed by bassist Matt Olsson and drummer Mano Ruiz. “Last Time” is a great introduction to Melchor’s music and a great transition from ROSIE’s fast beats and high energy.

Following that slower song, he performed “I Choose You,” which music-listeners can find on multiple music platforms in its normal, upbeat form or as a more relaxed “Wedding Edition”.

Melchor’s adorable personality shone through his guitar skills and clear passion for performing; he didn’t skimp on audience interactions, continuing to share personal anecdotes and funny

quips throughout the show. Despite a majority of the crowd being unfamiliar with his work, he had the crowd laughing and swaying to his songs, displaying his skills as a performer.

“Moon in the Morning” was by far one of my favorite performances of the night. The song describes a romantic partner who has other priorities, one who’s prone to disappearing like a moon on the verge of daylight. The song is bittersweet, with a serene beat and tone, but has a story that tugs on the heartstrings of anyone who has wished someone would “lay in the bed for a moment” instead of leaving.

Melchor talked about how his music career wasn’t successful till the release of his single “Joyride,” one of my personal favorites. He originally worked at a pizza place

and performed small gigs at restaurants; after a long road trip to clear his head and experience more selfexploration, he wrote “Joyride,” a sentimental tune that shows his talent for storytelling and is reminiscent of adventures with old friends and the calm of countryside drives.

Melchor redefines “indie-pop” with a folk twist, creating a special aura over the usual chaos of

a concert crowd. It is not just his music that garners attention, but his cheeky smile and attention to his band members and audience. I highly recommend listening to his music, or perhaps catching one of his concerts on Chelsea Cutler’s tour. Unlike a “Moon in the Morning,” Melchor won’t be disappearing from the music scene anytime soon.

Comets Cosplay at SUAAB Con

One of the biggest draws of this year's Comet Con was the two hour cosplay contest

Stunning, confident and bold, UTD students from all different walks of life participated in SUAAB’s entertaining cosplay competition on March 23.

The cosplay competition, which was only one of several different events featured during Comet Con—UTD’s take on Comic-Con— allowed Comets to bring or watch their favorite anime, video game or movie characters come to life. This event received a lot of engagement through both the participants and the live voting, where audience members got to vote for their favorite costumes and select winners from different categories.

Comet Con, which is one of SUAAB’s biggest annual events, was a day-long special that featured guest speakers, an artist alley meant to support small and upcoming artists, an esports competition, wand-making, pancake art and much more. The cosplay competition served as an opportunity for UTD students to embody their favorite piece of media and bond with others who also enjoy cosplay.

“I was surprised how mixed [the cosplay competition] was. There wasn’t just anime, there was ‘Kung Fu Panda’ Po and a few video game [characters] too, so I’m glad that they had a variety,” said Shohini Ghosh, a neuroscience sophomore who attended the competition.

Some other entries included Glamrock

COMETS COSPLAY

Freddy from the new “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach” game, “Panty and Stocking” and even a female version of Temoc. Each entry reflected the individual’s personal style and taste, allowing several fictional characters to be brought to life and diversifying the winners for each of the competition categories, such as Best Performer, Cutest Cosplay and more.

“There were lots of unique characters, many of which I didn’t know, but everyone seemed like they were really enjoying themselves and they were so happy in their costumes,” said Zachary Carver, a Computer Science freshman who voted in the competition. “I was actually really impressed by how long some people spent on their costumes.”

Several of the participants made their costumes by hand, some even spending months perfecting their cosplay. Participants were able to give a brief explanation on how they created their cosplay and do a brief character performance. Thomas Cortez, a computer science sophomore, won the category of Coolest Cosplay with his extremely intricate, handmade Glamrock Freddy costume.

“I have three things that are very important to me: accuracy, uniqueness, and scale,” Cortez said. “For accuracy, I always want to try to make my costume as close to the source material as possible, so I try to select colors that are most similar to the character. For scale, I always strive for the correct proportions of the character. For me personally, I want to be unique, so [Glamrock Freddy] is more or less

a character that people haven’t seen before.”

Some of the homemade cosplays included typical costume materials, such as foam and PVC piping. However, many entries included unique and innovative items on their costumes as well, such as Christmas ornaments and even Easter eggs.

Comet Con as a whole provides UTD students who are interested in anime, video games, and more, an opportunity to connect with other members of the community who share the same interests, and even gives students who are not able to attend ComicCon the chance to experience a smaller-scale version.

“I have always wanted to go to a Comic-Con, like a big one, but I never had the opportunity to do that, so when I saw that [SUAAB] were doing Comet Con, I was like: ‘oh my goodness,’” said Brianna Teafatiller, a Business Administration senior who competed as a Loki variant.

With a successful showing for Comet Con’s 10-year anniversary this year, SUAAB hopes to be able to grow this event for the future. Many UTD students have expressed continued engagement with cosplaying, including Hope Shon, an ATEC senior and SUAAB’s marketing chair.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for people to do something they enjoy and be able to, if they created their own costume, show off their work and be proud of it, and portray their favorite characters.” Shonsaid.

MANYA BONDADA Mercury Staff

Giving Comets keys to the keyboard

UTD has a chance to reverse the trend of reduced student access to artistic facilities and equipment with new policy

JACK SIERPUTOWSKI Mercury Staff

The single piano in the Student Union is not enough for an entire college campus.

UTD needs to prioritize creating an efficient and equitable system ensuring access to music spaces for all students.

Like many others here at UTD, I have a strong passion for music, even though I my-

self am not enrolled in music courses. In my free time, I like to play the piano. However, finding pianos to practice on has become increasingly difficult, as musical resources are made unavailable to the general student body, for a variety of reasons—some satisfactory, and some not. I’ve spoken with several musically involved students about their difficulty finding usable pianos. Charles Averill,

a senior Ccomputer sScience sophomorestudent, described his long-time passion for music and his increasing struggle to find available practice spaces. This started with trips to Jonsson Performance Hall.

“Once I couldn't use the performance hall anymore, I would go a floor down to the practice rooms to use the out-of-tune wall pianos,” Averill said. “Not nearly as nice, but it was still

Lights, Camera, Play: Overcooked!

With a bevy of silly video-game concepts going into film production, it's high time studios looked to titles that would be compelling on screen

ANDRE AVERION

Mercury Staff

“Overcooked” deserves a movie. Unlike the the odd projects currently aiming to make live adaptations of “Tetris,” “Just Dance” and even “Raving Rabbids,” “Overcooked” provides compelling potential to be a unique entry into the video game movie catalog, one that could challenge the formula and rekindle interest in the game.

The last three decades of video game movie history have been filled with mediocre adaptations. It’s only within the past few years that creative adaptations with more positive receptions have begun to erode that trope of poor adaptations– making this the perfect time for “Overcooked” to debut on screen. The dynamic chemistry of an invigorating world and the Herculean achievement of bringing plot to a cooking simulator would make enormous waves. People would flock to the sight of plump animal chefs developing as a team to overcome bizarre cooking challenges. One might argue that “Overcooked” couldn’t make it as a film because of its dearth of plot, the unrefined cooking genre in cinema and it lacking any appeal outside the game’s extant fanbase – however, it stands to have a lot more potential than the video game films that are currently in development.

In 2016, animation studio Threshold Entertainment was given an $80 million budget

to make a live action “Tetris” movie, planned to be the first of an epic sci-fi adventure trilogy. Surprisingly, the ambitious project has yet to be cancelled. If a plotless game like “Tetris” is slated for a trilogy, what’s stopping “Overcooked” from getting a film of its own? The game’s unique plot establishes an interconnecting world with actual characters, while holding enough space open to interpretation for any storywriter to fill in the lore of the world. A film could flush out the struggles of being a team while having to handle the diverse kitchen puzzles that made the game so popular, constantly keeping an audience engaged and on their toes. The chaos of each puzzle could reflect a player’s frustration, creating plenty of comedic opportunities, too. Its plot alone would make it stand out from the current slate of videogame films, a premise that could revive the genre—instead of hurting it like our next entry.

In 2019, the Sony Pictures subdivision

Screen Gems, producer of the previous “Resident Evil” film series, was given the rights to create a live action “Just Dance” film after the franchise’s involvement in “The Emoji Movie.” They have since prepared a script and entered production. Unless they switch gears and make it a musical, it’s hard to imagine this being a successful film when its entire premise relies on the work of others. “Overcooked” has far more potential to be a successful film because of its original premise, backed up by the viewership of its genre. The box-office viewership of “Ratatouille,” for example, is unsurpassed by many dancefocused films such as “Singing’ in The Rain,” “West Side Story” and “Center Stage.” The cooking film genre is unrefined, as few filmmakers are bold enough to boil a story down simply to cooking, but the few examples that have done so have won attention from movie

SEE OVERCOOKED, PAGE 10

Jen Lee's comic encapsulates the nuance of change

SIHANYA ROCHA

Mercury Staff

As cliché as it sounds, a breakup is just one of those falling outs that hit differently, and no other work captures the awkward transition of moving on from that person and that life you had together like Jen Lee’s “At The Edge Of The Stream At Dust.”

To summarize, “At the Edge of the Stream at Dusk” is a bittersweet memoir about how Lee started her career in animation after the unexpected breakup of an almost decadelong relationship. She ends up moving across

the country, from her rural life in Idaho to Los Angeles, and starts a career in the animation industry. Throughout this move, she navigates the highs and lows of transitioning from one phase of life to another.

While at first the premise of this comic might not seem exciting, the visuals and color palette the author chooses to go with it are more than interesting enough to compel a reader to continue. To start, Lee has an interesting way of using black and white as negative space to separate memories from the past and from reflections on things in the present. This also allows her some freedom with where she chooses to have panels, speech bubbles or unbordered sentences on the page. The color palette of “At the Edge of

silent and secluded. Eventually, those were locked as well. After the rooms were locked, I emailed student services, asking about unlocking the rooms. I figured I was paying tuition to use campus facilities, so they shouldn't be locked. Student Services cited COVID as their reasoning for locking the doors, which I think was silly as I very rarely brought a guest (my roommate) with me.”

Ben Wise, a senior vVisual and pPerforming aArts studentsenior, is part of multiple musical ensembles here at UTD. However, he has had major issues finding practice spaces for Novis, his a cappella group, which is not course-affiliated. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice rooms in AH2 were open to all UTD students. Now, only music majors or those in a musical ensemble can access them, and even this requires students to sign up for a COVID-19 safety training.

As previously mentioned, last semester, the justification for closing the practice rooms last semester was the COVID-19 risk-, but at this point, that seems like a non-issue. It is true that a lot of practice rooms are not well ventilated. However, campus is now completely re-opened, and UTD is clearly confident enough in its contact tracing given activities have started back up. And, as Ben Wise pointed out when we spoke, at the same time that practice rooms were closed, “people were allowed to go to the gym unmasked.”

Practice rooms may be poorly ventilated, but they get exponentially less foot traffic. So why continue to gatekeep access?

UREC Activity Center should open earlier

SMRITHI UPADHYAYULA Mercury Staff

The Activity Center should open at 6 a.m. in order to be more inclusive of students with early morning classes and help ease gym traffic.

The gym currently opens at 7 a.m. on weekdays. If students arrive as soon as it opens, they can get through an hour-long workout by 8 a.m. Allowing a few minutes to check in, find the right equipment, and rerack weights, they will likely be out the door by 8:10 a.m.. For students with 8:30 a.m. classes, 20 minutes is not nearly enough time to shower, gather their supplies, have breakfast of some kind and get to class on time. Moreover, with only three squat racks and a handful of benches, people are often subjected to long wait times for the Activity Center’s most popular equipment. Spreading out gym traffic over more hours could also help alleviate this problem.

Christopher McAlpine, University Recreation’s associate director of facility operations, said that a primary reason for opening the Activity Center at 7 a.m was the difficulty of recruiting student workers to staff the gym earlier in the morning. Student workers must arrive fifteen minutes before the gym opens, and a lack of bus routes that early in the morning would make this difficult.

However, DART has recently expanded

SEE GYM, PAGE 10

Students should play intramurals

ZAID HAQ Mercury Staff

Whether you are a graduating senior or a freshman looking to find your place within the UTD community, it remains important for everyone to possess and embrace a certain level of competitiveness. Intramurals are an excellent way to do that.

With a constantly-growing campus, UTD has countless sources of competitive activities, from hack-a-thons to business presentations. Once found, this competitiveness can potentially translate into greater internship and job opportunities, as well as a network comprised of similarly goal-oriented people capable of harnessing and implementing change. Yet, sports remain an important avenue that students can utilize outside of a classroom environment to become leaders and build confidence in themselves.

Across campus, it is not uncommon to see people playing basketball or tennis near the Activity Center throughout the day. And despite not being a football school, UTD athletics continues to grow and expand into new areas, the latest of which has been esports. But for the remaining majority of students who do not play on a NCAA athletic team, UREC-led intramural sports provides the same competitive environment that allows students have the opportunity to prepare,

lead, and perform in recreational activities across multiple areas. With activities ranging from one-night tournaments to extended sport leagues, UREC offers students the chance to form teams and perform individually or collectively in athletic events ranging from basketball to cricket, as well as gaming events such as Overwatch and FIFA. Although intramural sports are standard across most campuses in the nation, a campus as diverse and unique as ours should continue

SEE INTRAMURALS, PAGE 10

the Stream at Dusk” clearly reflects its title, repeatedly using orange, shades of blue and light brown to imbue her story with a comforting, dream-like atmosphere, which adds to the overall theme of the comic being a recollection of someone’s memories.

Jumping off of that, there is a visual style change that happens three times where the author includes actual photos from her life and Idaho-to-California move. The first happens when you open up the book: if you look at the right where the front board is, you’ll see a real picture of a pig eating and baby sheep pasturing on her farm. The second, when Lee’s big move to California finally happens, involves actual photos of the of the trip she took, but with the added detail that she's

drawn over the picture where a person would appear with the artistic style she's using for the rest of the comic. Then, for the third and last time it happens again at the end of the comic: the backboard of the book has a closeup picture of a chicken from her farm. It’s a fitting ending, reminding us that this isn’t just some fictional story someone made to cope with a tragic event in their life; instead, it’s an intimate, true story about loss and recovery.

Beyond its visual expressiveness, Lee’s comic is funny in ways you don’t expect. For

example, it is riddled with tastefully self-deprecating jokes. A specific scenario that showcases this occurs towards the end of the story, when she and her boyfriend decide to stop speaking to each other. She claims she took this conversation like a champ, but draws herself in the following panels crying while doing daily activities. (She most definitely did not take it like a champ). This calm situational humor combined with the comfort-

A Comet prepares his serve in a pickup set of volleyball by Dining Hall West. Opportunities for casual play at UTD abound.

Casual athletics events provide opportunity to practice beneficial competition, teamwork in social enviroment

QUINN SHERER| MERCURY STAFF SEE PIANO, PAGE 10

ANDRE AVERION | MERCURY STAFF

ANNA PHENGSAKMUEANG| PHOTO EDITOR

much fighting, the conflict is constantly escalating, and as police chief he will be responsible for recruiting and training resistance forces. Defusco worries about the psychological toll of facing war in his homeland after so many years spent preventing it abroad.

“He’s just already been through so much, and to watch somebody who dedicated ten years of his life to helping other societies recover from war then have to face a war on his own home turf? It's just tragic,” she said. “But he's proud to be Ukrainian, and he thinks they can beat them back.”

For Chernenko’s family, it’s been one thing after another. A few years ago, they had finally saved up enough money to build their dream home in Zaporizhzhia—then it burned down. They just finished building a second house before the invasion began, but were forced to abandon it when war broke out, driving for 14 hours to escape Russian forces.

ATHENAEUM CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

the focus, [which] we got approval from the board of Regents for last month. We have to go ahead to start the construction.”

The Crow Museum already has a space downtown in the Dallas Arts District, where the museum is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 11am to 5pm. Sr. Direc-

STATUE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

networking and alumni activity after graduation, so there are all kinds of benefits to being a member.”

Hart and Polk, who are members of Tau Beta Pi themselves, showed excitement about The Bent’s sudden arrival. The professors spent the past couple years raising the funds to get the monument, submitting proposals for its approval and waiting through a campus beatification before it could finally be placed

TACO CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

ully this is general enough to be a catch-all for people. Hope -

OVERWATCH

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they left spawn? Ok, they’re gone,”” Porter said. “It was fun cause it used to [be] we didn’t really do that, and

SOC CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

Manual) says two weeks. But the real date is three weeks. And before my event happens, we have to plan what paperwork we have to submit,” Obenza said.

Between stringent timelines, loads of paperwork and the increasing potential for delayed reimbursement, many student organizations are simply opting out of using SOC funds.

While Popa set up a bank account for reimbursement for the Math Club back when he was president, they’ve since shut down the account.

Biomedical engineering senior Laura

HONORLOCK CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

discussing the effectiveness and necessity of Honorlock, indicating a high level of engagement with the issue.

One of the questions on the survey asked about each feature individually in order to pinpoint users’ feelings about specific aspects of Honorlock. The features that students responded most poorly to

@chairsofutd) and Sleeps (@ utdsleeps)—who review furniture and naptime spots around campus respectively—rely on their own investigations around the University for content generation.

“My inspiration for this account came from exploring campus. seeing the variation in different interior design, I felt like it needed to be documented; and after seeing the [conical] chair in ATEC, I knew I had to document the different chairs around UTD,” Chairs wrote.

Sleeps stepped up- or laid down, rather- to fill what she saw as a gap in Instagram cov -

This year also marked Chernenko’s fourteenth of waiting for a green card. She was scheduled to fly to Eastern Europe in May to obtain it, but the Ukrainian Embassy closed down and informed her family that they would need to find another embassy in Europe to take their case. They spent the weekend after Russia’s initial attack writing letters.

“We probably wrote to 14 or 15 different ones. Romania, the Netherlands, Germany, everywhere, just to see who, what embassy would be willing to take our case,” she said. “A lot of them immediately said no, because they were having such a huge influx of refugees from Ukraine already—which is very much understandable, they are the ones who need immediate processing and help, as opposed to our case, which has just been on hold for a long time.”

Fortunately, Latvia has agreed to take their case; Chernenko is scheduled to fly there in May instead of to Ukraine. Still, she mourns the loss of the trip they had planned.

“I haven't been able to leave the

tor Amy Hofland said that space is expected to remain in operation once Phase I is completed, but the majority of the Crow’s collections are not currently on display, due to the limited space afforded in downtown.

“We show about 15% of our collection right now. We love being in the Dallas Arts District … but I think our museum has always been growing beyond its seams: this first

in ECS North’s courtyard. Now that The Bent has finally found its home on campus, UTD’s chapter of Tau Beta Pi will be throwing a celebration in its honor.

“It feels wonderful actually, to have The Bent on campus,” Feriha Ahmad said, electrical engineering senior and president of UTD’s chapter of Tau Beta Pi. “Finding it on campus, right in the middle of the ECS complex, lets everybody who walks past it see it. It is really cool to see a physical monument that represents the excel-

fully, this is a great place to meet people and kind of form those relationships, which’ll in turn help you do better in school.”

then we started trying it and then it started working really well. So we just kept pushing that further and further. So it’s been a lot of fun to make a style that other teams actually

Vargas Ortiz, president of Stop Pretending You Can’t Dance, said that previous officers had warned her about using SOC funds.

“I knew a bank account had existed, but when I adopted the club, I talked to the people before me and they were like, no, don’t go through SOC.

It’s literally the worst. Just go through Venmo. And I was like, okay, easy clap.

So, we have this Excel sheet … it’s literally color coded, itemized,” Ortiz said.

“Whenever someone graduates, all of the money is accounted for, for the next person. And we just use a personal Venmo, ‘cause it’s way easier.”

Former officer and biomedical en-

were Honorlock’s webcam and microphone monitoring. Microphone monitoring was the most unpopular feature, with less than 10% of students feeling comfortable with it.

“My takeaway is that a lot of people don’t like Honorlock’s more invasive features,” the creator said.

However, students’ responses to other features- such as student ID verification to confirm test takers’ identities- were much more neutral.

erage. “I was just sitting there one day thinking hmm what if there was an account that just rated the best places to sleep on campus,” Sleeps said. “I decided I shall make the sleep rate account. All the other UTD accounts inspired me… as well as sleep.”

Mutual inspiration is a common theme. Many accounts named Bruh Moments as their spiritual predecessor—even their newer inverse currently on hiatus, Yuh Moments (@utdyuhmoments)- but some find joy in the smaller accounts, too.

Green “particularly enjoyed” Chairs; Yuh Moments (@utdyuhmoments) and Trees (@ treesofutd) pointed to Bunnies

U.S. since we came here—it was just a part of, you know, being a refugee here—and I was so excited…my mom and I had talked about being able to visit the hospital while I was born and the school where she grew up and all of these places that meant a lot to her and to us as a family that I don't remember. And I know that those places don't, a lot of them just don't exist anymore, or they'll just never be the same way again. That is…devastating to think about.”

Defusco has witnessed similar stories over ten years of working with displaced persons. Oftentimes, there’s a separate psychological trauma associated with the lack of closure that people fleeing conflict often face when leaving home unexpectedly.

“Imagine if you had to walk right now to Mexico with nothing,” she said. “You think: ‘I'll be able to go back.’ And then you find out your house has gone. Your family's dead. Everything's gone.”

In other migrants, there’s often an active choice to leave. Whether it’s for economic opportunity, political

phase will allow us to really fulfill the dream of the Crow family,” Hofland said. “We want to create a museum that is relevant and meaningful to students and to the communities around UT Dallas, that [is] celebrating the Asian community and really lifting the voices of Asian artists. So, I think that this is the really the completed version…we like to think of it as one museum in two locations.”

lence in engineering at UTD regardless of Tau Beta Pi membership, and then on top of that there’s that extra special, ‘this is for our organization on campus and everything that we’ve done.’ It feels like a monument to all the engineers.”

The Bent itself is a watch key in the shape of trestle bent, resembling a parallelogram. A trestle is the part of a beam that supports and bears the weight of the structures above it. Similarly, Tau Beta Pi’s Bent represents an engineer’s responsibility to

Hawkins hopes for his new Taco Bell Club echo Saenz’s –but he said he stresses that Taco Bell itself isn’t the point.

recognize.” With the release of Overwatch 2, the game will be reduced from a 6v6 to a 5v5 game, with the tank role reduced to a single player on the

gineering senior Thien Nguyen said UTDuelists shut down their original bank account with Wells Fargo and switched to Venmo because, unable to pool for a minimum account balance, they were forced to pay monthly fees to Wells Fargo just to keep access to SOC funds.

“A lot of people, we just want to run our clubs. You know, we decide to make our clubs official with SOC because we want to have fun with the clubs, and [instead] we have to jump through all of these hoops and hurdles and meet every single month just to keep our club running,” Nguyen said. “Despite SOC

More than half of student respondents reported having no concerns about this feature.

“I think that shows that Honorlock can be good if it cuts back on the invasiveness,” he said.

A lesser-known concern about Honorlock that the creator tried to raise awareness of through his survey was the software’s use of “honeypot” websites to catch cheaters. These websites are designed to

(@utd_bunnies).

That interconnectedness between accounts gave their answers a sense of communitysomething that many felt arose from the University’s student culture as a whole. Trees theorized that the plethora of accounts is tied to the “misfit” nature of its student body and agreed with Green on the newness of UTD’s campus culture, with a lack of solid ground that lends itself to many different interpretations.

“Our undergraduate student body has only existed for less than 50 years, with freshmen only being here for about 30 years,” Trees said. “Even then, the university didn't grow much until the mid-2000s, so it

stability or various other reasons, the émigrés make that intentional “mental switch” to a new situation, away from their previous life. Those forced to flee from their homes, however, often don’t get to make that shift, enforcing a kind of psychological displacement as well as physical.

Keeping up with the conflict, her family and immigration situation on top of her regular course load has been stressful for Chernenko.

“I just–I don’t know how to explain how long 14 years of waiting is, and also how much I was worried about my grandparents. The first two or three days, all I was doing was on the news. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t eat,” she said. “I failed at least one exam for sure…I got an extension on a project, and I appreciate that.”

Fellow students have been helpful, especially through campus organizations. She credits the friends she has made through UTD Nebula, a software development club, as a vital support system, but places the emphasis on those struggling in Ukraine.

With the additional space afforded by the Phase I location, Hofland said that the museum would regularly display about 80% collection, in accordance with conservation bestpractices. But the additional space would also open up the opportunity for visiting collections, with an eye towards creating a hub for appreciating Asian art that isn’t located on one of the coasts.

their field and the organization’s willingness to support engineers in their endeavors. The Greek letters from the organization’s year of founding, motto and values are inscribed on the Bent’s base.

“Excellence in engineering comes with a strong responsibility to your industry, to yourself, to your peers, to the world that you’re creating things for and the hard work and integrity that goes into that,” Ahmad said.

Tau Beta Pi’s Bent also plays an important role during the orga-

“Taco Bell just happens to be a popular congregating spot-on campus,” Saenz said. “So, it was perfect to help foster a social

team. Porter will be graduating and finishing his time as a tank player in a world of two tanks at the same time, but is ready for the new game to come.

being helpful at times, I feel like that the number of times they’ve been a detriment are significantly more and it's honestly been a pain.”

The SOC monthly meeting is a point of complaint for more than just Nguyen. While intended to update organization officers with pertinent information to relay back to club members, Nguyen said he and others wished that the meetings were simply an email. Former Pokémon League President and computer science grad J.T. Landry said that they tuned out as they attended through the years and added that the annual risk management training felt par-

trap students who copy and paste test questions directly into a search engine, hoping to find solutions online. Masquerading as innocuous search results, they record who visits them and for how long. Privacy concerns are raised by the fact that they also record clicks from devices that are not using the Honorlock extension and try to match them up with a student who is currently taking an exam to provide evidence of

makes sense that always-online internet culture would become the predominant culture on campus!”

It’s not all sunshine, however. Trees criticized Bruh’s focus on negative interactions with the university, for instance, and many pages have been abandoned over the years. Yuh Moments apologized for their lack of new posts, admitting that they were struggling to “find the ‘yuh’” lately. Still, a significant portion of these accounts are going strong, lasting through lockdown and pushing forward into the future- Bruh has even begun using their platform to fundraise for human rights causes, emphasizing social justice and “[passing] the kindness

“I think I'll bounce back, but we'll see. It's okay. The most important thing is, you know, just getting through it. Even if I fail a class, I can always take it later,” Chernenko said. “The people who really need help right now are in Ukraine, are at the borders. There's people who don't have medicine, who don't have insulin right now. What's the most important right now is spreading that information.”

Many organizations are accepting online donations, from ActionAidU-

“Bringing in contemporary artists, bringing in collections that are outside the scope of the Crow [collection], that’s essential, because we say we're building the Asian art museum of Dallas in these incremental steps,” she said. “We’re looking at some of the national collections of India and thinking of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, [to see] what is in storage that we might create an in-

nization’s inductions. Students of a certain academic caliber are sent an invitation into the honor society. During the ceremony, inductees are given a smaller version of The Bent that is roughcast and needs to be polished, which symbolizes putting in the work to achieve your goals, exemplifying Tau Beta Pi’s fondness of hard work.

Pol said the monument is not yet complete; The Bent still requires a plaque that describes what it is and its relation to Tau Beta Pi. Ahmad and

organization. This could as well have been the Halal Shack Club or the Chic-Fil-a Club if lots of people flocked there, you know.

“I will really miss there being tank duos, … always been a lot of camaraderie there between the tank line and you have to work together really well. So you spend a lot of time

ticularly outdated.

“I got tired of the meetings because I had been going to meetings forever and like, alright, I know what’s coming up now, I hear this one at least once a semester,” Landry said. “The risk management training … it’s the same PowerPoint from almost a decade ago at this point. With outdated memes. It has a philoso-raptor in it.”

The general consensus amongst students is that while SOC is there to help, overly bureaucratic policies combined with the staffing shortage handicap the office’s ability to assist organizations and deterring them from walking through their

academic dishonesty.

65% of survey respondents were not initially aware of Honorlock’s honeypot websites, and only a tiny fraction could actually identify them when shown screenshots.

Knowing about the honeypots made more than a quarter of survey respondents reconsider their support of their universities’ continued use of Honorlock.

Overall, the results of their survey

forward” in their interview.

“Accounts like Bruh Moments give students a common point of conversation for things that happen at UTD and provide a way to stay connected… Being able to say “bruh” and laugh about something on the Bruh Moments platform enriches students’ community experience and reminds everyone to stay positive,” Bruh said. “We believe positivity goes a long way, and we hope our impact is one that makes Comets smile.”

After all, while spin-off Instagrams are a silly part of student life, they can bring some much-needed levity to a stressful time. Sleeps and Bruh Moments are glad to bring smiles

SA to UNICEF, as well as the International Rescue Committee, which focuses on refugee assistance.

“This is the moment. If you're going to do stuff, go be active,” Defusco said. “Petition your senators and your congressmen to take action. Go volunteer; go fundraise. Because you're going to look back and get to say, ‘I contributed to supporting one of the most important, if not the most important event that happened in the early 21st century’…you only have this one time. You can’t go back.”

ternational partnership with to bring objects here on a yearly rotation.” While the expanded Crow Museum has potential to become an internationally-recognized “epicenter” for Asian art, the project also entails several components designed to cater directly to Comets. Benson said that Phase II, while further out, is equally important to the goal of better integrating the arts into UTD.

the organization’s other officers have been working on the specific wording that will be used for the plaque.

“The UTD chapter of Tau Beta Pi has only been around for two years because UTD as a whole is a very young university, so I think that a lot of people don’t really recognize the name of the organization at first or if they get an email invitation it gets brushed under the rug,” Ahmad said. “I think having the [The Bent] on campus highlights who we are and gives us more recognition.”

And we might move past Taco Bell. Who knows? Whatever helps us get to know each other and have fun.”

playing together and getting use to each other, but that aspect’s gonna be gone,” Porter said. “So that’s a little sad that that’ll be gone, but we’ll see what new experiences arrive.”

office doors on the second floor of the SU. Alumni and AIGA founding member Gina Rattanakone said that the sentiment is that clubs would just have to manage if they slipped through the cracks.

“At times we just managed on our own. That's what we were doing and I'm pretty sure that's what other clubs did too,” Rattanakone said. “SOC does have resources, but we cannot rely on them most of the time, and sometimes getting a hold of that support is more of a tedious effort. SOC is like a parental figure with too many kids. There’s limited resources and we’re all fighting for attention.”

make the creator skeptical about Honorlock’s role in a post-pandemic world.

“Honestly, outside of schools that will continue to provide an online option, I don't think [Honorlock] has much of a role going forward,” he said. “I think students are more comfortable with one real human watching over them instead of HAL-9000 and random people you don't know and can't see.”

to students’ faces. Green enjoys the engagement with others on campus. Sunsets is happy with the impact that submissionsbased accounts can have on the student body.

“I really value other students sending me their photos as I believe it helps build a strong student community centered around displaying the natural beauties of UTD’s campus,” Sunsets said.

Perhaps there’s hope for the pages on pause, too, even in the midst of global crisis.

“Reflecting on everything that students have gone through, I think I may start posting again,” Trees said. “I may as well play my part in making UTD a meme paradise.”

Cahill said. “Skateboarding was inherently attractive to a lot of people, but we were mostly white macho men before the early 2000s – I think because the narrow social identities and norms of the time, for women, people of color, et cetera, didn’t favor them to participate in or attract them

I spoke with Dr. Catherine Parsoneault—an aAssistant Ddean in Arts and Humanities and the Ddirector of mMusic at UTD—on the situation, and she offered many reasonable justifications as to why access to these practice rooms is currently restricted. For one, UTD has relatively few practice rooms for the hundreds of students enrolled in

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their bus schedule, providing transportation starting at 5 a.m. for all routes and at 4 a.m. for their most frequently used ones. Now would be a good time for the Activity Center

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to embrace a competitive spirit both in the classroom and on the field for a number of reasons. All it can take is one simple question – “can I play?” – for students to become invested in a common goal or activity. Particularly for underclassmen, participating in intramural sports allows students to expand their social network and have a cohesive group of friends they can rely on to engage with throughout their time at UTD. In

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critics and the Oscars – “Overcooked” could take part in that success. The eastern world has already taken the culinary genre to heart, as apparent in “Food Wars,” “The Lunchbox” and the emphasis on food in Ghibli

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ing, yet dream-like atmosphere Lee conjures up through visuals creates a

to skateboarding at first. But within the last couple of decades, these sort of rigid parameters around the roles of women and people of color opened a little bit – and once opened a little, it’s expanded wide open.”

Along with the culture becoming more diverse and socially accessible, Cahill said skateboarding became more physically accessible once it

music courses, who have in the past struggled to find space to practice because of high demand. In addition, the practice rooms have previously been at risk of vandalism— an issue that’s particularly pressing when they contain an instrument as valuable as a piano.

Dr. Parsoneault suggested that some of this burden of responsibility should fall on Student Services,

to reevaluate when their employees are able to arrive on campus and see if that would make an earlier opening possible. Another concern is that there isn’t enough demand for the gym’s earlier hours to warrant extending

addition, for some students, playing sports can be viewed as a leisure activity to get away from the stress of exams and projects. The more time students are able to dedicate towards competitive activities they enjoy, the less likely it is that they will struggle in handling the overall the college experience and the difficult periods that every student undergoes. In fact, several studies suggest that participation in intramurals can boost student satisfaction, retention and even GPAs.

As for the competitive events

films; the western world can welcome that same love. The fun of the “Overcooked”s world and the beauty of the culinary genre overall could combine to deliver a delicious film. At the very least, it’ll shine in the eyes of children- which is what the next unfortunate entry aims for.

comic that feels like an understanding, literary hug. Facing the end of something, especially when you have invested a lot

moved onto the streets and sidewalks, like at UTD.

“Anyone with a skateboard can ride it,” Cahill said “If you go overseas, you’re gonna see kids playing with a soccer ball in any alleyway or any street or any little bit of yard. Same thing with skateboarding – if you just have a little bit of an open path and a board, you can do it. And

or the Student Union, which has in the past provided a public piano. However, as the Mercury previously reported by The Mercury, the piano that was outside the Student Union has been temporarily moved. The Student Union similarly deferred responsibility by promising that it will return at some point—but not stating when. It is possible to juggle the onus for providing musical re-

them. McAlpine said there are usually only 25-33 people in the gym at 7:30 a.m., compared to an average of 72 at 4 p.m. and 62 at 8 p.m. But going back to an earlier point, I’d argue there are people who want to utilize the gym in the morning

themselves, the process of forming a team, identifying strengths and weaknesses and implementing strategies allows for students to continue to embrace being a team player and focus on adapting to overcome a challenge – regardless of their individual major or career path. Despite all participants going to the same school, the idea of competing head-to-head against people you may not know is both exciting and nerve-wracking. It is one thing to have your own individual or team-based strengths, but

“Raving Rabbids” has been through development hell trying to make a movie since 2014, but as the world’s original “Minions”-appeal, the psychotic rabbits are finally in production as of 2019 under Lionsgate supervision to make a hybrid live-action adaptation. The

of time and of yourself in it is always hard. Lee reminds her readers that, through growing pains, you’ll heal and reach a new state of normalcy-

it doesn’t have any rules like a sport does. There isn’t any proper way to do it. As long as you can ride, you’re skating quote-unquote ‘properly.’ And if you get that feeling that you like this thing that you’re riding, you’re a skateboarder.”

This sort of accessibility is what allowed computer engineering sophomore Kennan Wu to join UTD’s skat-

sources between departments all day, but is it really productive? The practice spaces we are talking about already exist.

There is a clear solution here, one that Dr. Parsoneault herself has looked into. While it has no guaranteed timeline, the music department is considering using a modified room reservation system that would allow students enrolled in music

but don’t because the current timings make it difficult for them to workout early without being late to their morning classes. This makes logical sense since “morning people” who would prefer to work out before 7 a.m. are likely also those

it is another to play against someone or a team of which you have little knowledge regarding their approach or strategy. In essence, this concept is what makes intramural sports unique. For NCAA sports, there exists extensive stat-tracking and team film athletes utilize when preparing for games and series. But for intramural captains, most of whom are full-time students with classes and projects, it can be difficult to assess the quality of competition and tailor game strategy to each opponent.

main focus for any film like “Rabbids” is the child appeal- so screaming and creepily-twitching rabbits of mayhem surely have less appeal than animals of all varieties in their little chefs outfits.

“Overcooked” has jackpot potential from the merchandise alone- a diverse range of characters would allow

you just have to hang for a bit and ride out all the emotions that come with moving on. Yes, you can talk it out to close ones, but sometimes you

ing community easily, despite no prior experience in the activity. In his freshman year, Wu began riding around purely as a means of transportation.

When he got that “a-ha” moment Cahill described, he began making skater friends to ride around with and learn tricks from, who readily accepted him despite his inexperience.

“Everyone was super chill and ac-

courses to reserve a specific time slot for practice. Tentatively, students not enrolled in music courses might be able to request access as well – a function which should be a priority.

Obviously, it makes sense to prioritize the use of practice rooms for students enrolled in music courses, for whom access to these pianos is an academic need and not just leisure.

Still, this is not a reason to restrict

who are enrolled in the earliest classes of the day.

Opening the Activity Center at 6 a.m. would allow people that like to work out early but also have morning classes the opportunity to hit the gym without worrying about miss-

With this in mind, the competitive nature of the various events remains variable; participating students are forced to focus on their own effort in preparation, as opposed to concentrating on the play of others.

While some may argue that winning an IM tournament does not compare to winning on the NCAA level, it is the overall experience of diverse groups coming together and competing on a larger scale that remains the focal point of any UREC-initiated event. Even in crushing losses or heartbreaking

“Overcooked” to be a marketing success for all ages. Imagine how many people, children especially, would be running to grab a husky chef plushie, or a dragon chef costume, or even a mermaid chef doll.

“Overcooked” deserves to be a film for its colorful plot potential, the

just need to read about someone who has gone through the same thing as yourself. If that’s you, or if you’re looking for a creative outlet to make

cepting and I got to learn all the good spots on campus,” Wu said. “Security doesn’t really like us grinding and stuff, but you know, we do it anyways –it’s fun, we aren’t harming anyone. And we can seem like a pack, but we really aren’t intimidating. So, you know, if you want to skate, walk up to any skater. We don’t bite. Unless you hate skateboarding.”

access from other students. It is my opinion that The University’s departments should prioritize coming up with a room reservation system to address the desires of all students should be the university’s top priority. With the new reservation system in development, Nnow is the perfect time to include more studentsnonmusic majors, before plans settle and become policy.

ing their classes, and would generally help spread out gym traffic. If students are willing to hit the gym at 6 a.m.–freeing up equipment for those who would rather go later–they should have the opportunity to do so.

last-minute defeats, through these tournaments and events students can create memories that will last them throughout their tenure at UTD and beyond. It is these memories that can spark conversations with old friends or reignite past sporting passions without requiring a full-time role. Even if in this semester you were unable to compete, look to your friends and network and start considering forming a team for intramural sports this fall – it just might enhance your overall college experience.

genre development it could represent and the success it would bring for itself – it certainly has more merit than some of the other films we’re getting. It’s a simple statement to say that people love food, so it’s about time we see it pan out on the big screen.

sense of things during an awkward transitional period, perhaps you’ll take inspiration from Jen Lee’s “At The Edge Of The Stream At Dust.”

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