The Newman Library is one of Virginia Tech’s top locations for studying, grabbing a book, or just hanging out. Everyone knows the basic rules of “don’t be noisy on the quiet floors” and “clean up after yourself,” but the average newcomer might not know the rules of the library past that. Without further ado, I present you with my top 5 unspoken rules of the Newman Library.  “Public” Utilities   There are a number of rolling whiteboards on the library’s 4th floor, which at fir

Just about two weeks ago, going thirty miles an hour on Interstate Route 81 South, I jumped out of a car. Before you close your browser tab and cost us some precious website traffic, I implore you not to match my level of impulsivity. I know it sounds insane, especially as an opener to a collegiate blog. And that’s partly because it is—pigs are pink, and jumping out of moving vehicles is bonkers. While I claim mental sanity and ensure the action wasn’t an intentional way of h

Dear readers, what was your vision of college? Did you think you will make a lot of great friends, or meet your extraordinary life long partner? Or that maybe you wouldn’t care about either of those because you’d be so very locked in on your education? If that’s the case, props to you. I, however, figured I would be so amazing that I would attract all the cool people within a 5-mile radius simply with my aura alone.  Unfortunately, that was not my reality. I thought that maki

Straight men being obsessed with “crazy women,” is, quite frankly, an epidemic. What they consider “crazy” for women is not the same problematic behavior that would be considered crazy for men. It’s always just “I love b**ches on Zoloft,” a weird obsession with mental illness in women (we won’t even dive into the harmful implication of men calling women “b**ches,” but we all know it’s there). There’s a fixation on the idea of a woman needing them for her fulfillment; it’s a f

Silhouette Magazine: Virginia Tech’s go-to for all things creative expression. Send in your submission for critique, wait a little bit, and get published! It’s a beautiful, well-executed mission, but the magazine can only feature you if your forms of creative expression fall into the categories of poetry, prose, art, or photography. Fundamentally, that comes from the limitations of the printed medium, but the Blog has no such limitations: it’s the lawless wild west of Silhoue

I was impassioned to talk about this after watching Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” a couple of nights ago, and the passion has not faded. With Halloween just around the corner, I want to share my opinion on who the real monster is in Frankenstein’s story (Spoiler: it’s not him). Let me first make it clear that I don’t mean Victor Frankenstein: I mean his creation. The whole “Don’t you mean Frankenstein’s monster?” is an outdated pedantic way of viewing him because, in my

The dating world in 2025 is nothing short of hell. Last week, I corrected a man who called me the wrong name on a dating app, and he responded by calling me aggressive. This isn’t anything new, and I’m definitely not an angel in these interactions either. In a post-pandemic world, romance seems to have fizzled out. For the most part, when the pandemic shut the world down, Gen Z was in high school and middle school. Normally, this is the time to learn what you want out of a re

I, and I'm sure many of you all reading this, love cats. They’re cute, playful, soft, and full of lovable personality. It's what draws me to cats. But for some people, that very personality might be the thing they find most egregious. As a feline lover myself, I adore cats. And one important factor in building a relationship with a cat is how you treat them. Cats have their own mannerisms that demand their own corresponding actions. Are you holding your hand out for the cat t

Eyes trained in front of me through the net, waiting for the downbeat. Imagine a punchbag recoil and now you’ve seen me,  flung backwards. My glasses frame exploded inward,  the metal digging into me.The glass had the mercy  not to bend and shatter. Didn’t notice til it healed in a straight line  like someone had raked their nail across the bridge of my nose. I was bleeding straight, the copper frame bridge shoved into my skin like strangers elbowing into each other when the

There’s this quote by Kait Rokowski that reads: “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was...