Which WHO is your WHAT?
A stray email from the SU, titled ‘Dear First Name’, began to expose the bare bones of the algorithms sustaining the quotidian hum of campus.
So shocking was the revelation that the university doesn’t put pen to paper and write to each of us in turn, that a collective of investigative journalists hired the help of a wifi-and-coffee powered hacking squadron nestled in a Siberian bivouac, so as to find out what else on campus is delivered without thought.
Penetrating deep into the cyber backrooms of the Warwick webscape, the dogged journalists scraped through the endless clutter of Deutsche Bank employer-connect emails to eventually uncover the shining masterwork of the Tab’s article generator. The algorithm is an online kaleidoscope that hurls together combinations of hypothetical personal ‘connections’ in an attempt to create a pseudo-meaningful piece that will have share-value for a lonely student. One might liken it to the famous monkey/typewriter conundrum.
The potential articles are then sent to an underground sweathouse in the Philippines, where PTSD-wracked youths filter through the endless combinations of articles to find something of potential merit. In the sweat, dust, and tear filled room, hanging in the centre space of cracked concrete wall, is an all seeing portrait of Rupert Murdoch, so as to remind the workers of their valourous task. The whole process, it could be added, is reminiscent of a computer-age take on music and pornography generation for the proles of 1984.
The journalists intercepted a handful of said articles, all of which remain un-vetted as yet, and to which we have been granted the rights to publish. Each contains an ungarbled snippet of the complete article. Their Pulitzer Prize is expected to be announced imminently.
1. Which armed group in the Colombian civil conflict is your university accommodation?
Rootes: The AUC
A questionable ragtag generally in accord with central management. Should have been demobilized in 2006, yet for some reason keeps going on in various forms. Known for excesses of brutality, and the occasional massacre of a peasant village.
What your colon movements say about you.
Long creeking sounds: you study engineering
Late nights? Energy drinks? A vain attempt to sustain an appearance of being a cool guy (male, obviously)? Your flatmates see right through it, and so do your bowels. No one should have to rush to the toilet three times in pre-drinks, but it’s all fine, because you’ve made a spreadsheet of all the quickest routes.
What it’s like to be a neo-Hellenic pagan at a Welsh university.
Most people find the local accents difficult enough, but trying ordering a virgin ram, three ounces of gypsy tears and a saber in your local Lidl and you’ll quickly find the difference between Pontypridd and your home in 6th Century BC Miletus.
Every surface you’ll ever have a borderline sexual encounter on.
A tube
You bustle through a crowded Northern line carriage, reach up for a handrail, and your elbow grazes the unmistakble feel of a perky breast; unfortuantely, you also happen to make eye contact. Sweat beads down your forehead as you do your best to make the whole thing appear accident. Regardless of the station, you alite at the next stop, awkwardly waddling to hide your physical excitment.
Which degree course best suits your stance on bread?
“The rise of the ‘Chorleywood loaf’ in the 1960s is the saddest period of British history”: philosophy
You both hark back to idealisms about how things were, and seek to resist the forces that made things as they are now. Your the same kind of person who insists on shopping at workers’ cooperatives, and only take your coffee hand-ground by the knuckles of liberated Ethiopian poets.
Can we guess your stance on the Dreyfus affair based on your membership of the third French republic?
J’accuse!
Don’t even talk to me about curry.