I had an unhealthy addiction to Oregon Trail in elementary school. The second that screen popped on up my window, my morals went out the window.

Hell yeah, I’ll be a banker. There’s nothing more important in the world than money.

Shoot extra bison even thought I very well know I can’t carry it all back to the wagon. No duh.

Leave my grandmother to die because she’s slowing us down with her damn cholera. I never looked back.

And then I grew up. Or maybe not grew up as much as learned how to play the Sims. If you think controlling someone’s life changing journey across America puts you on a power trip, spend ten minutes playing the Sims. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have a soft spot for Oregon Trail. That’s why I clicked on this article as soon as I saw the title and decided to share it with you.

So with no further ado: How the Oregon Trail Relates to Dating

Jenni may or may not have downloaded the Oregon Trail app to her phone and was crushed to see you had to pay to play the full game. You can follow her on Twitter here @MayorJenni.

I spend 83% of my day deleting e-mails from my career center. It seems they spend 100% of their day sending out e-mails with job tips, career fair, and networking seminars. Every time I report one as spam, five more pop up in its place.

And the most frustrating thing is that their language is all so misleading.

Job Hunting makes the process sound so adventurous. I’m immediately thinking back to shooting oxen (too many pounds to carry back!) on the Oregon Trail. Instead it’s scrolling through databases and filling out applications. I went to the resume building workshop. I assumed that we would be physically stacking up our resumes to build some sort of post-modern card house that would look awesome while also giving some insight into resume writing. Instead, it’s listening to all the things I should have on my resume instead of babysitting jobs from the 7th grade. Read More »

I came to college up north because I insisted on going to a school with all four seasons. I chose Syracuse because I tend to do things in excess. Why have a few days of snow every school year when I can spend 8/9 months at Syracuse freezing and wearing the somehow-still-popular Ugg boot for the majority of the year?

Four years ago I ran outside as the first flakes fell from the sky. I spun around and around with my tongue out reveling in the snow not because it came naturally but because that’s what people always do in the movies. I stayed spinning until a bus pulled up in front of the dorm, almost ran me over, and my friend asked me to come inside and stop embarrassing myself. Even as the winter wore on I got delight out of hearing the crunching snow beneath my feet and writing my name over and over again on ever snowy surface.

But nothing good can ever last and now as the first snow falls, I’m sitting inside wrapped in fourteen layers chugging a large coffee. I made a list of everything in the kitchen and rationed it out so we can survive five months without having to go outside and to the supermarket once. I haven’t been this prepared with food since I won the Oregon Trail in fifth grade.

So I guess the magic of snow has worn off. The first sign was probably when I put a hat on and everything remarked that I looked unmistakeably like a penis. The second sign is when my boots stopped working and I had to wrap plastic bags around my feet so the 3-foot ice puddle wouldn’t give me hypothermia. The third sign was when I made a snowman last year and someone ate the skittle eyes. Ever since then I just can’t look at snow the same way.

So here goes hibernation ’09. It should be a blast.

Hey, remember those days when you took a computer class to help you learn how to navigate the Internet and use that thing called Microsoft Word? And then there were those advanced classes (my middle school class called it Careers…ahah) that taught you how to use Excel. The best part of it all was that our woodshop class was called Technology.

I mean, did anyone else learn to use a computer on one of those really old Macs? You know the kind with the ACTUALLY FLOPPY disks that supported the original version of Oregon Trail? And they were that cream color with the black screen and blinking green cursor and the multi colored apple?

Can a sister get an Amen or am I just getting really old??

Sadly, the nostalgia days are over. I’m pretty sure that in today’s age, babies pop out of the womb typing on a keyboard and surfing the World Wide Web (Remember when you learned that that was what the www stood for?? Sigh.)

And since we’re all totally fucked up these days and kids no longer push each other on the playground but instead use their tiny little fingers to do the dirty work, schools now feel the need to implement cyber safety and ethics lessons into the US Curriculum. And this shit is funny!

Below, the guidelines that the National Cyber Security Alliance outlined in this article, called the ‘C3 Principles’ of Cyber ethics, safety and security: Read More »