Ludus Novus

President Hulbert was the much-loved and eternally admired friendly old president of Rose-Hulman. He’d been president forever, but he finally retired after my freshman year. He proved irreplaceable; we went through two more officially selected presidents during my time there, as well as the assorted interim administrators and de facto triumvirates that arise during any rough political transition.

Fun fact: During my first quarter, I got to play a ninja who was kidnapping Dr. Hulbert for a Film Club production. I was the one who held the chloroform rag to his face. I may be the last Rose student to ever get that close to the man.

This is the last comic from my freshman year at Rose. Year 2 heralds some longer (loose) storylines.

Lovecraftian horror names are hard to spell and pronounce. According to some stories, Lovecraft would give each person who asked a different pronunciation of “Cthulhu.”

I think my first encounter with gaslighting was in the book The Twits by Roald Dahl.

I suspect that “Last Saturday…” caption is there because that was when roommate assignment requests were due. The Thorn newspaper went out on Friday mornings, so I must have been concerned that the topic wasn’t quite timely enough.

Rose did not have co-ed on-campus housing.

Chemical Engineers are strange creatures that only use computers to talk to their friends and download spyware.

Hoosiers are strange creatures that play games that aren’t digital, use cards that aren’t collectible, and have rules that make no sense.

Cthulhu has no problem with killing humans. He is, however, aware of the complications that other humans would experience if they do so.

Geeky college students often have trouble distinguishing between making humorous allusions and parroting tired lines from popular works. The cake is a lie.

Ahh, Unreal Tournament 2004. Excellent game. My (eventual) roommate ran a server with a stats mod on it that let you gain experience and upgrade your abilities. It was a bit broken.

Edit: Speed was one of the dorms on campus.

Sorry about the lateness. I forgot to schedule this post.

Civil Engineers bore the brunt of a lot of jokes at Rose. One reason is that one of their early classes involved surveying, which meant that they got to go outside during class and play with cool mirrors on sticks and stuff. They also had classes that discussed weird topics like mud and harmonic resonance.

Remember the woman in the third panel.

This is a variation on a classic gag that has appeared many places. Unfortunately, I know of no fictional students ever enrolled at Rose.

Around February (I suppose) of my freshman year, an e-mail was sent to all students from the RAs. It was a letter urging for the tolerance and embracing of diversity. It was one of those deliberately vague e-mails that is clearly in response to a specific event, but where the senders don’t want to actually talk about an embarrassing incident, and don’t want to make it seem like they only care about diversity when things go wrong, even though that’s the only time they do care.

I don’t remember if I knew what the instigating incident was. I don’t think I did; it wasn’t public knowledge. If I had to bet, I’d say it was in response to homophobic slurs being written on some student’s dorm room whiteboard or something. But the RA letter was so vague and tentative so as to be pointless. “Hey, everyone! We’re all different, and that’s great!” All it did was increase the amount of social isolation on those people who were different, because everyone around them was wondering and whispering about whether they were the ones who tattled to the RAs.