Stuff Dartmouth Kids Like: Every Breath You Take, I’ll Be Watching You
Thankfully, Dartmouth offers many, many resources to help meet your stalking needs.
The Dartmouth Name Directory is your friend (obligatory remark about how old Blitz was better). But seriously. DND will give you nicknames (so revealing! Does this person have a sense of humor or not? Are they punny?), year, and for the dedicated-slash-should-be-incarcerated level of creeping, Hinman box and maybe their cell phone number. DND should always be used in conjunction with Facebook and Dartmouth Sports, which are no-brainers and help you put names to faces, blah blah blah.
The notoriousBored at Baker,where everything should be taken with a block of salt, is slightly (read: highly) more voyeuristic than Facebook. If you’re feeling really desperate, you can ask the bored masses, “do u guyz know who this kid is??? Help plz, I’m looking for love!!” without fear of judgement behind your wall of anonymity.
Stalking people onBlackboardbrings you to a whole new level of creepy, but it's a great way to figure out whether you need to shower and do your makeup before your classes or get that extra half hour of sleep. Honestly, though, if you have a 9L everyone will be too focused on keeping their eyes open to notice how cute or not you look. So just forget it.
I think the best and most interesting way to stalk people is through their iTunes libraries. Maybe this is just me, and it’s super judgmental to base your assessment of someone off their top 25 most played songs, but whatever. I do it. Not sorry.
Disclaimer: I usually use iTunes to figure out if any of my friends are in the library, and I usually only check out the libraries of people I know. I don’t really care what Johnny XYZ is listening to. I am not a total creep.
I’m not sure how the whole music sharing thing works. If I’m in the library and your name shows up on my “Shared,” I don’t know if that means you’re in the library or just using Dartmouth Secure. Not that that’s particularly relevant, but there always seems to be a handful of people who are always on my network or have weird library names and have stuck out in my head as a result. Dear person who named their iTunes library “Jim Yong Kim’s Library,” that joke stopped being funny in 2009.
Obviously, iTunes isn’t a particularly good judge of character — unless you are one of those hipster snots who thinks that liking anything that’s been played on the radio makes you less of a person. But you do find out fun things, and stalking other people's music can offer an opportunity for introspection. For example, everyone seems to have playlists for the gym. I do not. Clearly this means I need to get with it and get off the couch.
But it can be fun to see what other people are listening to. I love it when I find out that someone else has the song I just discovered and have been playing on repeat for the last two weeks. It’s always funny when sick bros have super girly music in their libraries – Call Me Maybe, anybody?