The Tipping Point

Another unique character, Death Metal David, real name David Williams, was a lover of all things death metal, and would sing, or I guess growl, death metal down the Quarter Mile from 2006 to 2011. Known largely for this, he would become quite well known, even doing an interview for the September 30th 2011 edition of The Reporter. Apparently, his favorite Disney princess is Ariel. As of eight years ago, he remains in Rochester.

Govind Ramabadran was the Kengar Dongatron of the early 2000s, and is maybe even more infamous. From 2002 to 2008, Gorvid was everywhere. Almost every RIT student and club had some experience with Gorvid. His biggest legacy, however, is not in the weird and creepy things that he allegedly did, but his contributions to The Reporter. Specifically, he ran the Crime Watch section of The Reporter, where he would report on recent crimes in and around RIT, such as harassment, mischief, and vandalism. This of course caused RIT students to be RIT students, and try to commit more and more crimes in an effort to get featured. This culminated in Public Safety having to shut down the Crime Watch. Overall, a man whose legacy at RIT will remain…for better or for worse.

Gracies Dinnertime Theatre was a student run newspaper that ran from 1995 to 2005. It was a newspaper that focused on political discussions, conspiracy theories, deep satire, dunking on then RIT president Al Simone, and much, much more. Created by RIT students Sean Hammond, Kelly Gunter, and Marc Trzepla, it originally started as dinnertime discussions at Gracies between the group that would explore things and ideas taken to a logical extreme. That would inspire the group to create a radio show around this concept, but that went nowhere. Instead, fueled by Sean’s dislike of The Reporter, he decided to team up with his friends to write their own newspaper, which would become Gracies Dinnertime Theatre. The name was a spoof of the show Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and the logo was a reference of the three co-founders standing next to each other with a meter stick on their head. Which, by the way, is almost certainly what the Unity Quad statue is depicting symbolizing, as it was created at the height of GDT’s popularity. GDT’s notoriety only grew as the years went on, and it was eventually hosted on Computer Science House’s servers in 1996. The three co-founders led GDT from 1995 to 2000, before handing it off to a different set of students. And while GDT fizzled out in 2005, all of their issues, as well as issues of GDT’s sister publications are all archived on hellskitchen.org. Additionally, if you would like to learn more about Gracies Dinnertime Theatre, I did a full two hour interview with Sean Hammond and Kelly Gunter, where they went into a lot of depth as the how they wrote articles, some forgotten history, how they published their own book, and much, much more. Definitely check out both the interview and read the archived articles if you want to learn more about Gracie's Dinnertime Theatre.

Named after Henry Lomb, Henry’s Restaurant is the most secret dining location on campus, not appearing on the map of dining locations. It’s located in room 4125 in George Eastman Hall, and is only open from October to November, and only for a few hours each week. It’s a student-run restaurant that is run by Food And Beverage Management majors as well as Restaurant And Event Management majors, as it helps them gain valuable first hand experience in running an actual restaurant. They use Henry’s Restaurant to learn about inventory management, kitchen management, menu design, food preparation, health and safety codes and regulation, as much, much more. Since this is run by a class, the menu is always changing. However, one special fact about Henry’s Restaurant is that it has dual liquor licenses, meaning that it can serve alcohol to both the public and to students for educational purposes. That means that if you take the class Beers Of The World or Wines Of The World, you will be able to drink even if you are under age (which is why those classes take place at Henry’s Restaurant).

Run by RIT’s Research Computing department, it allows you to download local mirrored copies of open source software for free, mainly different Linux kernels. The closer you are to RIT, the faster the various distros will download. Despite being over a decade old, it has been maintained and its founders have kept it ad free. Just don’t fall down the Ubuntu rabbithole.

 RIT has also had some more notable people who gained their fame through more nefarious acts. Now, I’m using the word alumni very loosely, because the three people I’ll be focusing on in this section never actually graduated from RIT. This is not an exclusive list. The first person is Guido N. DiMatteo, a Computer Science major, who in 1997 was arrested for counterfeiting money, allegedly with four other people. Secret Service agents recovered about $1000 in counterfeit money. Next is George Hotz, aka geohot, who briefly attended RIT, and became known for jailbreaking both iPhones as well as the PlayStation 3. The latter caused Sony to sue George Hotz in 2010, and he has since abandoned jailbreaking software to pursue other ventures. The final person that I chose is Lucas Henderson, a Computer Security major, who in 2011 was arrested after an FBI investigation revealed that he was creating counterfeit coupons for Campbell Soup, Tide, Bagel Bites, Magic Hat beer, Xbox, and PlayStation, just to name a few, and posting them to 4Chan. Lucas also created tutorials on how to create your own fake coupons, all of which ended up defrauding hundreds of thousands from these companies. 

Ricky The Brick is a student made mascot of RIT that gained popularity in 2015. Based on RIT’s most famous architectural feature, its famous red bricks (which there are over fifteen million of at RIT), Ricky The Brick initially started as a 2015 PawPrint petition created by Braxton Frederick, that got over two hundred signatures. Student Government responded, and then CIAS Senator Andrea Shaver drew the first ever sketch of Ricky The Brick in response to the PawPrint petition, and Student Government accepted Ricky The Brick as the third official mascot of RIT. From there, RIT student Dan Simon would create the first ever Ricky The Brick mascot costume that they would wear to events, and Ricky would become a social media influencer. Ricky would then branch out to song writing with their hit single “I’m Bringin’ Ricky Back (SexyBack Remix)” on SoundCloud, and Ricky would also become the official mascot of BrickHack.

 RIT Let My Son Die refers to protester Ron Fairman, who regularly attends important RIT events such as graduation to protest RIT’s alleged negligence over the death of his only son, Timothy Fairman. On November 16th, 2017, Timothy Fairman, a senior Computer Science major, passed away from diabetic ketoacidosis due to undiagnosed type one diabetes in an off campus apartment. Weeks earlier, in a video detailing his side of the story, Ron stated that Timothy did not want to return to RIT for his final year, and did so reluctantly. Being concerned for Timothy, Ron emailed Timothy’s senior academic counselor, Mina Pulcini, and asked her to email and check up on Timothy. She agreed, but it was revealed after Timothy’s death that neither of these things happened. RIT claims that because Timothy died from natural causes due to an undiagnosed medical issue, and never went to any of the health services that RIT provides, RIT nor Mina could have prevented Timothy’s death, but Ron disagrees, saying that there were enough warnings, such as Timothy missing classes or him not responding to emails and phone calls from his parents. Due to what Ron considers negligence on RIT’s part, he has regularly been protesting big events at RIT with his signs, as well as making a full website, and demanding answers. He has also continued to harass Mina Pulcini, even when she left RIT for another college, and even though she was an academic advisor, and not a doctor or a health counselor. Overall, a story with no happy endings, as this wouldn’t be the first, nor last time a student died at RIT.

Soul Human was a RIT student band that played at RIT’s various basement shows and events. Their name is based off of Sol Huemann dorm.  In 2019, they released their album of six original songs, “Objects In Space”, on Spotify, with their song “Jazz Nut” being their most popular, according to their Spotify listens. Unfortunately, they disbanded during Covid.

 The Distorter is the April Fools edition of The Reporter. It’s usually full of the most random pieces of content, smothered in a deep layer of sarcasm. It doesn’t show up every year, but when it does, they are worth tracking down physical prints of. And for your reading pleasure, I have compiled a list of every Distorter article from 1951 to 2016. In order, the first April Fools Reporter was released in 1958. In 1959 we had the RIT Repeller. In 1960 we had the RIT Repenter. Then we hit a hiatus until 1983, when the first issue of The Distorter came out. We then had an issue of The Distorter in 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1993. In 1996, the April Fools edition was renamed to Spun, before being renamed to Squirt Gun for the 1997 edition. In 2000 the Pritty was released, and in 2001, the Stank Magazine premiered. In 2002, a RIT Reporter magazine from the year 2035 was released. In 2005, a normal Reporter was released on April Fools Day, if you don’t count the article on how hype terrorism is. We then got the Distorter back in 2006, which was a choose your own adventure type book, and the 2007 Distorter was a full blown escape room in a magazine, and is my personal favorite. Finally, the latest archived Distorter came out in 2013. A few things to note, though. The RIT Reporter archives aren’t complete (we haven’t gotten anything past 2016). So there is a chance there was an issue that was not archived. Additionally, at the time of creating this project, both the 1983 and 2013 Distorter issues have only broken links, and no way of seeing them. Many Reporter articles archived also suffer the same fate, so hopefully, if you are listening to this from the future, you can view these articles. Regardless, definitely give these a reading. They are all unique and interesting.

Twerking Tiger is the name given to a sexual assault awareness poster, likely created in April of 2015 for Sexual Assualt Awareness Month by the RIT Center For Women And Gender. The poster features a really thick Ritchie doing a handstand while drunk. The phrase “Twerking Tiger, Hidden Condom” is also likely a reference to action adventure movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which came out in 2000. Some may say that the poster is problematic, after ROO, are we really surprised by this?

 On March 16th, 2012, a bus driver saw a student walking around Nathaniel Rochester Hall and Kate Gleason Hall with what looked like an assault rifle, and notified the campus community at 8:05 am. RIT was then put into a lockdown as Public Safety investigated. They found out that it wasn’t a student with an assault rifle, but a samurai umbrella, and by 9:30 am, the all clear was given. And like most things at RIT, by the end of the day, people already had “I Survived The 2012 Umbrella Scare” t-shirts, and the Umbrella Incident would become yet another inside joke that would persist even a decade after the event.

 Uncyclopedia is a satire version of Wikipedia, and its page on RIT has many jokes poking fun at various RIT stereotypes and lore. This includes giving President Munson the nickname “Kracker Easy D Davy Smooth AKA Frosty Jab,” claiming that Gracies was originally a top-secret robot food production plant and bio-weapons research lab, writing out a full list of some of RIT’s more notorious characters, and much, much more. It’s worth a read, if you enjoy satire.

 On March 8th, 2017, a massive windstorm hit the Rochester area, including RIT. The winds reached 81 miles per hour at its peak, which knocked down a lot of power lines, trees, and other infrastructure. The wind tunnel effect caused the Quarter Mile to be unwalkable, so RIT shut down for a few days, as most of Rochester and Henrietta lost power for a few days. In addition, the windstorm knocked down a century old oak tree. Rather than getting rid of the tree, RIT hosted an event called T-Minus 151, where teams of students, mainly Industrial Design majors, had 151 hours to come up with a plan on what to do with the oak wood. The event was hosted to honor the late RIT Artist-In-Residence Wendell Castle. Three designs won: wooden benches near Global Village, an abstract tree structure in the style of Castle named “Sprout” that was donated to the Henrietta Public Library, and a limited run of commemorative souvenirs made of the wood and glass, signifying the old and new RIT.