The Housing Lottery is, well, a shitshow. We’ve got you covered with commentary and live updates on what’s going on in Sayles Hall, who’s taking your favorite room, and everything else in between.

Take a break from the stress of the housing lottery, and head over to Jo’s, which is hosting a Year of China special from 6 to 10 p.m. tonight. The special menu will include fried rice, egg rolls, dumplings, blossom salad and sesame noodles, according to culinary guru Aaron Fitzsenry.

Beyond food, the special will also feature “a Chinese gown fashion show, calligraphy and musical and dance performances,” according to the Dining Services website.

Time to take a break from that spicy with spicy kielbasa, and grab yourself some egg rolls.

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If you’re participating in the Housing Lottery (aka Shelter Games), you’ve got until Wednesday the 11th (numbers 1 through 460) or Tuesday the 17th (461 through 697) to map out your strategy. Which (at least for my freshman and sophomore groups of 11 and 8 people, respectively) meant contingency plans upon contingency plans upon contingency plans. Historically, it has proven a huge pain in the ass to navigate the huge amount of room info, past results, and other pertinent information from the Res Council website: there’s just so much.

Fortunately, some students created a tool to make the process at least 10,000 times easier (actual mathematical figure). Nathan Malkin ’13 and Sumner Warren ’13 have developed Cella over the past semester as a successor to their CS32 project Domus, a desktop app with similar functionality created with Miya Schneider ’13. This tool is incredibly versatile as well as informative. It uses a database of rooms and your preferences (only want to live on Main Campus? Want to live anywhere but Pembroke? Know what dorm you want to be in?) to provide you with tons of options for a group of a specified size, also taking into account your lottery number in comparison with past results in order to rank the probability of each room. It also provides links to floor plans and other info specific to each dorm (gender neutrality, apartment rate, etc.). If you want to play around with different breakdowns of a large group, create as many separate searches in separate tabs as you want. Check out their About page to see what else the tool can do, or better yet, go forth and experiment. The design is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

The Hunger Games movie is coming out this Friday, and to say we’re excited is a bit of an understatement. We’ve listened to the soundtrack, watched the trailers (five times), and even have begun to play the game “RISD outfit or Capitol citizen?”

To celebrate our age-inappropriate excitement for the wholesale, post-apocalyptic slaughter of adolescents, BlogDH reimagines the world of District 12 here on College Hill:

It’s sometime in the indefinite future. Brown’s endowment is gone, and to make money, the Corporation has started The Housing Games—a nationally televised event where Americans can feed their schadenfreude and watch freshman Ivy Leaguers fight to the death.

But freshmen eagerly look forward to the competitions: awaiting everyone in the winner’s dorm is priority housing, early registration, and 500 flex points.

So fame, mortal danger, and a whole lot of Blue Room sandwiches lie ahead.

May the odds ever be in your favor, and let the Housing Games begin!

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Complain all you want about dorms, but there are some advantages to living on campus. Assuming you and your friends have already figured out your housing group and have already begun arguing thinking about all your options, you can head over to the ResCouncil website and fill out your housing lottery form.

Once you submit your application, you can spend your spring break plotting and making lists of potential housing options (or was that just me?) — the site also has pages of past results, so when your group gets its number in two weeks, you can see where you might fall and what your potential housing options are. And make sure to check back here the night of the lottery for ways to make your housing experience a bit more fun.

“SUPER DEADLINE DAY” sounds like it should be a lot cooler than what it really is, which is the deadline for submission of various housing preferences, most notably Program Housing and fraternity/sorority housing. According to ResLife,  Super Deadline Day is also the last day you can request to live on a same-sex floor, even though forms were already due for other special interests like substance-free and over-21 housing (… what dorm is that? How hard do they party?). Super Deadline Day is this Thursday (March 8th), so if you’re considering one of these options, figure it out in the next few days!

If you’re living on campus next year, consider bookmarking the Residential Calendar 2012 so you don’t forget any deadlines in the housing lottery frenzy.

Aaaand we’re back. Night Two at the Housing Lottery and you know what that means: a whole lotta people are going to get screwed. Last week we saw numbers 1-460 take their picks, some to cheers, some to jeers. Tonight we finish ‘em out. If you’re tuning in from home, watch it all play out here. So cross your fingers, grab a drink and hang tight, because starting at 6 p.m., things are going to get really exciting.

It’s time to get geared up for round one.  The first night of the Housing Lottery is upon us, and BlogDailyHerald is on the scene in Sayles Hall to provide LIVE coverage.  We’ll be here ‘til the last number of the night (whattup 460, we see you) chooses a room or passes into summer assignment.  You can follow the lottery as it happens on the online projection available on the ResCouncil website.  We’re here to give you commentary on the human side of things: the screams of victory, the sighs of defeat, and everything in between. It’s going to be a long night folks, so bring some refreshments, get comfortable, and brace yourself for a truly wild ride.

Spring Weekend may be the dominant event on your horizon, but lest you forget an equally notorious spring ritual, brace yourselves, because tonight is the kick-off of the 2011 Housing Lottery. Lottery is a competitive sport, a game of luck, a bloodbath, and if nothing else, incredibly entertaining to watch. Whether you’ve got stakes in the competition or you’re just an innocent bystander, there’s a way to make lottery even more … enjoyable.

Behold, the official BlogDailyHerald Housing Lottery Drinking Game.

Festivities start off tonight at 6 PM, though only those with the first 100 numbers will be allowed into Sayles. If you’re a lucky upperclassmen, fill your backpack and do it live. For everyone else, the magic happens here.

Basic rules are below, though feel free to submit your own creative additions. After all, lottery is nothing if not interactive.

And don’t forget to check back later, starting with the first picks, for BlogDH’s own live coverage.

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At long last, ResCouncil has released the list of group priority numbers for the 2011 housing lottery! Find out your number at the ResCouncil website.  Let the plotting begin…