Today we celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Rate Your Students. None of us has been around that long, but we take any excuse for a party, so we've loaded in the fur pelts, the absinthe, and the battery cables. It's going to be a long night at the compound. We've got some special guests coming, so we've had Wicked Walter and Weepy Wayne working all morning getting the blood and mud off of the furniture.
Last year at this time we posted a retrospective that included a brand new note from this site's founder, the more and more elusive "The Professor." We thought we'd check in with him to see if he'd like to say howdy again this year, but he's apparently living up in Forks, Washington with his new family, and passed.
So it's left to us, we suppose.
Three years in a blog's life. It's an eternity, of course. Almost 1700 posts over that time, tens of thousands of emails, and more than 7 million visitors.And we're not even trying hard.
Actually, many of you have noticed our thinly veiled attempts to kill the site, JobFinder, Coolest. College. Students. Ever. CrimeBeat. The inane hot links.
Every new feature we try is designed to piss people off, annoy them. We love it when the first line of a reader's mail says, "WTF?" Of course we're trying to disappoint you. Of course we get up at 3 or 4 every morning Pacific time (in order to be online when school starts on the east coast) to read mail and post the best stuff just so that you can get all high and righteous and tell us how sucky we're doing our job.
We've been especially successful ruining everyone's fun with our indiscriminate changing of the page design. "The colors, my god, the colors! And what's with that font? And what are those fucking leaves doing on the page? WHY CAN'T YOU MAKE THE PAGE LOOK THE WAY I LIKE IT?" Oh, it's delicious.
Of course we're trying to ruin the site. It's all we dream about. That and pouring honey on that blonde spy on NBC's cool show "Chuck." We Tivo that shit just so we can watch her run around. We have slow-mo. We've got it down to a science. In fact, she's here with us tonight. One of the former moderators taught at a juco in LA and met her when he was working a craft services job. How he got her on a plane and to the compound, we'll never know. But it's not as if she'd be the first person to arrive on site a little woozy and tied with heavy rope.
Anyhow, it's been 3 years. Blah blah blah. Big fucking deal. How many is that in dog years? How far along the tenure clock are we? Oh, who gives a shit. If there's a fourth year - and we're not even going to think about it until every last one of those shrimp gets eaten - we're just going to do what pleases us. We're pretty sure we lost our way this year. After all we have the emails to prove it. But if we return, we're going to all shave our heads, get down to our high school weight, and let the freak flags fly. If it's something you dig, we'll be happy to have you along for the ride, sending in your own screeds, being one of those nifty "chief correspondents." We might even send you one of those great RYS purses.
And, if the site's not for you, just shuffle right on past. We'd recommend you check out another academic blog, something like Highly Emotional Academic with Cats.
Anyway, it's just turned midnight here. Bring us some of that absinthe, and don't be skimpy this year with the portions. Tell Yvonne that we're out of dip, and to get her skinny ass over to the CD player. No more Talking Heads. Put some fucking Kool Moe Dee on there.
Oh, and it's little. Do you hear us? Years ago The Professor made a promise. This world. This fucking academic bullshit. It's little and we're saying it.
You decide what you want to do with that. We'll hit you on the flip.