Here's wishing happy holidays and long winter breaks to our readers, especially to those poor souls who attend Harvard and Princeton, where fall semester final exams occur after winter vacation. Nassau and Massachusetts Halls: Thou art a Grinch.

We'll be back on January 5. Until then, how about some premature nostalgia and self-reference? This year saw our redesign and tech upgrade at the hands of nimble-fingered Tech God Zach Ozer, to whom we are constantly indebted. Also, the addition of several new writers and editors, all of whom are obscenely talented and frighteningly dedicated to this wretched little blog. They created the following Top 10 Fall '08 stories, listed here by pageview:

• 1. Egotistical Freshman Wants to Rule the World: 15,300 views for that breathtakingly bizarre sensation, Stephany Her Royal Highness.
• 2. "I Was Shocked I Would Be Joining a Lower-Tier Bank": Life After Buyout: 9,800 views
• 3. Ivy League Scores Low in Forbes College Ranking: For some reason you guys continue to be obsessed with rankings: 7,800 views
• 4. Harvard's Very Own Hugh Hefner, If Hef Devoted His Magazine to Pictures of His Own Penis: 7,700 views for Not-so-Big Man on Campus Matt diPasquale and Diamond magazine.
• 5. Middle-Aged White Guy Sues Columbia for Discrimination: An Interview with Roy Hollander, Men's Rights Pioneer: Messiah of Misogyny scores 7,500 views, never gets laid again

The rest of the top 10 + assorted tidbits, time-wasters, and arbitrary "Best Of" designations:

• 6. Diamond Magazine, DiPasquale's Penis: Rough Cut?: 7,400 views for our second post on the guy whose jizzum "tastes like bananas."
• 7. "I'm Trying to Stay Positive": I-Bankers Speak Out: 6,300 views for the first installment of Dan Haley's coverage of the i-banking collapse.
• 8. Professor Summers Thinks You Fail at Life: 6,400 views for the Summers Who Is Not Larry
• 9. Brown Olympic Gymnast Totally Decks This Guy: 6,100 views for the weirdly strong tiny pretty thing Alicia Sacramone punching a classmate in the face. He collapses into heap of empty beer cases.
• 10. Wallow In Our Collective Misery: The Best 368 Colleges of 2009 Has Arrived to Mock Our Very Souls: 5,600 views to find out that Cornell has bad food, Brown is utopia, Harvard is an "amazing, irresistible hell," and Columbia is "a fruit truck." That last one sounds like homophobia, but in fact it is an extended metaphor demonstrating the poverty of Columbia's Creative Writing program.

Two old stories crept into this year's top 10: Lena Chen and the Case of the Naughty Nudie Pics is not only our most-viewed story of all time, but technically this semester's #2, with 12,000 views. Kitchen Sex Is the New Shower Sex clocked just under 7,000 views despite being so old, Nick Summers wrote it. Vintage!

As for comments, our brief foray into the world of registered commenting succeeded/failed miserably, depending on your perspective. The semester's most-commented:

• 1. 73 comments debating Zimbabwe politics and whether Cornell is super-fratty or just kinda-fratty in Ithaca College's Cornell Impression More Cornell-y Than Real Cornell, culminating with someone trying to steal thatcornellguy's username. Party foul.
• 2. 48 comments on our other ICTV post
• 3. 47 comments on StephanyHerRoyalHighness
• 4. 40 comments on Dartmouth Religion Professor Apparently Clueless About Facebook, debating whether Reiko Ohnuma's ill-advised Facebook use could possible be real (yes) and whether the Ivy League actually contains the smartest people on the planet (hell no)

A few other gems, handpicked by the editor:

• Keggy the Keg's tragic kegnapping, and related atrocities
• File Under Well-Intentioned But Hideously Misguided. And funny meta-coverage!
• Daily Prince Uncovers Earth-Shatteringly Elitist Document
• The Rest of the Best: In Which We Take Over 02138's Job
• Whartonite Wins Lottery, Poor People Pissed
• Video of the Year: Harvard Yale Aid Hotline, posted in Yale Beats Harvard: And Then There's the Matter of the Football Game
• Video of the Year, Runner Up: Yale of DYE (Q: What's that stick for? A: Your ass)

The two funniest videos of the year just so happened to be the funniest anti-Yale videos ever created (unless you count the Bush family's entire televised existence). Your move, Yale. Where's that Drama School when you need it, anyway?

Answer: Helming the greatest school musical of our time.