Check the cup holders

It always begins the same.

I'm aimlessly wandering the halls of my high school, frantically trying to remember my locker combination and, to a greater extent, where exactly my locker is located. But that's not all that bad. It's the day before graduation and all that I have in my locker is 14 flannel shirts and a tattered Alice In Chains poster.

But then it occurs to me. I forgot to go to Anthropology class for the entire year. I think, "Gah, that could come back to haunt me." I'm paralyzed with a staggering fear. Then I think, "I'm kind of a little guy. Maybe my teacher didn't notice." But alas, my teacher did notice. Just then, a booming voice comes over the PA stating that due to my delinquency, the entire graduating class will be forced to repeat senior year. Around that time, Anthony Green swoops down riding a dragon of some sort and they chase me off a cliff from which I fall forever. Okay, that's not entirely true. Sometimes it's Carrot Top on the dragon.

Look, I'm no psychiatrist. I'm just a guy who can and will burn S'mores Pop Tarts when presented with the opportunity. But I think that the impetus behind this recurring dream that I’ve had for the better part of six months is at least partly due to the fact that I’ve been overseeing the overhaul of Altpress.com—the very ambitious, very blue site you’re on right now. Granted, the guys at Paper Tiger did most of the heavy binary lifting, but you’d be surprised at how much planning, organizing, reorganizing, copying, pasting and swearing goes into reinventing AP’s online presence for the digital age.

But now that we’re here in the future, I’m completely stoked with how the site turned out  and I think you’ll be, too.

< shameless pimping > Not only have we massively ramped up our news, reviews, stories and columns, but we’ve implemented a ton of new features. We’ve got intensively extensive artist profile pages; a sleeker, more intuitive Mosh Pit; a huge calendar featuring new releases, upcoming shows and more; cleaner, crisper photo galleries; about 52 trillion ways for you to comment on and share everything on the site; a hugely improved APTV with new video features we think you’ll dig; and for those of you who were fans of our staff blogs from the era before Twitter infiltrated Jason Pettigrew’s frontal lobe, those are back, too. < /shameless pimping >

But (at the expense of my REM cycle), we’re not even close to finished. It’s basically like sprinting from Iowa to Massachusetts just to immediately begin running the Boston Marathon (except my water bottle is filled with Pepcid AC instead of Gatorade). This is just Phase 1 of the new Altpress.com. We’ve got a lot more to roll out in the coming months and we’re going to be constantly adding more artist profiles, more reviews, more videos and more of, well, everything until I run out of Xanax and interns.

But the truth of the matter is, this is your site. Take it for a test drive. Check the cup holders. Kick the tires. Kick Scott Heisel. Get involved. Comment on stories. Start a discussion about Travis Clark’s hair. Tell us what you like and don’t like. Because, believe me, we read and take to heart every comment and message posted. You’re calling the shots.

And if I can impart anything upon you of any sort of resonance, it’s this: Don’t ever, ever blow off Anthropology for too long. Those ancient Carpathians aren’t gonna learn about themselves, people.