Yep, awesome work guys! The coming of garden was not just something silly, it was truly a turning point in the history of the forum. Before 12/4/07, the forum was business only... very few regular users, very little humor, very little camaraderie... all posts were questions, answers, opinions or rants about apps/PGRE/recs etc...
But garden's
epic cryptic post incited so much interest, debate, joking and laughing in the following days that people began becoming more social and friendly on the forum. Formality diminished. Do a forum search for the F-word. You'll find it was only used ONCE before garden came... a whole year earlier...
But after garden's classic line "*** off the school with damn committee" and all the discussion of that phrase that followed, the F-word was here to stay. It was used countless times in the days and months afterward. Humor, sarcasm and sometimes vulgarity took over the forum, spurred by hall of fame posters such as RG (who canceled his account due to frustration over the haterzz and is now known as cancelled20080417), twistor (called "twator" by physicsdude), grae313, dlenmn and myself... bitter feuds broke out over political correctness (often instigated by doom, zxcv, 400nm and physicsdude aka "physicsdouche") and the censorship movement took over (that's when the **** swear word filter started). 2007-08 became
by far the most active admissions season, in terms of posts per month, in forum history.
We had been begging garden to come back and enlighten us about the meaning of his post, but all in vain, until months later he mysteriously appeared again with
more cryptic posts, reigniting the garden obsession among the regular users. We had so much fun on the forum that year that some of us are still here as grad students
garden's name has been referenced 195 times and he currently leads all users in "physics weight". (Note his name should NOT be capitalized, even at the beginning of a sentence. That was also a topic of debate.)
grae313 wrote:I sense that garden worship is splitting into two great sects. The ones who believe it should be Garden, and the others who believe it should be garden.
Ah that was so moving to write... sadly the forum has calmed down since then, but maybe garden will come back again, when we least expect it.