Here is another hot bit of Manhattan media gossip for you influentials: this is my last day at Gawker. To say it's been an amazing experience would be a ridiculous understatement.

First of all, insidery listicles aside, I will still be writing mostly the same things about mostly the same monsters. I will just be doing it at Salon.com's War Room. So: if War Room is not already in your "bookmarks" or on your "de.liciou.us" or in your "RSS reader" or "downloaded to your iPad," please rectify that ASAP. (Or by next Wednesday, when I start.)

Second of all, please continue reading Gawker, because I am friends with everyone here (besides that jerk Brian), and basically every time someone who's been around a while (or for far too long) leaves the site just ends up getting better. (Once you take into account the fact that it's never been as good as it was when Spiers edited it, obviously.) (J/k Matt Haber was actually the best Gawker editor ever.)

Thirdly, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks are still terrible. Still! I have accomplished literally nothing.

Because I cannot think of anything else relevant to say about the huge chunk of my life I've spent writing funny things on the internet for this company, I figured I'd just share the story of why I am doing this, as a Warning to parents everywhere who suspect their children may want to Blog.

It's an old and boring story that I've told a million times, but I got this job, in a roundabout way, because of Paris Hilton. She was going to host Saturday Night Live. I wrote like three jokes about this fact and emailed them to tips@gawker.com. Choire Sicha thought they were funny. Then I "interned" at Sploid (the greatest Gawker Media site of them all, and probably more "influential" in terms of attracting copycats than any of them besides Gawker and Gizmodo themselves) and then I dropped out of college and then I guest-edited Gawker with Jessica Coen in May of 2005. 2005! It was a crazy time. Can you believe they were still fighting about what to build at Ground Zero? This weird billionaire from Boston was the mayor!

This is my first Gawker post. I was 19 years old.

On that first day, I made fun of Slate and wrote a post about local New York politics that no one read. Nothing has changed, except that now it takes me twice as long to write the posts about New York politics that no one reads.

(The next day, I began making fun of New York Times op-ed columnists.)

Jessica and Choire and Lock were incredibly helpful and patient (while also more or less being like, alright, good morning, put up 12 posts now).

Choire even gave me a dollar to write this post.

Here's some other stuff I did that week:

After a few more stints of filling in for Jesse Oxfeld during the High Holidays (and one weird day where Noelle Hancock and I ran the site while Jesse and Jessica did... something) they told me (at the Gawker Christmas party) that they were going to send me to Washington DC to edit Wonkette. After I gradually lost my mind over the course of almost two years, Choire, on his second Gawker-editing stint, invited me back to New York to come back to Gawker. (Then everyone else promptly quit.)

I don't have a big "that fucking guy was totally an asshole" bridge-burning thing to post here before I go, because, uh, who I think is an asshole is entirely a matter of public record, thanks to the fact that Nick, Gabriel, and now Remy have always given me the freedom to say terrible things about people Nick eventually runs into at parties.

So I'll just say thanks to everyone I have worked with at this nutty old laugh factory over these long years. Thanks to Richard, Hamilton, Brian, Sheila, Maggie, Ryan, Moe, John, Jessica, Jesse, Choire, Lock, Alex, Emily, Doree, Josh, Rebecca, Ian, Gabriel, (And Ken and David and Megan and Liz and Liz and Josh and Ana Marie and Chris and Jason) and Anna and AJ and Ray and Lux and everyone else at all the other sites (besides those assholes at Lifehacker) (j/k!) And thanks to Scott and Gaby and Erin and Kaila and everyone else who I actually see in real life since I started coming into this bizarre office.

And, you know, thanks to Nick Denton. Yes, he's a large-headed amoral Tory whose ability to experience empathy is occasionally questioned, but he gave me an amazing job and let me keep it and do with it whatever I wanted for years, and he's paid a lot of really talented people to produce really amazing work that really couldn't have succeeded anywhere else. And all he ever asked was that my headlines be Tweetable.

Thanks, of course, is also due to the readers, the commenters, the emailers, and those who Tweet that I am a stupid liberal fag. But I hope to continue seeing all of you guys. (Seriously GO TO WAR ROOM AND CLICK ON EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME STARTING NEXT WEEK.)

So. It's been weird! And fun! Cheers.