Today, Blueprint founders Trent Teti, Matt Riley, and Jodi Triplett are unveiling Blueprint: The Movie 2.0. It is the second version of our online LSAT course and the best thing to happen to education since the abacus. Or the protractor. Whatever.

The old video course was awesome, but the new one blows it out of the water, sets it on fire, scatters the ashes, and throws it back into the water just to blow it out again. The big innovation with our new online LSAT course is that it’s fully animated. This doesn’t mean you’ll be watching a mouse with stupid ears teach you the LSAT; it means that as Trent Teti and Matt Riley (sole instructors for the online course) teach you concepts, you’ll be treated to explicative and hilarious animation from our team of highly-trained animators. It’s sick. More to the point, the animation is wildly useful for illustrating things that are hard to understand, like formal logic or why men can’t put the toilet seat down.

In our opinion, Blueprint: The Movie 2.0 is far more advanced than any other online course you’ll find in LSAT prep. But don’t take our word for it–check out some sample clips:

Matt tackles a logical reasoning question involving brain capacity:

Trent discusses different types of bait for this Flaw question:

Blueprint: The Movie 2.0 features:

- Approximately 60 hours of high definition, streaming videos
- Hundreds of hours of video explanations for homework questions
- Unlimited email support from veteran Blueprint LSAT instructors
- Blueprint course books containing every LSAT question legal to license
- 16 real practice LSATs
- A lollipop that will turn your tongue an alarming shade of blue

At $799, we also think Blueprint: The Movie 2.0 is the best value in LSAT preparation. It’s coming at you today so sign up now, or forever dishonor your ancestors.

Article by Trent Teti, Matt Riley, and Jodi Triplett: the triumvirate of test prep. To see more sample clips, check out our Youtube channel.

While the sample only includes two lawyers who went on to do work in publishing, this is an educational moment for all would-be lawyers out there. Everyone should prepare themselves for the idea that they might not enjoy large swaths of what they learn (and learn to do) in law school. Most of you are not wildly familiar with what law school entails, and it’s perfectly natural that aspects of it might not be what you want to do.

The lesson to learn from the story of Roger and Jessica (the two lawyers quoted in this article) is: don’t panic. They learned to adapt their goals, time and time again, due to their changing interests and the changing world around them. In the present economy, adaptability is a necessity. If you take out a bunch of loans to pay for law school, you might have to get a job out of law school to pay the bills that’s not exactly the job you want. If the economy tanks further, then you might have to settle for a job that’s lower paying than what you want (but since the median lawyer salary is still north of 80k, I’m going to be playing the world’s smallest violin for you).

Suck it up and stick it out. Eventually, if you work hard, you’ll find something that’s tolerable. Or at least make enough money that you can go do something interesting, like chopping down trees or eating competitively.

Thankfully, class is like my very own Hitchhiker’s Guide to the LSAT. Last session, we went over the once in a blue moon test (aka the “LSAT of Equivocations and Double Negatives,” as it was named in class because practically every flaw in it was an equivocation and it had so many double negatives that it made the English language beg for mercy.) It also featured a couple logic games that seriously crawled out of the depths of Hades simply to ruin your day.

Despite all of this test’s bells and whistles, I was most shocked at how my own simple mistranslation of a rule ruined an entire logic game for me. It was like this one time in my first semester of Greek where I mistranslated a single verb and had to ask my professor why the Persians were eating the Greeks. Maybe that was funnier in context and in Greek, but you learn something new every day. The ancient Persians were definitely not eating the Greeks and “neither-nor” statements use an “and” sign not an “or.” Good things to remember.

We also talked about how to use our copious amounts of time to study (suddenly 38 days feels like a really long time). Study as if you were actually taking a test and time your sections so that you can get a sense of pace. Apparently this will lead to some sort of internal clock in sync with LSAT sections. On the great scale of clocks, this one ranks somewhere below your body’s circadian rhythm and somewhere above the alarm clock you hit the snooze button on five times this morning. Think of it as your new (yet kind of lame) superpower! You won’t be saving the world in a spandex costume anytime soon, but at least you’ll be able to know if you’ve got five minutes or five seconds left.

Speaking of alarm clocks, I’ve started timing myself with one of those kitchen timers where you can hear the ticking. This seems to make me even more stressed out because I can actually hear my 9 minute reading comprehension section ticking away steadily, but it definitely gives me a sense of accomplishment when I can finish that section with time left over and one or none wrong.

To those of you who didn’t bomb the last test, congrats! But to my fellow students who got owned, all is not lost. A bad logic game can ruin your section, but not your spirit. A bad practice test does not a poor student make. Now is not the time to despair. There will come a day when the courage of men fails—oh wait, that’s from The Lord of the Rings. Now is the time for calm and concentrated efforts at improving, for studying intelligently. We’ve progressed from hitting things blindly with sticks. Now, it’s time to start sniping.

Enjoy, and be sure to let me know who I’ve missed and where you fit.

The ones who would have gone to med school, except blood makes them throw up.

These students are quietly better than everyone else, and they know it. They are genuinely smart, and not given to crazy cutthroat law school behavior because they already know they are more intelligent than everyone else. No seriously, they are. I mean, have you ever seen an MCAT? That is some crazy baloney. Or watched Grey’s Anatomy? McDreamy opens up peoples’ heads, for the love of god. Much respect.

The ones who sit in coffee shops and talk, loudly, about the law.

These students are the same sort that will one day ride a train to and from work while yelling, loudly, about work on their cell phones. This talk will be interspersed with thinly veiled crude jokes, all while they drink beer from a brown paper bag. Both now and then they will annoy you. But your annoyance will be tinged with pity, since you know masturbation is really their only option.

The ones who sit in coffee shops and look like their dog just died.

Go home, man. You’re not being deep, just a downer.

The ones who take pride in not drinking coffee.

Seriously, get over yourself. I promise you this: out of all the junk law students put into their bodies, coffee should be the least of your worries. If having pride over your ability to avoid a completely legal and only minimally physiological altering substance is the best thing you have going for you, well, that’s sad.

The ones who are law school hot.

This is the greatest gift to a law student. Genuinely good-looking people do not go to law school. They are too busy doing more fun and interesting things, like being CEOs or underwear models. So, in law school land, the Drew Barrymores and Justin Longs become the Brads and Angies. (Side note: Can someone please explain to me how that woman managed to parlay a chance rendezvous with an alien into a thirty year career, despite a pretty significant speech impediment and total lack of talent?) Anyhow, if you are one of these lucky few, congratulations and enjoy it. If not, don’t be too upset, we’ll have to venture back out into the real world eventually and with it will come a return to mediocrity for all.

The ones who are normal hot.

This is a myth.

The ones who have been president of everything.

Including, but not limited to: their high school class; their college class; their Sunday school class; the high school down the street; their sorority; the chess club; the “Saving it for Marriage Club”; the “Oops… Saving the Second Time for Marriage Club”; the dirty girls social club; that club that organizes those parties where ladies come to your house in smocks to sell make-up, baskets or sex toys; the PTA; the Neighborhood Watch in SimCity; that club you and your friends created when you were eleven which had the sole purpose of hanging out down by the pond and explicitly qualifying the power hierarchy of your clique; the Young Republicans and General Electric.

The ones who are aliens.

Like llamas and people who don’t spell check the signs they bring to Tea Party rallies, these students will intrigue and confuse you, but you’ll ultimately find them unimportant. After all, who really cares how you stack up to someone who isn’t even human?

The ones who are secretly amazing.

These students aren’t on Law Review or some other prestigious organization, and didn’t earn a random award during 1L, so there aren’t any big red flags that they are law school awesome. But then, one day you’ll be chatting with them at the bar and all of the sudden they will (genuinely on accident) mention the amazing firm they summered at or the fantastic clerkship they have lined up and you’ll be like, “HOLY SHIT SAY WHAAA?!?!” And they’ll be (again, seemingly genuinely) embarrassed and modest, and graciously turn the conversation back to snow cones or gladiators or Snooki or whatever crap you were chattering on about beforehand. When the discussion eventually ends you’ll be filled with a quiet feeling of warmth and disbelief, comforted by the knowledge that not everyone who is successful feels the need to be a huge douchey braggart about it.

The ones who are not-so-secretly amazing, yet are gracious about it.

Thank you.

The ones who are not-so-secretly amazing, and are cocky jerks about it.

Don’t let these students bother you too much. In fifteen years they will have two kids, half a house, alimony payments and a cocaine habit.

The ones who refer to their professors by their first names.

My hypothesis is that the professors are the closest things they have to real friends, and I mostly just feel bad for them.

The ones who refer to their professors by nicknames.

Depending on the caliber of nickname, this is either awesome or just trying too hard. Usually the latter.

The ones who brag about not going to class.

Newsflash: we all miss class sometimes. This is because we are adults, and tequila is, inexplicably, still legal. But guess what? Spending two hundred thousand dollars to sit in your off-campus university housing apartment and watch reality TV for 112 hours a week is NOT something to brag about.

The ones the RSVP to all law school functions on their Blackberries immediately, leaving no room for people who spend their time doing unimportant things like paying attention in class or having a life that doesn’t involve constantly staring at cancer radiating cellular devices.

Seriously, give a girl with a flip phone a fifteen-minute delay, would you?

The ones who find magical law school love during 1L and then take classes together and hold hands under the tables.

Their kids will be smarter than yours, too.

The ones who get really drunk and throw up every weekend, and then pretend like it’s a surprise and say, “Wow that hasn’t happened since undergrad.”

Logic would suggest that you could only do this one time and preserve any sort of legitimacy, yet there are those who continue to offer the same explanation every single Monday. On one hand, they are the sort of people who become entertaining law school legends. On the other hand, this is a professional school, and it’s probably best that the first association your future colleagues have with your name does not involve the time you woke up in the student center lobby, covered in vomit, using a hornbook as a pillow. We all make mistakes, but c’mon, get yourself together.

The ones who get really drunk and throw up every weekend because they hate their lives.

These people are called alcoholics and it’s not nice to make fun of us.

The ones who send “tips” about fellow students to Above the Law.

I swear to god if I ever get dirt on you I’m plastering it across a Times Square billboard.

The ones who actually comment on my blog.

You are my favorite, and possibly mythical.

As I said, this list is currently not exhaustive, so tell me who I missed. Otherwise, good luck with classes starting/LSAT studying. And take comfort in the fact that, at least until 2012, summer will eventually return.

If you haven’t started studying at all, you’re in a far from ideal situation. All is not lost – if you really hit the books now, and work for hours and hours per day, you can still improve a lot by the October 9th. But it’s not going to be easy. Unless you have overflowing rivers of time, you should strongly consider studying for December instead. If you could score significantly higher then, that would more than outweigh any advantage afforded by being able to apply early with an October score.

But if you have been studying, that’s fantastic. It’s totally normal if you don’t feel all the way ready at this point. 40 days really is a whole lot of time to improve, polishing all the skills you’ve attained. If you’re in a Blueprint class, you’re probably close to Lesson 13, which is pretty much where you finish learning new concepts. That means you have around a month just to review. During this time you’ll be really learning how to implement the skills you already have, but in a timed, pressured environment. It’s one thing to know how to do a certain type of question in theory, but it’s quite another to be able to do it in practice. This is why it might be the case that up until now your test scores haven’t gone up as much as you may have liked, even though it felt like the homework was going really well. Now will be the time to change that.

You’ll do this in a couple ways. First of all, just with practice you’ll become more and more familiar with the questions and the methods, and will naturally get better and faster. But you really need to do more than this. Now is the time to transplant your study into a more testing-like environment. Gone are the days of doing games while watching Sanford and Son reruns. Whenever possible, you should be trying to do your practice like you do the test. You don’t want it to be too loud and distracting, but you also want to be out of your comfort zone as well. University libraries are generally a good bet; overall they’re quiet, but there will be shuffling of paper, dropping of pencils, people getting up and walking around. These are the kind of distractions you need to acclimate yourself to. If you only ever practice at home in bed with your Hello Kitty duvet, the LSAT is going to be a harrowing experience (well, more harrowing). Also, make sure you’re not eating or drinking, listening to music, using anything other than wooden pencils, or anything else deemed forbidden by LSAC. The practice has to mach the real thing.

Also, you have to take extra tests. This sort of goes without saying, but when you’re practicing for the LSAT it’s a good idea to take LSATs. Just don’t go overboard. You should never, ever take two tests in one day. You should generally not take tests two days in a row. There’s no need to track your score progression on such a microscopic scale. You should definitely keep practicing, and you’ll have a lot of extra material in the fourth book if you’re in a Blueprint class, but it doesn’t need to be in actual test-form every day.

And just a note about postponing. Many of you might be worried about your progress thus far, and feel that you should have gone up more. As I mentioned before, people generally see the biggest gains in the review-phase, so the best is yet to come. Even if you think you might not be ready in time, don’t worry about that for now. The deadline to change your test date is September 19th. By that point you probably will have improved a whole lot, and none of this will matter. If, by this point, you feel you won’t be ready in time, you can then consider postponement. But that consideration shouldn’t even be on the table for the next two and a half weeks.

So get back to the books! You’ve got about three and a half million seconds until the LSAT, plenty of time to see some major further improvement.

Darrelle Revis is a cornerback for the New York Jets. But not just any cornerback. Revis is, by most standards, the best cornerback in the NFL. He guards the opposing team’s best receivers and, more often than not, shuts them down. He’s the best at what he does.

Revis, 25, is currently holding out on his contract, meaning that he is not participating in training camp until the New York Jets give him more money. He is currently getting paid about $5 million a year, which is a very large amount and more than you or I can realistically hope to ever get paid. If the Jets do not give him a new contract, he is threatening to sit out the season.

Second, none of this will have anything to do with the LSAT, and I will be making no attempt to even provide a tangential relation aside from mentioning the LSAT for a second time in this sentence.

A coworker and I were recently arguing about the Revis situation. His point is that, regardless of any extenuating circumstances, Revis signed a contract and should be held accountable for the terms of the contract which he signed (i.e. getting his ass on the field). And that if Revis doesn’t fulfill the terms of the contract, the ownership of the Jets can and should sue him. It’s a fair point; a contract is a contract, and if Revis thought it was unfair at the beginning of the contract, he should have not signed it, right?

My issue, of course, is that it’s the damn NFL. Paying a star cornerback is not like paying a plumber. Revis is the best player at his position in the NFL, and if he isn’t on the field and isn’t getting paid, it arguably hurts the Jets more than it hurts Revis. Revis has the leverage in this situation and will not be sued.

Should he be sued? I say no. If an NFL team sues a player for holding out, then I would almost guarantee some kind of player strike within a year. The NFL contract system is heavily weighted toward the owners. Contracts are not guaranteed on the owner’s end, so if player A gets injured, player A can get a firm, but loving, kick in the ass, no matter how many years he has left on his contract.

Should he be paid more money? I say yes. In the NFL, you’re really about a play away from a coma. As guys get more and more juiced, and become as fast and strong as modern chemistry allows, it becomes a much more unsafe environment. Revis could be snapped in half this season. His contract was signed when the Jets did not know how good he was going to be. He’s now the best in the league at what he does, and is getting paid like he’s mediocre. Because of the odd circumstance that is the NFL, in that severe injury is highly possible and could prevent you from fulfilling your contract, restructuring should be a natural custom when talent outperforms, by a wide margin, the terms of the contract.

Who has thoughts on this? I don’t see any easy solution to the larger issue (which is the fact that people get injured often in the NFL). Owners don’t want to guarantee money to people who might be crippled in a few years, which I understand. Players don’t want to play for less than their market worth because they might be crippled in a few years, which I also understand. What do you do? One year contracts and constant negotiation? That kills team continuity and would basically lead to much more unwatchable play. Chime in if you have a point.

Anyway, prediction: Revis will be back by week 3, with a new, $12 million a year contract. Book it.