The Marvellous Mr. Marble

Those of you who obsessively follow my fledgling writing career (which should really be all of you) will probably remember that I got a short story accepted for publication a few weeks ago. Good news, everyone - you can finally stop checking your calendars and wringing your weary hands, because my story is officially published and available for your reading pleasure. 

How you're feeling right now.

The story is called "The Marvellous Mr. Marble", and I originally wrote it for a creative writing class assignment in my fourth year of university. At the time, I had just read an article about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa - for those of you with an irrational fear of hyperlinks, a random workman spotted the painting at the Louvre, thought to himself 'hmmm, that looks like a nice painting' - or whatever the equivalent phrase is in French - slipped it into into his cloak and walked out with it, at which point he managed to successfully evade police for two full years. I wanted to fit this into a story somehow, so I ended up writing a 4,000 word comedy story about a middle-aged man who lies about stealing the Mona Lisa to impress his old classmates at a high school reunion.

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How to Get Through Election Day 2016

Well, folks, after four solid years of campaigning, the day of the 2016 American Presidential Election has finally arrived.

Depicted here.

As we all wait to find out whether we'll be celebrating the election of America's first female president, or desperately stocking up on weapons and blast doors for the commencement of the first annual Purge, tensions are running a little high. If you're an eligible US voter, you should be out at the polls right now, collecting your "I voted" sticker and maybe not taking a selfie with your ballot. But if you're not a US voter, or if you've already cast your ballot, here a few suggestions to take your mind off the impending end of American democracy as we know it:

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Two New Cracked Articles!

Earlier this week, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed like a good little mindless millennial, when I stumbled across an article that was a list of unsolved murders. Being the sort of person who likes reading about unsolved murders, I clicked on it, and immediately congratulated myself on already knowing all about the first murder on the list. In fact, the further I read, the more familiar the article seemed.

Then I scrolled to the top and realize I'd written the damn thing.

The haunting images of dead-eyed statues, however, were chosen by somebody else.

As it turns out, I submitted an article about creepy unsolved murders back in May, and it got combined with two other excellent articles on creepy unsolved murders, and turned into a two-part creepy murder extravaganza for your Halloween viewing pleasure. Only a handful of the entries are actually mine, but all of them should have you sleeping with the lights on and railing at the unfeeling God that could allow these atrocities to go unpunished. 

You can read Part One right here, and you can read Part Two right here. Or you could go up to the top of the page and find them under the "Cracked Articles" tab. I can't tell you how to live your life. 

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Getting My First Short Story Published!

If you've kept a close eye on my website navigation bar, you might have noticed there's a new category called "Short Stories". 

Nothing gets past you, champ.

After two solid years of psyching myself up to let people read my fiction writing, and not just my endless snarky critiques of horror movies, I started submitting some old stories from a creative writing class to literary journals. Lo and behold, one of them just got accepted!

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Over-Analyzing "The Purge": 4 Reasons Why the Purge is Even More Terrible Than You Think

At this point, we can all pretty much agree that 2016 has been one shit-laden clusterfuck of a year. And in honour of that shit-laden clusterfuck, I recently watched the only movie that really sums up the feel of current events: The Purge: Election Year. 

Like it or not, this is pretty much the most quintessentially American thing I've ever seen.

As I write this article, America is staring down the barrel of the first presidential candidate in history who thinks the Purge is a documentary and still can't quite wrap his head around the fact that other people have feelings. Americans everywhere are living in fear that they'll be called on to hunt the Most Dangerous Game come next March, and hey, they may have a point. But before you enroll your children in sniper training and start shopping around for the best deal on blast doors, let's take a moment to think about what the Purge would actually look like. For starters:

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5 Things Men Do When They Are (Way, Way Too) Into You

There are two things I enjoy most in this world: key lime pie, and making fun of horrible advice I find on the internet. And since I'm currently rocking the physique of a butternut squash, the only joy I have left in this world is ripping apart lists of terrible life advice for insecure millennials.

"Someday, my great-great-great grandchildren will be proud to see that my whole squad was on fleek."

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a website called "Millennial Lifestyle", which, despite its name, knows nothing about healthy lifestyles or the seething resentment that all twenty-somethings feel at being called "millennials". Their list-based advice ranges from a toddler's understanding of weight loss ("have you tried eating vegetables?") to your bigoted grandfather's understanding of relationships ("have you tried not threatening his fragile masculinity with your academic and career successes?"). Another Edmonton-based writer masterfully took them down in the Huffington Post, and yet they're still churning out relationship advice that belongs in the back pages of a Farmer's Almanac from 1913. Recently, they tried to let us know what kinds of creepy, creepy things men do when they're into a woman - if you don't want to click through five pages of their clickbait nonsense, the main points will be quoted below.

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Update on Cracked Stuff

If you're reading this, there's about a 50/50 chance that you found my website via Cracked.com. 

You either found me on here, or you're probably my mom. Hi, mom.

For those of you who are new to "the Internet" or "humour", Cracked.com is one of the internet's largest humour sites, specializing in list articles like "The 5 Weirdest Disappearances No One Can Explain" or "The 7 Most Horrifying Twist Endings (Happened in Real Life)". There are thousands of articles on there, but those two are definitely the best. 

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Why I'll Never Open a Hedgehog Cafe

A few months ago, I became aware of a pet hedgehog living in less-than-ideal circumstances who needed a new home. Despite the fact that I have never owned a hedgehog, nor have I ever felt a burning desire to own a hedgehog in particular, I did want a pet that my landlord would be cool with, and I didn't want this little guy to keep on being neglected. One thing led to another, and I now share my apartment with a tiny ball of spikes named Harley. Owning Harley has taught me a lot of things; mostly, what it's like to share my life with a living hairbrush that hates me.

This is Harley.

As a 20-something living in a developed nation in the year 2016, my self-esteem is largely dictated by how many strangers click buttons for me on the internet, and pet hedgehogs are social media methamphetamine cut with Scarface-grade cocaine. Within moments of getting the little bastard home, cleaning him up, and naming him 'Harley' - his previous owners were that special kind of neglectful who never bothered to name him - I had his image plastered all across my social media accounts. Even now, after saturating all my feeds with pictures of Harley for months, a photo of him is still pretty much a guaranteed shower of unwarranted internet attention.

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10 Things Idiots Wish Women Knew About Dating

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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For Real, Stop Learning About Human Psychology on Facebook (Part Three)

After five years and an amount of tuition money that will forever turn up in my nightmares, I am the proud holder of a psychology degree. It might not be the most practical degree, but it does have one benefit (other than the full-time, gainful employment it got me in my chosen field): it sometimes lets me know when strangers are wrong about things on the internet. 

It happens sometimes. Shocking, I know.

Every now and then, I find enough bullshit psychology on the internet to write an entire post about it. This is one of those times. Enjoy. 

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Announcing the Six Finest Candidates for the Supreme Court of the United States

If you weren't in a coma on February 13th, 2016, and you occasionally leave the TV news playing in the background, you were probably surprised to hear about the death of Supreme Court judge and political dinosaur Antonin Scalia.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

Justice Scalia's sudden death is obviously a huge tragedy for his family and friends, but it's also a pretty huge deal for the rest of the USA. The Supreme Court doesn't just exist to keep DC's robe dry cleaners in business; at any time, the Supreme Court has the power to strike down, uphold, or change the application of laws based on how they interpret the constitution. We're talking about a document that was drafted at a time when people set whale flesh on fire to read at night and treated public executions as fun family outings, but 200 years from now, when America is trying to decide how to legislate people uploading their brains onto computers and transcending the physical world, they'll deal with it by asking nine random lawyers what a bunch of dead 18th century politicians would have wanted. And that's why it's crucial that Scalia gets replaced with someone the USA can count on.

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For Real, Stop Learning About Human Psychology on Facebook (Part Two)

Last week, I stumbled on the motherlode of bad psychology information floating around my Facebook newsfeed. I went to school for a long time to study psychology. I have a full-time job in psychology. There are millions of people around the world who have been helped, directly or indirectly, by the field of psychology. And it's posts like this that convince the general public that psychology is nothing more than hypnotism and voodoo.

The original post was such a massive load of steaming bullshit that I had to break it into four smaller, equally steamy loads of bullshit to get through the whole thing. This is part two.

Origin of the original post.

I know it's awfully disappointing that psychology used to make astonishing claims about dream interpretation and subliminal messaging, when today it mainly just sits in the corner playing with graphs, but that's what happens when a scientific discipline grows up and gets a real job. The bullshitty email forwarders of the world don't seem to want to accept that human psychology is way more boring than you think it is, and so they twist scientific studies or straight-up invent facts to spread amongst their equally bullshitty friends. But no more. I am on the case.

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For Real, Stop Learning About Human Psychology on Facebook (Part One)

If you've read this blog for any substantial length of time, you'll know that I love psychology enough to hold a shiny degree in it (followed by an actual, honest-to-god full-time job in it), and I absolutely fucking hate it when my field of choice gets reduced to a series of glib 'fun facts' that haven't been considered true since Freud was still prescribing cocaine as a cure for opiate addiction.

For real, he killed his best friend with it. Look it up.

And since it's hard enough for psychology majors to be taken seriously without our entire field of study being reduced to a series of semi-fictional email forwards, you can imagine my immense, crushing disappointment when several of my Facebook friends littered my page with one massive dump of half-true psych facts and hilariously untrue fictions. Like, c'mon, they even superimposed them over stock photos to look legit. Since there's no greater force known to man than 20-something-year-old Nerd Rage, I am dedicating the next few posts to untangling the scientifically-backed probably-truth from the definite lies. Links will be provided throughout the post, but they'll be really hard to see, because I'm a hell of a lot better at writing than designing websites. 

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Cracked Article #4

As most of my regular readers/devoted followers/binocular-wielding stalkers already know, I write for Cracked.com from time to time. This is one of those times.

Brace yourselves, it's a weird article this time.

Article #4 is called 'The 5 Weirdest Disappearances No One Can Explain', and you can get to it by clicking that link. If you like taking extra, unnecessary steps to do everything, for reasons known only to you and your therapist, you can find the full list of my Cracked articles at the top of my webpage. It's under "Cracked articles". Because I excel at labeling.

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