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. 

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.

10 Things Idiots Wish Women Knew About Dating

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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. 

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.

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.

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.