4 Awful Things We're Now Considering Nerd Behavior I'm not a pleasant person to be around. I mean, I'm mostly OK on the outside, but it sometimes seems like the person who lives in my brain and presses the buttons that make me do things is just trying to see how far he can push the envelope before society exiles me to a desert island with nothing but a few years' worth of snacks and a solar-powered laptop so I can play Fallout 2. I'm basically just like any other sociopathic nerd, and I'm guilty of every one of the behaviors I'm about to explain. #4. Lucasfilm Here's an awful truth: We may love the stuff our favorite artists create, but we don't give two shits about them as people. There's no better example of this than the Star Wars prequels. LucasfilmFear leads to anger, anger leads to hastily typed forum posts and a meaningless life. You get angry when someone does something to hurt you or someone/something you care about, not when someone fails to keep doing something you like. I'm not above this at all. Again, this makes no sense.
The 5 Things That Separate Troubled Geniuses from Jerkwads Have you guys seen Sherlock? It's a pretty fantastic show, and it brings up some very valid points, such as: Does extreme intelligence always equate to isolation? Are human beings really just a collection of transparent self-serving impulses? And when, exactly, are Sherlock and Watson going to bone already? Just ... just touch him, Sherlock. But perhaps the most important question that shows like Sherlock, House and Luther raise is this: What's the difference between being a troubled, misunderstood soul and just being an asshole? #5. Getty The most obvious difference between assholes like me and Troubled Savants like House is that the latter are constantly making observations, while I'm constantly making crude snare traps to set around my box of Work Wine. "I'll take a large Irish, with room for coffee," I said, just waiting to T-bone her with the garbage truck of deductive reasoning. "Wait!" "What?! "Don't you dare touch my cup with those hands. "Excuse me?" "Your eyes. "Th ... the what?"
5 Reasons The Greatest Movie Villain Ever is a 'Good' Witch When you think of The Wizard of Oz's cast of villains, you most likely think of the flying monkeys and the Wicked Witch of the West, and maybe the pissy apple trees and the green dudes guarding the WWotW's castle. Also known as 'Winkies.' True story. If you've seen or read 'Wicked,' you might have a more sympathetic view of the Wicked Witch of the West. It's her, right there. Glinda, not the Wicked Witch of the West, is the cause for everything that goes wrong for Dorothy and her new friends in the land of Oz, and she starts instigating the film's central conflict the second Dorothy shows up. You remember the story, right? And that's when Glinda the Good Witch floats down and merrily interrogates Dorothy to find out if she is a good witch or a bad witch. "And remember only bad people are disabled, Dorothy" You caught that, right? "It's like Saddam's execution all over again." Right off the bat, the Western Witch wants to know who killed her sister. What?!
It's me, Jesus! This was during my audition for The Lion King. I didn’t get the part. braiker: thanks again, internet A portrait with my dear friend, Bob Ross. Fear not children for he is with me now. I shall always look after my sheep. My newest attempts to convert my children that follow a more revolutionary path. My classic mosaic has been restored. One of my followers has gotten a beautiful tattoo of me on his back. Me as a child.
The seven most disturbing psychology experiments - Weird.Answers.com In the annals of unnerving social science work, one name stands out in the pantheon of researchers, an unassuming Harvard professor who put together the experiment that bears his name. In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram found himself curious about the nature of obedience to authority, specifically the propensity of ordinary people to comply with orders to commit evil acts as happened in Nazi Germany. To test his ideas, Milgram devised an experiment in which subjects were situated in front of a board of switches and instructed to ask questions of a fellow volunteer who was restrained to a chair in the other room. When the restrained person got a question wrong, Milgram's experimenter instructed the student at the board to throw a switch and administer a shock. As the shocks grew in intensity, the subject in the other room screamed in pain, begged to be let free, and finally fell into a chilling silence - apparently either unconscious or dead from the torture. The results were stunning.
6 Double Standards We're All Guilty Of Every one of us has decried a double standard at some point. The double standard in the workplace when it comes to paying women, or among universities when it comes to letting in people who thought high school was boring. But while we're wondering how admissions departments sleep at night, there are some much more common double standards that we rarely complain about since we're too busy obliviously believing in them. PSAs Are About Other People, Not Us If you leave your house occasionally, even just through the magical portal of television, you'll be no stranger to PSAs (public service announcements) warning you about the dangers of drugs, drunk driving, texting while driving, not reading to your kids and not eating "the other white meat." However, if a corny anti-drug commercial has ever made you want to shout at your TV "NOW I AM GOING TO GO DO EVEN MORE DRUGS!" Getty"I am going to do ALL THE DRUGS! And it's not just because the commercials are corny. Getty Or a metrosexual.
The 6 Best Towns To Live in (If You Have a Death Wish) Maybe the greatest thing about human beings is if you show us the most desolate, horrible place on Earth, at least one of us will scratch his chin and say, "I bet land is really cheap there." Boom, a month later, there are apartments and a Waffle House. We're not kidding, there are people living and working right now in places where you wouldn't think a man could survive for even a day. Places like... Where is it? Drive about five hours out of Ethiopia's population center until the ground gets too rugged to proceed, then get out and travel by camel-back into one of the cradles of human civilization in the Danakil Desert. This is the region of the world where human life began, and life has been comparatively smooth sailing for those of us who escaped this hellhole. Lifestyle In the 1960s, an American company set up a mining community in the Dallol region in order to mine the mineral, potash. "Hey Hank, this is fun and all but I was thinking maybe, you know, fuck it. But, hey. Ah, Siberia.
The 6 Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In Look, we're idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it's probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC'ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be: #6. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.com Back in 1945, the USSR discovered oil just off the coast of Azerbaijan. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.com"If you find yourself plummeting into the sea, you've gone too far." Five thousand people live and work on Neft Dashlari, right there in the face of logic and Poseidon alike. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.comThey went a little crazy on the swimming pool, though. But if there's one thing the Soviets weren't exactly known for, it was the reliability of their engineering; they always did prefer to glue things together with a combination of balls and aggressive optimism. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.comOur guess? #5. #4. For money!
5 Surprising Upsides of Horrible Natural Disasters There's a reason natural disasters are called that, and not "natural fun times." It's a constant scourge on our development as a species that we are perpetually beaten down by the wrath of nature. But that's why it's so surprising to learn that occasionally, just occasionally, natural disasters can have surprising upsides. Here are a few cases where the universe's fury has actually worked out pretty well for some of the people involved. #5. Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images Surprisingly for two peoples united in their shared love of rotating meat, for most of the 20th century, Turkey and Greece really, really hated each other. But when a huge earthquake hit Istanbul and northern Turkey in 1999, the Greeks reacted out of character. Goodshoot/Goodshoot/Getty Images"They're hoarding gold! Then, less than a month later, a separate earthquake hit Athens. This time the thaw stuck around. Digital Vision. #4. Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images Via WikipediaIt was kind of a big deal. #3.