So Cracked mainstay Mike Swaim, whose crew did the internet party video that approached 10,000 diggs and helped make Cracked famous (as well as the video game sketch linked below), have entered a YouTube competition called the Sketchies, where they take videos of sketch comedy and the winner gets like $50,000.

So Swaim and his crew (called Those Aren’t Muskets!) entered a video and wound up as one of the ten finalists among all the millions of videos that were entered. So that’s really cool.

But now they’re in the next round, and they need your vote.

The page is below, Youtube randomizes the videos so no one gets an advantage, but next to the video window you’ll see a link for “Next Video” and that will let you scroll through them. The TAM! video is a fake trailer for a movie called CHOPS!

Find it here.

So if you liked it and/or want to help out Swaim and Cracked (as we will almost certainly claim credit for any success he has from here on out) find his video on there and give it a vote.

Another way you can help is by Digging it and sending more traffic its way.

This way, once Swaim becomes famous he’ll owe all of us favors and we’ll be able to crash by his pool when we all move out to LA.

By the way, if you’re wondering what video they made was so awesome as to put them in the top ten among the whole universe of video submissions at YouTube in the first place, behold.

I have nothing to say in defense of this. It is The Scientology Song, and I am sorry.

The cat’s pretty much out of the bag. This was the “big news” I had been hinting at for months.

Read the announcement in Fangoria.

Don Coscarelli, the guy who did Bubba Ho Tep and the Phantasm series, has bought the film rights to my ridiculous horror novel John Dies at the End. He contacted me in November and it’s taken from then until now to get the paperwork together with the lawyers and all that.

Here’s an interview I did with Apex Digest where I mentioned it.

So there it is, kids. No matter how incredibly retarded your dream is, it can still come true. We’re all talking about it in the forums.

I’ve been fascinated with this subject for a while, the fact that in order to spread, it’s more important for a piece of information to be striking than true. So I started looking into how people would fake these videos (or at least the backstories) to make them go “viral” and I think there’s something crucial to be learned there, about how mythology evolves to whatever truth makes it spread the fastest. How much truth is lost seems to depend on the size of the audience.

Or something like that, I realized it a couple of days ago and I’ve pretty much forgotten it since then. It’s probably the subject of another article anyway. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy this one.

Digg it.

Yes, I realize many of you knew arleady that some of these videos were staged, please do not take the title as a factual guarantee or accusation of ignorance. If any of you were offended by that

inflammatory title, I offer this animated gif of a man kicking a horse in the cock.

New article coming tomorrow. By far the most valuable thing I learned in the research was that the title of this french video of a teacher beating the shit out of his classroom is “Prof qui pète un cable” which translated is “Teacher farts a cable.” Maybe something got lost in the translation, maybe not, but what’s important is that we adopt “farts a cable” as a common phrase for people who lose their temper. There is nothing in english that matches it.

In the unsung heroes department, we have the guy in the white shirt who shows up at 1:30 of this video and starts delivering his own brand of justice. Watch it once to appreciate his persistence… and then watch it a second time to notice him walk in from the right, on the sidewalk. That’s right, he’s just a passerby. He saw his opportunity, and took it.

Did you see the results of the retarded photoshop contest referenced a couple of inches below? The results are HERE. That went pretty well, so we decided to have another one. CLICK HERE if you want to enter. Winner gets 50 bucks.

You JDatE fans who are following the story for the first time, the finale will be posted in a few hours (evening of Feb 4th) over at the official site.

I wrote that headline up there so, yes, David wong refers to himself in the third person now. This is sort of a companion piece to Gavin’s Kick-Ass Apocalyptic Prophecies from a while back, where we looked into end-of-the world scenarios from religion and mythology. Now, Hollywood gets a turn.

Digg it.

Mike Huang (”Codespyder” from the forums) takes some time to remind us of popular brands you use every day that the Nazis gave us. January is Hitler Appreciation Month at Cracked and we intend to do a new article every day explaining why we should reconsider the Third Reich.

After being out of stock for several weeks, my retarded horror novel John Dies at the End is back in stock and you can buy a copy at any moment by clicking here.

Speaking of internet people with real-world projects and stuff, somehow in the course of hearing about what an incredible game Portal is and seeing it win Game of the Year in several places and having all my friends rave about how hilarious it is, I completely missed the fact that the game was written by Erik and Chet of Old Man Murray fame (they both went to work at Valve after abandoning OMM).

That site is the reason I got into writing web comedy, and they even hosted PWoT for a while back in the day.

Me and the other Cracked editors put together this article which serves as our goodbye to 2007.

Digg it.

I hereby present, The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses, by myself, David Wong, and Owen Ball, a thoughtful guide to the most ass-kicking book ever written.

Digg it.

Today on Cracked we’ve reviewed the 10 creepiest Craiglist casual encounters, which is where many strangers post their requests for anonymous sex. Not that we’re here to judge; it’s kind of cool that there’s a public arena where a young man can stand up and shout into a crowd, “HI I AM 26 AND I NEED FIVE TO EIGHT WELL ENDOWED MALES BECAUSE I WANT TO WEAR A HAT MADE OF DICKS. Here’s my contact info.”

Digg it.

Meanwhile, my friend John sent me this link with the UC Berkely marching band acting out a huge game of Tetris:

I’m fascinated by that, huge numbers of people getting together to do amazing but useless shit. It reminds me of this famous photo, of 18,000 soldiers standing out in the desert to form a Statue of Liberty:

That was part of a promo they were doing back during World War I to sell war bonds. The thing is, you see it and say, “Well, how hard is that? You scratch out a huge statue in the dirt with your shoe, then have everybody stand on it.”

The problem is they didn’t have arial photography back then, so they had to take a picture from a fairly short tower nearby. That means the perspective is skewed, so to make it look right they had to distort the whole image so that when viewed from that angle it would still be in proportion. So, if you could see a top-down view, the torch would be enormous and the feet would be tiny (there are 18,000 men in the formation–and 70% of them are standing in the torch and flame). It’s inspirational to see so many men coming together to create something in perfect unison like that, but the whole thing looks like an enormous pain in the ass.

If you’re following the my retarded horror novel John Dies at the End as it’s slowly released online, today is update day. If you don’t feel like waiting for months to find out how it ends, just buy the paperback.