The 25 Most Popular Cracked.com Articles of 2011

25 The 8 Creepiest Glitches Hidden in Popular Video Games

We've told you about the creepiest video game Easter eggs ever found. But Easter eggs are hidden details that someone intentionally put there to mess with you -- their horror is still limited by the human imagination. No, the most terrifying game moments are when lines of code go awry to make characters start looking, and behaving, like monsters.

Lines of code, or maybe demonic possession. You be the judge.

24 8 Simple Questions You Won't Believe Science Can't Answer

The field of science is capable of some amazing things, mostly because it's filled with all the Albert Einsteins and Doogie Howsers the world has produced over the centuries. But it may shock you that some of the most mundane, everyday concepts are as big a mystery to scientists as they are to the average toddler.

Things like ...

23 5 Complaints About Modern Life That Are Statistically B.S.

In general, it's easier to be negative. It's easier for us at Cracked, because it's easier to write jokes about terrible things than nice things. It's easier for us as a generation, because to admit that the world isn't that bad right now would be to admit that we have it easier than our grandparents did and that the world thus has the right to expect more from us. But as much as we like to joke about the sorry state of the world, the facts really don't back us up.

22 The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games

Our generation will be remembered for our video games. Every generation is remembered by its popular art; when you think of the 60s you think of Woodstock and hippie music. When you think of the 80s, you think of Miami Vice and the birth of music video. So when your grandchildren think of the 2010s, what will they picture in their minds? Let's put it this way:

21 5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation

At this moment, a whole lot of people, most of them 15 to 20 years younger than me, are protesting in every major city. What are they angry about? A lot of things, some of which are partially my fault.

See, I'm a part of Generation X, the post-Baby Boom era kids who grew up on a mental diet of Beavis and Butthead and Alice in Chains. We wrote poems about how angry we were at our fathers, wore goatees like weapons and made panties burst into flames by playing Pearl Jam's Black on our acoustic guitars. We were a bridge from the Baby Boomers to all you guys who are in high school and college now. And I'm pretty sure we fucked up that handoff pretty badly.

This is not a sarcastic apology, I'm not a big enough dick to write all of this as a backhanded insult about how lazy and entitled you are. Because you're not.

I'm honestly apologizing for ...

20 5 Ridiculous Sex Myths from History You Probably Believe

Since the sexual revolution of the '60s, we tend to think that sexuality from the Baby Boomers back to the beginning of time was a long history of repressed urges, prudish fundamentalist restrictions and brutal rape politics.

But it turns out that a lot of what BBC dramas tell you about sex in history is just a fanciful cover for sex lives that didn't differ that much from our own. Myths that persist to this day include ...

19 7 Psychotic Pieces of Relationship Advice from Cosmo

We get it. Guys are tough to figure out: There's like 24 possible combinations that you can make with 1) beer 2) food 3) sex and 4) sports. No wonder their girlfriends have to resort to lady magazines to gain insight into the buzzing hive that is the male mind. We know most women laugh that stuff off as cheap entertainment not to be taken seriously, but what if they actually did listen to all of the advice?

It'd pretty much turn into a nightmare of paranoia and petty revenge. After all, according to various Cosmo articles...

18 5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck (Seriously)

We're guessing you haven't thought about Donald Duck even once today. Sure, Disney's cartoon ducks are some of the most iconic characters around -- Uncle Scrooge, his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, and of course, their half-naked uncle with anger control issues, Donald. But it's not like they're relevant to your life at all.

Oh, you couldn't be more wrong. For the last 50 years, these ducks have been busy changing the goddamn world, and it continues right to this moment. Seriously.

17 6 Intimate Details You Can Tell Just By Looking At Someone

How much would you pay to be able to read another person's mind? As superpowers go, it's a hell of a lot more of a game changer than, say, flight. Your career, your relationships -- everything would change.

But experts say you can gather a whole bunch of intimate details about a person just by looking at them. No, it's not 100 percent accurate, and it's not magic. It's just science.

16 7 Movies That Put Insane Work Into Details You Didn't Notice

Easter eggs are usually kind of a bum deal. Sure, when you finally find one it's like having a secret conversation with your favorite director ... but he's kind of a jerk, the conversation is one-sided and it's usually all about how much of a loser you are for spending a hundred hours sifting through the special features on your Firefly DVD just to find something Joss Whedon slapped together in five minutes.

What follows are the direct opposite of that: These are seven instances where the creators poured their blood, sweat and several other more unsavory fluids into creating something and put it right in front of your face ... and you didn't even notice.

Now who's the jerk, huh?

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15 9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along

Being a movie villain is not easy. Nobody respects your work, everyone loves your sworn enemy, and cheers if he straight up murders your ass. Of course, the villains deserve it, right? Well, actually Hollywood is littered with supposedly evil characters that, when you take a step back and ignore the cackling laughter and yellow teeth, were clearly the ones getting screwed over. Here are the so called bad guys who got the rawest deals of all:

14 6 Reasons The Guy Who's Fixing Your Computer Hates You

By my calculations, about 96 percent of all computer repairs are done, not by the local computer guy or the Geek Squad, but by The Friend Who is Good With Computers. Often that friend is nothing more than an average computer user who knows how to look up error messages on Google, but it doesn't matter -- once they become known as TFWIGWC, they will get the call every time something goes wrong. And they will fix it, probably for free, because TFWIGWC pities you.

13 5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think

The Internet has introduced a golden age of ill-informed arguments. You can't post a video of an adorable kitten without a raging debate about pet issues spawning in the comment section. These days, everyone is a pundit.

But with all those different perspectives on important issues flying around, you'd think we'd be getting smarter and more informed. Unfortunately, the very wiring of our brains ensures that all these lively debates only make us dumber and more narrow-minded. For instance ...

12 17 Images That Will Ruin Your Childhood

Nostalgia is a sucker's game. We imagine all the toys and TV shows from childhood as perfect and awesome purely because our immature brains hadn't developed the ability to joylessly pick things apart for their flaws. The songs we liked at age 10 weren't any better than the Justin Bieber stuff the 10-year-old girls love now.

So it's good to go back and look at our childhood icons through adult eyes. OK, maybe "good" isn't the word for it ...

11 7 Creepy Urban Legends That Happen to be True (Part 4)

Once again, it's that time of year when Cracked goes out our way to fact check the outlandish stories that allegedly happened to your friend's former roommate's cousin's girlfriend. As we've shown three times before, sometimes the stories that get told and retold around a flashlight at slumber parties aren't as full of shit as we might've hoped.

10 6 Movie Plot Holes You Never Noticed Thanks to Editing

The magic of movie-making is that directors have the luxury of leaving the boring shit out. One minute Kate Winslet is whistling her heart out in the middle of a corpse-filled ocean; the next, she's a decade too old for a part on The Golden Girls. That's what they call editing, kids!

The thing is, that casual jump from A to B is also used as a writer's crutch to gloss over the stuff they didn't have the time to think through -- little things like "continuity," "logic" and "whether or not our protagonist just did some accidental murder."

For example ...

9 The 5 Most Depraved Sex Scenes Implied by 'Harry Potter'

The Harry Potter series has sold billions of dollars worth of books, movie tickets and DVDs because it's one of those rare series that children can enjoy but won't make adults want to gouge out their eyes.

Author J.K. Rowling had a way of throwing a bone to the grown-ups here and there by slipping in sly little adult references along the way. It's usually done in subtext (like the elderly wizard Dumbledore's homosexual relationship with the male wizard Grindelwald), but sometimes it's right there in the open for anyone perceptive enough to get it.

And sometimes, that shit gets nasty.

8 7 Insane Easter Eggs Hidden in Movies and TV Shows

We've already told you about some of the most mind-blowing Easter eggs hidden in music albums, classic works of art and video games, so it was just a matter of time before we explored our favorite Easter Eggs from the world of television and film.

Captain, unleash the list.

7 6 Laws You've Broken Without Even Realizing It

None of us can claim with a straight face that we've never done anything illegal, be it speeding, drunkenly stealing a shrink-wrapped pickle from a bowling alley or hunting the homeless for sport. But on the whole, we're upstanding citizens. After all, it's not like we're out there breaking the law on a daily basis.

Wanna bet? Because all of the stuff below is illegal in most of, if not all of, the United States. If you live outside the U.S., you need to double check to see if you can get jail time for ...

6 8 Movie Special Effects You Won't Believe Aren't CGI

We mean no disrespect to the digital effects artists working in Hollywood, but sometimes it feels like computer-generated (CG) effects haven't improved in 10 years. Every blockbuster seems to have at least one big effects scene that looks like it was lifted from a PS3.

So maybe we need to stop and appreciate the mind-blowing scenes that were done the old-fashioned way -- with stunts, models and borderline insanity.

5 The 6 Most Horrifying Lies The Food Industry is Feeding You

If there's one thing in the world the food industry is dead set against, it's allowing you to actually maintain some level of control over what you eat. See, they have this whole warehouse full of whatever they bought last week when they were drunk that they need to get rid of -- and they will do so by feeding it all to you. And it doesn't matter how many pesky "lists of ingredients" and consumer protections stand between you and them.

4 The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming

Tens of millions of adults spend all their free time in fictional worlds that are full of more tedious work and assholes than most real-life jobs. Combining Internet anonymity with people who have absurd amounts of free time, massive multiplayer online role-playing Gamers (MMORPG)are a better guarantee of asshole-ry than a digestive system, and yield uglier results. But there are some spectacular douche bags who have put more work into screwing with strangers than should be humanly possible.

3 6 Classic Songs That Were Supposed to Be Jokes

We tend to think of successful songs as the carefully crafted result of great artistic vision and hours of grueling, dedicated work. This isn't always the case, though. Every so often a song explodes into the mainstream completely by accident, tearing up the charts to the surprise (and sometimes chagrin) of the musicians responsible. Like ...

2 7 Basic Things You Won't Believe You're All Doing Wrong

If you're like us, you might sometimes have a problem with complex tasks, like trying to drive an ambulance and send a text message at the same time. But hey, at least most of us have figured out the simplest things that get us through the day, right?

Except, you know, some of the simple things we've done every day of our lives, like ...

1 The Top 8 Everything of 2011 (For Better and Worse)

Influential people can grace all the Time Magazine covers they want. Great actors and directors can keep their Teen Choice Awards. When we look back on 2011, we'll remember stuff that was appropriately weird, great, awful, (or all three at the same time) enough to represent the glorious mess we just lived through.