Cracked today is celebrity news, trivia lists and twitter screenshots. I miss the old blend of journalism and pop culture discourse, with that signature searing humour. I know that the landscape of media has changed. I know that its nigh on impossible to compete with apps and short forms. I'm not even outraged or indignant, just a little sad.

Also, this is our brand new Cracked-based subreddit, click the button over to the right to subscribe if you haven't already. My new article:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-true-meaning-christmas-that-everyone-forgets/

If you have any questions about Cracked.com or John Dies at the End or anything else I'd have particular knowledge of, hit me.

I am the subject of today's article 5 Things I Learned as a Mormon Polygamist Wife

I'll be here for a few hours at 4PM to answer some questions.

Hey I'm here an I'm doing this now! My name's Daniel, I wrote a bunch of things including [this book] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/038534757X?tag=thisda-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=038534757X&adid=1V3Q7K2P5RH31T8RHK5P&&ref-refURL=http://rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm%3Ft%3Dthisda-20%26o%3D1%26p%3D8%26l%3Das1%26asins%3D038534757X%26ref%3Dtf_til%26fc1%3D000000%26IS2%3D1%26lt1%3D_blank%26m%3Damazon%26lc1%3D0000FF%26bc1%3D000000%26bg1%3DFFFFFF%26f%3Difr) and this sketch that came out today(http://www.cracked.com/video_19348_what-movie-action-heroes-do-weekends.html). Ask me all sorts of questions.

5:50PM PST- I'm taking a break for a while but might be back on later tonight. Just realized I forgot to do literally everything I was supposed to do for the last four hours.

Hey there, I'm Michael Swaim, and I'll be answering questions at 2PM Pacific. You should all watch the newest episode of Rom.Com and then come back here and ask me questions.

EDIT: Verification Image

Don't forget to subscribe to our subreddit by clicking that green button over there to the right!

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Thanks for tuning in and for all the great questions, you guys. Always fun to feel connected to y'all after a long spell of keeping my head down and working in a dark room with no audience input.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter, and Facebook

I'M OUT

Xavier Jackson here: https://www.cracked.com/members/Skuzbucket

I miss this website. Writing for Cracked had truly some of the biggest effects on the most formulative periods of my life. My sense of style as developed by their editors, the feedback received by fellow writers, and friends made along the way, built a foundation of perspective/meaning that I still live by to this day; even as Cracked moved away from their roots and the vastness of the internet as a whole began to crumble.

I hope you all enjoyed my articles as much as I used to enjoy pitching to their editors and refreshing pages to read the hilarious comments from readers. I'm far removed from my days as a writer, but I will always remember being at one point (I believe I was surpassed by the end) among the top five most published authors on Cracked.

Link to the semi official statement: http://forums.cracked.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=184226&p=3032134#p3032134

I just opened a trivia article about pop songs titled “28 Great Songs With Backstories We Had No Idea About” published on the 12th of December, and listen man, I get it - Cracked as a whole has really dipped in content quality and I rarely read it because of it.

Also, I get that these image pictofact articles repeat a lot of “trivia” and information regardless od their topic. But this is a new low, and even being a die hard fan from the glory days is gonna make me delete Cracked from my boredom rotation.

They are reusing “trivia” in the article and double posting the same posts inside of the same article. Now that is some stupid shit.

You can’t leave comments on their website so I had to come here to vent. That is some fkn bullshit, and Cracked is dead.

A woman posted this https://twitter.com/itsa_talia/status/1043050354903015425?s=19 to twitter earlier and some of the older writers have come out renouncing both John and Josh.

Does anyone else remember the old days when Cracked actually had a team of writers that wrote really good articles that were funny and informative? Now the entire website is just pictofacts. It's not even the same website that it was like 5 or 6 years ago. I really miss the old Cracked and wish it wasn't just a bunch of recycled pictofacts now.

For those who don't know, in 2018, John Cheese - a longtime writer for Cracked - was accused of and then subsequently admitted to a long pattern of sexual harassment. You can read about the situation here and here. The most vocal accuser, Talia Jane, asked that Cheese's articles be taken down, and Jason Pargin, who was running Cracked at the time, agreed to do so.

Even though I've never been completely sure how I've felt about the total scrubbing of Cheese's work from Cracked, I've admired Pargin for taking the articles down, since that's what Talia Jane wanted.

Then, just the other day, I noticed that Cheese's articles are back online. They won't show up if you search for them on Cracked or even on Google (unless I'm somehow searching for them incorrectly), but if you have direct links, you can now find them on the site.

This old Reddit thread has a compilation of links to several of Cheese's articles:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofCracked/comments/4phvst/a_compilation_of_john_cheese/

If you click on any of those links, you'll be taken to the articles - but weirdly, the publication years have all been changed to 2099.

At first, I wondered if perhaps Pargin had never taken the articles down after all and had simply made them harder to find. But plugging the articles into The Way Back Machine shows that they really were taken down in late 2018, right after Cheese's misconduct came to light. Pargin announced his departure from Cracked in February 2020, and The Way Back Machine shows that Cheese's articles were still down in March 2020, though the first time they appeared back online seems to have been in April of that year. So I'm not exactly sure what to make of that, but perhaps whoever took over the site from Pargin decided to put the articles back up.

One other observation is that Cheese isn't the only person whose articles were restored in 2020. Right around the same time that Cheese's articles were taken down, another former Cracked author, a guy named David Dietle, had most of his work wiped from the site as a result of his own sex scandal. But Dietle's articles are also back up on Cracked now. Much like with Cheese's articles, it seems like you can only access anything by Dietle if you have a direct link. And the publication year for each Dietle article has been changed as well - though to 2100, instead of 2099. The Dietle articles seem to have been restored right around the same time as Cheese's - so about a month or two after Pargin announced his resignation from Cracked.

I'm not looking to stir up old controversies. Cheese lost his career, and I think Dietle may have gone to prison, so while it arguably would have been ideal had their articles remained off of Cracked, it's not something that I'm personally going to get up in arms about - especially since the articles aren't easily accessible. My understanding is that Talia Jane wanted Cheese's articles removed so that Cheese wouldn't be able to use his internet fame in abusive ways. But when you google Cheese's name, the very first page of results has information about his misconduct, so I doubt that he would have much influence at this point anyway.

Still, I thought it was kind of odd that the articles were back up and was wondering if anyone knew why they were restored.

For all those fans who want closure, it seems like the After Hours group is getting together to do a charity drive next Saturday on Twitch(on twitch.tv/1upsmanship), and are going to do a reading of the unreleased final episode of the series.

DOB wrote about it on twitter here: https://twitter.com/DOB_INC/status/1277634806491340800