Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal is at it again with a smart, funny, and very relevant look at how we construct our beliefs, build our reality tunnels, and why we react so forcefully when the core assumptions of that belief system are threatened.

Read the rest of it. Nice touch that there are two version, one with colorful language and one clean, "classroom-friendly version."

David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart did a wonderful 3-part series on the backfire effect. You can access the first episode here. Read the rest

Elan Lee writes, "Bears vs Babies is a monster-building card game from the creators of Exploding Kittens, Elan Lee and Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal). Described as a game of 'strategic benevolent betrayal' it has already raised more than $2.5 million in funding on Kickstarter from 67,000 backers. Bears vs Babies completed the original $10,000 funding goal in less than 10 minutes after its launch. The game is set to join the ranks as one of the most successful crowdfunded gaming campaigns in history." Read the rest

Not that there can't be more than one museum for something, but it's worth noting that there already is a Nikola Tesla Museum. It houses more than 100,000 of his original documents, plans, and drawings, as well as some of Tesla's personal belongings. (Including a needlepoint his mom made for him!) The museum covers the history of electricity and subjects related to Tesla's other inventions. There is even a little shop. And you can go there, right now ... or at least the next time you're in Belgrade. (Thanks, Leonard Pierce!) Read the rest

The longer it goes on, the stranger it gets. Here's Nate Anderson at Ars Technica on the latest stunt.

Camp Carreon isn't done with [The Oatmeal's Matthew] Inman yet—a new video depicts the cartoonist as a "Psycho Santa," while a new website suggests that Carreon might like to pursue litigation against those who engaged in a "Distributed Internet Reputational Attack" against him. ... it's up on a site called Rapeutation.com. The site, apparently set up just for the video, suggests that Internet users are (or have been) engaged in a coordinated assault on Carreon's reputation.

Don't miss last night's feature, by Glenn Fleishman, about the amazing pile of cash that Inman's charity drive generated. It's a good refresher for the whole complicated story behind it, too. Read the rest

I am kneeling on a sun-dappled hardwood floor with stacks of $20 bills in $2,000 bundles in each hand helping to spell out the word "douchebaggery," and thinking: $220,000 just doesn't seem like that much money. I found myself in this position after asking Matthew Inman, the artist behind the cartoon and business The Oatmeal, if I could take pictures when he withdrew the cash he will ultimately hand over to the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation in order to use it to make fun of a Web site that threatened him with legal action.

This is the latest episode in a saga that BoingBoing has documented in quite some detail, and which began June 11, when Inman posted an annotated version of a letter he had received from Charles Carreon, a well-known attorney representing FunnyJunk, a user-submitted content site, complaining about a post Inman had made a year ago. Inman complained in 2011 about FunnyJunk's business model, noting, "Most of the comics they've stolen [have] no credit or link back to me. Even with proper attribution, no one clicks through and FunnyJunk still earns a huge pile of cash from all the ad revenue." It's a common problem with sites that rely on submitted items, and each site has different policies on how to manage such unauthorized postings. Inman didn't issue DMCA takedown notices, though he would have been within his rights. He says he's just not interested in engaging in that sort of behavior. Read the rest