I spent one Saturday morning late last year on my couch toggling back from Grindr to Scruff to Grindr to Scruff. I don’t remember what I was looking for; all I remember is that I was looking. At some point, I realized three hours had passed, and I still hadn’t moved from my couch or started my day. Even if I had, it undoubtedly would have been interrupted by a hook-up app, and/or a hook-up, though the latter was far less likely.

When people think of someone with an “addictive personality,” the image typically isn’t a pretty one. “When is an addict lying?” goes a joke told by addiction counselors: the snide answer is “when his lips are moving.” Media portrayals of addiction tend to depict people with addictions as “fiends” or “demons” whose debauchery is driven by a ravenous hedonism, not a human or understandable search for safety and comfort. Consequently, the “addictive personality” is seen as a bad one: weak, unreliable, selfish, and out of control.

A six-month-long New York Times investigation has found that New York City’s system of “three-quarter houses” preys on those it ostensibly exists to help—recovering addicts and alcoholics. One sober-housing operator reportedly told residents to relapse and return to certain outpatient treatment programs, so he could receive Medicaid-fee kickback. If they refused, he would evict them.

Despicable gutter tabloid columnist and human embodiment of the emotion of hate Andrea Peyser today uses her column today to piss on the memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The final season of Breaking Bad, now down to two "really messy" remaining installments, has incited some curious behavior. Before the season premiered, Irish fans showed up at Aaron Paul's house, as if that were a reasonable thing to do. When the Cable went out before a new episode was supposed to air in one Connecticut town, local residents called 911 instead of Cablevision. And this seems like a peculiar promotion: An Albuquerque rehab center is honoring Vince Gilligan's AMC series' finale—with two free scholarships.

Cat Marnell is a writer whose persona is tightly wound up with her acknowledged drug use. Last March, the book proposal for her tentatively titled memoir How to Murder Your Life, a Basketball Diaries meets The Devil Meets Prada sketch, sold to Simon & Schuster for $500,000. Earlier this week, we received a concerned tip with the subject header: "Cat Marnell almost died the other night."

"I used to shoot cocaine, heroin and ketamine. All together. Morning, night, 20 times a day." Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., now four years sober, can finally wear short sleeves.

This past Sunday, an early morning Kmart crew in Jonesboro, Arkansas came to work, only to find a pair of unfamiliar feet sticking out of a back-room cubby hole. The store manager called the local cops, who discovered the man, Robert Pry, was a retail stowaway who'd passed out in the storage area after huffing 16 cans (!) of air duster.

If there's one thing that the State of California wants in a drug and alcohol counselor, it's a spotless past free of crime. So the state was appalled to learn that felons may be counseling people about drugs. Do we want to live in a society that legalizes speaking from experience?

Glee star Cory Monteith, 30, has admitted himself to rehab for substance addiction, according to a statement from his representative.

When 30-year-old Natasha Harris of Invercargill, New Zealand, died of a heart attack three years ago, her family suspected the cause of death was linked to her extreme fondness for Coca-Cola.

I gravitated to the fucked up writers. Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Charles Bukowski, William Faulkner. There weren't many women in my list. Dorothy Parker, and that was about it. Somehow, hand in hand with booze and drugs, the terrible dance that substances led me on became one that I must perfect to be a writer. It was a required necessity, an essential rite of passage, and my writing heroes' words were the proof. I drank, gurned, snorted, swallowed and hallucinated like they did. That waltz into the dark was absolutely crucial for me in order to write like them—even if the familiar, haunting beautiful chimes of The Blue Danube led me instead to the depths of degradation, I could still write about it.

Are we constantly checking our phones because we're assholes or addicts? The Guardian reports on a new study that used BlackBerrys to measure the willpower of its subjects. Researches found that participants were mostly able to resist the impulses to drink, fuck, and even sleep. Twitter, email, and other forms of media, however, were simply too strong.

Demi Moore was apparently drinking massive amounts of Red Bull (and forgoing food and drink) before the 911 emergency that led to her hospitalization. The Sun (which, to be fair, just make shit up sometimes) reports:

Larry Carlat used to be a married editor of a men's magazine. (Men's Health, according to LinkedIn.) Then he became obsessed with Twitter, lost his job, got divorced, and alienated loved ones. In a grim addiction memoir for NYT Magazine's Lives column, the tweetoholic describes tweeting "every hour on the hour, day and night":

Malaysian officials confiscated Shirley, an orangutan at one of the state-run zoos, because apparently her cigarette smoking had gotten out of hand. The authorities removed her because they said smoking isn't natural for monkey-like creatures Did they at least give her some Nicorette or a patch or something?

For vacationing tech addicts who simply can't relax without plunging a Twitter-feed mainline between their toes, a new trend in the travel business: digital detox. The Wall Street Journal reports that several hotels and resorts are offering enticements to visitors willing to abandon the grid during their stay. They target these junkies in the social media crack dens where they tend to lurk, offering discounts if the travelers promise to surrender their gadgets and computers at check-in.

Cue the "No, no, no" jokes: Amy Winehouse has checked herself into rehab for alcoholism once again. She reportedly "drank a small bottle of vodka on her way to the facility." [TMZ]

If you consider the Internet a drug, then we live in a world of addicts. A new study of 1,000 students around the world found that those who gave up the Internet felt intense withdrawal symptoms within 24 hours.

In another exploitive adventure into the twisted world of those that are Strangely Addicted, we met Josh: a glass-eating comedian. Your skin will crawl with the shivers of one million chalkboards being scratched by one million acrylic nails.