Things We Saw Today: Something We Can’t Describe Without Using The Punchline

At Adventures of Comic Book Girl.

The superhero alphabet, at Lishoff’s Flickr. Beautiful, but, seriously, Electra is the only woman on here? Yeah, that Z stands for Zorro, not Zatanna.

That the Center for Atheist Research was founded to address the dearth of sociological research on the nonreligious, and is looking for women atheists to take a survey!

The Health and Social Well-Being of Nonreligious Women
Study now live! Women who identify as nonreligious will be eligible to participate in this study. The purpose of this study will be to investigate the health, psychological and social characteristics of women from nonreligious backgrounds. Participation will take less than 30 to 45 minutes.

A exhaustive compilation of Evangelion themed food products on sale at the Evangelion theme park attraction, at Kotaku.

Jane McGonigal, talking to Edge.

You begin the book by explaining that there’s currently a mass exodus from reality going on, as people steadily escape into game worlds – is this different from the escape into daytime TV that’s been going on for over 60 years?

There’s a lot of anxiety about how much time people are spending escaping into games. I think there’s something interesting about the fact that nobody cared when people were spending five hours a day watching soap operas. It comes down to the fact that suddenly we’ve got a much more diverse demographic with games – we have men with full-time jobs, young people. It’s apparently OK for people who don’t have jobs to watch TV, but suddenly we have people who are gainfully employed seeking engagement in the game world. There’s also the intensity of it. For people who don’t play games, there’s such a gap in their understanding. They don’t understand how it’s possible to be so motivated by something with no real-world consequences. You don’t get that intense emotional state that games deliver from reading a book or watching TV, so I think people are confused.

That there are definitely some things wrong with this picture, at Miss Cellania.