Stuff Archives - Page 15 of 38

Hyperreality is the inability to decipher which is real and fake in the real world. The concept comes from Jean Baudrillard and he sees consumerism hampering our ability as a culture to see the real. I accidentally found one the best examples of hyperreality when I Googled the other day for Mansa Musa.

For some context, when you search a famous person on Google the site will pull in an image of that person like so:

Pretty nice feature right? Look at the image below of the search results for Mansa Musa:

You see that? Where Google usually puts an image of the person in question they have parsed the web and found that the best image to use is from the game Civilization IV!

I wondered if the other leaders from Civ IV and the newer Civ V (leaders) suffered from the same fate, and below are other leaders that get the hyperreal treatment:

Pachacuti (Incan):

Huayna Capac (also Incan):

Gilgamesh:

Hammurabi (Babylon) gets a Civ 4 screenshot only in the thumbnail of his pictures:

All the other leaders are too popular or too well documented to have Google deem a screenshot from a video game is the best image. If I’ve missed any leaders please let me know!

Ever read a comic book and wondered what religion the superhero is a part of? No? That’s OK neither have I, but some people have and they’ve shared their findings with the internet.

The Comic Book Religion Database contains the religious beliefs of pretty much every character to appear in a comic book. The site includes popular characters like Batman to real people who’ve appeared in comics like Mike Tyson. Now you can know that Wolverine was raised Protestant; is sometimes atheist; has practiced Buddhism; and is a skeptical seeker.

Proposition Player (Vertigo’s official page) is about a gambler who is down on his luck then starts to bet souls he thinks are worthless. Turns out souls mean something and envoys from beyond show up to get them back.

Wikipedia describes it best:

One night, during a round of drinks, he is pushed into a proposition that sees him buy the souls of thirty-two people for the price of one free beer each. It isn’t long before those who sold their souls are suffering fatal accidents one by one, and the forces of Heaven and Hell show up trying to put a price on the purchased souls for themselves.

Religion from fiction

Not only is there interest in looking at religion in fictional universes there is also interest in brining openly fictional religions into reality.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land contians a manufactured religion which has been made real. The Church of All Worlds is inspired by the characters in the book and the thinking of self-actualtion from Maslow.

CAW’s members, called Waterkin, espouse paganism, but the Church is not a belief-based religion. Members experience Divinity and honor these experiences while also respecting the views of others. They recognize “Gaea,” the Earth Mother Goddess and the Father God, as well as the realm of Faeries and the deities of many other pantheons. Many of their ritual celebrations are centered on the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece.

How can we talk about fiction and religion without mentioning Scientology?

*Image from Comic Attack.