In my recent article ‘To Love a Villain’, I wrote about fans and our weird attractions to villainous characters. But where does the wider Australian population stand on dastardly villains and dashing heroes?

To coincide with the release of new game Injustice: Gods Among Us, NetherRealm Studios (creators of the Mortal Kombat franchise) conducted a study of a little over 1,000 young Australians to garner their opinion on some of DC’s most popular characters. The results are as follows:

Most Fashionable Superhero: for the women, we have Catwoman, closely followed by Wonder Woman. Most fashionable male superhero is (unsurprisingly) Batman.

Sexiest Superhero: Catwoman and Wonder Woman tied for the top place, with Batman again number one for men.

Classiest Superhero: This category had no clear winner, with Batman, Catwoman, Superman and Wonder Woman all very closely tied.

Most Evil Villain: The Joker won out the top spot, closely followed by Lex Luthor, Bane, Deathstroke and Harley Quinn.

Ugliest Villain: The Joker again had the dubious honour of taking top spot in this category, with Bane, Cyborg, Lex Luthor and Solomon Grundy as hot contenders.

Some of the results are also looking at how the individual states view certain characters. Apparently Victorians are the most likely to have a crush on a superhero – or super villain. Western Australians are into Catwoman in a big way, rating her highest in all categories, while people from South Australia are more afraid of Bane than any other state.

These results are interesting both for the general Batman character preferences and for the categories themselves – it says a great deal about the company and the gaming industry as a whole that categories like ‘Classiest’ and ‘Ugliest’ are considered important. It also says a lot about the Australian public and how we prioritise certain qualities and concepts of attractiveness.

Although I might take issue with some of the questions, Injustice still looks like a pretty great game. The character renders are dynamic and interesting, and the female characters are sexy while still looking powerful and generally not ridiculous.

Who’s your favourite hero/ villain? Let us know in the comments!

- Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, NBA All-star Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi. Directed by Lesley Chilcott.

I would argue they’re today’s rockstars, for the mainstream population. Sure, most of us geeks know that coding isn’t half as hard as the average Joe thinks it is, but to the average Joe, like this video says, it’s like a coder is a wizard. I’ve always said I would definitely date someone who considered themselves a wizard. A coder who called himself a wizard? Yeah, I’m there.

I remember I took an Information Systems class in my final year of University – and I only took it because I knew I was going into Computational Physics in the next semester and had absolutely no clue as to how to code. It was eye-opening to be shown how a computer thinks – the logical steps it goes through when you give it commands. It’s in English words, but the syntax is completely different. Being a writer at heart, and studying creative writing at the same time, meant that it was the most intriguing thing in the world.

When I got on to Computational Physics, I got fully lost inside the coding world. I started ending Facebook statuses with semi-colons. I started taking longer to say things to people because I had to consciously rearrange the words. Towards the end though, I started to pull back out (I kinda had to…had other subjects for which I had to write essays!) and it started to settle into being a new language that I could turn on and off. Learning code is like learning a new language – they’re even called coding languages. But languages can be hard to maintain if you’re not speaking them all the time right? And who speaks these languages? Everything these days: your iPhone, your computer, your bedside speakers, your high-tech oven, your elevator. Everything is programmed and everything needed someone to write that program. It’s quite literally universal language.

And like most languages, they’re easier to learn when you’re younger. So if you are in school, then make a point of asking about coding classes. If they don’t have any in your school, maybe show your IT teachers this video, and they might just be spurred into starting something up.

But no matter what your age, no matter who you want to be, where you want to work, or how you want to go about your life – coding is a skill that will always come in useful. Even in the most basic things – like programming a macro in Microsoft Word or Excel to get it to automatically do a task you do everyday in the office. I did this for my boss once and she was floored.

It makes a difference. Go learn. It’s worth it.

[via Code.org]

Did you know something as simple as a block on a search term can have huge impacts on a community’s visibility and access to support?

Google only put a ban on ‘bisexual’ in its searches as recently as 2009, due to something complicated to do with de-prioritising and algorithms. Within the last week, however, the ban has been lifted. This means it’s going to much easier to look for bisexual-related content, including information about support groups and the like.

As much as Google’s status as supreme overlord terrifies me (I have been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and now I’m pretty sure that Vik’s promotion of Google+ means that he is a cyborg), they do have a history of supporting queer rights, and that means I can support them.

Thank you, Google, for helping to minimise the extent of bi-invisibility.

[Via BiNet USA | Image Credit]

This made me LOL. It is, of course, a joke. But it’s still hilarious.

[By Andrew Brett Watson | Via Gizmodo]