Survey results of the day: half of us think that trailers give too much away.

The other half are bloggers who have to watch them anyway and have just given up all hope of every being 100% completely spoiler safe.

When I found out I was on a panel set for 9 p.m. Friday night of New York Comic Con I figured it would be the panelists and ten of our friends. Much to my surprise, it was standing room only to hear psychologists Robin Rosenberg and Andrea Letamendi and cosplayers Holly Conrad, Bill Doran, and yours truly talk about the psychology behind cosplay and cosplayers. Moderator Jenna Busch helped lead us through some interesting statistics on the people who do it, how much time and money they spend on their costumes, and the reactions of those outside the geek community. Thanks to Lawrence Brenner for videotaping the hour-long panel!

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Take all this in with one skeptical eye, but rumors are flying wildly over the nearly-finished sets of Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World. Normally, we don’t hold with the sort of outlandish, unsupported rumors that come with superhero movie territory, but we can’t resist them if they’re just weird enough – or wish-fulfilling enough – to be interesting. And boy, is this one interesting. Hit the jump for wild, unabashed speculation, news about that Phase 1 box set, and some more set photos!

A wizard is never late, nor is he early, but the question of whether he will arrive at San Diego Comic Con is always one worth posing. And with the event only a month away, studios have necessarily begun to show their hands. Hollywood has been playing hard to get with Comic Con lately. At the time, I remember it being blamed on Universal Pictures throwing a ton of Comic Con branding power behind Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, only to have it open fifth at the box office and make “respectable cult classic” money instead of “special effects laden action/comedy” money. That was in 2010, and it’s true that since the biggest Comic Con reveal I can remember was for The Avengers, and not even of footage, but simply of its cast.

At the moment, though it looks as if Disney and Marvel will be back for sure, along with Warner Bros., and yes, they’ll be bringing your favorites.

A pretty adorable internet hoax has been debunked that concerns the real origins of Facebook and one of the country’s most popular presidents. After someone posted an anecdote about a visit to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois, a rumor started spreading — and trending on Twitter — that Abraham Lincoln had invented a primitive, pre-digital version of Facebook. But alas, Aaron Sorkin does not have a potentially wonderful prequel to The Social Network to write, because this was proven to be fiction. No, Seth Grahame-Smith should take this one.

Now that it’s a new year and we all have a fresh start, here’s a tip to start us off right: Your manners are showing! And if your manners are showing, make sure they’re freshly starched, and pressed, and 100 percent free of any sort of emotion or humor!

And remember, ladies: let the men help. They enjoy it.

(via YouTube)

I may be at my happiest on Twitter when a new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises or The Hobbit is released or when a celebrity tweets at me but a new study has narrowed down when exactly users of the social network are at our best and worst by checking tweets. Let me guess – we’ve got a case of the Mondays? 

Could a sentence written by Pride and Prejudice author Jane Austen have uncovered the real cause of her premature death? Crime novelist Lindsay Ashford certainly thinks so, and she’s posited a new theory that Austen, who died at 41 for reasons that have never been truly determined, may have been poisoned with arsenic. She came to this conclusion after reading Austen’s own writings, including one that was likely written months before her own death, and applying what she already knew about arsenic poisoning … From her novels! From her novels.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

(via the High Definite.)

Imagine running on a treadmill. You got that in your head? It’s might not be uncomfortable, but it’s no sitting in a chair, right? Now imagine yourself running on a treadmill, only you’re wearing a suit of armor. It’s probably a bit more than uncomfortable at this point, right? Well according to science!, the answer is yes, to the point that the weight of said suits may have affected the outcome of some of history’s famous battles.

Monitoring volunteers fitted with 15th century armor as they ran on a treadmill, they found that (shocking!) those who ran while wearing the armor used a greater amount of energy, with side effects like restricted breathing and immense amount of pressure on the legs. And they were asking medieval war re-enactors, who were already practiced in the art of pulling off a suit of armor.