I’m home from work today and I really should be wrapping presents right now, but instead…

You Are Pop Art

When it comes to art, you’re definitely not a snob. You can appreciate the mainstream aspects of culture, even if you need to twist them a bit to make them your own. Whether you’re into comics, retro pinups, or bold colors, you embrace what’s eye catching and simple. As far as most other art goes, you consider it a little too elitist and high brow for your tastes!

Huh. That’s surprisingly accurate. Read on for more useless but entertaining time-wasting quizzes and their results…

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From Jaquandor comes the latest silly Internet quiz. This one is something a bit different, as it asks you to identify sound clips from various sources rather than simply answering questions. And my results are:

	I received 92 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

Weird. I thought sure I’d gotten all of them. I even identified most of them before the end of the clip. Oh, well… I suppose I should take some comfort in the fact that not even I am 100% geeky.

I’ve not read any of Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, and I really don’t have a lot of interest in seeing the film version of the first book, The Golden Compass. (My reluctance has nothing to with the controversy over whether the story promotes atheism, in case you’re wondering. No, the problem for me is more basic than that. The trailers look great, with an impressive cast and wild-looking airships and an alternate-reality version of Victorian England, all really cool, pulpy stuff… and then the damn, cartoony, armor-plated, talking polar bear shows up and suddenly it all becomes extremely silly-looking. Seriously, the Coca-Cola bear just ruined the whole thing for me, like a pin into a cheap balloon.) However, I’m always up for a silly Internet quiz, so when I saw a link over at Puffbird’s LiveJournal for a test to determine your Golden Compass daemon, naturally I had to take it…

(A daemon, in Pullman’s universe, is apparently a sort of animal avatar of a person’s soul. Or some damn thing. I don’t quite get it. But then, I didn’t quite get my D&D character either.)

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After a long, long period of trying to deny my true nature and pass for cool, I finally came out of the closet, er, comic book store, about ten years ago and announced proudly to the world that, yes, I am a geek. I think I’ve got plenty of street cred to justify the title, what with the Star Wars/Star Trek fanboy thing, the dozens of tattered sci-fi paperbacks that I devoured during my misspent youth, all my college-years debates over whether a Star Destroyer could beat the Enterprise in a fair fight (Duh! Of course it could!), and, of course, the toys and ephemera and other crap that I collect (quite a lot of it still in its original packaging, just as The Collector would insist). But there’s one particular subset of geekiness that’s never really grabbed my interest, one big hole in my curriculum nerdae that prevents me from becoming fully actualized as a true-blue, Wil Wheaton-level hardcore Geek Master, and that’s… gaming.

No form of gaming, be it electronic, board-, paper-, or card-based, has ever held my attention for long. Just not my thing, I’m afraid. I’ll admit to having some fond memories of the early-80s video arcade experience, but nothing beyond what every Gen-Xer probably shares; shoveling quarters into Donkey Kong and Zaxxon was a novelty that eventually lost its luster. As for role-playing games, the ultimate initiation into the world of the geekly arts… well, I went to exactly two Dungeons and Dragons sessions in my youth before deciding that the whole thing was kind of silly and pointless; all the different kinds of dice and little charts with arcane formulae and numbers and such frankly left me baffled and wondering what the big deal was. I went back to my paperbacks and left the RPGs to the folks whose idea of fun was crunching a few math equations, because as best as I could figure, that’s all D&D really amounted to. In all the years since then, I’ve never once felt like I missed out on something.

Until today. Right now, I’m wishing I’d spent a little more time hanging around the fringes of the RPG scene, because then at least I could interpret my results from the latest silly Internet quiz thing:

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Huh… it would seem that when I did that Christmas meme a few days ago, I somehow failed to copy over a number of the questions from SamuraiFrog’s blog, and then I failed to notice the omission. I just now saw that Jaquandor has also snagged the meme from SF, only his version is obviously much longer. So, obsessive-compulsive sort that I am and in the interest of completeness, here is the rest of the Christmas meme, presented for your edification and/or amusement, assuming you can find any of either in these silly things:

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Oh, no, not another meme! This one is Christmas-themed… you know, for a guy who so frequently self-identifies as a grinch, I seem to be doing a lot of writing about Christmas this year. Go figure. Anyway, I ganked this one from the irascible SamuraiFrog. Read on for insight into my unique holiday philosophy:

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It’s that time again when people start trying to think of ways to summarize or recap the year that’s just winding down. According to Chris Roberson, there’s a meme going around that’s along those lines; it asks you to repost the first sentence of the first blog entry in each of the previous year’s 12 months. Well, I’m always up for a good meme, so here goes:

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Here are some other bits of quiz-based silliness:

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Just took the “How Geek Are You?” quiz. I’m sure my score would have been higher if only I could honestly say that I had ever solved a computer problem in the shower. Sorry, but the shower is me-time, no computing problems allowed!

Well, so much for all my blather yesterday about how much I love Salt Lake…

Your Score: SEATTLE!

You scored 57% Style, 15% Climate, and 43% Culture!

You are Seattle, Washington. Seattle is the largest city in Washington and the seat of King County. A city of steep hills, Seattle lies in western Washington between two bodies of water�Puget Sound on the west and Lake Washington on the east. Its fine landlocked harbor has made Seattle one of the major ports in the United States. Seattle is the region’s commercial and transportation hub and the center of manufacturing, trade, and finance. Its important diversified industries include aircraft, lumber and forest products, fishing, high technology, food processing, boat building, machinery, fabricated metals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and apparel.

You’re probably very happy that I stuck you in a city where you can get a nice view of the mountains and breathe that fresh, cool air. And the rain won’t get you down either. You are very stylish and you belong in a big city with a bit of a faster pace than say, somewhere in the South or Midwest. I think you’d be quite happy in Seattle where you can do lots of shopping and take in a good bit of culture. You could probably stand to take in more culture than you currently do. Musicals and art shows are good for your soul I say. But you do enjoy nature and maybe sports as well, and you’ve definitely got a good city here.