Originally an email quiz, now gone to ground somewhere in the vast, vast Internet:

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Just to show you how reliable these Internet quizzes are, I just took another Firefly/Serenity-related one, and it tagged me as an entirely different character than the previous one:

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This is kind of cool:

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I spotted this personality quiz over at Scalzi’s AOL presence, and, me being me, I couldn’t resist checking it out. It appears to be a doorway into some new social-networking site, but it has a unique approach: rather than answering a bunch of text-based questions of dubious applicability, you select your favorites from a series of pictures. The results seemed to be reasonably accurate, at least as close as Internet quizzes, horoscopes, and card readings ever get. The site allows you to make a widget that shows your selections; mine is pasted in below the fold, if you’re curious:

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Another meme from Jaquandor, this time about books:

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Jaquandor turned me onto this geography quiz thingie, which asks you to name as many states as you can in 10 minutes. I went into it rather cockily, figuring I spent all those years reading National Geographic, so I ought to clean up, right? Eh, not so much… I named 40 states in about four minutes, then managed to pick up only three more as the clock ticked off the final six minutes. I couldn’t for the life of me think of Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, or Wisconsin.

I think I’ll skip the one that asks you to name 192 U.N. member states in 10 minutes. I’ve already been humbled enough for one morning…

Courtesy of the Sinister Scalzi, it’s my Monster Name!

Get Your Monster Name

Ogre of Nihilism… I like that. Can an honorary Unitarian be a nihilist, though?

Hmmmm… this is unexpected: according to the Belief-o-Matic&#153 over at BeliefNet, the religion that most closely matches my personal beliefs (at least as interpreted by an online multiple-choice-style quiz) is Unitarian Universalism, with Liberal Quakerism and secular humanism tied for second place. Mormonism, the dominant faith of my home state and the one with which I have the most personal experience and knowledge of, came in at number 24 out of 27 possible matches. That’s lower than Islam, Hinduism, and even Scientology.

I usually self-identify as an agnostic — I’m not comfortable flat-out denying the possibility of the divine, but I have a lot of doubts, and religion simply doesn’t play any role in my day-to-day existence, except for those moments when living in Utah inevitably demands one to deal with it — so I expected this thing to tell me I was a big ol’ secular humanist. The Unitarian and Quaker results genuinely surprised me. And to be honest, it also surprised me that Mormonism ranked so low. After all, I was raised here, immersed in that faith, even if I wasn’t practicing it; most of my family and friends are LDS, and I really don’t think of myself as hostile to Mormonism, at least no more so than I am to any other religion. (By which I mean that I object to those of any faith who would tell me how to live my life or that I’m not a moral person because I don’t do all the things they do, but I really don’t care what people do or do not believe themselves.) You’d think that a lot of Mormon ideas would be present in my belief system simply by default.

I’m probably making too much of this — after all, Internet quizzes have also told me that I’m Arthur C. Clarke and Spider-Man, and I should know to take them all with an iceberg-sized grain of salt. Still, it’s food for thought, isn’t it?
If you’re interested, the complete breakdown of my results is below the fold:

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