I don’t find a lot of memes out there on the ‘net anymore — apparently they were just a fad that’s now on the wane — but every once in a while, I still run across one that grabs my fancy. Here, courtesy of Tosy and Cosh, is one that grabbed my fancy this morning. It’s one of those list-style memes that asks how many Oscar-winning films — i.e., winners in the category of Best Motion Picture of their respective years — I have seen.
It’s time for a silly Internet quiz! Today, the question is, “Which science fiction author am I?” And the answer is:
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I am:
Well known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary. |
Here’s another meme from SF Signal, focusing this time on genre literature. As I pondered my answers, I realized that I’m not nearly as much of an SF junkie as I used to be, or at least as I used to imagine myself to be, because it was downright hard to answer some of these items. However, much of this meme can relate to book habits in general, so it’s still worth considering, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
Not a surprise, but the validation is nice, especially considering how I was just complaining this weekend that I sometimes feel like I’m losing my intellectual edge:
Your Vocabulary Score: A+ |
 Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person. |
Morning, kids — I’m back in the blogosphere after a few days offline. Hope my absence wasn’t too traumatic for you. I’ve been hosting my good friend (and Simple Tricks regular) from the City of Angels, Cranky Robert. I showed him some of the winter-time sights of the SLC and introduced him to the wonder that is the Star Burger (not to mention the stuffed head of Buck the dog, a.k.a. Newfy); we also toured the galleries of the local aerospace museum, drank a lot of coffee beverages, and talked ourselves hoarse about every subject imaginable, from politics to Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, and Homer, to how hot the tatooed quasi-Goth chicks in the Sugarhouse neighborhood are. It was a good weekend, and I wish weekends like it came more frequently.
I have a number of topics I’m itching to write about, but the way my day is shaping up, I probably won’t get to them today. In the meantime, here are the results an interesting little quiz that I picked up from Brian Greenberg:
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The West
Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta. |
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| The Midland | |
| Boston | |
| North Central | |
| The Inland North | |
| Philadelphia | |
| The South | |
| The Northeast | |
| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
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What I find interesting about this isn’t so much the specific result — I know I’m from the West, after all — as the accuracy of the result coming from the method used. Brian has several comments on his blog from people who all say the quiz correctly nailed their accents based on only 13 textual questions. Very impressive, I think…
Man, it seems like forever since I’ve run across a good meme — I suspect that they were probably just another Internet fad that’s now largely run its course. Still, that doesn’t mean we won’t run across one from time to time, right? Courtesy of Lou Anders, here’s one based on the the Science Fiction Book Club’s list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels published between 1953 and 2002.
Like other book-related memes I’ve done before, the idea here is to indicate which ones you’ve read and what you thought of them, to demonstrate your erudition and good taste, no doubt. Or your lack thereof. Or to at least give you something to do on the boring work-day before a long holiday weekend. Here we go:
Haven’t done an Internet quiz in a while, so here we go:
| What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Fad Reader
You always read the latest bestseller so you can be up to date on what other people are talking about, and to pass the time on your commute, but you have other leisure pursuits in your free time. |
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| Literate Good Citizen | |
| Dedicated Reader | |
| Non-Reader | |
| Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm | |
| Book Snob | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz |
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Hmm… a “fad reader?” I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. It’s not an inaccurate description, I suppose, but there is something sort of… shameful… about it. At least I’m not a non-reader (he says, rather defensively).
[Ed. note: the table is screwy, incidentally — those black lines are supposed to be red, but I don’t know what’s wrong. I copied and pasted the code exactly…]
Here’s another thing that I’m way behind the curve on, that Web site that everybody was playing with a week or so ago that will tell you how many people in the U.S. have the same name as you:
| HowManyOfMe.com | ||
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No time so far this week to write a real blog entry, so let’s compensate with a Silly Internet Quiz™:
According to Javi, there’s a meme circulating among television producers who have blogs (there are three of them that I’m aware of) which asks them to name their Top 25 Favorite TV Characters Ever. I’m not a TV producer — I don’t even play one on, er, I guess that one’s too obvious, isn’t it? — but I’m never one to let a good meme escape me. So read on to discover my picks…
