Inane ponderings of personality test quzzy things.

[kiya]

So I went and had a look at this elemental personality test that I saw referenced by netbard and keshwyn. Elemental symbolism is one of My Pet Obsessions, after all.

Jehosephat, what a godawful test. "Let's pick the bog-standard symbolisms and arrange them always in the same order so as to make it obvious to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the elements as addressed in ceremonial magic will find the entire thing completely bloody transparent."

When the first question is a pick one of: "thoughts, reason, intellect, memory, knowledge, freedom", "emotions, feelings, intuition, insight, fertility, divination", "stability, strength, warmth, comfort, animals, farming, harvest", "passion, enthusiasm, desire, courage, force, lust, fertility, virility" and the second one is, essentially, "Wands, Cups, Swords, or Rocks, which one gets you going?" . . . words elude me.

Yes, let's assemble all of these transparent answers and, what, tot up whichever one has higher numbers of 'Pick me!' answers? Ugh.

Someday I should teach myself enough cgi to do this test right, which would mean doing questions that would, for example, get a positive answer from earth and water, say, and a negative one from fire and air, and totting them up with nuance. Might even get some interesting answers that way.

(I think as this test came out I had about even numbers of obviously-earth, obviously-fire, and obviously-water answers, and wound up with water as a result. I think I'd want, also, in the 'doing it right' category, to see if I can come up with something for people with Obvious Dominances of more than one element. . . .)

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Cooool. Have I mentioned recently that I like how you think? :) I also hate the tests that let you pretty much pick the results you want by giving completely transparant answers - which is part of the reason why I rarely bother to take online tests anymore, much less post the answers. :P It's one thing if they're fun; it's an entirely other thing when they're stupid.

Re: elements... let's just say that the Queen of Wands is my significator for a very good reason. ;)

[kiya]

Ah, but are you of the wands-are-fire or the wands-are-air school? :}

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Wands-are-fire. Burney burn! :D The rationale used by one of my friends seems most apt to me: wands will burn when set on fire; thinking can hurt and often leads to difficult situations, as most of the sword cards portray. ;)

And, an appropriate quote: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." - Robert Louis Stevenson

[keshwyn]

Dispute, dispute! Wands are air, they are treebranches reaching to the sky, and groves where the wind whistles through.

You cannot get a sword without fire. Swords are fire.

(symbolism is in the eye of the beholder. :)

[avram]

I've got most of a quiz of my own written up (I've designed the back-end, and written seven out of the eight questions I want to use; now all I have to do is make the artwork, port my website over to a new site host, oh wait, first I have to implement that site redesign so that all the old PHP my site's been running on won't break on the new server), and that's how I set it up: Each of the possible answers is an entry in an array, with a numerical value (starting at zero) associated with it. Each quiz answer at minimum adds one point to one result's value; some of them add two points, add to multiple results, or subtract from some results.

Also, each question has "None of the above" as a choice, and there's a special result you get only if you answer that to all the questions.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Coool. I can't wait until I see your quiz making the rounds. :)

[kiya]

Sweeeeeeeeet.

Was it difficult to learn how to do the code end of it? oneironaut suggested that gtst and I should learn to do this stuff together at some point so that we can harp on each other when one of us is lagging. (Hey, it seems to work for writing novels!)

I think the only conclusion the test that set off this bitch-fest can come to sensically is 'Well, she's not an air.'