urg

here is a quiz i found on ‘s journal…


The Devil Card
You are the Devil card. The Devil is based on the
figure Pan, Lord of the Dance. The earthy
physicality of the devil breeds lust. The
devil’s call to return to primal instincts
often creates conflict in a society in which
many of these instincts must be kept under
control. Challenges posed by our physical
bodies can be overcome by strength in the
mental, emotional, and spiritual realms. Pan is
also a symbol of enjoyment and rules our
material creativity. The devil knows physical
pleasure and how to manipulate the physical
world. Material creativity finds its output in
such things as dance, pottery, gardening, and
sex. The self-actualized person is able to
accept the sensuality and usefulness of the
devil’s gifts while remaining in control of any
darker urges. Image from The Stone Tarot deck.
http://hometown.aol.com/newtarotdeck/

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

these things are really starting to make me wonder. i’ve heard them called “memes” but i’m not sure what that means. not that i haven’t heard a definition of the word, but i’m not sure if i agree with the definition when it comes to things like this. i think that these *may* actually be more sinister things.

there are many things that i wonder about this quiz, specifically, and all quizzes like this… is it major arcana only, or does it include the minor arcana as well… what are the computer’s criteria for determining which card you are? i tried the page they said their information was borrowed from, but that page is no more, and there doesn’t appear to be any other links on the page that would tell me about how this particular computer program works, or who made it…

how do we know that whoever wrote the computer program interpreted the cards correctly? we don’t. in fact, we don’t even know who it is that wrote the computer program at all. presumably there are ways of finding out, i’m sure that quizilla knows something, but it’s not made very evident for those of us who think about such things. what if the programmer had an alterior motive; what if, instead of giving accurate interpretations of cards based on logical inferences made from the answers you gave to the questions, what if they programmed it to spew out random interpretations and images, totally ignoring the questions all together.

and what about the questions? they’ve got your IP address as soon as you login, what do they do with the answers they gather to the questions? especially if the questions reveal you to be a person likely to do socially inappropriate things? i saw a “quiz” recently called Which America Hating Minority Are You? which had me down as a “terrorist”, which doesn’t surprise me, but now the epithet “terrorist” is associated with my IP address in some anonymous log somewhere… whose job is it to keep track of those logs?

i’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t all a big government conspiracy to gather as much information about us as they can in ways that, for the most part, we’d never suspect. 8/