BY JUSTIN COOPER
There is no better way to procrastinate than with a good on-line personality test. You take a half hour or so to fill the thing out, then you e-mail your results around to everyone and compare. It provides hours of entertainment. Of course, no one could catalogue all the personality tests out there on the net, but here are a few. I’ve also included some other interactive websites that I found amusing or noteworthy.
www.thespark.com
The first page appears to promise the kind of new-age cultiness that I long for: certain lucky individuals have “the spark” of personality, while all others are “the living dead.” Unfortunately, the site turns out to be a pretty standard personality test, albeit with some funny questions. My favorite: “Do you express yourself better orally or anally?” B
www.wizardrealm.com/tests
This site indexes on-line tests collected from all over the Internet. Some of them are real treasures. You just can’t beat the Your Life as a Gorilla test, which tells you which of the 19 gorillas at the Atlanta zoo you most resemble. It turns out that I am most like Kuchi, the “social butterfly” of the zoo’s gorilla population. A-
www.emotioneric.com
Visitors to Eric’s site tell him what emotion they would like to see him express, and he obliges by taking a picture of himself acting out that emotion and posting it for all to see. This mildly amusing idea has generated a huge amount of acclaim and popularity for Eric, whose site is littered with various awards. Unfortunately, Eric is clearly an untalented ham and his pictures show it. This site would be a lot better if Anger looked like an angry person, not some theater-geek feigning melancholy for his high school buddies on the set of The Pajama Game. C
www.mypregnancytest.com
This site offers an on-line pregnancy test (completely fictitious, obviously) to anyone who wants one, free of charge. You just click the button at the bottom of the page, and it tells you if a baby’s on the way. Next, if you so choose, it will tell you what gender it is. Finally – this is the part that cracked me up – it offers to tell you who the father is. Primitive graphics and nary a byte of content can go a long way if you’ve got a funny idea. A
www.amihot.comwww.amihotornot.comwww.amihotornot.de
All three sites – they seem to be unaffiliated – work on the same principle. People post their pictures on the site; you tell them if they’re HOT or NOT. It’s simple, brilliant and deeply humiliating to the participants. amihot.com is pretty well designed and has a Favorites section with some real babes, but it’s the slowest and has a lot of ads. amihotornot.com is quicker, but it’s confusing to look at because the rating bar looks exactly like a banner ad. For the truly adventurous, though, it has to be amihotornot.de. This German site offers a unique window into the Teutonic mind: Guys with fuzzy mustaches rate highly, while curvaceous women do not. Amazing. A
www.emode.com
emode.com creates their own tests and interactive exercises, over 100 of them in all. If you click the View All link on the first page, you can see all the tests listed in one place. This is the sort of no-nonsense feature that every webpage should have, but not enough do. I’ve only taken a few of the tests, but I enjoyed What Breed of Dog Are You? (cocker spaniel) and The Presidential Matchmaker (“W” is my man). The site is nice to look at and it works smoothly, but there’s nothing terribly adventurous or racy here. You could take the whole family to this site. B+
www.pencorse.freeserve.co.uk
This site features the Simpsons Character Tester, which tells you which character from the TV show The Simspons you most resemble. The test is admirably short, but there’s just not much here to laugh at, which is a shame, because The Simpsons have given us so much over the years. B-
www.keirsey.com
This is a great personality test website. It has no splashy graphics or frills, just tons of information. It tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the Keirsey personality test, how it came about, how to interpret your results, and so on. A
www.bluesapphires.net
What distinguishes this source of Web-order Russian brides from the others is all the how-to tips. It tells you how to write to your prospective Russian bride-they have pictures of the women, of course-how many letters to write, how to make cheap phone calls to Eastern Europe and so on. Best of all, they have alternative methods of payment for those who are “unable to pay by credit card.” This whole thing is so pathetic that I don’t think I can even give this website a grade.
Bonus Sitewww.angrylittleasiangirl.com
There is nothing interactive about this site, but it’s definitely worth visiting, if only to see the cartoon of the little Asian girl flipping you a double-barreled bird. The little cartoons are cute, too. I couldn’t get the videos to work. I like the homemade feel of this site – it’s not too polished and it doesn’t show off a bunch of flashy “website awards” that no one has ever heard of. A-