I think the blood began dripping from my nose, Stranger-Things-style, and sparks bursting from my eyes when the 90th CAPTCHA of the morning insisted that I keep selecting effing parking meters from an array of tiles showing barren streets, the ever-present blurry photo of a motorcycle exhaust pipe, and two identical mailboxes.
What I wanted to do was channel my inner Samuel L. Jackson and shout "Would a F*$#%*g robot stab your eyes out with a wireless mouse MuthaF@*&#$#$r?!?" Then, stab stab stab I would go on my merry way having finally scored a blow against SkyNet/TheMatrix/GeneSimmonsInRunaway!
Inwardly screaming, I just closed the site.
How many times each day do you prove you're not a robot?
Can you remember the first time you had to prove you are actually human? Do you puzzle over that memory or has this absurd torture been ever-present in your life? Are you part of Gen iZmayberobot? I think my first was probably eBay. But maybe it was Napster. Who am I kidding, like Napster gave s#!t.
It is a bizarre, cumbersome, aggravating, and ultimately existentially disturbing practice. All I want is to do what I came to your site to do and instead I am squinting at little squares! I know that these sites get scraped and attacked all the time by ROBOTS but I hate it anyway.
In the rest of my life, I hardly ever encounter CAPTCHAs. Honestly! And I actually use technology! Maybe there is no incentive to send a droid army after Poshmark or the fake Facebook page I use to check out job applicants (it's only illegal if I don't joke about it, right?). There is just something about Cryptoland that attracts layers upon layers upon layers of steps and gatekeepers and bridgetrolls and robot checks.
At first I thought I was doing the world a service. The CAPTCHAs seemed to want me to distinguish among the various things a self-driving car might see on the road. Is this a car? Is this a bus? Is this a truck? Is this a train? Is this a bicycle? Is this a motorcycle? Is this Lindsay Lohan in the road screaming at drivers about BTC AT $100,000!!!!!? I thought I was loading up machine learning databases for the good of some future 6 year old kid on a bike. I guess I thought I was helping robots not kill us by proving I wasn't a robot. Meta.
But what effing self-driving car needs to understand the difference between the Scandlink Baltic ferry and a palm tree??? What route is Waze sending the botcars on that needs them to dodge kayaks AND fighter jets? Is there really a future driving scenario where the only clue a botcar will have is a blurry photo of part of a tire tread?
No, the real agenda is to make us all crazy and infuriated and to make us doubt ourselves so that we will buy $FerarriBulgarCoin or BBeiberBBits.
This is a Weird Thing to Have to Prove
In the great 1982 movie Blade Runner and its recent reboot Blade Runner 2049, one of the central philosophical questions is What does it mean to be human? Characters struggle and cope with that question in various forms, from denigrating the clones of the movie as semi-human "skinjobs," to assassinating or enslaving them, or even to questioning whether one is a semi-human after all.
Imagine! Imagine a world where being asked if you were a robot was an existential, freedom-or-slavery, life-or-death matter!
Dumb Unwritten Rules I Think I See in CAPTCHA Hell
They come in easy and hard versions. Some make you do two waves and to start over if you get one "wrong" in their insane minds. Some just keep feeding you CAPTCHAs one after the other until you start clicking so hard that your mouse needs to be replaced. Some try to make you read text that is scribbled over my a maniac (these are not so common in Cryptoland luckily). Some launch popup windows the second you touch them. Some dither for an eternity (the ones on BetFury seem to just think themselves to death). Some make you type in phrases, and sometimes those phrases make you smile (I saw one that referenced the test used in the movie Blade Runner to determine if someone was actually human! Meta. Meta-meta!).
But to breeze through CAPTCHAs with minimal despair (meaning that you only want to scream and die a little, instead of going on an actual vandalism spree). Follow these simple dumb robot detection rules:
1. Palm trees are the only trees worth giving a crap about.
2. Parking meters are very special, as are chimneys, and, well, anything else that botcar might think is a beloved palm tree.
3. Boats are boats even if for some reason the picture shows it in the parking lot of a Walmart
4. If you see a window and the robot detector wants you to click a bus, that window is a bus. If the CAPTCHA wants you to click an airplane, that window is an airplane.
5. This is the most important rule. The final round of robot detecting Hell always has 3 things to click. In case you think I'm joking, I will tell you in all honesty that I have proved I am a not a robot 12 times on 3 faucets sites in the time it took to write this article, and every time the final round of robot detector required 3 clicks to win. It doesn't matter if it's true, just click the correct thing and some random other thing. Otherwise, CAPTCHA Hell starts over and you don't get your Satoshi. That blurry thing? That's a motorcycle. Those two mailboxes. Parking meters. That Bugatti Veyron is a beloved, sacred palm tree!
You disagree? What do you know? You're only human!
~~~~~
Here are the faucets where I am slowly, but verifiably gaining crypto for free. even when CAPTCHA Hell tries to stop me.
BetFury -- https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b (with my guide on how I earn here)
Cointiply -- http://cointiply.com/r/p9Gyy (with my guide on how I earn here)
FreeBitCo.in -- https://freebitco.in/?r=41144131 (no guide needed, I just click it hahaha!)
