Recently, Facebook has added a feature that occasionally forces you to perform a "Security Check" when you post on someone's wall or update your status. I recently tried to share a link with my friend and found myself on an infuriating journey of word recognition. I reproduce that journey for you here.
This is what I got when I first tried to post the link:
This is what I got when I first tried to post the link:
First of all, "Stricker" is not a word. "Sticker" is. But somehow Facebook believes that by adding an "r" to a normal word, they will prevent the internet from hacking my friend's account. Second of all, I don't even think that there is a word to the right of "Stricker." It looks like a sideways hammer. Or a little man shooting a tilde out of his torso. Yet it clearly instructs me to type "both words." I would like to type both words, but there is no way I am going to be able to type that fucking thing using the alphabet on my keyboard. I obviously can't write "little hammer" in the fucking box. So now I have a made-up word and an imaginary shape that apparently is made of letters. Finally, in frustration, I click on "Try different words."
Here's what I got next:
So I've still got "Stricker", which is totally infuriating. And for the second time there isn't a word next to "Stricker". Instead of a word, I have a number. A number is not a word, Facebook. To make matters worse, I can't fucking read the number. My first instinct is to go with 1,607. But it could be 1,807 or even 1,887. I consider just going with my gut reaction of 1,607 but then I remember that if I get it wrong, Facebook won't post the link and I'll have to re-try anyway with two new "words", so I just give up and click "Try different words".
Next, I get:
Okay, now you're just mocking me, Facebook. Now you're just making fun of how many times I've clicked "Try different words." You know what? I do feel pretty fucking helpless. Oh, and I see you haven't stopped giving me made-up words. "Dorp." Awesome. It's a totally original composition, Facebook. Some artists work with paint and canvas, you impishly rearrange letters around to create new turns of phrase! How delightful, Facebook! You have called me a "Helpless Dorp". LAWL.
Fuck you, Facebook.
/w\
Next, I get:
Okay, now you're just mocking me, Facebook. Now you're just making fun of how many times I've clicked "Try different words." You know what? I do feel pretty fucking helpless. Oh, and I see you haven't stopped giving me made-up words. "Dorp." Awesome. It's a totally original composition, Facebook. Some artists work with paint and canvas, you impishly rearrange letters around to create new turns of phrase! How delightful, Facebook! You have called me a "Helpless Dorp". LAWL.
Fuck you, Facebook.
/w\
5 comments:
One of the things that always bothered me with blogging is the ratio between time spent blogging and views received is rarely favorable. I can spend an hour crafting a well-written quip about how cheap plastic is ruining the modern water bottle, and yet only four people read it, those four most often just being me as I reread my post, checking for grammatical errors and looking to see if anyone else has read what I've written.
Taking a walk down the street yields a much favorable ratio than blogging. If you walk down a busy interstate for five minutes, you can be guaranteed that even in that short span, you will be seen by hundreds of drivers. In that same span (5 min.), there is a 99.9% probability that no one will read your blog.
This problem may not even be as bad as the sheer dearth of blog commenting. You can write five blogs and only get one comment on one blog (if you're lucky). Taking into consideration that "the comment" is the real reason internet writers post, a "no comments" notification (as if we could be lucky enough to be notified) is the most demoralizing event in an internet writer's career. Rather than subject yourself to the agony of a trickle of views and no comments, why not engage in activities that yield more views and more comments altogether?
Walking down the street isn't the only way. You can go the grocery store. Drop mail off at a post office. Look at clothes in REI. Even start an account on Justin.TV.
I've seen that CAPTCHA system before -- it's called ReCaptcha, and it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Basically it shows you two words from books that need to be digitized, one that it knows, and one that the computer can't read. When you fill in both correctly, it digitizes the unknown word in the book. Multiply that by thousands of entries per day, and you can see the point of ReCaptcha: to harness the energy spent on CAPTCHA word recognition wordwide and use it to digitize entire libraries.
Tate Strickland posts arguably the most interesting blog comment ever. My CAPTCHA for this comment: "ingmer."
Tate: 1
Evan: 0
where's your post-it now, SCHULTZ?
You guys are all dorps.
Post a Comment