Passionate for subway tile and doggos

April 27, 2024 6:49 AM

The Millennial CAPTCHA [SLMcSweeneey's]
posted by May Kasahara (63 comments total)

h/t

Also, perhaps I'm showing my Xennial by mixing up Michael Cera and John Cena when it came to the first part.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:52 AM on April 27 [6 favorites]

This post makes me feel 🤣🤣
posted by phunniemee at 6:56 AM on April 27 [3 favorites]

It’s easy to spot Michael Cena because he is the personification of Miracle Whip.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:02 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

I miss AIM.
posted by biogeo at 7:10 AM on April 27 [8 favorites]

I have firsthand evidence that a GenXer can reliably bypass this captcha. If it's important to you to keep your online discourse GenX free, more stringent challenges may be required.

As Gen X inevitably supplants Baby Boomers as the bogeyman generation, this will become increasingly important.
posted by Pemdas at 7:31 AM on April 27 [25 favorites]

I feel both seen and offended. But mostly seen.
posted by fight or flight at 7:33 AM on April 27 [5 favorites]

I am seen, 10/10. Too funny, thanks for sharing!
posted by subwaytiles at 7:39 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

It’s easy to spot Michael Cena because he is the personification of Miracle Whip.

And you can't see John Cena at all.
posted by mhoye at 7:42 AM on April 27 [8 favorites]

The choice of self-referential McSweeney's article was great too. Despite being solidly GenX, I have used that one on MetaFilter.
posted by notoriety public at 7:49 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

I guess I'm a xenniel. As I've failed Michael Cera and Sufjan Stevens so far. But I did already Google (ok. TV Tropes) skibidi toilet
posted by AngelWuff at 7:50 AM on April 27

part of the joke is to ignore genX of course. the iPod interface was when I realized that they were fully committed to the bit.
posted by zenon at 7:51 AM on April 27 [11 favorites]

I'm gen x and i watched skibidi toilet all the way through months ago

why yes i'm audhd but that's not relevant at all
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:12 AM on April 27 [3 favorites]

I still don’t know what skibidi toilet is
posted by panama joe at 8:13 AM on April 27 [17 favorites]

I'd like a GenX one, actually.

"Tune the TV to UHF 44 using the knob and by mangling the tinfoil on top of the antenna".
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:14 AM on April 27 [18 favorites]

I'd like a GenX one, actually.

"What channel are video games on?"
posted by mhoye at 8:17 AM on April 27 [25 favorites]

As a boomer, it took me a long time. Probably 10 min to text "fail". 5 minutes to find Sufjan Stevens. And yet I passed, finally. Unlike when I try to pay my utility bill online. When I fail.
posted by acrasis at 8:30 AM on April 27 [5 favorites]

GenX:

- program the clock on this VCR
- fix this cassette using a pencil
- dial into this BBS using a 2400 baud modem
- learn to fear global thermonuclear warfare
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 8:35 AM on April 27 [31 favorites]

- learn to fear global thermonuclear warfare

Teach a NORAD computer to play tic tac toe
posted by mhoye at 8:36 AM on April 27 [11 favorites]

I still don’t know what skibidi toilet is

It's a cgi head sticking out of a toilet and it says "skibidi."
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:39 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

I don't think I've ever seen anything with Michael Cera or John Cena. They're just meme faces. But I solved all the puzzles.
posted by pracowity at 8:40 AM on April 27

I got OK Go at the end. My wife got Keyboard Cat. I assume this says something about our personalities based on how we each handled the Captcha.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:48 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

A gen-Z engineering student I'm mentoring recently was excitedly telling me about something he did with a friend of his who's really into software-defined radio. They recorded a radio signal from a frequency used by the Russian military, carrying presumably encrypted data.

"It's really cool!" he told me. "You can actually hear the encoded digital information! I've got the recording on my laptop, want to hear?"

"Sure," I said. And he opened the file and played it for me.

"Have you ever heard anything that sounds like this before?" I asked him.

"No, nothing like it."

Friends, it sounded just like the noises from a modem if you pick up the phone while it's connected.

"You keep listening to that sound, buddy," I told him with tears in my eyes. "You listen to that Russian military transmission, and you keep it in your heart. Keep that memory alive for us."
posted by biogeo at 8:53 AM on April 27 [36 favorites]

(The last bit is embellished but the rest is absolutely true.)
posted by biogeo at 8:54 AM on April 27

Add me to the "GenX cosplaying as millennial" list.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:11 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

Yes it failed to filter out me, an Xer.

though I suppose if I was really an Xer I would have refused to play in the first place.
posted by heyitsgogi at 9:35 AM on April 27 [4 favorites]

I couldn't get past the Ipod.

but then I've never owned an ipod so...

(goes back to drinking water out of the hose)
posted by The otter lady at 9:40 AM on April 27 [9 favorites]

I still don’t know what skibidi toilet is

I tried to get my 10-year-old to explain it the other night and I strongly suspect she doesn’t fully understand it either, honestly.

Gonna drop skibidi rizz into conversation later just to embarrass her, though.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:52 AM on April 27 [6 favorites]

As a milleniold, I did not know what “post the boomerang” meant, but evidently I clicked the right thing anyhow.

Mr Nat, a year younger than me, had no trouble with the test. But after watching the Ok Go Video , he says “I guess I’m a millennial. Oops, I accidentally took a screenshot”.

I guess we’re both milleniolds.
posted by nat at 9:54 AM on April 27 [3 favorites]

Xer here (1976), passed with no problem. I've never seen skibidi toilet (until today), but that also falls under the umbrella of "nonsense 3d animated youtube poop videos" which never interested me.

I have owned 3 iPods - an original white one with the hard drive, a black one with an SSD, and then an iPod Mini. Two of them were lost, and the mini stopped holding a charge. It also feels like forever ago that T9 texting was a thing.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:55 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Got to the iPod and gave up. I'm a Gen Xer who never owned one.

Sigh.

Possible Gen X version entry: the tape in your VCR snapped. Can you glue it together and have a functional tape again?
posted by somebodystrousers at 9:59 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Kids, if you're going to keep playing here, can I at least ask you to mow it? Here, I'll even give you $20. The mower's in the garage. I'll give you an extra $10 if you mow it in a diamond pattern like at the baseball stadium.
posted by Reverend John at 10:04 AM on April 27 [5 favorites]

The best part are the Google autocompletes, which suggest many other catch phrases that a Millennial would find perplexing. I read them out to my 12 year old who had concise definitions for all of them.

I don’t even know if his generation has been named yet, but he finds Millennials annoying because they think they’re young but they’re not. My generation (X) are OK because we know we’re old. Huh.
posted by Paid In Full at 10:05 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

Boomerangs are instagrams that loop. It's what you're posting when you click the infinity sign. Used to be a separate app, now a built-in feature. /solidly millennial
posted by capricorn at 10:10 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Paid In Full: The best part are the Google autocompletes, which suggest many other catch phrases that a Millennial would find perplexing. I read them out to my 12 year old who had concise definitions for all of them.

One of the suggestions was "what is slugging" and I don't need to look that up because as a Millennial I know that slugging is carpooling with strangers so that you get a ride to work and they get to use the HOV lane for free and I will accept no other definition.
posted by capricorn at 10:13 AM on April 27 [4 favorites]

as a millennial, skibidi toilet was literally the first piece of gen Z culture I've instinctively understood in years
posted by BungaDunga at 10:44 AM on April 27

Yeah, this definitely doesn't filter out Xers.

All of you folks sniffing you don't know who Michael Cera is, like you didn't laugh at Allen in Barbie.
posted by praemunire at 10:51 AM on April 27 [7 favorites]

whelp I got hung up on 4. never had an ipod. I guess it works then.
posted by supermedusa at 11:04 AM on April 27

I thought sure the whole joke was that no actual millennial would click "I'm a millennial"
posted by straight at 11:06 AM on April 27 [4 favorites]

what would have been really brilliant is if biogeo's gen-z student had Rick Rolled him.
posted by supermedusa at 11:07 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

I'm a boomer and this was pretty easy. I've always been Extremely Online, although I have no prior experience of skibidi toilet.
posted by neuron at 11:16 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Now you kids get off my lawn. My blood pressure is high and it's giving me a headache [for reals].
posted by neuron at 11:17 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Maybe the best millennial test of all is who views this with the appropriate sense of ironic detachment that everything in McSweeney's demands and who is actually looking at this like it's some kind of genuine millennial purity test.
posted by phunniemee at 11:19 AM on April 27 [6 favorites]

Man I haven't used T9 to text in a really really long time. So many clicks to type just one word!
posted by potrzebie at 11:23 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Am millennial, my biggest objection so far is that I would never type "what is skibidi toilet" into google when I could just type "skibidi toilet". I do think that's at least a bit generational (though probably also shared with Xers).
posted by dick dale the vampire at 11:27 AM on April 27 [7 favorites]

I thought "slugging" as a type of carpooling was just a DC thing!
posted by biogeo at 11:38 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

GenXer with an iPod* that I still use regularly because we have an old car that won’t connect to our phones. I’ve never heard of skibidi toilet, but I am uncannily good at test taking.

*I know, I know, it’s really serious.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:40 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Okay, I laughed at "only select the millenial laughing emoji" and the limewire download.
posted by corb at 11:42 AM on April 27

Man I haven't used T9 to text in a really really long time. So many clicks to type just one word!

T9 is the later predictive version where you press each key once but maybe have to iterate through a couple of suggested words. This is… what was before that.
posted by atoxyl at 11:55 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

I feel like downloading a whole damn movie from LimeWire is a conflation of the P2P era and the torrent era but then I didn’t have broadband until like 2005.
posted by atoxyl at 11:58 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

The gen-x filter should have ten questions and eject anyone who keeps going after four.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:03 PM on April 27 [4 favorites]

All of you folks sniffing you don't know who Michael Cera is, like you didn't laugh at Allen in Barbie.
Haven't seen it.
posted by pracowity at 12:10 PM on April 27 [2 favorites]

slugging is lit, iirc
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:18 PM on April 27 [3 favorites]

Hah, I'm a boomer, and the only one of these I had trouble with was the texting one, because I never texted until smartphones were well-established; I finally had to google "how to text on old nokia phone." I can see now why kids got so quick with their texting thumbs, having to constantly cycle through letters.
posted by Kat Allison at 3:13 PM on April 27

The iPod was hilarious (I felt like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were missing, though) and I was slightly alarmed at how natural the texting felt (late X).
posted by EvaDestruction at 3:21 PM on April 27 [2 favorites]

I was a tech reps for T-Mobile in the past and when the phone popped up I knew exactly what number and how many times to push it to spell sup. I got stuck looking for the "send" button. And then realized it's not a real phone emulator, there is no send.
posted by fiercekitten at 3:38 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]

2400 baud modem

oh god please no I know too much about the future I can't live like that again
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:42 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Ah, the delight of texting on a nokia phone. Back in the early early years of the 21st century, young South Koreans were called the "thumb generation" because of their mad skillz in texting. I just held up my hands to verify how I used to hold a phone. It's not that I couldn't hold my current phone like that (all fingers on the back of the phone, only the thumbs on the screen/keyboard side) but the swipe motion as opposed to the typing motion is much more forgiving of hand position.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:43 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]

biogeo: I thought "slugging" as a type of carpooling was just a DC thing!

Oh maybe it is, I'm in DC.
posted by capricorn at 8:18 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]

This was fun! Thanks for posting it.
posted by brainwane at 4:42 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]

It’s easy to spot Michael Cena because he is the personification of Miracle Whip.
She calls it a mayonegg!
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 9:16 AM on April 28

Also the real millennial purity test is not whether you can get to the video at the end, it's whether upon doing so, you feel an immediate urge to go post about how the iPod was the apex of user design and AIM was a healthier high school online social ecosystem than Instagram and Snapchat.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 9:21 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]

Hah, I'm a boomer, and the only one of these I had trouble with was the texting one, because I never texted until smartphones were well-established;

When I was in college I wasn’t always the best at staying in touch with my parents, even after I got a cell phone. So one day I got a text from my dad reminding me to call home. I texted back, sure, I’ll give you a call around 5 after I’m done with classes.

Half an hour later I got another text from my dad: “How did you do that so fast”
posted by thecaddy at 9:58 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]

First of all, T9 word was the pinnacle of texting efficiency. (Yes, I'm a millenial). But the T9 word part of the CAPTCHA through me off, because my instinct was to finish spelling then if it didn't fill in the right word automatically, press the key to scroll through options until I got to the right one.

Just a minor quibble.

Has anyone invented an app that allows you to use T9 for texting on an iphone? Although, without the physical key presses it doesn't work as well.
posted by litera scripta manet at 10:52 AM on April 28