Last night, my friend Jen­nie sent me a link to a site enti­tled “Image Puz­zle!” A brief descrip­tion from the site itself:

“This is a cre­ative graph­i­cal puz­zle divided into 15 stages. Each stage comes with a dig­i­tal image that con­tains a text that allows you to get to the next stage.”

What they fail to men­tion is that you will quite pos­si­bly go nuts while try­ing to make your way through all 15 stages. It’s not that they’re all hard — if that was the case, you’d just quit. No, some are tan­ta­liz­ing easy: they buoy your con­fi­dence in between the beat­ings your ego takes from the really hard ones. I’m stuck on num­ber 12 now, after an ago­niz­ing 24-hour period stuck on num­ber 8. I thought about num­ber 8 all day — in the shower, while work­ing on reeds, at the pool, when I was as work. It wasn’t all bad, though — think­ing about that infer­nal puz­zle kept me from remem­ber­ing that swim­ming was sup­posed to hurt (I hadn’t been in the pool in weeks). I can only hope for the same benev­o­lent treat­ment from num­ber 12. I feel its grip clos­ing around me already.
If you value your san­ity, don’t start the puz­zles.
PS — Jen­nie, I’ll get you back for this
Update:
I finally got past num­ber 8, but I had to use Pho­to­shop to do it. My boss appar­ently saw it with­out spe­cial tools, but I’m just not that cool. I’m stuck on 15 now, and I’ve got no clues. If any­one gets through them all, let me know so I can direct some hate your way.
Update:
Hah! I have defeated the last puz­zle! It was kind of lame though, as it def­i­nitely requires Pho­to­shop, or some other image edi­tor. Alas, the last puz­zle leads to a new puz­zle: a code puz­zle. This one’s only 5 lev­els, but it’ll prob­a­bly be harder than the last one.
Update:
Ok, so the code puz­zles are really lame. They took me about 10 min­utes total. Now on to the math puz­zles…
Update (The Last One):
Ok, so the math puz­zles weren’t so bad, although you will need a cal­cu­la­tor (or Google). The gen­eral knowl­edge ques­tions were quite easy, espe­cially with the aid of Google. At last! I am free from the tyranny of these puz­zles! Any­body know of some more?