Have you always wanted to breathe underwater without bulky tanks?
The Triton underwater gill system has been making the rounds on the internets for while now. A magical piece of equipment, able to turn man into fish by filtering oxygen molecules from the water. It was hailed as a scientific advancement that’d free us to explore the depths at our leisure.
Couldn’t possibly work, merely the brainchild of a trio of scammers who hit on a notion into which the poorly informed would happily dump their hard earned money. Pretty much crowdfunding in a nutshell.
The Indiegogo campaign featured amusingly edited footage of a swimmer blowing bubbles underwater, begging the question, why not just pay a freediver to stick the thing in their mouth and play around in the ocean? I could’ve done it. Would’ve for a cut of their swindled dough. Not often you get a chance to monetize the ability hold your breath and swim downwards. Would’ve looked super cool, drag the thing down to a hundred feet and clown around a bit.
But they half-assed it, and lost their money. Yesterday Indiegogo suspended their campaign, refunding the $900K that a mind boggling number of morons had pledged in the face of overwhelming proof that it was a scam.
Oh well, no big deal, live and learn. Obviously there’s no such thing as a magic gill system. Some of us knew that, now everyone does.
Or so you’d think. After their initial project was shut down for violating Indiegogo’s TOS (read: being a scam), they changed their rhetoric, popped up a new campaign that claims to use “liquid oxygen technology,” and took off running.
You’d think, no one could possibly be stupid enough to dump more cash into their pockets.
But you’d be wrong!
They’ve got a new video, featuring some guy sitting in the shallow end, breathing through what is obviously a cunningly disguised pony bottle.
They’ve already conned nearly $200K worth of idiot bucks out of the uninformed and unintelligent! Amazing! Almost admirable, that refusal to back down from a con in the face of your own falsehoods.
Thankfully, we can take solace in the fact that breathing compressed air underwater is horribly dangerous without training. Even with, which is why I’d rather risk shallow water blackout than suck air at any depth.
If they actually follow through and ship the product we’ll get to see backyard pool owners the world over experience the joys of pulmonary baurotrama, drowning, and death. Which possibly isn’t a nice thing to joke about, but I’d enjoy a world free of a few thousand morons.
The only thing they could do to improve it now would be to slap on some stripes and call it a “shark deterrent.”
Perfect opportunity for synergy, grab that overlap between the cowardly and outright stupid.
