April Fools

[davidn]

It was Whitney who mentioned this to me last year, but April Fools' Day has somehow become something that I associate with the Internet more than real life now. When I was younger my sole imaginative idea was to creep downstairs early in the morning and swap all the plastic bags inside the cereal boxes round. Everyone expected it after a year or two, but that didn't stop me.

However, the rise of the Internet has allowed misinformation to be spread further and to more and more gullible people at an enormous rate. This year, everyone will have seen the video of flying penguins produced by the BBC. Another that stuck out in my mind was the Daily WTF reporting that it was changing its name to the Daily WTH, which a worrying number of agonizingly self-important readers believed. There was quite a good one from Apple that not many people saw, and the usual flood of links that trick people into watching "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley for some reason.

And unlike my cereal trick, I've never been able to think of anything good for the new Internet April fools. In fact, I'm surprised that out of the large amount of time I've been spewing collections of words onto the Internet through this journal, I've never even mentioned the day before. A good April 1st story needs to be something utterly absurd while still being somehow believable, so I'm not sure how that would be significantly different from my life in general at the moment.

Comments

[gr33bo.livejournal.com]

Good thing livejournal has that preview thing going or I woulda clicked that!

In fact youtube made their entire front page one big Rick Roll trap.

Google did a couple of good ones with Virgle (Virgin-Google joint venture to colonise Mars) and gmail (backdate your emails so they don't arrive late!)

[davidn]

I saw the Google ones - we were all quite fascinated by them at work. If someone could do similar doctoring of the dates in our bug reporting system that would be nice...

Sheezyart also sent a message out to everyone entitled "! Inappropriate Conduct" which gave you Rick Astley yet again if you clicked it. It's strange how the Internet latches on to these things.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

When they were younger, my sisters' favourite April Fools' joke was to put salt in the sugar bowl in the kitchen so that someone ended up using it in their cereal or tea. Tea with milk and one salt tastes like something that vampires might drink with their breakfast.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

Blood? Maybe they should use the Tea, milk with one salt for blood transfusions as would be cheaper.
"what made you inject tea into the patient?"
"well it tasted the same!!"

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I never did any pranks this year apart from a lame quick one with the secretary at work about having a passionate meeting with a danish woman before then telling how it only cost me 100 Kroner.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

Oh and I thought the cereal one was genius, I might do that to myself next year the night before and see if I remember in the morning before pouring out the chosen cereal.

[kjorteo]

Well, shoot. I'll admit it: You got me with that. Well played.

Yiffy and I had the idea of making perfectly mirrored (copy/pasted except the names changed) LJ posts where we confessed to making each other up a few years back, but then it somehow became tradition, and this year I had us reverse them (so we each claimed we made ourselves up) just to keep things mixed up. That's become one of two great LiveJournal traditions for us, the other being that every single time--every single time so far without fail--the Halloween Trick-or-Treat meme comes out, Yiffy ends up stealing all my candy.