Minecraft released their annual April fools day update yesterday. Apparently, they wrote some kind of rogue-like. I saw a few YouTubers having fun with it. Last year’s “poisonous potato” update was very entertaining.
I’ve never even heard of Troma before; therefore, even if I had seen the notice I don’t know that I would have known it was a prank.
My kids and I have a long tradition of doing April Fool’s jokes on my mother.
As she’s in the States and we were living in Taiwan, mostly it involved seeing how much she would believe outlandish tales. Obviously, after the first several she would have her guard up.
In order to get her to believe things, we would start feeding her misinformation months in advance.
The best one had the kids getting accepted into the Finnish Academy for Proliferation of Curling when they were 12 and 10. They were to live in a remote dorm with children from a dozen countries through university and then would come back to Taiwan as ambassadors of the sport.
It took about six months of making up various details about getting into curling, the training, coaches, tournaments and all.
Finally on April 1st the kids called her and told her they had been accepted, and they would be leaving the next day.
Grandma was not happy we were making this choice, but was not saying anything.
Finally we let her know it was all a prank. No Finland, no curling, nothing.
After she recovered, she thought it was hilarious.
In the UK, there’s a famous one the BBC did on its viewers in the 1950s - The spaghetti harvest in Italy:
Shows the state our culinary knowledge at the time. No jokes at the back.
I had my fourth grade math students yesterday, so I introduced them to two ideas: 7x13=28, and 0=1.
I told them that if their parents allowed them zero desserts, they could mathematically prove they were allowed a dessert. Yesterday evening I got a text from a teacher with a kid in my group, telling me that the child had successfully conned her parents, using algebra, into giving her dessert.
One of my proudest teaching moments.
Yesterday I was following a discussion about Robert Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 / If This Goes On… and the subject of his famously never-written story “The Stone Pillow” came up. When I researched the latter there were multiple cites to a review of “Robert Heinlein’s ‘The Stone Pillow’”, which led to a site reviewing a novel with a completely different plot than the one I was familiar with. The date of the page was 2009, but I didn’t notice the month and day.
I administer a website for my gaming group. Yesterday I got two concerned emails saying that there was something wrong, as when they tried to access the site, they ended up at the website of a South Pacific resort with the same name. I’ve been pulling this same April 1st trick for almost a decade now, and always catch at least one person who doesn’t remember the last time! Tradition!
I won’t say I came close to falling for it but I didn’t immediately recognize the headline announcing Berkshire buying Tesla was a fib. However, on consideration, no way Warren Buffett touches that smoking heap with a ten foot pole.
Geography’s still a bit off. The spaghetti harvest was in Switzerland, not Italy.
The one I liked from this year is that Denmark bought Trump.
Yesterday’s NYT crossword was a cute and sly prank. Not to give away too much: The puzzle started with several answers filled in, in a handwriting style and in a faded color. The prefilled answers were obvious and absolutely correct, but when doing the crossing down clues you’ll find they don’t fit. The answers they gave you look like they were written in pencil and then erased. One clue was _____ power, and the answer given was horse. However, the answer that fit was solar. Fun!
Could anyone tell?
(sorry, I’ll see myself out)
I mentioned this in a Game Room thread, but I’ve been playing a game called Satisfactory, which is a mining/crafting/automation/factory building sort of game. I was playing it last night and it froze/crashed shortly after I started, so I reloaded and continued playing. But I was seeing all kinds of weird stuff, like giant-sized versions of normally dog-sized creatures, or dog-sized versions of normally giant-sized creatures, and some had on helmets like what your player character wears. I wondered if it had anything to do with my game crash and thought maybe I was going to have to scrap my game and start a new one… then today at work I realized “Oh crap! Yesterday was April 1st! I’ve been pranked!”
Reality not far behind:
I mean, Death Row Records was owned by Hasbro from 2019 to 2021, so stranger things have happened.