When it comes to pop culture, I’m admittedly not an avid follower. I could care less about the lives of Hollywood personalities or pop music divas and giants. However, when it comes to Web culture and Internet memes, I eat it up. Being April Fool’s Day, announcements of phony products and odd couple corporate mergers have become commonplace. I used to enjoy this day, but this year, I’m left feeling somewhat jaded. None of these jokes are all that entertaining, since it’s all been done before.
I think the failure of fake written announcements common today could be likened to the an old-time radio program trying to lure our attention away from our TVs, iPods and computers. While it involves a fair amount of creativity, the written word has a hard time “selling” the hoax. For example, on this blog o’ mine, I could’ve easily posted something touting that I’m giving up the software game, throwing my Computer Science degree away (or at the very least, putting it into storage) to go back to university to finish off my Pharmacy degree like my parents wanted me to. I would cite the fact that none of my family members understand what I do for a living, but everybody has some inkling as to what the people in white lab coats behind the counter at pharmacies do, as my primary reason for doing so. And if you believe that, I’ve got a copy of Duke Nukem Forever to sell you.
Here are a few examples of this year’s hoaxes that bored me:
- Sun, after open-sourcing Java and Solaris, want the code back.
- Chris Pirillo plans dumps Mac OS X in favour of Windows XP
- Consumerist becomes the Conglomerist and posts a lot of things that are the antithesis of what the site stands for
- More of Google’s usual April Fool’s fake products and product features
- xkcd turns from a smart Web comic about stick figures pondering programming, sex, physics and the human condition into a dumbed-down fully illustrated Web comic about…something or other
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Hardy-har-har.
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Truth be told, there were a couple that I did like:
- Clicking on any of the featured videos YouTube‘s homepage gets you the video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead of the purported video. Bonus points for exploiting the Rickrolling meme.
- ThinkGeek has posted fake products on past April Fool’s days, but this years’ Super Pii Pii Brothers for the Nintendo Wii is pretty frickin’ funny.
Were there any other good finds today?
One Response to "april fool-ish"
Gmail has some good ideas.
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html