Two Slashes

If it’s easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Wednesday was probably not your day.  If you’re Kathleen Danielson, for example, you avoided any links lest they end up Rickrolls.  I feel that April Fool’s Day is a pretty amusing (and dangerous) time to be an Internet…well, addict, I guess, and it’s a day I particularly enjoy.  (The danger is only compounded if you were spending your day in the fetal position worrying about Conficker, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Compared to recent years, I think that this year’s bag of tricks was relatively tame.  DeviantArt (at least, as far as I know) wasn’t propogating 4chan memes (mudkips, anyone?) and the most YouTube did was flip videos upside-down.  Sure, ThinkGeek had bacon paste (but who doesn’t love bacon), and it sounds just believable enough that it might end up like their 8-bit tie from April Fools’ past.

I thought this picture only added credibility to my April Fool's joke, even though it was only by coincidence that Rose happened to tag me right after my status change. Apparently I was the only one to think so.

I myself decided to participate, though I didn’t really come up with my pranks until five minutes before midnight.  For starters, I was uncreative enough to be one of the dozens of people changing their relationship status on Facebook.  And, in a stroke of luck, a friend soon tagged me in a photo that made my status change almost believable.  Alas, I didn’t hear anything from my friends when I changed my status to claim that I was in a relationship, but a few friends started an uproar on the return trip.

The other trick started off on a new site of mine.  At the recommendation of Rachelskirts, I purchased the domain ShouldIUseComicSans.com to match a similar offering (thanks, @EricVictorino) only a few hours before, then decided that it changing what it said would be an excellent joke (but for one day only).  People fell for it, too.

I’m trying to come up with even better pranks for next year, though I’m coming up short.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as I have 363 more days to dwell on it.  (Suggestions are most welcome, though it might do better to e-mail them so there isn’t a public record to ruin the surprise.)

The corporate giants with the practical jokes weren’t the only people headlining on April 1, though.  Conficker, the latest worldwide scare, managed to slip through the day with very little fanfare.  Of course, there were isolated incidents, like my college campus blaming an outage on the worm, but on the whole I didn’t see too many news articles regarding the blasted thing.  Some people seem to think that this is exactly how it should be, though (and I agree).  However, you can’t deny that the Internet is still wholly intact.  (After all, you’re able to read this post, right?)

And, on a completely unrelated note, I decided to mess around with my dust-collecting Tumblr account.  There’s more information about that posted on the blasted thing, though, so I’ll let you visit if you’re interested in the matter.  (Hey, it could use the traffic anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing:  I’m in a relationship…alright, I don’t think you believed that for a second.  I don’t blame you, though.