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  • I like when people take it as an invitation to do something silly and high effort.

    I dislike it when it's just "haha I said a lie to you! April Fools!"

    It's been a good April Fools for me so far. Lots of the former, not much of the latter.

  • It was more fun before the internet. The local news would make up a silly local story and cause it's done by pros it came off more official. I like gags, jokes and tricks and think a day to celebrate them is cool and goof but the execution does leave a lot to be desired.

  • I enjoyed most of the [adult swim] April Fools bits but I don't even know if they still do that

    What other programming block would ever dub a bunch of fart noises over an episode of Ghost in the Shell?

  • I think we should rework April Fools as a day where we all get to dress up like clowns. that would be fun. no mean-spirited pranks or gotchas, just a day where everyone gets to be the silliest version of themselves

  • Anyone remember Electronic Gaming Monthly's April Fools joke of Akuma in Resident Evil 2? Shit got me back as a kid.

    • This was before I subscribed to EGM, so I hadn't seen it before:

      Goddamn, six A rank knife-and-handgun-only runs sounds brutal as hell. I usually replay the RE games a ton but I take full advantage of NG+.

      Also, I got curious and was looking up other game magazine April Fool's pranks and realized that I had gotten pranked by EGM without even realizing it! 23 years ago I heard a playground rumor that you could unlock Sonic and Tails in Melee if you could defeat 20x enemies in Cruel Melee. I spent many an afternoon trying (and failing) to do so--don't remember my high score (and sadly, a friend "borrowed" my memory card with all my Gamecube saves many years ago and never gave it back...) but I wanna say it was like 13? Turns out the origin was this EGM feature in the April 2002 issue:

      Gotta say, they did a damn good job with those fake screenshots (very cheeky making the unlock date April 1st) and mixing it in with a bunch of legit tips. Supposedly it spread so far that Nintendo Power directly debunked the rumor, although I flipped through scans of the April through August 2002 issues and didn't see anything of the sort. Did get a little misty-eyed looking back through those old issues, though...wish I had hung onto a few.

      I did find a podcast where they interview the guy and (among other things) ask the author, Chris Johnston, about the rumor (segment starts at 34:38). Ngl, it wasn't super enlightening, so it's not a must-listen (at least for that segment--haven't listened to the rest of the podcast), but it was still nice to hear about it from the man himself.

  • I have never liked April Fool's Day. idk why lying is "fun". Basically the best experience of April Fool's was my pre-school teacher telling me what it was, me not getting it, her being nice about it anyway, and then it was all downhill from there.

    • Sometimes I'll play a little Beyond Belief with people when I come up with a really plausible line of bullshit and wanna see if it works. Like one time I told a pal at work that lentils got their name because back in mideval times when Lent was much stricter the foods one could eat during Lent included lentils and they tended to be a staple during that time and gained the name. I totally made it up and admitted it immediately, I'm not really tricking that person specifically, just about anyone could fall for that. I've made up a massive elaborate backstory for a guy I've been working with on the same schedule for like 3 years cause he's incredibly normal so it's really funny to say he was on an episode of nanny 911 as a kid that was pulled from the air half way through and never seen again. Or that he believed for a bit as a teen that he could escape from any man made prison. Like Chuck Norris jokes but way weirder like him trying to join a cult but the cultists saying he was a bad fit for the group. Pranks are usually dumb but I've got got a couple times in ways I had to respect. This was at another job where there was a juice bar up front and wait staff would sometimes offer us some juices when it's hot and we're too busy to ask and it ruled. Anyway my homie offered me a lemonade and this absolutely genius filled a shot glass with hot sauce, wrapped it in plastic and then poked the straw through so the sauce stayed sealed in and the placed that inside the larger glass of lemonade so it looked totally normal. I got got good and the engineering and thought that went into that is worth a mouthful of hot sauce. That's how to do a prank well and the opportunity and inspiration for that is super rare and can't be forced.

      I think it's okay to mess with people if you're trying to make them laugh, but also most people are really bad at it. It's something you should be doing with someone and not to them, if they don't know that from time to time you're gonna feed them a line of bullshit for funsies and are having a good time trying to spot it then it's not for funsies. These are also generally co-workers, so people I'm killing time with and I make sure there's already some comedic relationship established that works that way. When you're in a kitchen making food all day, it's nice to riff.

41 comments