Foolishness

[liv]

I've seen a lot of posts on my friends list this year with warnings that the posters don't like April Fools day and will not appreciate any pranks. I'm rather saddened that people need to make these kinds of posts. Do otherwise sensible adults really think it's amusing to play cruel pranks on their friends? Spoof news articles is one thing, but actual personal pranks seem like the kind of thing that belongs in the realm of primary school bullying.

I'm rather relieved to see that LJ is doing something obviously silly, rather than anything actually annoying or deceptive. Considering that they announced the introduction of ads as a past April Fools joke, and now they're actually in the process of introducing ads, anything on the level of some of their past unfunny and vaguely plausible pranks would be in pretty poor taste.

Anyone like to restore my faith in humanity?

Comments

[emma]

I'm all for amusing redesigns of sites, jokes that aren't hurtful, etc. I'd try and elaborate more as to the kinds of pranks I don't enjoy that I've experienced, but I need to make a dash in the rain to catch a train. Hurray!

[draconid.livejournal.com]

Ditto.. site redesigns can be fun - I remember when DALnet redesigned their site in a "Hello Kitty" theme.. it was harmless but funny... I think they also made their site upside-down the once, but it was a long time ago I could be imagining it!

[gameboyguy13.livejournal.com]

Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) made their site pink ("OMG!!! Ponies!!!") today.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

Yup, I already posted about it on my Friends page. Wizards of the Coast (http://www.wizards.com) have announced a My Little Pony game - just to continue with the pink pony theme!

[liv]

Oh, you're quite right, there's nothing wrong with silliness. It's personal attacks on people and the nasty kind of deceit that I have a problem with. And put like that it seems kind of obvious, but some people do seem to regard April Fools Day as not only an excuse but almost an obligation to be mean in that way, and that I really don't get.

[bekijane.livejournal.com]

Usually I'm very happy to join in the fun. I'm just feeling fragile because today was supposed to be my wedding day and it's not now.

[liv]

I'm sorry you're having such an upsetting day. But I think this is why I would never want to get involved in the nastier end of the spectrum of April Fool's pranks, because you never know when someone might be fragile. The risk of hurting someone seems to hugely outweigh the benefit of possibly getting to laugh at them for being gullible.

[rho]

Were you around in support three years ago for the april fools joke pulled then? It got rather messy.

[liv]

No, that was before I was even on LJ. I have heard bits of rumours about that, and I can well imagine people would have been upset about that sort of poor taste. Especially when there's such a huge range of cultural backgrounds among the Support volunteers.

[redbird]

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is about the Moon being made of green cheese, complete with green photo. I wasn't greatly amused, but it's certainly harmless silliness--and they even explain where the idea comes from.

[cheshyre]

Searching for a soulmate?
Google Romance

[liv]

I liked that because it's Google mocking themselves, rather than laughing at other people.

[liv]

That's making a joke about saying something that is obviously untrue in a mock-serious way. I don't mind that, though I agree that particular example a bit lame. It's a very different category from the kind of joke where the supposed humour is in someone believing your fabrication.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm with you, and that's no joke. Making people feel like fools has never been my idea of a good time.

[liv]

Thank you for understanding.

[alsatia.livejournal.com]

On-topic: I hate April Fool's Day.

Off-topic: I'm posting this at 12:39 PM in my timezone, which is EST (the abbreviation looks wrong, I'm not sure why!).

[liv]

Thank you for all your help with sorting out the timezone issues. As you can see, it's now fixed, and I've brought the remote time into the main text instead of the tooltip, because tooltips that long were annoying me. I really like learning from S2 gurus who are also patient with beginners!

[alsatia.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! I'm not crazy about the tooltip part either, but I don't want to put a lot of effort into redesigning the function for my current style since it's not one I created myself and I only plan to use it until I find time to finish one of my own.

[lyssiae.livejournal.com]

Last year as an April Fools, someone who was then on my friends list posted saying that she was feared that she was unexpectedly pregnant, and that she didn't know what to do, especially as - according to this April Fools, of course - abortion wasn't an option for her. I fell for it, and offered any help and support that I could, unconditionally: may others had left comments that began with "If this isn't an April Fools Day thing...", but I thought that wouldn't be charitable.

Of course she was pulling our leg. Further, in her "confession" post, she declared that she would have had an abortion immediately..and that things like that should have given the game away immediately to us. Well, I thought, pardon me for trying to be helpful.

So, other than Dutch university students reading English, this country, thankfully, doesn't seem up on it. I agree that it's not a particularly great custom, one that would do well to die out. I've never been "inspired" to pull an April Fools on anyone - it seemed like a waste of energy, not to mention the whole treating people with less respect than they deserve thing. People might say that I need to lighten up a bit, but I happen to subscribe to this bizarrely old-fashioned idea that everyone is worthy of being treated decently.

I wish that last year's thing hadn't happened. It's made me very cynical about people I meet here; I interact less with them and I'm much more guarded when I meet them. On top of that, this is quite an emotional time of year, the 2nd being John Paul the Great's anniversary, and that little stunt just made it all worse.

Blah.

[liv]

That's a really awful joke. It sounds as if someone was deliberately showing as bad taste as possible. I'm really sad to hear that you came across that and that it upset you so much.

I definitely believe in treating people with respect, and I couldn't care less if that makes me old-fashioned or too serious. I think what's surprising me this year is that people who generally would treat others with respect still think that they should tell hurtful lies on April 1^st, as if that harm suddenly becomes a cool thing to do on that particular day.