April Fools' Day has now become my second favorite holiday. Halloween is first.
I appreciate anything that can make me laugh and today proved to be a good day for that. I first visited ThinkGeek.com, who always unveils new fake gadgets on April 1st. Last year I believe they had canned unicorn meat, and the year before they had a Tauntaun sleeping bag (remember when Luke sleeps in the slain Tauntaun to stay warm in The Empire Strikes Back?). Both items eventually became so popular that they ended up making them for real. This year they unveiled a slew of things, including Angry Birds pork rinds and arsenic-based sea monkeys. My favorite was the Star Wars lightsaber popsicles. I would buy those in a heartbeat! Hopefully they actually make these and it's totally ok if you want to buy them for my birthday.
Xkcd.com was next on my list. Xkcd is a webcomic about romance, sarcasm, math, and language (that's what it says on the website). It's a really fun comic for anyone, but you'll especially love it if you're into sciencey stuff. Last year Randall, the writer, turned the site into a unix console, so instead of clicking forward, next, etc., you type in your commands just like in a terminal or command shell. He actually still has that available here: unix xkcd. This year he and a bunch of readers made every comic 3D. When you move your mouse around the screen the perspective changes, giving the comic depth and making it seem like you are looking into a room filled with his stick figure characters.
Xkcd also has a forum, where readers can discuss the comics and other things, such as coding and sports. This week apparently is "Mod Madness," which they coincided with April Fools. The forum admins set up a parser that changes specific words found throughout the forums to something else. For example, anywhere you see the word "thread" you would now see "powwow." Since these are a bunch of geeky guys, phrases like "the speed of light" would get changed to the actual equation for the speed of light! Little things were done too, like "of" was changed to "o'" (so everyone sounded Irish) and they changed the letter S in some words to a tall s, ſ. It may not sound that fun here, but I spent a good part of my day reading the forums, laughing at all of the silly sentences and words that came up. I could go on forever listing all of the things they changed, but you can just take a look for yourself if you want: xkcd forums.
There were a bunch of other good ones too, like Google's Gmail Motion, a British newspaper saying that Portugal is selling Ronaldo (their star soccer player) to Spain to pay off their debt (The Independent), and LinkedIn.com listing historical people we might know, like Sherlock Holmes and Groucho Marx. If you looked at any of those links, I hope you found them somewhat amusing. Did you discover any other funny April Fools' jokes today? Feel free to share.. I'm always up for some humor.
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