Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

April Foolishness

The Internet is a dan­ger­ous place at the best of times, but April 1^st is a spe­cial case. If you’re at all given to swings of naiv­ete, com­pas­sion, or self-doubt, the best advice I can give is that you stay off the ‘net for the entire dur­a­tion of April Fools Day, from its narrow-eyed wak­ing begin­ning in Auckland, New Zealand (GMT +12) to its bloody, drunk and sad­istic con­clu­sion in San Francisco, USA (GMT –8). Gone is the safe haven of the over-by-noon con­ven­tion — with the inex­haust­ible and global nature of the Internet as we know it, you can expect to be fooled all day.

Pretty much every major web­site has a piss-around for April Fools, includ­ing Slashdot, Wikipedia, Google, and so on. Other high­lights this year included TuckerMax.com (a story about hav­ing sex with a pig) and WordPress.com. Slashdot is a par­tic­u­larly knarly con­tender, as the major­ity of the gag stor­ies it car­ries on April 1^st require some scru­tiny in order to verify their gag nature. This, espe­cially to a fra­gile I’ve-just-woken-up me, is a stress­ful task.