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No foolin'
In two days, it will once again be April 1. A holiday based on cruelty, where hoaxes, lies and tricks that would be considered unacceptable any other day of the year are laughed off. Where you get censured for not just going along with the "fun", even when you were the butt of the joke.
Needless to say, I don't care for any of it. It's the emotional equivalent of having a holiday based around hitting people with baseball bats, and it's all okay as long as you don't actually kill anyone.
Even leaving aside the likelihood that it started as an expression of religious intolerance (picking on people who insisted on celebrating the start of the year with spring instead of January 1), it has become a sort of anti-Christmas. Instead of a day when you're supposed to love one another all the more, it's a day when you're sneered at for not being amused at the humiliation of others (or yourself!).
Making things worse, most people can't come up with a GOOD prank, a FUNNY hoax, to save their lives. So you can't even laugh at it for reasons other than schadenfruede...joy at the pain of others. The internet is flooded with the weakest of japes, the most overwrought of hoaxes, and the signal to noise ratio (never high to begin with) plummets.
Fools, all of them.
Needless to say, I don't care for any of it. It's the emotional equivalent of having a holiday based around hitting people with baseball bats, and it's all okay as long as you don't actually kill anyone.
Even leaving aside the likelihood that it started as an expression of religious intolerance (picking on people who insisted on celebrating the start of the year with spring instead of January 1), it has become a sort of anti-Christmas. Instead of a day when you're supposed to love one another all the more, it's a day when you're sneered at for not being amused at the humiliation of others (or yourself!).
Making things worse, most people can't come up with a GOOD prank, a FUNNY hoax, to save their lives. So you can't even laugh at it for reasons other than schadenfruede...joy at the pain of others. The internet is flooded with the weakest of japes, the most overwrought of hoaxes, and the signal to noise ratio (never high to begin with) plummets.
Fools, all of them.
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— Screwtape, Letter XI (from the Marvel/Nelson graphic novel adaptation by Charles E. Hall and Pat Redding, as my copy of the Letters is currently still boxed up from our recent move)
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The aspiration element is my attempting to come up with a prank which will be hilarious and entertaining for everyone involved, heightened by the fact that it's April 1, and their chagrin at not having realized. I managed to pull this off once.
At the time I was character staff on Project Infinity MUX (it is teh awesome). The game's director (
The reaction was instantaneous and hilarious. People were stunned, amused, and righteously indignant. The blatancy of this plagiarism was incredible. People started calling other staffers on the phone to get them online to see it.
Ultimately, the administrators ended up exchanging several very polite emails with my nom de plume, and getting caps-locked vitriol (MY FAHTER SI A SYSAMDIN AND HELL GIEV ME A VIRAS 2 CRAHS UR SITE!!11!!11) in return. When the plagiarized director himself finally began to respond in a 'Now see here, young man...' tone, I revealed the charade and everyone had a hearty laugh.
That's the kind of joke I like. Nobody hurt, nobody humiliated, just ridiculous circumstances in which people should have paid more attention to the significance of the date. :)