My theories on April Fools' jokes, and pranks and hacks in general

[xiphias]

Originally, I was planning on having this post be full of rickrolls (links to the music video of Rick Astley's 1987 hit single "Never Gonna Give You Up" that are pretending to be links to other things), but I'm too lazy.

Because, to me, "rickrolling" is an example of "acceptable pranking". Um, mostly. Right now, it's so overdone that it starts to lose something, but, in general, it fits my rules for what's okay in a prank.

Here are some of my rules:

• The prank may not cause any damage to anything.
  
• The prank must be easily undone and it must be easy to get things back to normal.
  
• The prank must be designed to avoid negative feelings, with the possible exception of a limited amount of initial confusion.
  

That last one is really important. If a prank causes embarrassment, humiliation, shock, fear, worry, disappointment . . . it's a bad prank.

Pranks should be designed to engender amusement, wonder, surprise . . .

I think that a lot of what "Improv Everywhere" does counts as "good pranks". Having a random musical in a mall food court? That's a GOOD prank.

When Lis and I design pranks, that's what we go for -- trying to make people's lives just a bit more PLEASANTLY surreal.

Comments

[vonandmoggy.livejournal.com]

Agreed...I draw the limit on anything that will hurt someone's feelings or cause damage of any sort. My little semi-pranks were all gentle fibs delivered by text message...I just don't have it in me to pull anything really big.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

My rules are exactly like that. I have no sense of humor about pranks that cause harm, no matter how well intended.

I get particularly pissed about wedding pranks. People work HARD to make their weddings nice, and when people do shit like this it infuriates me.

Hey, I should have rickrolled you just there!

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

That wedding pranks thing?

If anyone did that to me, I'd fucking kill them. That is SO NOT OK. ANd I HATE the mocking of the bride in these - like the "help me" on the groom's shoes.

Man. My feelings would be so hurt.

N.

[ailbhe]

That is truly horrible.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

good lord.

A couple of them seemed /possibly/ okay. The 'turn in the keys' thing, if it's sufficiently over the top, or the ring eventually in the crackerjack box. But those both require the couple to have the right sense of humor too...

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

Hell, I know a groom who swapped out the processional music the bridge picked out with the Imperial March from "Star Wars." She was not amused.

Pulling crap like that at a wedding is just so not cool.

[undauntra.livejournal.com]

Hey, the Imperial March is an *awesome* processional! It almost makes me wish I'd thrown a wedding. :)

[ailbhe]

I think doing it on purpose is a bit different.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Yes, a friend of mine chose it for herself at her wedding.

[cheshyre]

Actually, if you're thinking about our former suitemate who married a woman who graduated 2 years before us, I heard a slightly different story.

I had heard that he tipped the band to play the Imperial Death March.
The band took his money and played the John Williams music.
The bride was perfectly fine with that because previously *she* had tipped the band to do the exact same thing. :)

Then again, I didn't attend that wedding, so this is entirely hearsay.

[danceboy.livejournal.com]

At least one person who was at that wedding claims to have ALSO bribed the band to play the IDM...

Evidently the ability to blandly accept money without comment is a requirement for a wedding band.

[jenett]

It is traditional for seniors at this school to do some kind of prank on their last day of classes (there's a 3 week senior project block, so this is in earlyish May)

My all time favorite - because it was non-destructive, easily undone, and *clever* was to plant cheap alarm clocks (set to the same time, during a free study period). We got the hint when the entire senior class showed up in the library, and then we started hearing the clocks go off.

They were *very* clever - they'd obviously gotten someone to let them in later in the evening or very early in the morning, and had had access to a ladder, because they'd gotten a few in the removeable ceiling tiles, one on top of the hanging artwork goose (flat back: they'd gotten it just between the wings) plus a whole bunch of more obvious places - desk drawers, under the library step stools, behind and on top of bookshelves, etc.

We kept finding them for about a month (every day, something'd go off, and we'd track down the closest ones we could isolate), but there were several that never went off, and I still find occasionally.

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

In general, I'm not a big fan of lavish pranks. Mine tend to be purely misdirection, like when my mother demanded I take down the wallpaper in the hallway. So when she got home, she sat down, opened a Diet Coke and said, "So did you get the wallpaper down?"

"Yeah," I said, "but the stuff in the entry hall didn't want to be removed easily. That took a while." [Note: The entry hall had been re-papered a couple of months earlier.] My mom stopped pouring her Diet Coke and got this look on her face that somewhere near to panic. I let her in on the gag and she tossed her empty can at me.

However, the "fill a co-workers office with balloons and confetti" just makes me scratch my head.

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

I always liked silly things... I used to turn pictures upside down and stuff like that. But I detest the fake good news or bad news things people do, especially in public, online. It only tricks kind, uncynical people and hurts their feelings. What a terrible thing to do!

If you want to play tricks on your friends, and you guys are all cool with that... well, I think that's weird, but at least leave me out of it.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and preferably they should have some kind of point rather than just "haha, I fooled you into believing a random lie" the way my mother does it. *eyeroll*

I have a tradition of LEAVING THE INTERNETS FOREVAR for a different reason every year, that's nice and solid.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

I've never been the victim of an April Fools prank before, but today I was...

I'm processing payroll this week - my company has the kind of time sheets that break peoples time down into different tasks (to be billed to different clients of course). So several of my co-workers replaced the task descriptions with things like "doodling at meetings" and "googling" and so forth... silly, and amusing if not terribly complex.

I almost didn't notice, which was kind of embarrassing... in fact I wouldn't have noticed at all, but one of the participants accidentally put in the wrong name as well.

The thing is, it almost didn't come off.

See, payroll is time sensitive, and this week I was really behind. So, when I first noticed the name change, I was amused... and I went (or tried to go) to the guy who did it, so we could laugh about it and I could get the corrected time sheet from him... but he was busy... every time I tried to catch him, he was on to something else - in a meeting, on the phone, etc. So instead of being amused, I ended up quite annoyed... although when I eventually did catch his attention, and caught on to the rest of it, it was pretty amusing again.

And I was wondering what you thought of that, especially in light of #3. How do you classify a prank that might cause negative feelings? Is it a good prank or a bad one? Or does that depend on the actual result of the implementation (i.e. it's a good prank if I'm amused, and a bad one if I'm annoyed)? If some level of risk to people's feelings is acceptable, how much?

Kiralee

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I really loved the Questionable Content April Fools joke.

I went to http://www.questionablecontent.net/ on 1st April - but it wasn't there! Instead, that link took me to Dinosaur Comics.

So I went "Hmmm", Googled Dinosaur Comics (I've seen it before but don't know the URL off by heart), and went to http://www.qwantz.com/. But that wasn't Questionable Content either! It was XKCD!

So, wondering just how many more webcomics I was going to have to go round before I found QC, I went to http://xkcd.com/. And fortunately, that was Questionable Content. Although I would have been totally happy getting a round-robin tour of 20 or so webcomics, because I don't regularly look at all the webcomics in existence, and there might be some really good ones that I'd missed.

No one was hurt, no one was embarrassed, no one needed to worry. But apparently lots of people bitched about it anyway. I guess because they were TOO STUPID to hunt down the comic they wanted to read.

[brooksmoses]

Also, the "Dinosaur Comics" title image linked to the normal URL for Dinosaur Comics, so I went around the cycle that way. I don't know if it would have occurred to me to google for the page, oddly enough.