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

[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.