posted 2007/04/01 at 23:51
April 1st has come and passed, and thanks to the fact that I pretty much barricaded myself in my room all day, I managed to survive. I can't say that I don't appreciate a good April Fool's joke, it's just that I tend to appreciate them a whole lot more when they aren't done to me. What can I say, I'm not that jovial a person. (That being said, I actually had a couple of ideas for April Fool's jokes I could have done here on the .org, but I didn't want to run the risk that maybe a potential employer would come by here and see it and not realize it was a joke, so once again I played everything safe as can be.)
A thread on one of the messageboards I visit reminded me of the April Fool's jokes that the editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly used to pull back in the day, though. EGM always was my favourite gaming magazine back when I was younger -- I still have all my old copies, although I haven't exactly kept them in collectible condition -- and back in the day they would always sneak something into one of their April issues to confound everyone. There would always be some tell that it was an April Fool's joke, but it was always fun a couple of months later to read the letters they got from readers who fell for their tricks.
One year, though, they decided to hold a contest where readers were supposed to send in a letter saying what that year's April Fool's joke was, and, well, no one got it. The answer was that they misspelled the title of a game on the cover of the magazine (they tripled a consonant that was just supposed to be doubled), and that seemed kind of lame to me. I don't mean to offend anyone at EGM, but misspellings happen, even in professional publications like theirs. I mention this because I thought of doing something similar here, where I'd go back and misspell a word from a post I made six years ago and see if any of you could catch it, but like I said, that just doesn't seem cool to me. Besides, from having gone back and reformatted all my old .journal entries lately, I know that I misspelled enough words back then as it was.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon