Demented Rants

Oh the joys of April Fools day…. I was going to come up with some extravagant plot to fool everyone I knew and associated with, but got lost in the Rock Band forums instead.

I stick to the General forum, as it’s normally filled with mass chaos and hysteria, which makes me feel a teensy bit better about myself. See, there are volunteer mods, paid mods and the developers that all hang out on the forums there. Today, though, chaos and hysteria hit a new level. The volunteer mods banned all the HMX community crew. (Now, mind you it’s not hard for a mod to unban himself but it was all fun and the mods got the day off essentially). This was just the beginning though.

We soon realized words such as “rock” “band” “guitar” “drum” etc had been banned and were all showing up as just asterisks, which made people like RockBandRocker show up with the most offensive looking name available on the forum if you quoted any of his posts.

It then evolved into a day of pretending to be someone else on the forum. I started with HeyRiles and moved onto Alright_Computer. (I love the kitteh but didn’t want to be away from the forum when Riles showed up and freaked out lol.) Bermuddy was me, RenRock was Daesania and Mex was a 15 year old ErinGoesMoo.

Of course, a few people saw this as a bunch of grown adults acting immature, but screw it. It’s the internet. Why would anyone take it so seriously on a forum that has a thread called “What are you doing right now part 2″ in which we hold conversations like we were in a chat room?

Oh well, to those people I say:

Today was filled with oddities all over the net from some of the biggest names around:

Google introduced CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

CADIE is an “AI” that believes she is outgrowing her creators. She blogs on blogspot regularly now, about her love of pandas and how google devs are “doing it wrong”.

You-Tube’s New Viewing Experience

Check it out for yourself! As per you-tube’s info page about the new view: “At YouTube, we’re always looking to improve the way you watch videos online. As part of that, today we’re excited to introduce our new page layout.” Some of the “tips” for this new experience involve turning your monitor upside down or even moving to Australia.

Wikipedia’s New Main Page

Hilarity continues with wiki’s new Main Page citing new finds that we were totally unaware of such as:

• 1293 – Robert Winchelsey left England for Rome to be consecrated by the Pope, only to find that there was none.
• 2006 – As mandated by a 2005 Act of the British Parliament, several British policing agencies joined together to become very serious.

Conficker Worm

I’m still convinced that this was the best laid out April Fools joke ever. Creating more panic than the Y2K bug, this teensy worm has caused people to actually unplug their lives from the internet for the entire day (because yea, that’s gonna make a difference). It’s now 6:30PM and there hasn’t been any damage reported, and I doubt it was because you turned off your modem.

Game Informer

Of course, no April 1st is complete without Game Informer’s 2009 Compendium with such gems as “Elder Scrolls: Oblivion DLC Prices Slashed… Mostly”, “IGN Gets The Scoop On Super Smash Bros. Brawl X: Extreme” and “World of Warcraft Introduces New Dance Battle System”. The Rock Band forums even got a note in there about our calamity

This year’s April Fool’s celebrations were definitely amongst some of the best, many of which I didn’t even cite including all of the Google associated ones (Gmail Autopilot anyone) and the various other gaming ones. For a list of those that happened today, check out The Museum of Hoaxes.