Speaker 1: Get in Touch with Technology with tex Stuff from Hey
Speaker 1: the guys, it's Jonathan from tech Stuff and today is
Speaker 1: a special day. This episode is publishing on April first,
Speaker 1: two thousand and fifteen, and that means it's an April
Speaker 1: Pool's edition of the show. Now, I could have done
Speaker 1: something super lame, like claimed that Chris Palette was coming
Speaker 1: back to the show or that some other amazing co
Speaker 1: host was going to join on permanently, But honestly, that's
Speaker 1: just not fair to you guys and would kind of
Speaker 1: make me upset too. So instead I thought I would
Speaker 1: try something else. And I debated about recording a show
Speaker 1: about some sort of fake technology, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: perpetual motion device or something. But instead of all that,
Speaker 1: I decided, let's just look back on some of the
Speaker 1: best and worst April Fools Joe in the tech sector. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not the first time tech Stuff has looked
Speaker 1: at April Fools. There are episodes from two thousand nine
Speaker 1: with Chris Pallette and two thousand thirteen with Lauren Vogelbaum
Speaker 1: that covers some of the famous stories, so you should
Speaker 1: check out those episodes to learn of earlier examples of
Speaker 1: tech Tomfoolery. I'll be focusing on more recent jokes, hoaxes,
Speaker 1: and scams, and sometimes outright lies for today's episode. If
Speaker 1: you follow tech news, you're probably aware that many tech
Speaker 1: journalists detest April Fools Day with a passion that burns
Speaker 1: brighter than a thousand exploding suns. Part of the reason
Speaker 1: is that it can sometimes be difficult to separate the
Speaker 1: fact from the fiction, as lots of tech companies love
Speaker 1: to indulge in some silly antics on that day. Part
Speaker 1: of the problem is that not everyone knows how to
Speaker 1: tell a joke, and sometimes the jokes aren't particularly funny.
Speaker 1: Reporting on unfunny jokes or what you suspect to be
Speaker 1: a joke can be a real pain. So I'm sure
Speaker 1: a few of those journalists maybe sour pusses who don't
Speaker 1: find any humor and fake product announcements or press releases
Speaker 1: that are just elaborate hoaxes. Personally, I still find a
Speaker 1: good April Fool's joke to be really entertaining, but then
Speaker 1: I don't have to report on the news. With all
Speaker 1: that in mind, it's time to dive right in. Here
Speaker 1: are some of the big jokes from the past couple
Speaker 1: of years, starting with That's the year when Apple announced
Speaker 1: a new gaming console called the I Play. Johnny I've
Speaker 1: himself introduced it in a video. Apple explained that the
Speaker 1: elegant design and simple form factor made the device a beauty.
Speaker 1: It connects seamlessly to television systems, and it plays the
Speaker 1: only video game that really matters, Angry Birds. That's all
Speaker 1: it plays, according to Apple, is the only game you need,
Speaker 1: and so the I Play would only feature Angry Birds. Now.
Speaker 1: I love this joke because it poked fun at something
Speaker 1: we had all noticed. Angry Birds was everywhere. You could
Speaker 1: play it on your smartphone, on your tablet, video game consoles,
Speaker 1: even set top boxes like the Roku allowed you to
Speaker 1: play Angry Birds. So of course Apple would make a
Speaker 1: game console product, and of course you could only play
Speaker 1: Angry Birds on it. And of course, Apple, the company
Speaker 1: that people like me criticized for telling us what we
Speaker 1: really want, would state that this was enough. My favorite
Speaker 1: line from the video reveal was when I first told
Speaker 1: you about the I Play, I was excited, and nothing
Speaker 1: has changed. They also mentioned that you could get the
Speaker 1: new I Play, the I Play for S, and the
Speaker 1: I Play five g all at launch, So it was
Speaker 1: fun seeing Apple reflect on their cultural image and make
Speaker 1: some jokes about it. Google always does a few things
Speaker 1: for April Fool's Day. In two thousand thirteen, the company
Speaker 1: announced that Google was going to shut down YouTube because
Speaker 1: the winning video had finally been found In a video
Speaker 1: posted on YouTube, The company revealed that YouTube wasn't actually
Speaker 1: a video hosting site, It was a contest for the
Speaker 1: best video. The joke claimed that YouTube would shut down
Speaker 1: at midnight and a team of judges consisting of movie critics,
Speaker 1: YouTube celebrities, and people who left lots of comments would
Speaker 1: gather together and debate which video was best. Then the
Speaker 1: service would come back online in twenty three after having
Speaker 1: watched all of videos ever submit YouTube and feature the
Speaker 1: winning video and nothing else. I thought this was also
Speaker 1: a pretty funny joke, something no one would really take seriously,
Speaker 1: and something that just folkes fun at the cultural phenomenon
Speaker 1: that YouTube had become. But some people did take it
Speaker 1: seriously and we're worried that all their videos were going
Speaker 1: to be a race forever. Of course, that didn't happen.
Speaker 1: Google has a lot of divisions besides YouTube, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them will get involved in April Fool's Day.
Speaker 1: So Another one in two thousand thirteen was Google Maps,
Speaker 1: which introduced treasure mode. Now. In this prank, Google claims
Speaker 1: that it had uncovered treasure maps from Captain Kidd himself
Speaker 1: that included codes and riddles that would lead to treasure.
Speaker 1: Google claimed it had scanned most of the maps and
Speaker 1: that using your smartphone or tablet along with other devices,
Speaker 1: you could uncover clues. Now, some clues would require you
Speaker 1: to hold your phone up to sunlight so that the
Speaker 1: camera could detect the light and then you would see
Speaker 1: where X marks the spot. Others would require you to
Speaker 1: get together with groups of people and you'd all put
Speaker 1: your phones and tablets together like a puzzle, and then
Speaker 1: the X would be revealed that way. In reality, you
Speaker 1: could view Google Maps as if it were an antique
Speaker 1: map from the eighteenth century, which by itself was pretty cool. Sadly, however,
Speaker 1: there was no booty to be found. Believe me, I looked.
Speaker 1: Gmail joke was Gmail Blue, which was a jab at
Speaker 1: Microsoft for Windows Blue, which was meant to create small
Speaker 1: updates to Windows eight Gmails. Blue update asked the question,
Speaker 1: how do we redesign and create something while keeping it
Speaker 1: exactly the same. It did, however, turn Gmail blue for
Speaker 1: a day, So there's that. Now, this is an example
Speaker 1: of one company taking a pot shot at another using
Speaker 1: the April Wouls Day explanation as sort of a shield.
Speaker 1: And it's not the only example I have in this list,
Speaker 1: so we'll come up to some other ones a little
Speaker 1: bit later. And of course the main branch of Google
Speaker 1: had to introduce something new as well. In this case
Speaker 1: it was Google Knows. It claimed to introduce aromas to
Speaker 1: your computing experience with more than fifteen million scent to
Speaker 1: bytes of nasal information. Now you could explore the web
Speaker 1: and indulge your sense of smell along with your other
Speaker 1: information and the search results. So if you were searching
Speaker 1: for flowers, your computer would emit the lovely smells of roses,
Speaker 1: for example. Now Google said it could use the photons
Speaker 1: from light sources and the computer itself to organize molecules
Speaker 1: properly to stimulate the smell, and of course the entire
Speaker 1: project was in beta. You could also use your smartphone
Speaker 1: to find out what that weird smell you were detecting
Speaker 1: actually was. Clearly all of this is science fiction. You
Speaker 1: couldn't really do that. Right now, But who knows, Maybe
Speaker 1: we'll get our sense of smell in the future and
Speaker 1: be able to search very, very carefully. Meanwhile, Twitter announced
Speaker 1: it was going to start charging for vowels. If you
Speaker 1: compose messages without vowels, you could use Twitter t W
Speaker 1: T t R and that would remain free. Vowels would
Speaker 1: come at a premium service at five dollars a month. Why, however,
Speaker 1: would remain free of charge since it's only a sometimes vowel.
Speaker 1: Then you have Tashiba, which announced a three and a
Speaker 1: half giga Hurts twelve or processor gaming device with four
Speaker 1: gigabyte RAM graphics processing card and infrared sensors as a
Speaker 1: competitor to the Connect. They didn't name it in their
Speaker 1: press release, but that was essentially the message. Now. According
Speaker 1: to the specs page on this fake device, it could
Speaker 1: scan your room fifty seven thousand, six d forty two
Speaker 1: times per second to make sure your gaming experience was
Speaker 1: as accurate as possible. It was called the Sheba Sphere.
Speaker 1: Now I would let families play games together like Contract Negotiation,
Speaker 1: where you pretend to sit at a table and argue
Speaker 1: over contractual clauses, or the Travel Simulator, which required you
Speaker 1: to take off your shoes and belt as if you
Speaker 1: were going through airport security. Mostly the video existed to
Speaker 1: make fun of motion control systems like the Connect and
Speaker 1: suggesting that perhaps it wasn't as compelling an experience as
Speaker 1: the companies would want you to believe. But if you
Speaker 1: ever wanted to pretend like you were having contractual meeting
Speaker 1: with your loved ones, I guess that would be the
Speaker 1: way to go. All right, this one might be my favorite.
Speaker 1: From two thousand thirteen, Netflix created a special category for
Speaker 1: the day. That category was movies featuring an epic Nicolas
Speaker 1: Cage meltdown, which, to be fair, it's pretty much every
Speaker 1: Nicholas Cage movie ever made, and fortunately Netflix had a
Speaker 1: lot of them saved up so that you can actually
Speaker 1: watch them. The service also offered other joke categories, like
Speaker 1: movies that are in English but still requires subtitles, an
Speaker 1: example being trained Spotting. Since then, Netflix has experimented with
Speaker 1: playful categories, particularly those involving characters from Netflix original series.
Speaker 1: One of my favorites is watched by Buster Bluth, character
Speaker 1: from Arrested Development, which includes choices like hands of orlock
Speaker 1: hook and Freaks and Geeks, which makes a lot of
Speaker 1: sense if you've ever watched the show and you know
Speaker 1: the character or a bust blue. Meanwhile, Hulu advertised fake
Speaker 1: shows that were featured within other television series, such as
Speaker 1: Rural Juror, which was a fake TV series featured in
Speaker 1: the show thirty Rock, or You Heard with Pard, which
Speaker 1: was featured in Parks and Recreation. Video, on its hand,
Speaker 1: acknowledged that the power of cat videos was overwhelming, and
Speaker 1: so had become vimeow for the day instead of vimo.
Speaker 1: All your cat videos would now belong in one place,
Speaker 1: without the distractions of other videos that feature different life
Speaker 1: forms or subject material. I'm actually kind of amazed they
Speaker 1: didn't stick with that strategy. Skypes, April Fool's joke was
Speaker 1: introducing a new feature called Skype in space. You see,
Speaker 1: we had become used to the idea of making Skype
Speaker 1: calls from across the world, but what about when we
Speaker 1: happen to be across the galaxy from each other? So
Speaker 1: Skypes new program would allow people to beam conversations across
Speaker 1: vast reaches of space, and it would have useful features
Speaker 1: like an auto rotate function, so that as you float
Speaker 1: around in microgravity, the screen would always stay right side
Speaker 1: up from your perspective. The biggest challenge, according to Skype,
Speaker 1: was that the speed of light was still a limiting factor,
Speaker 1: meaning that if you're really far away from the other person,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be some delays in your conversation. Virgin Airlines
Speaker 1: announced that it was going to introduce a glass bottomed
Speaker 1: plane for April Fools. Now, that way you could actually
Speaker 1: watch the world pass beneath you as you saw at
Speaker 1: thirty thousand feet. Got a feeling that would have had
Speaker 1: a negative effect on folks who already find air travel stressful.
Speaker 1: And another company, a big one that routinely makes great
Speaker 1: April Fools jokes, is Thinking. In two thousand thirteen, one
Speaker 1: of those jokes was the play Dough three D printer.
Speaker 1: It supposed they could connect to an iPad and that's
Speaker 1: where you would create your three D too signed before
Speaker 1: sending it to be printed in play Do. It even
Speaker 1: featured three extruders for the play do giving you up
Speaker 1: to three colors to build with simultaneously, which is pretty
Speaker 1: impressive compared to actual three D printers on the market,
Speaker 1: many of which are limited to a single color per printing. Now.
Speaker 1: Sadly this never became a real product, unlike some of
Speaker 1: the jokes that have come out of Think Geek in
Speaker 1: the past. The other Think Geek fakes in included the
Speaker 1: Bain Mask walkie talkies, which would change your voice to
Speaker 1: sound like the Batman villain, or the Eye of Salon
Speaker 1: desk lamp, which I actually want for myself, though the
Speaker 1: price tag was pretty hefty on that fake product, so
Speaker 1: if they ever make a real one and it's not
Speaker 1: ridiculously expensive, I'll buy it. Also in two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: Star Trek alumnus and Internet superstar George t Kay got
Speaker 1: into the by announcing he had been cast as a
Speaker 1: Jedi Master in the upcoming Star Wars film. That's a
Speaker 1: shame that we won't get to see Sulu wield a
Speaker 1: lightsaber the same way he handled a foil in the
Speaker 1: iconic Star Trek original series episode The Naked Time. That's
Speaker 1: the one where he ends up getting affected by this
Speaker 1: stuff that makes an act of crazy and he believes
Speaker 1: himself to be a musketeer and then he buckles everyone's swashes.
Speaker 1: It would have been interesting to see the Jedi version
Speaker 1: of this character, and of course having a crossover uh
Speaker 1: Star Trek and Star Wars character or actor at any
Speaker 1: rate would have been a lot of fun. But it
Speaker 1: was just a joke. Now, perhaps the award for least
Speaker 1: funny joke in two thousand thirteen, at least for folks
Speaker 1: who live in the United States, goes to the National
Speaker 1: Turk Online newspaper. The news site reported that an eight
Speaker 1: point seven magnitude earthquake had hit Washington, d C. And
Speaker 1: that many famous landmarks were destroyed or were burning, and
Speaker 1: that President Obama had been evacuated to Norad. I should
Speaker 1: probably do a full episode on Norad sometime. That would
Speaker 1: be a pretty cool topic. At any rate, this entire
Speaker 1: story was reported in a very straightforward way, including a
Speaker 1: bit about a tsunami affecting Halifax, Nova Scotia, And at
Speaker 1: the very end of the article, which had no indication
Speaker 1: that it was actually a joke, there was this sentence
Speaker 1: and it's this is verbatim the way it was written
Speaker 1: on the site. You can actually go and read it
Speaker 1: right now, and it's written the same way. This is
Speaker 1: a April fool. Thank you for your understanding exclamation point. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe the whole thing is much funnier in Turkish, but
Speaker 1: on the face of it, this sounds more of what
Speaker 1: I'd like to call a fib than a joke, and
Speaker 1: it reminds me of some sites that do the stuff
Speaker 1: all the time, every single day. But that's another podcast.
Speaker 1: I could do a full episode just talking about fake
Speaker 1: news sites that claim to be satire but in fact
Speaker 1: just report fake news in a way that doesn't indicate
Speaker 1: that it's a joke. Uh, something that I find really irritating.
Speaker 1: Kind of curious what you guys think. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: that brings us up to two thousand and fourteen. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about some of the jokes that came out that year.
Speaker 1: There were some big themes in There were a lot
Speaker 1: of things about wearable technology. There were a lot of
Speaker 1: things about video games, and obviously I just picked picked
Speaker 1: in a few from the various sources there were so many.
Speaker 1: And that's part of the reason I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are getting sick of April Fool's Day in
Speaker 1: the tech world is that everyone tries to get in
Speaker 1: on this, and not everyone does a great job of it.
Speaker 1: So Microsoft made me both wins and smile simultaneously April
Speaker 1: Fool's Day, and that kind of hurt and away. If
Speaker 1: you logged into office dot com and opened up a
Speaker 1: new document or a new spreadsheet, you were greeted by
Speaker 1: an old friend. That's right, Clippy, the helpful paper clip
Speaker 1: that nobody liked, pops up and tries to ruin your
Speaker 1: day by suggesting what to do next. It was amusing
Speaker 1: to see, but still just as irritating as ever. Google
Speaker 1: Chrome's big joke was that it would now have an
Speaker 1: automatic emoji translation service so that you could use it
Speaker 1: when viewing websites. Now why you didn't have to worry
Speaker 1: about what a site is actually trying to say or
Speaker 1: how it was trying to say it. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about misinterpreting it because you could get the
Speaker 1: whole gist of it just from a winky face or
Speaker 1: a shy snowman or some other emoji. The whole concept
Speaker 1: was explained in a video demonstrating how the team was
Speaker 1: able to boil down complex concepts into a series of
Speaker 1: simple images. They showed how everything from videos, subtitles to
Speaker 1: medical journals could be emogified. This is another one of
Speaker 1: those that I think is is pretty cute. It's worth watching.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily laugh out loud funny, but you know, I'm
Speaker 1: sure you'll crack a smile. Maybe YouTube's big joke was
Speaker 1: claiming that it was responsible for all those viral videos
Speaker 1: you know and love or hate or are indifferent to anyway.
Speaker 1: A video explained how YouTube writers meticulously crafted every viral
Speaker 1: video from jankat to skateboard fails to GANDAM style and
Speaker 1: everything in between. So everything was supposedly orchestrated from scratch
Speaker 1: and created by YouTube as opposed to submitted to YouTube
Speaker 1: and then just went viral. And they even gave us
Speaker 1: a sneak peek at trends that were supposed to become
Speaker 1: big in that included clocking, which was the next generation
Speaker 1: of crazy physical activities like planking. Now in this case,
Speaker 1: clocking is when you go to a location and hold
Speaker 1: your arms up like you're an analog clock, and then
Speaker 1: you move your arms so that they are in line
Speaker 1: with the correct time, and you keep correct time for
Speaker 1: as long as you can. According to the video, the
Speaker 1: longer you do it, the funnier it is. Other trends
Speaker 1: that they said were in store for us included cake bumping,
Speaker 1: which is just casually knocking cakes off of tables, uh
Speaker 1: Wolf mask t ball, the Harlem Shake again, and geology
Speaker 1: another amusing video. I think check that one out to
Speaker 1: All of these that I mentioned are still up, so
Speaker 1: you can actually go back and find them if you
Speaker 1: miss them the first time. Now, Google Maps had something
Speaker 1: that I ended up playing with pretty much on and
Speaker 1: off all day on April Fools Day last year. It
Speaker 1: was a new feature that allowed you to explore cities
Speaker 1: while tracking down and capture ring Pokemon monsters, or as
Speaker 1: Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth refers to them, pokemons, which
Speaker 1: I think is my preferred way of designating them. But
Speaker 1: as you discovered the little critters, you could click on
Speaker 1: them and then add them to your Poka decks, which
Speaker 1: I guess is your index of pokemons. You didn't have
Speaker 1: the ability to actually hold spontaneous Pokemon battles with nearby folks, unfortunately.
Speaker 1: It was really just kind of looking around to see
Speaker 1: which Pokemon monsters you were missing from your Poka decks
Speaker 1: and capturing them. Uh, Larger cities had a lot more
Speaker 1: of them than smaller cities. Tokyo had a ton of them.
Speaker 1: As I recall, I never collected all of them, so
Speaker 1: I did not catch them all. Very sad. Now, to
Speaker 1: wrap up the Google extravaganza for the Google Plus social
Speaker 1: network added an Auto Awesome photo Bomb feature. So Google
Speaker 1: Plus has this Auto Awesome feature that will automatically enhance
Speaker 1: pictures for you. Then you can choose whether or not
Speaker 1: they get posted to your account. So, for example, I
Speaker 1: took a picture in a snowy field one day when
Speaker 1: it was snowing overhead, and the Auto Awesome feature created
Speaker 1: an animated layer of snowflakes falling down my actual picture,
Speaker 1: which was kind of cool. In this case, it was
Speaker 1: an Auto Awesome photo bomb feature which would insert an
Speaker 1: image of Baywatch and Night Riders star David David Hasselhoff
Speaker 1: into the photo, so you get David hassel Off photo
Speaker 1: bombing you. I had a friend who had this show
Speaker 1: up and it looked hilarious. Never got any of my
Speaker 1: pictures to do this, though, so I was a little
Speaker 1: left out. Uh So, David, if you're listening, um, maybe
Speaker 1: we can get a photo together sometime. Canadian airline west
Speaker 1: Jet announced it was converting to metric time with a video.
Speaker 1: Metric time, according to WestJet, includes million minutes and keylow minutes,
Speaker 1: and they and included a simple conversion formulas that you
Speaker 1: can be as accurate as possible, which involved multiplying by
Speaker 1: a certain number, subtracting another number, converting it over. It
Speaker 1: was ridiculous, and you know, I'm using Perhaps this might
Speaker 1: have been my favorite video. The apparel company Bnobo's entered
Speaker 1: a new line of shirts with Internet connectivity through what
Speaker 1: they called Wi Fiber, which already was cute, but the
Speaker 1: video really made me chuckle a couple of times. It's
Speaker 1: supposedly linked your clothing to an artificially intelligent personal assistance,
Speaker 1: so sort of like Siri or Cortana or the Google
Speaker 1: Voice assistant, and I guess that one doesn't have a name. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this particular personal assistant would get a little crazy or
Speaker 1: do things that you didn't necessarily wanted to do. It
Speaker 1: could do some useful stuff like alert you to the
Speaker 1: temperature outside and even suggest if you need to put
Speaker 1: on extra layers of clothings that you stay warm, but
Speaker 1: it could do crazy things too. In the demo they show,
Speaker 1: the shirt ends up sending a Facebook message to the guy.
Speaker 1: The guy who's wearing the shirt, it sends it to
Speaker 1: his ex girlfriend, which he then says, why would you
Speaker 1: do that? And then it likes the message on Facebook
Speaker 1: and he just totally loses it and it's pretty amusing.
Speaker 1: It's actually a really funny video. I recommend checking out
Speaker 1: the Benobo's video on tech. It's called tech style, as
Speaker 1: in tech and style put together as instead of textile.
Speaker 1: You gotta see the whole joke. And I actually own
Speaker 1: the same shirt that's in the video, which I thought
Speaker 1: was kind of funny. Um. It does not, however, talk
Speaker 1: to me or do crazy things. Highly recommend checking that
Speaker 1: one out. It was one of the funnier ones of
Speaker 1: the year, and wearable tech, like I said, was not
Speaker 1: surprisingly a huge topic in jokes. Fourteen Toeshiba, HTC and
Speaker 1: Samsung all announced smart gloves complete with different gesture user
Speaker 1: interface aces. Some of them had screens. Uh. Very predictable
Speaker 1: considering how popular wearable technology was getting in tween. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'll be shocked if the day you're listening to this,
Speaker 1: if we don't have at least three or four examples
Speaker 1: of silly wearables as jokes, I'll be completely shocked. Probably
Speaker 1: augmented reality too. I'm gonna go ahead and take a
Speaker 1: wild stab at that. With things like the hollow lens
Speaker 1: and uh magic Leap coming out, I'm i imagine we're
Speaker 1: going to see some really crazy augmented reality jokes. Back
Speaker 1: in though, I g n ran a video that got
Speaker 1: some gamers hopes up. They claimed that the video game
Speaker 1: titan Fall, in which you compete in uh in military
Speaker 1: style games with other players who all of whom are
Speaker 1: playing as pilots who can control enormous mex so you
Speaker 1: run around in these games. You can either play as
Speaker 1: your pilot who can jump really far and shoots guns
Speaker 1: and stuff, or you can get into a mech whenever
Speaker 1: the max land whenever you can call one in and
Speaker 1: now you're a giant robot that can shoot stuff. You're
Speaker 1: still the pilot in sight, so you can actually eject
Speaker 1: from the robot. It's pretty cool concept, and it was
Speaker 1: really popular before it finally kind of died down. But
Speaker 1: they said that they were introducing new downloadable content that
Speaker 1: inserted Optimist Prime from the Transformers series into video gameplay,
Speaker 1: which would have been incredible. The idea of getting someone
Speaker 1: as iconic a figure as iconic is Optimist Prime incorporated
Speaker 1: into a an independent video game like that would have
Speaker 1: been a lot of fun. But if you clicked on
Speaker 1: the headline and you watched the video that was supposedly
Speaker 1: footage of this. It was purposefully an amateurish representation of
Speaker 1: Optimist Prime in the video game, which pretty much revealed
Speaker 1: it was a joke. If you paid close attention and
Speaker 1: saw that the link at the end was to I
Speaker 1: g N, then you would know it was a joke.
Speaker 1: But uh yeah, it was not a very um accurate
Speaker 1: representation of what Optimist Prime looks like, and his truck
Speaker 1: form also looked pretty rough. However, it was a really
Speaker 1: cool idea that got a lot of people's hopes up
Speaker 1: when they first saw the headline. Now, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if the next video game, April Fool's Joke I want
Speaker 1: to talk about is really a joke or more of
Speaker 1: a taunt. So there's this guy named Phil Fish, and
Speaker 1: gamers know who I'm talking about. He's famous or infamous,
Speaker 1: depending upon your point of view, and he's the developer
Speaker 1: behind the independent video game Fez, which is a really innovative,
Speaker 1: fun video game, and he had all but vanished after
Speaker 1: announcing that Fez two, which was long in development, had
Speaker 1: been canceled. He kind of had a pretty famous the
Speaker 1: debate argument meltdown. All depends upon whom you ask in
Speaker 1: uh In in two thousand and fourteen and kind of disappeared,
Speaker 1: so he had shut down his Twitter account, made it
Speaker 1: private so people couldn't read it unless they were already
Speaker 1: on his list. But then he in on April first,
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen, he turned it public again. He went
Speaker 1: on Twitter and he said that he was back and
Speaker 1: Fez two was back in development. Not long after that
Speaker 1: he disappeared again, went back to private. So it was
Speaker 1: clearly a joke. He did not actually mean it, and
Speaker 1: a lot of video gamers were very sad. Another video
Speaker 1: game joke that might have gone out with without full
Speaker 1: approval was a message that came from e A's Frostbite
Speaker 1: three engine Twitter feed. So this is specifically a video
Speaker 1: game engine developed by e A called Frostbite three. It
Speaker 1: has its own Twitter handle to tweet out news about it,
Speaker 1: and on that day, on April one, the tweet went
Speaker 1: out that the company had decided to bring the engine
Speaker 1: to the Wii U console because it was actually the
Speaker 1: most powerful console among the current game systems. So the
Speaker 1: actual tweet read Frostbite now runs on the hashtag we
Speaker 1: you since it is the most powerful gin for platform.
Speaker 1: Our renderer is now optimized for Mario and Zelda. So
Speaker 1: essentially this was a little backhanded comment meant to poke
Speaker 1: fun at Nintendo and say, ha ha ha, look how
Speaker 1: underpowered their console is. And even if they could use us,
Speaker 1: what would they use us for these little kiddie games
Speaker 1: like Mario and Zelda. That seemed to be the implication
Speaker 1: from that message, and a lot of people called attention
Speaker 1: to it and said it was mean spirited and misplaced,
Speaker 1: and apparently e A ended up agreeing. They deleted that tweet,
Speaker 1: and the c o oh, the chief operating officer of
Speaker 1: e A, Peter Moore, actually went online and apologized for
Speaker 1: that tweet. So sometimes jokes don't go the way you
Speaker 1: thought they would. Also, in the Right for a House
Speaker 1: of Cards, bo Willman leaked a page of script from
Speaker 1: the House of Cards third season, which had not come
Speaker 1: out yet. In the leaked page revealed that Kevin Spacey's
Speaker 1: character Francis Frank is addressing the citizens of the United
Speaker 1: States on the fourth of July when aliens attack, and
Speaker 1: very slowly that transforms frank speech into a copy of
Speaker 1: the one from Independence Day. If only uh, that would
Speaker 1: have been a lot of fun. Also really weird, but
Speaker 1: I mean, we're watching Frank play various games like a
Speaker 1: like a The Monument game on his uh mobile device,
Speaker 1: so maybe we would see something more ridiculous like that
Speaker 1: pop up. Probably not. Netflix ended up releasing videos of
Speaker 1: reverse footage of food that was cooking. I remember showing
Speaker 1: this to Matt Frederick here at the office and he
Speaker 1: actually had it on in the background for way longer
Speaker 1: than any human being should ever have. One of these videos,
Speaker 1: so you can actually watch food uncooked because they shot
Speaker 1: footage of bacon cooking in one and I think of
Speaker 1: rotisserie chicken cooking in another. Then they reversed the footage
Speaker 1: and it lasted a really long time, like forty minutes
Speaker 1: or more, and you could watch as the food would
Speaker 1: uncook over time and become raw meat. It's just as
Speaker 1: enticing as it sounds now. Going back over to Think Geek,
Speaker 1: we had the Mr Beard Beard Machine, which supposedly could
Speaker 1: bond hair to your face, giving you the beard or
Speaker 1: mustache you always wanted. With the touch of a button.
Speaker 1: You would just pick the style you would want and
Speaker 1: insert the appropriate B cup, which I imagine had DRM
Speaker 1: on it, similar to curing cups, and you're all set
Speaker 1: Each cup had the picture of whatever hairstyle you wanted
Speaker 1: for your face. They also introduced the Nerf Nuke, which
Speaker 1: was a NERF weapon that could launch up to eighty
Speaker 1: NERF darts simultaneously in all directions. It was the last
Speaker 1: resort weapon. Other joke products included a Rosetta stone kit
Speaker 1: for Klingon and a dark mage l ed spell casting staff.
Speaker 1: Those were equally bogus, but a few joke products found
Speaker 1: their way into Think Geek's actual store in two and
Speaker 1: this does happen on occasion where I think Geek will
Speaker 1: use April Fool's Day, not just to post jokes, but
Speaker 1: the kind of test out ideas that maybe they're not
Speaker 1: entirely sure there's an audience for. In this case, it
Speaker 1: included the Flux Capacitor charging station that you could plug
Speaker 1: into a car's twelve vault power adapter. It would look
Speaker 1: like the Flex capacitor from Back to the Future and
Speaker 1: then you would plug in USB cords there. Or how
Speaker 1: about the dos ken in Stein, which would convert boring
Speaker 1: old beer cans into beer stein's temporarily at any rate.
Speaker 1: You would slide them into this handle that would look
Speaker 1: like a steinhandle complete with ornate stein cap that became
Speaker 1: a real thing too. Or how about the magical Unicorn
Speaker 1: Drinking Horn, a drinking vessel made to look like a
Speaker 1: unicorn horn. All of those were presented as jokes, but
Speaker 1: the response was positive enough for Think Geek to make
Speaker 1: real versions. Still waiting for Mr Beard, however, and perhaps
Speaker 1: the cruelest joke of two thousand fourteen, This one actually
Speaker 1: has some stiff competition. Here's a couple of different jokes
Speaker 1: that I think might have hit the audience particularly hard.
Speaker 1: One of them came from TV Addict, which published a
Speaker 1: story claiming Netflix was reviving the short lived but beloved
Speaker 1: science fiction series Firefly. Brown Coats across the Internet briefly
Speaker 1: rejoiced as they heard that Captain Mal and his crew
Speaker 1: would return to their ship the Serenity, before finding out
Speaker 1: it was all a joke, or if you prefer a lie.
Speaker 1: Of course, gamers might argue that Game Games Radars fake
Speaker 1: review for Half Life three should make that list because
Speaker 1: Halfway three has been highly anticipated for years with no
Speaker 1: sign of it on the horizon. Or how about Game
Speaker 1: rants fake announcement that BioWare had just announced Knights of
Speaker 1: the Old Republic three in all of these cases, these
Speaker 1: are properties people are very much aware of. They want
Speaker 1: another version of it, they want another chapter in these stories,
Speaker 1: they want the ability to tell the story the way
Speaker 1: it was intended in the case of Firefly, which got
Speaker 1: canceled before it could really go anywhere. And so sometimes
Speaker 1: these jokes just seemed to be a little maybe mean spirited,
Speaker 1: where you're just saying something that's not true, which I
Speaker 1: would argue is different from a joke, But maybe that's
Speaker 1: just me. And you know, after doing this episode, I
Speaker 1: think I see why some of my favorite tech journalists
Speaker 1: get tired of April Fool's Day. For every truly amusing
Speaker 1: idea that comes out, there's at least two or three clunkers.
Speaker 1: Some might barely climb above the level of mildly amusing,
Speaker 1: and only if you ever reach the point of being
Speaker 1: actually funny enough to coax out a chuckle. But I
Speaker 1: still look forward to the day each year just to
Speaker 1: see which companies get creative and indulge in some silly behavior.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious what you think about April Fool's Day,
Speaker 1: dear listeners. Do you enjoy it, do you hate it?
Speaker 1: Do you regret ever having an April Fool's Day because
Speaker 1: of all the stuff that pops up on Twitter and Facebook,
Speaker 1: or do you actually think it's kind of a fun day. Um.
Speaker 1: I guess it all depends on how much you pay
Speaker 1: attention to. I want to hear what you think was
Speaker 1: the best April Fool's joke or the worst April Fool's joke.
Speaker 1: You should write me and let me know that email
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or
Speaker 1: drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler at
Speaker 1: all three I use the handle text stuff hs W.
Speaker 1: You can even go back and see my own little
Speaker 1: uh contribution to April Fool's Day. This was from way
Speaker 1: back in two thousand nine where I talked about rechargeable gum.
Speaker 1: It's called chew on this rechargeable gum is on the
Speaker 1: tech the tech stuff blog way back when, and I
Speaker 1: talked about this magical type device, the Rebubble device, which
Speaker 1: was a company that was creating a gadget that would
Speaker 1: reinvigorate gum with flavor and textures so that you could
Speaker 1: keep chewing the same piece of gum over and over.
Speaker 1: In this case, they would put it into what was
Speaker 1: called a rechew. The Nation Chamber. Did you get it anyway?
Speaker 1: You would plug that into either an adapter in the
Speaker 1: wall or through USB, although the USB version took much
Speaker 1: longer to recharge. And uh it talks about you know,
Speaker 1: exactly how the stuff supposedly works, and of course it's
Speaker 1: all made up. I had a great time just putting
Speaker 1: in a fake news story and uh, I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: the opportunity to make something truly ridiculous and posted it
Speaker 1: on April Fool's Day. I haven't done that in a
Speaker 1: very long time, so I need to do that again now.
Speaker 1: I'll also say this, if you're a fan of Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast where we talk about the optimistic view of
Speaker 1: the future, you should check out today's episode of Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: both the video and the audio. There might be some
Speaker 1: surprises there, or there might not, because I'm recording this
Speaker 1: episode of Tech Stuff before I do those Forward Thinking episodes,
Speaker 1: so we'll find out if my impish sense of humor
Speaker 1: has made it through on those other shows. As always,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: this episode and this look back on some of the
Speaker 1: jokes from Remember you can listen to those previous episode
Speaker 1: of Tech stuff to hear, the older ones where Chris
Speaker 1: and I talk about some classic jokes and Lauren and
Speaker 1: I talked about more recent jokes at least between I
Speaker 1: think two thousand and ten, and maybe you should check
Speaker 1: those out. And I will talk to you again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and thousands of other topics
Speaker 1: because at house stop works dot com