April Idiots.
Apr. 6th, 2011 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupYou've read Speaker for the Dead and its crappy sequels, right? In it, there's an AI named Jane, that is all powerful within the multiplanetary internet and computer system, but has no physical presence. Governmental authorities are close to figuring out she exists, which would be Bad. She can create clues to throw them off, but only virtual clues, and the presence of virtual but not physical evidence may tip them off sooner. It's quite the dilemma.
I feel this is roughly equivalent to April Fools blog posts. I'm not a huge fan of pranks in general: most of them seem to be excuses to be really, really mean to people in a situation where they're not allowed to get mad at you, on pain of not having a sense of humor.* But some of them are genuinely funny and take a lot of work and creativity, and I appreciate those. And it's a good excuse for xkcd's annual redesign, which is usually entertaining (and a LOT of work). But this whole write-a-blog-post-outlining-made-up-tragedy grates on me. It's not clever, it's not funny. Either people know the date and dismiss it, or forget and believe you, or your writing is so good they believe you anyway, in which case... congratulations, you've convinced everyone you've broken up/had a pregnancy scare/have MRSA, and made the bar that much higher for people who have genuinely bad things happen to them on 4/1.
I have another level of anger for people like John Scalzi, who retreat to but I didn't actually saaaaaaaaaaay it.. He just pointed to people who were lying and made statements that he knew would be interpreted incorrectly, even though there was a technically correct interpretation. And it's not like anyone except me yells at you for l lying on April fools, so you might as well own it. The amount of argh I have over this is truly disproportionate
*Every time someone says "Major Actor is a really nice, funny guy, you can tell because he's always playing pranks on people", I hear "Major Actor is an asshole who uses his position of power to hurt people in a socially acceptable fashion"
I feel this is roughly equivalent to April Fools blog posts. I'm not a huge fan of pranks in general: most of them seem to be excuses to be really, really mean to people in a situation where they're not allowed to get mad at you, on pain of not having a sense of humor.* But some of them are genuinely funny and take a lot of work and creativity, and I appreciate those. And it's a good excuse for xkcd's annual redesign, which is usually entertaining (and a LOT of work). But this whole write-a-blog-post-outlining-made-up-tragedy grates on me. It's not clever, it's not funny. Either people know the date and dismiss it, or forget and believe you, or your writing is so good they believe you anyway, in which case... congratulations, you've convinced everyone you've broken up/had a pregnancy scare/have MRSA, and made the bar that much higher for people who have genuinely bad things happen to them on 4/1.
I have another level of anger for people like John Scalzi, who retreat to but I didn't actually saaaaaaaaaaay it.. He just pointed to people who were lying and made statements that he knew would be interpreted incorrectly, even though there was a technically correct interpretation. And it's not like anyone except me yells at you for l lying on April fools, so you might as well own it. The amount of argh I have over this is truly disproportionate
*Every time someone says "Major Actor is a really nice, funny guy, you can tell because he's always playing pranks on people", I hear "Major Actor is an asshole who uses his position of power to hurt people in a socially acceptable fashion"
