April Fools of 2012

Sadly I didn't play an April Fools prank in NE this year on YT. I just didn't have the time after just finishing my 1,600th video and being busy with other things. I did, however, have time to do another NE Power Ranking prank image.

New England Power Ranking Prank Image

So everyone sensible hates Bronies. They're stupid, annoying, probably sick in the head, and they're stupid. Also, they're stupid. So I figured I'd make a My Little Pony image to screw with New England PRs. Turns out everyone pretty much loved it or thought it was the actual real PRs and was okay with it. So...I dunno if...successful or not...

Either way, it was rather painful that I had to not only figure out what characters are on that show, but find out their names (thx to a MLP Wiki...sigh) and then proceed to Google Image pictures that might be better than the ones on the Wiki. By the way, NEVER Google Image MLP stuff without Safe Search on. Cannot unsee.

The only fun part of this was making the image itself. I'm not really too knowledgeable about Photoshop overall, and messing with stuff and trying to figure out how to make a decent image was fun, it's just a shame it had to be MLP. That was the painful part of it for me. I also did player write-ups for the PRs, but that's about it.

Here is a link to the image if you want to see it: http://i.imgur.com/Zw8I1.jpg

Other Websites Pranks

*GameFAQs*

As far as I can tell, boring and nothing other than a trick poll that has a secret option. Not new, and not funny. So unless I'm missing more, which I might be, Gamefaqs dropped the ball this year.


*Smashboards*

Another disappointment. I don't think anything happened here either. A joke ruleset was posted for Smash 64, but that's about it, and probably not tied directly to the site. Read it here: http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=320453

Sort of fake edit: Okay so Smashboards trolled me hard. As I was typing this up, I'm near the end, and guess what. April 2nd 12:00am, and Smashboards whips out The Slowpoke Forums. Yes, I laughed really hard. As far as content goes, there's not much. They changed the skin (ugh) to a blinding blue/purple theme, I guess to gather attention, which it does accomplish. The only other change seem to be 4 new News threads as a slow joke. Here are the threads:

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=320464
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=320462
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=320461
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=320460

You don't have to know Pokemon to get the joke behind this whole theme, unless you don't know what the word "slow" means. But thanks to this, Smashboards has indeed redeemed itself as being good at April Fools.

*Youtube*

...Yea. No surprise here, just another video button gimmick. This time it seems to add a button on the bottom of the player that simulates a DVD type menu where you can choose options such as "Scene Selection, Home, etc" They work with your video, though, and not anything pre-set to another video. Their content thing was probably a joke too, too lazy to go into that. Overall, pretty underwhelming from YT unless I'm missing more stuff that went on.

*Google*

I only heard this on the news, but apparently Google made a fake ad for their new idea of having Google race cars that drive themselves without a driver. Probably to sort of promote their idea of cars that sense their way and can drive themselves that they've been working on. Either way, it's a joke and was a pretty amusing one, since I'm sure many believed it.


*AllisBrawl*

It's hard to compare to last year, both had a lot of thought put into it and both were pretty funny. I really miss the Toonblade harassment from last year, but the changes this year were pretty amusing as well. The general list of changes that I've noticed are:

1. Username box on Banner moves around on Mouse Over. This was last years joke as well, and it makes trying to click on your username to go to profile, clicking for alerts, PMs, or friend requests annoying to do. There were ways to get it not to move, but most wouldn't bother.

2. Everyone able to recommend blogs. Something only Admins/Mods can do. Some users have stated "Why can't all users recommend blogs?", so Neal decided to make it so any user can recommend any blog (except their own). Most likely as an attempt at showing why this will never happen. Most blogs were spammed with recommends just for laughs. This one I thought was pretty funny.

3. Everyone has League of Legends avi. This one was a little underwhelming compared to the Pokemon avis from last year. The ratio of people that know Pokemon to LoL is just abysmal for LoL. So most didn't know who they were, or hated who they were. I wuold have just preferred Pokemon avis again or something most people could relate to.

4. LoL ladder added. This was kind of amusing, but I still was not really digging the LoL theme. Either way, to get a new badge Neal made, you had to make a 5 vs 5 team to get it. It was a little confusing, since you apparently needed to know LoL to know what kind of users to add. The ladder was fake, but Neal edited the score of the team he was on which happened to be the one I was on to have a 1-0 record, giving us 1st on the fake ladder.

5. Random loading skins per page & new pink skin. This one was kind of a jerk troll move. I HATE the skins on aib for the most part. Most of them are blinding, aside from Rising Sun, which is better than the original IMO. The new pink theme looked promising, though. I still would prefer Rising Sun, though. But the others made the constant changes ridiculous, Neal should have made it able to be toggled off for the day since the joke kind of wore off after the first few page loads. It also lagged the pages with loading until near the end of the day when Neal fixed it.

6. Swear words replaced with "flour". This was really funny to do. Instead of a swear filtering to "****", it filters into "flour". So saying "Fucking" would end up being "flouring". It restored back to "****" the next day, which makes a lot of blog posts during April 1st really kind of funny. Though on the other hand, having "flour" remain would have equally been as hilarious later on to users who maybe weren't here on April 1st.

7. All videos on aib replaced with a different video. It's exactly what it sounds like. Every video page on aib that links to a YT video was replaced with the same YT video of a "Guiles theme goes with everything" video. Kind of funny, easily missed this one myself as I don't often watch aib linked videos to YT.

8. Some trading card groups replaced with repeat cards. Stuff from last year repeated, such as all character cards are fox, all stage cards are Final Destination, items were blankish, etc.

9. Last, but maybe not least if I missed any, is user names changed to LoL titles. I don't know LoL, so I don't understand the titles, but basically it was just "username, LoL stuff". It made it pretty confusing to follow. Once again, didn't dig the full LoL theme going on, user names from last year were much funnier to me.

Overall, still really well done and lots of effort put into it clearly. I feel like Neal's blatant love for LoL made him choose a theme most don't really know much or anything about. But the non-LoL related stuff was pretty funny that wasn't re-used from last year.

TV???

Yea, one last thing. Toonami. If you haven't heard, you must not be on any social media sites. Adult Swim aired Toonami as their April Fools joke. Just in case you're out of the loop on Toonami in general, it was one of the greatest things to ever happen to Cartoon Network. It consisted of a bunch of animes when Toonami would run, all of which were generally entertaining (until it got into Naurto and other garbage). So CN killed it, even though people still loved it. So AS brings it back for the night replaying the really old series it had, such as DBZ, Gundam, YYH, and more.

I heard from a friend that Adult Swim aired the new ep of Bleach first at midnight like it always is, but then had The Room movie play next. If you're unaware, The Room was their April Fools prank from the last two years (it's considered the best worst movie to most). But they apparently cut off the movie 5 minutes in into a surprise Toonami DBZ episode. And so began the epic Toonami night. It also featured Tom, old Tom too. It also had some of the old commercials and promos for the shows as well. It was just a great night overall.

It's hard to say whether or not Adult Swim is serious about bringing Toonami back. Here's an idea of how successful the night went. Reportedly, a regular Saturday night ratings for AS is around 140,000. This night had over 4 million ratings. That should be a red flag that people want Toonami back, if even it's on Adult Swim Saturdays. Online social medias exploded over this, it was huge. Adult Swim clearly must know what's going on and might have Toonami planned. Steve Blum, who is the voice of Tom had his Twitter up all night supporting bringing this back, showing us he's on our side. Will Adult Swim (CN) listen? We'll find out next week, as the end of AS on April 1st had Tom say "Next week on Toonami..." sort of phrase.


That's about it for this years April Fools. Who did well this year for me? Adult Swim knocked it out of the park. It could all be a cruel joke to get our hopes up, or the greatest April Fools leading into the greatest return ever. Maybe I'm a little biased, I sort of grew up with original Toonami. But Toonami was amazing. Youtube and GameFAQs blew it as far as I can see, not really taking advantage of anything to get hype or interest in their jokes. Just resorting to the old boring tricks from last year. AllisBrawl did a good job overall with lots of noticeable effort, but the LoL theme made it a step down from last year IMO, although so many things were changed that some of the new ones were better this year than last year. Smashboards did pretty well also after fooling us all day into thinking they were going to change something but then whipping out The Slowpoke Forums April 2nd.