Hey, you didn’t expect to see this podcast again, did you? I’m still doing it, when I have the time. This one’s rough, I think, but maybe you’ll find it interesting.

• When you listen to music, your brain is actually making a series of predictions. And when your predictions are wrong, then it gets interesting.
• Fiction is more persuasive than non-fiction, and we’re still guessing why.
• Easy = true. I didn’t do a great job of explaining this one, but just read the article. Fascinating stuff in there.
• Slime mold studied by researchers is developing in the exact same pattern as the Japanese rail system.
• Disney parks are fun, but what about the lines? Disney’s trying to come up with a new way to make you wait without making it feel like you’re waiting.

Hopefully something in there catches your fancy. Thanks for listening!

 

 The Modern World, episode 13 [40:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Yeah, it’s actually Thursday, but I’ve been super busy the past few weeks (and that’s not going to change, as I’m about to head out of town again this weekend). But just in case you want to know what I think of the World of Warcraft, I hate to disappoint you, so here’s a late Warcraft Wednesday for you.

• Warcraft Word Jumble, and it’s even interactive! I would not be opposed to seeing Warcraft-related versions of common party and newspaper games. It would even be wild to see them in the game — isn’t it about time Blizzard added a little bit more interactivity to quests and games rather than just the click-this-item, run here gameplay?
• Brigwyn has me a little worried with all of this finality — hopefully he’ll still keep up the site as always. But it was nice to be mentioned in such a flattering way. And you can listen in to their podcast to hear me rant and rave about the sparkle pony.
• Larisa, intelligently as always, puts into words what I’ve basically been saying for years. I don’t guess at what Blizzard is thinking any more, just because none of their actions as regards their community have made any sense for a long time. And I don’t give them free advice about how to deal with that community, either, though I’ve definitely got plenty sitting around my huge head. Anytime they want to call me up to consult for their community team, I’ll be here. Meanwhile, however, never in the history of selling products has one company accomplished so much by doing so little. It speaks to the power of their game design talent that even as they shut doors and ignore their biggest core fans, people still can’t donate enough attention and time (and let’s be honest, money) to their games.
• In-game, I’ve actually been playing quite a bit (on the few days I’ve had recently where I’m not working from when I wake up to when I go to sleep). All I’ve been doing is running quests with my Paladin — he finally built his epic flying mount, and next I’m planning to get to da choppah. I need money, which is coming pretty quickly from the quests, and I need to level my Engineering a few more points, which should come pretty easily with all of the various ore I’ve stockpiled while questing around. After that, I’m seriously considering going for Loremaster, but I figured that I’d start in Northrend — I haven’t even cleared Icecrown yet, so first things first. If I finish all the quests in one zone, I’ll move to another, and if I clear out Northrend, then I’ll start questing in the older expansions. You may argue that I should do the older realms first, since Cataclysm will replace all of those quests, but I’m not in a hurry — I’m willing to wait and see what happens there. If they do replace all of those quests, then at least I’ll be doing new ones.
• These are cute. I feel like I should probably get some art of my characters done sometime here — I don’t want something so cookie-cutter or space-taking as a FigurePrint, but it would be cool to have a custom drawing or even painting of a few of my favorite characters to put on the wall. Of course, if I ever end up marrying somebody, it’ll probably just sit in the closet, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to look at it for now.
• And finally, I don’t remember if I linked this here or not, but just in case you missed it, I was also on this Group Quest podcast the other week. I don’t rant about the sparkle pony, but I do hopefully provide some entertaining insight on the game at large and Cataclysm’s class changes specifically. Enjoy!

And that’s it for now. This site is one of my favorite sites to work on, but it’s also kind of the inverse of whatever I’m doing in real life — when things are slow out on the other blogs, I write a lot here, and when things are busy out there, I almost never have time to write here. So even if you don’t see posts from me here regularly, you can at least know that somewhere, I’m out there, writing like a madman.

Unfortunately, the Cubs season has been one long run of disappointment so far, and things don’t seem to be looking up at all. Fans of the Cubs at this point are basically just hoping it doesn’t hurt too much — we’re mostly putting our arms up and asking for it not to be right in the face if possible.

But I have gleamed something worthwhile from this baseball season so far, and that is a growing deeper appreciation for the game itself. Last year, I followed a bunch of Cubs tweeters, and while they gave me a lot of fun and good insight on my team, I didn’t get much news from the rest of the league. So this season I pulled up what I thought were a few good league-wide baseball blogs, and they’ve been extremely interesting reading even outside of the Cubs’ disappointing gameplay. I’ve learned fun things about numbers from all over the league, whether baseball is actually running out of records to break, Jackie Robinson day (call me dumb, but I didn’t know such a thing existed — how awesome), heard a great story from a Philly blogger about catching a foul ball for his kid, and gotten to watch a mascot fall off of a dugout overhead. Don’t worry, he wasn’t hurt at all.

Sports, to me, have always seemed pretty impenetrable — I never really had the time or interest to follow anything specifically, and the traditional sports talk (in which a bunch of dudes throw around names and numbers while subtly competing with each other about who knows the best or who can be the most dismissive) has never appealed to me much. But what I’m finding in exploring the bigger world of baseball this year, especially on these blogs, is not only a real sense of community (which is to be expected — what else is the Internet but a series of communications inside various communities), but a real intelligence and wit shining on through. Sports media tends towards the elite — even something like Sportscenter, shown at bars and gyms all over the country, has to keep the names and references coming to keep “real” sports fans hooked. But these blogs that I’m reading about baseball, especially the best of them, offer up no such walls or hurdles. Haven’t heard of the players they’re joking about? They link off their names, so you can go see them online, where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Don’t know what RISP or OBP are? They explain it, they link it, and they give a little insight along with the opinion.

For the most part (having followed Cubs bloggers and twitterers for over a year now, I do go a little deeper on the Cubs side, so there are a few bloggers I read who aren’t so accessible), the tone is jovial, and inclusive, and fun. And that’s really refreshing — even if my Cubs don’t win, I can jump into the baseball section of my RSS reader and hear a good baseball story or learn something interesting about a game that went down last night.

I like it. I don’t know if it’s just the way baseball is right now (it seems like as sports go, this one is pretty popular), or if the Internet really has made more of these connections and story-sharing circles possible, or, more likely, some combination of those two. But I’m surprisingly myself with how interested I’ve become not only in my own team, but the sport in general.

Not that it’s helped me — I downloaded the MLB 10 The Show demo the other day, and just got crushed (I’m looking around for a softball league or something like that — maybe I’ll do better in real life). But it has made a terrible Cubs season more fun so far.

Employee 1: Hey so I had an idea last night.

Employee 2: Oh yeah? What’s that?

E1: You know all of these little minipets we’ve got laying around from the card game?

E2: Oh sure. My friend in character design worked hard on one of those. He was angry when he found out it wouldn’t be used.

E1: Well I’ve been playing Farmville, and I had a thought. What if we just, you know, sold them?

E2: Sold them? What, you mean like for gold?

E1: No, I mean… like… for money.

E2: Wait, real money? Are you nuts?

E1: Not a lot of money! Just a little money. They’re just sitting on our art database, it’s not like they’re getting used any more since the TCG went bottoms up, right? We might as well liquidate them off.

E2: But that seems, like, wrong. It’s a game. You’re supposed to play and earn stuff, not just buy stuff.

E1: Well you won’t need to earn these, it’ll just be a fun thing. We’ll sell them for like ten bucks. They’re just pets — nobody will buy them anyway. We’ll probably get thanked for helping clean out inventory before the expansion.

E2: I guess we did just create that online store and the online identity thing — all we’d have to do is create a SKU and then mail them out in-game. But pets for real money, doesn’t that seem kind of… skeevy?

E1: Bah, no one will care. People who want real pets will still earn them, these will just be one of however many thousand we’ve got. A fun little thrill for just ten bucks.

E2: Five bucks?

E1: Ten bucks seems good to me.

E2: …

E1: Ten bucks, and on one we’ll give half the profits to charity.

E2: …

E1: Oh, come on! What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll make money for the company?

E2: Fine. But if the bosses find out, it’ll be your fault.

***

Boss 1 and boss 2 break in the door.

Boss 1: Who’s in charge here?

E1: (was sleeping) Huh? Wha?

E2: Holy crap! If anything went wrong, he did it.

E1: All right, fine. I’m in charge. What do you want?

B1: Why is all of this money being deposited into our online store account?

E1: Wait, which account is that?

E2: Is that…? Oh crap, I knew it. I told you! I told you this would screw us over!

E1: Ok, listen, I can explain. This is just a little thing we tried, I can turn it off.

B1: Listen. You two are just menial employees here, and this company has grown very big in the past few years — there are all kinds of people wandering the halls whose faces I don’t even bother to try and recognize any more. All I want to know is: One, what have you done to get all of this money in our account?

E1: It was just a –

B1: Two, is it legal?

E1: Look, we’ll fix —

B2: And three, how can we get more of it?

E2: Look, this is all just a misunderstanding. We had this little idea to get rid of some old designs we had that we weren’t going to use, and it just got out of hand. Wait, did you just ask how you can get more of it?

B2: Son, I know you’re probably some kind of “video hypercoder” and that you didn’t go to business school, or probably any school at all, given the way you smell. But this building you’re in is a business, and the goal of a business is to make money. So either tell us what you did right now, or you won’t be making any money here ever again.

E1: Look, we sold a few pets. That’s all. We had them designed, they didn’t take any time, we just figured we’d put a store up and sell them. It wasn’t a big deal, and it’s over — we’re really sorry. We’ll refund the money and we’ll give the pet out to everyone in the game.

B1: Give the pet out? Why?

E2: People weren’t happy about it — they don’t want us selling pixels for real money. The game is about making your character better, not buying things with real money to make it better. People don’t like it, we’ll end it, we’re sorry.

B2: Wait, people aren’t happy because they didn’t get anything real? But they still paid?

E1: A lot of people paid, actually. Like, a whole lot of people.

B1: And they each paid $10? Do we have anything real to sell?

E2: Well we’ve got these plushies sitting around — we usually sell those during the big convention every year. I guess maybe we could put those on the site and include these with it.

B2: Do it. We’ll check back in after it goes live.

E1: Wait, you don’t want to fire us?

B1: Fire you? You just earned us more money in one day than we spent making the last content patch, and the online store is still going gangbusters. If we’d known we could do this three years ago, we could have given an expansion away for free!

E2: Wait, really? But it’s not fair. These pets aren’t worth $10 — they’re not even worth $5. We’ve been giving them away for years! At least when people buy an expansion, they’re buying actual content, an actual experience that they wouldn’t have otherwise. These are just pixels.

B2: Son, things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. I know these things are just pixels in your crazy video machines. But if people are willing to pay ten bucks to see pixels, then you take their money and smile when you say thank you.

E2: But that doesn’t seem —

B1: Look, do it. Put the pets up, add the plushies with it, and let’s see how those do.

E1: What should we sell them for? We sell the convention ones for $40, but that’s a special event, and there’s no pets with those.

B1: What do they cost to make?

E2: We got a bulk deal for next year — they’re each a couple bucks to make. They come out of China somewhere. The people who played them probably come home and spend the money we paid them on our games.

B1: Sell them with the pets for $20.

B2: $25.

Boss 1 and 2 look at each other. They both laugh.

B1 and 2: $24.99.

They laugh again as they walk out of the room together.

***

B1: Ok, we’re back. How did the pets with the plushies do?

E1: Umm…

B2: Spit it out, son!

E2: Look, they didn’t do quite as well as the other pets.

B1: What? But they were worth more! They were real items — I thought that’s what these people wanted.

E1: Well we thought that, too. But then we talked to some players, and they said that they didn’t really want a plushie sitting around their house. And they didn’t really want to give their address and wait for it to be mailed, and wonder if it would show up or not.

E2: And some of them said that they didn’t actually want the plushie anyway.

B1: Wait, they didn’t want the plushie? I thought they wanted something real.

E1: That’s what they said. But they don’t actually want the plushie specifically. Digital is just easier, they said.

E2: Don’t get us wrong, we sold plenty. Just not quite as many as the in-game pets by themselves.

B2: Do we have anything else to sell?

E2: What? No, it was just the plushies. We’ve got t-shirts and stuff, but we have other companies to sell those for us.

B2: Nothing? What about this art vault you got? Anything in there?

E2: Well yeah, we have another little pet in there — we were thinking about giving it away on a test realm or something.

B1: That’s good. That’ll do.

B2: Sure, that’s good, too. But do you have anything bigger?

E1: Bigger?

E2: We did make this one thing, but that’s not really…

B1: What is it?

E1: There’s this horse. It was supposed to drop from a boss on one of the instances, but he wasn’t the last boss of the expansion, and we figured we’d want to save the coolest mount until the last boss. So we just kind of put him away for a while — we were thinking of using the horse next expansion, maybe in another realm or something.

E2: Yeah, but we can’t use that horse. I mean — I wasn’t really comfortable with the pets, but the mount? That thing is a game changer — people won’t have to buy a mount ever again if they get one of those. Plus, this whole thing is wrong anyway — it’s all gotten out of hand. There are people that do this, companies that take money like this, but not us. We sell experiences, not designs. We make games, not virtual item stores.

B2: We make money, son. This mount — can you put it up on the store? Like by itself, without a plushie?

E1: Sure, wouldn’t be hard. The code’s all there.

B1: And people would want it? Like there’s not anything else like it in the game?

E1: Well, the model is in the game, but not the textures or anything. Yeah, I think people would want it. I mean, I wasn’t even really sure people would spend money on those pets, but they did, right?

B2: They certainly did. Do it. Put the mount up.

E1: What should we charge for it?

B1 and B2 smile.

B1: Same as the plushies. $24.99.

B2: Wait. $25. Take a penny, take a penny, right? (smiles)

E2: You can’t be serious, though! Just a cosmetic mount for twenty-five dollars? There are really incredible full games that cost less than that! You’re talking about a situation where people might actually give us thousands of dollars for this thing. I mean I don’t think it’ll go this high, but we might get a million dollars from people, just for this mount. $25 is two months worth of the subscription, if you go with a longer plan. If half of our user base buys this thing, we’ll earn more on the mount than on the actual game this month! I thought we were a game company here — I signed up to be a game designer.

B2: I told you, son. We’re a business. We make money. It’s tax day — they’re all getting their refunds, they can pay. Put the mount up.

E1: Will do.

B1: We’ll see what it does. If you’re right, and nobody buys it, lesson learned. We’ll go back to making our games, and we won’t ever bother with just selling pixels for many, many times over what they cost us to make. Like he said, something’s only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If this mount isn’t worth $25, then nobody will pay for it.

E2: But what if people do? I mean, I don’t think anyone’s crazy enough to spend $25 on a virtual item — it’s a cosmetic change in a five-year old game. And once we announce the new MMO in the next year, no one’s going to be interested in this game any more, anyway.

B2: The new MMO! I forgot! Oh man, I can’t wait to see what we can do selling items in that.

E2: Ugh, thank goodness I’m not on that team. But here’s what really scares me: what if this mount thing works? What if it sells? This company got huge because we worked really hard and made really great games — the only reason you can even pull off a scam like those pets is because of the hard work people did years ago, not just on this game, but on all of the great ones before it. Because of the solid, polished, impressive work that that small team of folks did years ago, our company is a behemoth today with thousands of employees globally, and we have an extremely dedicated userbase that dwarfs almost everyone else in the industry. And you’re going to use all of that good will and all of that love we’ve earned to charge people $25 for a bunch of pixels that look like a pony? That’s what really scares me. What if they pay?

B2: Son, if they pay, then we will have ourselves one very successful business. [Laughs]

B1: [Laughs]

They both exit the room and walk down the hall lined with posters of classic PC games, laughing all the way.

Sorry — I’ve been away covering a conference all this week, and I still have a stack of work to do from that, plus I took the wrong path and ended up driving about ten hours across Southern California today. It was pretty and all, but I’m exhausted. So while there’s lots of cool WoW stuff going on, I just don’t have the brain bandwidth to write about any of it today.

But I will post this oldie but goodie, one of my favorite Spiff videos. WW will be back next week.

I wrote this sonnet about Lost for a longer joke I was going to do about me selling some poetry to try and raise money for an iPad. But the joke wasn’t that good, and I really shouldn’t be begging for money here. I should probably stop whining about how much the iPad costs and just buy it.

But anyway, here is a sonnet in (somewhat — I think I missed a few places) iambic pentameter from the point-of-view of Sun on Lost:

As I, upon this wind-swept island wait
For him, my rough-classed strong Korean man,
I wonder if he’s reached some ill-sung fate,
Or gotten lost in time, just like that Dan.

I’ve lied and threatened, known my share of sin,
But I returned here, searching for my Jin.

For some reason I’ve been awfully busy lately, so I haven’t had much time to write here, much less play World of Warcraft (and unfortunately, this probably won’t change — next week I’ll be out of town for a conference, and then the week after I’m hosting a panel, and then in May I have another big project to work on). But I did want to do this week’s Warcraft Wednesday for you, so here it is. Probably smaller than usual, but maybe something’s better than nothing.

• I can confirm that the Cataclysm beta is about to start. I don’t know if I’ll get an invite (or if I even want one — I usually like to avoid PTR/beta realms and actually experience things on the live realms), but either way, I’d say we’re about four or five months out from the release. That puts Cataclysm out sometime in August/September, which seems about right. It’s possible that they could go a little earlier, as we already know that lots and lots of work has been done on the expansion, not to mention that Blizzard has gotten better and better, I think, at testing and releasing content. Plus, I was just thinking about this the other day: with the exception of a few people and a few Blizzard higher-ups, this is a very different team from the people that actually launched the game and even that first expansion. The workflow has probably changed quite a bit since the days of Burning Crusade and even Wrath. Still, we’re at least closer than ever, and from what I’ve seen, there will be zero NDA, so we’ll likely see a flood of screenshots and movies and information come right out of the beta as soon as it opens.
• I’ll tell you something else that’s probably close: An Armory iPad app. I’m a little surprised that there’s not one already, but then again, Blizzard would want to test the app before they release it, and they’re probably not grossing enough in the store for Apple to justify giving them a test unit early. But I’ll bet you money that there are plenty of iPads sitting around the Blizzard offices during the day, and that very soon, we’ll see a release from them in the store. An authenticator doesn’t really seem right — more likely it’ll be an updated Armory app.
• There’s a lot of class information dropping this week, but honestly, that doesn’t bring much more than a yawn from me. Not sure why — it could be because I haven’t seen Hunter changes yet, or maybe it’s because I’m most looking forward to content, not class changes. New class abilities won’t surprise me any more — I don’t care if Hunters can spawn copies of their pets or Shaman have a more steady mana output, yadda yadda yadda. What matters most to me is what Deathwing does to the Old World, and if Blizzard can make a five-year-old game feel new again. When they plan to release that information on the forums, let me know.
• Hey, happy birthday Warcraft Pets! Notable for being probably the most visible member of the community that’s actually acknowledged by Blizzard, so kudos for that (oh yeah, and for having a great site of course :) ). Slightly related to vanity pets: I am a little ashamed to say that I got taken in by El’s April Fool’s joke about the Aquarium for in-game fishing. At first, I was like, “Oh man Blizzard is going way too Farmville,” and then I was like, “Whoah, actually this is pretty cool,” and then (about 3/4ths of the way down the page) I realized it was April 1st and El was having a go. But still, I have to admit that I was kind of sold on it. Not into the microtransactions, mind you (never into the microtransactions), but the idea of a serious system behind vanity pets? That’s intriguing.
• Cool wallpaper. Cool icons.
• Great post by Larisa about BlizzCon. It is an excellent event — at this point, even if Blizzard wasn’t announcing games or showing off new titles, everyone would want to just get together anyway and have a good time for a weekend. Too bad Larisa can’t go, but yes, I agree, it is a pain to come all the way across the country (or in her case, the world), pay for hotel and food, and try to nab a ticket to get into a limited show. On the other hand, if it was easier or cheaper to come, I don’t think it’d be the same event. Same deal with PAX — the fact that it is such a targeted and focused group is kind of what makes it so special. A tightly knit virtual community brought to life.
• I twittered about this, but I’ll say it again: goodbye and thanks, Eyonix. For some reason, the CMs never seemed to like my corner of the community (actually, I think I know why, but it’s a misunderstanding that never got corrected), but I appreciate their work, both as a writer and a fan. Hope we get to see him somewhere else (and when we do, hope we realize that he’s Eyonix — kind of weird that CMs of his stature are still going by aliases).

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading!

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything witty to say tonight, but instead I’ll share Hunch’s Twitter predictor with you. Hunch is a site that I mentioned a while back on The Modern World (which I should really do a new episode of at some point…) that is designed to crowdsource decisional questions — answer things like “What should I eat for dinner?” by seeing what people before you in the same situation chose.

They’ve hooked their system up to Twitter, and if you type in your username (it’s safe, they won’t steal your account or anything), they’ll check out your followers (and maybe your tweet text, but I’m not sure about that I just saw on the bottom of their page that they don’t — it’s only follower information), and then they’ll try to predict how you’ll answer a series of questions. In other words, they’ll ask if you are good at computers, and if you have a lot of techies in your “circle,” it’ll guess that you are.

I ran through the quiz twice (once with my username, and once by putting in someone else’s twitter username — shh, don’t tell them), and it’s pretty interesting. While they make some pretty broad strokes (“Are you a liberal or conservative?”), there are some interesting questions in there (“Are you more extroverted or introverted?” and “Do you consider yourself traditional or original and inventive?”). And more often than not, Hunch did indeed guess correctly about me, though there was the occasional secret (how could they know that I secretly prefer chick lit over sci fi?) about me that they didn’t guess correctly.

And of course, as you answer, the survey updates itself, so that at this point, they’re hitting correct on most of their answers. It’s just a cute online test to most of us, but I’ll tell you who’d really be interested in this information: Advertisers. Twitter follower information is publicly available (at least it is for me — private accounts may not be), and if an advertiser plugged my information into a service like Hunch, they’d have a pretty good idea, even without getting my consent, about the kinds of things I like to spend money on and the kinds of things I am interested in. That’s the real secret of Hunch’s database: the more of this kind of stuff advertisers know about you, the more they can get you to agree with.

Is Hunch selling this information? I don’t think so, but there’s nothing to stop them, and in fact Twitter might even want to pick them up (and/or is probably running something like this already), since they’re rolling out their advertising plans soon. But in the meantime, it just shows you how much information about you is encoded into these social networks you join and frequent. There’s a whole library of information that can be learned about you and who you are simply by seeing who you’re connected to and how.

I used to actually be very into the whole April Fool’s thing. When I was a kid, I tried to convince my parents that our TV had been stolen. I woke up very early in the morning, unplugged our family television and all of its various wires from its stand in the family room, and carried it by myself (I’d like to think I was 8 or 9 when I did this, but it was probably closer to 13, which makes it more embarrassing) into the living room, where I hid it under a blanket. When my parents finally got up and I walked in to act all surprised and wonder very loudly why someone would steal our TV, they just shook their heads and wondered what was wrong with me. The joke didn’t go over very well (and, I can now see with my older and more comedically-experienced eyes, for good reason). I returned the TV quietly only a little while later, without incident.

I like the idea of April Fool’s — that anything can happen, and that something surprising and unexpected might be right around the corner. But over the years, and especially with the rise of the Internet, where it’s extremely easy to make things up and spread the word about them very quickly and without a lot of recourse, April Fool’s doesn’t always fall into that same sense of wonder and trickery. Sometimes, it’s just an outright and awkward lie — as all the game journalists I’m following on Twitter have said, this day can be hell for fact-checking, especially when you’re covering sites that aren’t good at being just subtle and witty enough to make it a joke rather than a fabrication or a trick. And this year, even the jokes have gotten a “meh” reaction from me. I think XKCD pulled off the only real April Fool’s Day prank that I liked this year, which was a fully-working command-line interface for the webcomic site. Even the one joke I tried this year, talking about Farmville rather than Warcraft yesterday, got a pretty “meh” reaction from me, and no reaction from anyone reading it.

I’m not sure if there’s something actually wrong here, or if this needs to be fixed at all. Ideally, we’ll get to a point where everyone is tired of the fabricating and the meh jokes, and sites on the Internet will only post really interesting and entertaining funny things on April 1st. That’s started to happen a little bit — it used to be that everybody switched places or went crazy on April 1, and compared to a few years ago, today’s events have been pretty sedate.

But I wouldn’t mind going the other direction — maybe it’s so easy to spread and share information nowadays, and the Internet is already such a silly place, that we don’t even need April 1st any more. Maybe it’s just not worth bothering with. Are we even getting anything out of it? Are there any pranks or jokes that were really worth reading or putting the time into today? ThinkGeek probably had some of the most worthwhile stuff, but that stuff is so smart that like many ThinkGeek April 1st gags in the past, they’ll probably have someone actually make it. And Bioware is actually selling DLC for April 1st. Yes the items are joke-y, but what’s really funny about that?

The best April Fool’s prank I ever pulled was also when I was a kid, and also on my parents (you can probably see why I admire them so much, considering how many annoying shenanigans I tortured them with). One April 1st, I woke early (again, most of my plans involved waking up early), and changed every clock in the house that I could to an hour forward. My dad usually woke up at 5:30, and I set his clock so that it would actually go off at 4:30 (when it was set to 5:30). I changed the kitchen clock that he always checked, and my brother and sister’s clocks as well. The only clock that I couldn’t change was the one in his car, and I figured that as soon as he got into the car and turned the key, the dashboard clock would light up and he’d know something was wrong.

And lo and behold, it worked. At 4:30 he rose and showered as he did every day, ate his cereal breakfast and read the paper while packing his lunch (my Mom also got up and chatted with him as he packed), and headed out to the car a full hour before he was supposed to be at work. I wandered out of my room innocently, and just as my Mom asked why I was up so early, my Dad came back in from the car. “What time do you have?” he asked. “I think there’s something wrong with the clocks. Why’s it still dark outside?”

I remember him being confused, and again, my parents getting that look on their faces as I explained my subterfuge like a minature, chubby supervillian. But in the end, my Dad got the joke, and even moreso, I think he appreciated that he didn’t have to be at work for another hour. He sat back down at the kitchen table with my mother and I, and we talked and laughed for another forty-five minutes, extra time I’d secretly earned us with my prank.

I guess, for reasons like that, we might as well keep trying to fool each other, even if most of the jokes don’t quite hit their target exactly. Maybe it’s worth it for the occasional one that does.

But if not, I’m fine with International Talk Like a Pirate Day taking over for the silly holiday every year. I think I like that one a little better anyway, matey.