It's April 1st and I just realized something: my inbox is completely empty of the usual nonsense. No fake product announcements, no "we've acquired [tiny startup] for an undisclosed sum," nothing. Usually by 9am there are already three or four tech sites running some bit about a fictional gadget or a feature nobody asked for. This year, crickets. Google apparently told people internally not to bother with jokes this year - saw a screenshot of the memo floating around last night - and honestly, fair enough. Feels weird to fake-launch a product when half the country is stuck inside and the real news is bad enough without competing satire.
I can't say I mind, for what it's worth. April Fools online stopped being funny for me somewhere around 2015, once every company with a marketing budget decided they needed a "bit." It turned into a chore just figuring out which announcements were real and which weren't. Remember reading three different "new feature" posts before lunch and having to fact-check each one against the calendar? Not missing that today.
What I've actually been doing instead
Been playing an absurd amount of Animal Crossing: New Horizons since it came out a week and a half ago. My island is a mess - I planted the first batch of trees in a rigid grid pattern I now deeply regret, and Tom Nook's still got me paying down a loan on a tent I don't even like the layout of. Doesn't matter though. It's become the thing my sister and I do together now instead of just texting - we hop onto each other's islands, wander around, sell turnips, don't really say anything important. It's oddly nice. I've seen a couple pieces this week calling it "the game we all needed right now," and normally a line like that makes me roll my eyes, but this time, yeah, kind of.
Also did my first real family Zoom call this weekend - all the cousins on one screen at once, total chaos in the specific way where nobody knows when to talk and everyone talks anyway. My uncle spent a solid ten minutes not realizing his mic was off, gesturing at us like we could hear him. I've been reading about Zoom's security mess this past week too - the bit where calls were getting routed through servers in China, and the "end-to-end encryption" they advertised turned out not to really be that. Makes sense people are annoyed. Didn't stop a single person in my family from joining today though. Convenience beats concerns basically every time, and I don't think that's a new phenomenon, I think it's just more visible right now because everyone's suddenly on these apps at once.
There was also this whole thing with Houseparty over the last few days - a bunch of people online swearing their accounts got hacked right after they downloaded it, and the company firing back saying it looked like a coordinated smear campaign and putting up a million dollar bounty for proof. No idea who's right. Feels like exactly the kind of claim you can't verify from outside, but it's a strange thing to watch a video-chat app get into a public PR fight days after it suddenly became the thing everyone's cool teenage cousin was using.
One small complaint while I'm here, unrelated to any of that: can we go back to phone calls being the default for at least some things? Not every conversation needs a camera pointed at my face and my own reflection staring back at me in a little box in the corner, judging my haircut. I like my family. I do not need to see myself react to my family in real time while also talking to them.
Anyway - no jokes today, apparently, from anyone with a marketing team to answer to. Kind of a relief, honestly. I'll take one quiet, un-funny day on the internet if it means not having to double check whether some company actually "acquired" a fictional product before I've had coffee.