I had some really elaborate April Fools joke planned out for today. I wanted to make a cryptic post here, that would link to some random page outside of the blog. I was actually thinking about registering a really weird domain name for this purpose. The linked page would have more cryptic gibberish on it – something among the lines of the infamous time cube thing. Only it would make more sense. I even started writing random verbiage half inspired by House of the Leaves (which I reviewed recently). The page would include some clues that would lead you to another page, where there would be a block of text that would need to be decrypted. I’d probably use some commonly available symmetric cipher such as DES for example. I would probably have to base64 encode it before posting it – maybe not. I don’t remember if DES outputs weird characters by default. As you can see, I really didn’t think it through that closely. I could always find an algorithm that would spit out ASCII friendly ciphertext.
Anyway, the decryption key of course would be here, in the initial post – I’d probably make it bold, or different color or something. But you wouldn’t know that it was important until you found the encrypted page. Once you would decrypt the text, it would give you last final URL, which would redirect you to a… Rick Roll.
Yeah, that was my master plan – make you follow vague clues, and do all this work only to expose you to the oldest meme still in existence. Fortunately half way through implementing this deranged plan it dawned on me that no one in their right mind would actually bother with it. I would do all this work, and likely no one would actually complete all the cryptic steps required to be rick-rolled. It would be like this XKCD comic with the strange wood shavings.
So I stopped myself. Besides, seeing how rickrollig is pretty much mainstream these days, every idiot on the internet is going to be doing it today. So screw it. I’m not going to fall into the group think and do what everyone is doing. I’m not going to rickroll you. I’m not going to trick you to see goatsey or tubgirl. I’m going to be my own man, put my foot down and not make any jokes, pranks or silly crap today.
Out of curiosity though – how many times have you been rickrolled today? I’m guessing you have survived at least 1 or two attempts before you even got to this blog. Let me know in the comments!
Oh, and also share your April Fools pranks and jokes. We already covered few good ones when we talked about office pranks. Feel free to share yours.
Oh, and a quick announcement – since I posted this today, there will be no post tomorrow (Thursday). We will be back on schedule on Friday.
Also, I have to quit blogging for a little while, because fighting crime as Batman is eating up all my free time these days.
Today was probably one of the most boring 1-Aprils :) We had a video conference call from our headquarters in another city. First we decided to consider meeting invitation an April Fool joke and not to come. Then we realised our SBU Director (have you ever seen abbreviation this stupid? Strategic Business Unit, huh) won’t get such an attitude.
So we came and decided to laugh hysterically at each phrase. The speaker was so boring and pretentious, constantly using words like ‘proactive’ and developmental that we miserably failed and immediately fell asleep :)
I haven’t been Rickrolled ye.. Ah crap.
I just went with the standard facebook-fake-girlfriend. I never use Facebook for anything else, I thought I might confuse all of my distant relatives who are now surprised to find that I’m engaged to 67 year old Serbian Communist.
Yes it’s lame, I don’t care.
Slashdot and all those tech sites are so full of tech jokes, its kind of boring. Besides, they fail at subtlety, most of them can be detected by a glance at the post title :|
But I kid you not: that was my first rickrolling, EVER!
Well… god damn you sir. I hadn’t been rickrolled all day, then you got me 3 times simultaneously due to my tendency to open links into new tabs (to read after the thing doing the linking).
Well played. Well played.
Ah, I see what you did there.
ARH, GOD DARN IT! Ah well, at least the song is pretty good :D
OMG… I couldn’t resist the xkcd link! :-)
I wasn’t Rick rolled yesterday, but as I just got to this post today it happened to be on your first link…damn it! :)
Nicely done! Good luck with your crime fighting endeavors.
Ah, saved by flashblock
Damn rick rolled!
@astine: My brother said one dude he knows tried to fake his death via facebook. Unfortunately he picked a really bad time since someone from the school actually did kill themselves that same day so now everyone thinks he is a horrible person. :P
My brother decided to tell people on Facebook that his visa got revoked.
I decided to rick-roll people since it seemed harmless, and also very fresh and original. ;P
@IceBrain: LOL. I’m glad you had your “first time” here then.
@Hector: Yeah, I was actually considering linking to the actual comic, but I was like “nahh, that’s too good to pass up.”
@Milos: To tell you the truth, the crime fighting is not as much fun as it used to be in this economy. I had to sell the bat-mobile and bat-jetplane and now I’m stuck with that shitty bat bike. :(
Also, I’m depressed as hell lately. Tom Cruise kidnapped my first girlfriend, Two Face killed my second one, my Arch-Nemesis killed himself to get an Oscar. To make things worse this dude named Robin (or Robert – I don’t know) is totally stalking me and he wants to be my “sidekick”. I can’t win.
Oh, and since we made the cutbacks at Wayne Enterprises the retards in R&D keep putting nipples on the new batsuit prototypes.
@Hex: Hey! That’s CHEATING!