It’s funny how sites used to play music all the time and now people are on the phone with the FBI to report any site with audio
It was probably the first time I noticed what others have noticed since then, which is that I have a way of asking questions that causes other people to react (often more than my attempts to directly influence).
All I said was, "Isn't this going to be our last release before April 1?" Everyone got quiet for a minute, their eyes glinted, and we went from releasing at a reasonable hour for once to deploying at 1 am. Unfortunately the lead engineer (who ended up putting an audio clip of himself knocking on his CRT and saying, "hello? Is anybody out there?" on an idle timeout) and I had worked out all of the off-by-one errors on date calculations in Win32 early in the evening when we were still sharp, only for him to change the numbers in a crisis of faith later in the evening. So the whole thing fired on April 2. Which luckily was a Sunday, so few people using it at work or for classes were affected.
It was all fun and games until the emails started coming in informing us that we may have been hacked. I like easter eggs in my games, but I've only ever mentioned this to coworkers as a cautionary tale about impulses and judgement when tired.
Whimsy is still out there to some extent but just not as prevalent.
https://www.kickscondor.com <- anything in the kicksverse
http://tetrageddon.com/ <-- nathalie lawhead has some wild net art projects
The cool web isn't dead :) and I'm not even sure it shrank -- the less-cool web just got a lot bigger right next to it.
I hadn't heard of some of these other ones, and they look cool, thanks for sharing!
One cue that it was a joke is that the "multiple people" are supposedly a brother and sister pair named "Cody" and "Jody". Also the quote above. Also "Jody: We both use a lot of VR to interact with the different people we come out with."
So, again, this is not saying that the kickscondor.com website is run by two Facebook employees, it is explicitly saying that "Cody" and "Jody" have created a fictional personality who has done all the blogging that refers to a single person's life, and that that's kicks condor, and that it's pulled from the amateur cigar-smoking community, and that they interact with him in VR. And also they like Segway shoes.
Were that not enough to cue one that it was Maybe Not To Be Taken Literally, the interview with the "claim" to being from Facebook was preceded by a LARPy revamp of the website where it was all supposed to be sentient Disney IP run amok, and there was a hidden puzzle game (and telnet BBS, the thing was genius), and you could also email completed mazes to a particular address, and then another revamp had the whole thing "seized by the FBI", with police lights and noises...
> Grape-Nuts Media Lab announces a new partnership with the brilliant duo behind the beloved Kicks Condor intellectual property. This is a new page in our history—a crisp, brittle new page. (By brittle—we do not mean fragile or frail—we mean “firm and crackly” and “feels fun to touch, crumbles in the hand in a satisfying way, similar to a page fabricated from 3-D printed and nutted grape-based matter.”)
> Cody and Jody, the precocious brother and sister team hailing from Facebook Labs, have perfected their recipe for an iconic blogger-type character, one who is very difficult to describe in marketing terms, but which has caught the TiddlyWiki enthusiast worlds by storm.
> By now, it’s very clear that Kicks Condor was a secondary (or tertiary) character in the shelved script for National Treasure 3: How the West Was Done. But lowly beginnings have never stopped the Grape-Nuts® family before. Our founder, Joshua Jonathan Grape-Nuts took his original portfolio of grape-nuts sample textures to the Del Monte/Bloomberg Corp on a northbound Greyhound Bus back in 1863! That’s right in the middle of Civil War I!
(Mind, everyone got sick of unwarned, auto-playing media.)
And even then I have a bad habit, in part due to multiple monitors, of trying to mix tabs and windows and sometimes I cannot for the life of me locate the tab that is playing when someone needs me for something. I may need a new rule about where such tabs need to live (separate window, one monitor, virtual desktop, something).