Megathread: April Fools' Day 2025 on the internet
Over the next day or so, the internet will be filled with jokes, pranks, fake "announcements" from companies, fun interactive activities, games, and so on. A lot of these can be quite clever and interesting so I think posting about them in general is fine, but in the interest of preventing them from completely taking over Tildes, let's try to keep as many of them restricted to this thread as possible. Ideally, a separate top-level comment for each individual item would be good.
If something particularly discussion-worthy comes up (like an ARG or activity that a lot of people want to talk about), a separate thread is reasonable, but please make sure it has the "april fools day" tag. That way, if anyone wants to avoid seeing the April Fools' Day threads, they can use the topic tag filters and filter that tag out.
I'm going to use the "official" styling for this topic (that's usually only for ~tildes.official topics) to make it stand out more to try to encourage people to notice it. If you notice people making individual topics for April Fools' Day things that don't really warrant their own topic, please (nicely) encourage them to delete and post in here instead.
This one isn't internet-related, just a proud dad:
My young-elementary child came up with their own April Fool's joke:
They're going to go around and ask people: "Do you want a brownie?"
If they say yes, they're going to hand them an "E" cut out of brown construction paper.
Edit: This AM they also asked for a bag of nuts, as in the kind you attach to bolts, so they can also ask "With nuts or without?"
I'm going to borrow this and use it on my kids. It is delightful.
@vord and the ultimate Vordling: I also made brown e's. Thanks for the idea, it has worked several times today.
I also gave one to one of my staff. We laughed
It's a delightful joke.
I also went out and bought some two bite brownies, so it was like a joke that worked twice. I asked my wife earlier if she wanted a brownie, and she said "yeah, sure" and then I gave her one of the cardboard cutouts. When the kids got home, I hit them with it one at a time. Then later on I asked them again like I'd forgotten, and then when they declined, I pulled real brownies out of the container.
This is genius. And because I'm on the west coast and my kids nor wife are home yet, I'm shamelessly stealing it!
One cannot steal what is freely given... that I already stole from vord.
So did you give them the brownies, or eat them since they declined anyway?
Every time, I ate the brownie.
(then got them a replacement one from the pack)
It's one of the least healthy, but most wholesome pranks.
This and the similar "green tea" were a yearly classic with my kids.
Utterly adorable! I love it. ❤️
Sour Patch Kids are now Just Patch Kids
Here I am , at work at 5am watching things get patched and monitoring for failures. This made me smile.
Their Tiktok had a video of them washing all the sour powder off a bowl of "just patch kids" which made me smile. So I'm glad I could share
I'm totally down for the Just Patch Kids. Maybe they'll release a limited batch as a novelty.
Maybe just rinse some off and give them a try?
I don't have them often, but is the covering not just regular sugar? The flavouring is part of the jellies themselves I thougt
The powder definitely includes acid (probably citric acid)! I haven't had one for a while but iirc the gummies themselves are pretty sweet.
I think it's that sour powder that goes on the outside. Usually the gummy part of sour gummies is pretty basic
Sounds like a great opportunity to get more vegetables into our children’s diets and call them cabbage patch kids.
Bleh
Tbh they might have done that before!
The lock picking lawyer has continued his April Fools series https://youtu.be/QlPQaLk1MZ8?si=iYeintiTzOAviRWK
LockPickingLawyer's April Fools videos are easily my favorites on YouTube. Previous years' videos:
My 36 Inch King Dick Wrecks Locks!
Getting Into A Woman’s Kitty
How To Fill My Wife’s Beaver
My 18-Inch Long Johnson
Getting In My Ex-Girlfriend’s Back Door
Getting Into My Wife’s Beaver
Manipulating My Tiny Coq
I just don't get why he lies about the lengths of the wrenches. The "8-inch Wang" is clearly at least 20 inches long.
Are you sure you're not mistaking Tony's Wang for Rob's Johnson? The Wang is the bright red one in the middle, and clearly the second smallest of the bunch at 8" after Nick's 4"er. Trevor's Rigid example is 10", Rob's Johnson is 14", the Pittsburgh specimen shown first is 24", and the largest is LockPickingLawyer's 36" King Dick. You can actually see their sizes written on all their shafts, and even on a few of their heads too. ;)
I know it's the second smallest but I know what 6" looks like and it's maybe a little over a quarter of the length of that one so there's no way it's actually 8".
MetaFilter, an old-school community blog and my other online haunt, is finally embracing The Future by unveiling Socky the Sockpuppet, a goofy, Clippy-esque "AI" "assistant" that spouts in-jokes, memes, and inane advice from the corner of every page. Especially fun because certain lines only appear on certain pages, encouraging exploring around the site to try to find them all! And the art for it is kind of adorable.
The front page of https://scryfall.com (a Magic card search tool) usually has a few cards shown on it around a certain theme. For this April Fools, they display from a random selection of a few Balatro jokers (fools) and Magic cards adapted into jokers. More info here.
Similarly, Magic Arena continues last year's April Fool's joke of worn out card back sleeves. This year, the front of all cards has been distressed as well. For example: https://i.imgur.com/SMJuBz9.png
Yeah, I saw that while playing late last night and was confused at first, then realized it was already April 1st in other time zones.
James Hoffman is well known in the world of coffee. He just released a new video "The secrets of my daily coffee routine"
Literally came to the thread to post this 😂 One of the top comments says "The gulf between James Hoffman and Hames Joffman is increasingly diminishing" and I can't say I disagree.
Seeing this today is what reminded me it was April 1, had me for a minute at the beginning.
Flightradar24 is having fake Concorde flights. We had AFR9999 earlier today, Paris to New York in 3:50 hours, now BAW9999 is "flying". Check their home for the XYZ9999 flights if you miss this one.
I'd love to see one flying!
If you want to see at least take-off, have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ShTUVIzCI which is an amateur footage filmed at suburbs, but it is great IMHO.
I may as well head to Sinsheim museum in Germany where they have one Concorde next to the other supersonic passenger plane Tu-144 as it is just a few hours from me.
EDIT: I've got one more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ-pa0tY2SU
😇💩! I was not aware Europe had so many flights over it! I wonder if Europe has a near constant noise of aircraft flying over?
Topical side note, that’s actually one of the (many) reasons Concorde struggled: like others have said, normally you’ll only hear a plane if you’re near the airport where they’re low enough for take off or landing, but sonic booms are a lot more disruptive from a lot further away.
Getting routes approved for Concorde to fly at full speed turned out to be one of the major difficulties because of that.
Unless you're under a flight path, you don't really notice. And even then you have to be near enough to an airport (so that the planes aren't at cruising altitude) to be disturbed. But yeah, it's a lot of planes in a small area!
Unless you're very close to an airport, the planes are plenty high enough that noise isn't an issue.
Palworld More Than Just Pals, a dating sim where you date the Pals, started as a joke but is supposedly now in development.
https://youtu.be/ZUpilXM6638
https://gamer.express/threads/palworld-developers-announce-dating-sim-set-in-an-elite-academy.2711/
I wonder how many times this has happened in different games. I can't remember which one it was, but one april fool's joke was implemented as a real game mode in Arma.
This used to happen with Thinkgeek's April Fools Day products all the time. People (myself included) would get excited for some of these wacky items and they would get pressured to really make them.
Man I miss Thinkgeek and its caffeine nonsense. I'm sure it still exists in some "buy through Amazon" form but that's not the same; it was so cool back in the day. Same with w00t and their bag of crap.
Ditto. I even miss Loot Crate too despite the majority of their items having been kinda useless junk. But their subtly ultra-geeky T-shirts were especially fucking awesome, and I still haven't managed to find anything comparable to them yet. Which sucks because a lot of my old Ts from them are getting pretty worse for wear. And I am not looking forward to the day when my absolute favorite of them, a Ninja Turtles shirt that looks like it's a University sports team crest, finally kicks the bucket. It's already pretty faded and pilled, but thankfully doesn't have any holes in it yet. However, I don't think it's long for this world since the fabric is getting pretty damn thin now. :(
The last of my shirt.woot tees had to be taken out of rotation last year including my cherished F5 shirt, so I feel your pain. I would reorder, but the quality of shirts is just not what it once was before the Amazon buyout.
Yeah, same for me with Loot Crate, which technically still exists too. But ever since they went bankrupt and got acquired, the quality of their T-shirts has dropped significantly as well, IMO. I subscribed for a few months to Loot Tees again when they brought it back, but it just isn't the same. My original LC shirts lasted me for over a decade, and several are still in good enough condition to be in my regular rotation... whereas several of the ones that came when I resubscribed didn't even last 2 years before they started getting holes in them.
I have started using Redbubble for T-shirts like this, and have found their quality to be quite good. It's print-on-demand, where Redbubble does the printing and shipping. There are a ton of options. I couldn't find the turtles shirt above specifically, but there are some with a similar vibe.
My current shirt roster that I've gotten through them includes:
I probably have a few others as well, and all my kids have some covering various topics; they cover a pretty big range of things.
Before I started ordering from them, I did some research to figure out how they pay artists, and how ethical the company is, and it came back as a mixed bag. Printing on demand isn't generally environmentally great, nor is the shipping fantastic. They do (or did at the time I looked it up) okay in paying artists. The lowest tier shirts aren't great quality, but they do have some very good quality shirts in the mid tiers.
I've had multiple people comment on the shirts, and even had someone ask me if I was looking for a job when I wore the Python shirt (he figured anyone wearing a Python shirt who had a wizard beard is probably a legit coder?).
They've almost entirely filled in the niche shirts that I was missing that seem to be exactly what you are looking for; things that people who know about it will get, but that just seem like shirts for people who don't know about it.
Oh, nice. Thanks for the suggestion! And after just a quick browse/search I have already spotted a bunch of designs that are right up my alley; Geeky but a bit subtle about it. E.g. Visit Arrakis, 42, Section 9, Rabbit of Caerbannog, Fellowship Hiking Club. :)
p.s. I have ordered a bunch of shirts from TeeTurtle over the years, and their shirt quality is pretty decent too... but I'm also generally not a fan of their super cutesy designs, so I always have to go hunting pretty deep in their catalog to find anything that interests me.
Oh man, insert cat-with-newspaper meme with line "I should buy a monty python shirt". I dig all those ones you've picked there, especially the Dune one.
My fellowship shirt has this one, which is pretty similar, but no words. Most people take it for a hiking shirt. When I was looking through orders for the specific image, I also saw I have an Employee 427 shirt (Stanley Parable) and a Miskatonic University Alumni shirt (Lovecraft universe).
Speaking of, a few more I saw that I am tempted by and might similarly interest you:
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Just-Say-It-by-kg07/51357891.IJ6L0
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/The-Number-Three-by-kg07/99441971.0S66D.XYZ
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Strange-Women-Lying-in-Ponds-by-kg07/99442594.0S66D.XYZ
LOL. All three of these are currently open in another browser.
Edit: I'm leaning towards strange women lying in ponds.
Yeah, I bought way too many items from both of those places. I had totally forgotten about their caffeine obsession on that site. i actually got their original caffeinated soap "shower shock" as a gift. Unsurprisingly, it didn't actually perk you up at all.
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was announced on April Fool's Day and released at the end of the month. It had already been in development for a while, but it was a fun way to promote it.
Loved that game and what a perfect way to announce a game that wasn't even happy with jumping the shark, choosing to instead jump the Amphibian Shark-Squid Hybrid Attack Titan.
Oddly enough, not the first time that a developer made a dating sim as a April Fools joke with one of their IPs, if you want a pretty well written one, Love Thyself - A Horatio Story is pretty good for what it is. This is a spin off of Amplitude Studios' Endless Series, with the main character being a Horatio on one of the Horatio's ships. The Horatio's is a species that is made up of one person's clone because he had a big opinion about himself. It is weird and it is pretty funny. If you have about 2.5 hours to kill, for whatever reason, it is not that long of a game, even if you 100% it.
When a joke takes a disturbing turn and becomes a business venture. Aren't Pals like pokemon? 🤣
April fools day is a great time to introduce a wild idea you aren't sure will be popular or as a joke in a joke to introduce a new product you know will be liked allowing you to say "April fools, it's actually real!"
The Dangers of End-to-End Encryption
Author is "Anita Key". Brilliant.
Here's a private one: my friend works as a dev for a faculty of computer science and they quickly cobbled together an "ASCII-art" (actually short-unicode-art) console version of /r/place that appears for everyone who logs in through ssh today.
So far it's not very interesting, it seems like it hasn't spread around that much yet. It's 1 pm here, so most of the traffic is likely yet to come. And of course the unix guys were going to create a perfect Nix logo.
edit: it is indeed getting slightly more busy and
you can now watch it in realtimeactually not, it wasn't made for actual traffic lol, maybe later. Everything here was made literally last minute, so right now the realtime display crashed.edit2: Here's what it looks like now, 4:27 pm CEST.
edit3: uncrashed, realtime again
RetroDECK April 2025 Update: The AI Retro Revolution
In particular, I liked the “Bigger Sibling” AI character:
Spoilers
A puzzle game for modern times: The Talos Principle Reawakened: Thinking Not Required
The video is good, the description is perfect.
The UK to order third aircraft carrier due to Russia threat
They definitely start off nice and dry before signalling more clearly as you get further in to the article.
From the same site, Britain to introduce new inflatable warships to expand fleet. On that note, turns out Avril Fuller (author of the article you linked) is a Commodore!
Looking at the related articles, they seem to have a whole slew of joke articles. Whee!
I mean, hindsight's 20/20 obviously, but also:
You're far more perspicacious than I am, I hadn't noticed that at all!
I enjoyed the section below the article as well:
I like that line of thinking a lot - I did think using that headline just for a joke article seemed like it was playing with fire a little, so it’s interesting to see they had a broader reason behind it.
Which, to be fair, is another way of saying I also didn’t read the article, but I did at least already see it in the context of an April fools thread…
NPR Music released a new video:
Chocolate Droppa: Tiny Desk Concert
Oh man saving this for later!
My pest control company is offering an anteater service
That's delightful
Games Workshop's Warhammer: Tactical Rock is a new life-sized base so you don't feel outdone by your minis.
This wasn’t intentional, but apparently the word “camel” was causing issues on many websites and services including NPM and Stack Overflow.
It turned out to be an issue in Cloudflare surrounding a suspiciously-named framework:
An exploit in the framework just happened to be discovered yesterday, and presumably Cloudflare turned on some mitigation that was way too aggressive.
The animation for the LoFi Girl Livestream has been changed as a callback to its original channel name.
The change itself is absolutely blursed.
LFTL:
Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/lofigirl
YouTube - Moo 🐮
Loads machine gun
Sufficient Velocity appears to have insufficient acceleration to break the planet in it's logo.
Meanwhile, SpaceBattle is gonna hold an IPO and hosting a shareholder meeting. Needless to say, people are taking the theme and running with it.
Redsun kept things simple for april fools, they just UwUified the main site (the april fools maps are also available but that's automated apparently).
A couple discord servers are also playing around: Stop Killing Games has a notification icon built-in (took me marking it as read to figure it out...) and decky-loader's making homebrews for the Acer Nitro now.
AO3 interviewed orphan_account, while it is funny (because it's, y'know, automated) it was still informative (namely who to contact for what issue in an orphaned work).
Arknights makes some minigames for April Fools, I don't thing they're up yet, even if we know them.
Global will have the Terra Investment Masterclass, where Prof. Can (better known as Cannot Goodenough) will guide you on maximising profits by... participating in Salty Bets?!
Well, get those bets in!
Spoilers from China on the new AF event.
ARK no NIGHTS, where Reunion awakens the Doctor and we fight a version of Rhodes Island that might be controlled by PRTS (this is taken from a reddit post so might).Lastly, I wouldn't normally add them here, but the pranks are clean (even if the websites are very much adult-oriented/only) so I think it's fine?
I'm still throwing them behind a spoilerbox.
On one hand FurAffinity gave itself a makeover replacing the banner with only the highest quality mspaint drawing.
They're also using Comic Sans everywhere now.
On the other paw E6 is following some new regulations by requiring user to submit to a fursona check.
It, of course does nothing, but a lot of users did download their drawings to post them (it even has a tag), and despite E6 being, well, E6, of the 3k+ posts under the tag, only about 100-200 aren't rated safe somehow?
Well, safe by E6 standard, I'm sure at least some could be considered suggestive elsewhere.
Also, despite the tools given being worse than mspaint there's still a lot of good drawing outta this, couple I found are 5473083 (a chibi soulseer mizutsune) and 5473527 (a small dragon perched on a branch).
Our company has gradually started a weekly schedule update over email for the past couple of years. My schedule update via email today consisted of a storyline starting with Monday (yesterday) having already put laxatives in the coffee without anyone knowing, and then the following week consists of me obtaining laxatives, building a time machine, and by Friday I'm hopping into said time machine with the laxatives. I don't have the energy for any real pranks, but trying to keep the spirit alive.
I've already had my monitor unplugged and mouse taped, so who knows what horrors await around the corner.
At the very least you may find out if anyone actually reads these emails!
Adult Swim did a live action Rick and Morty play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNnwHPubiA
Wow this is so cursed but I gotta watch it all.
For a minute I fell for this from the LiverpoolFC subreddit earlier today. Wishful thinking I guess. It's one of those April Fool pranks where you chuckle after finding out and then get sad that it isn't reality.
LTT bought and unboxed a fire truck! I can’t tell if they actually bought it or loaned it for the video.
Jeff Geerling’s lamp rack to run the LAMP stack made me smile!
Two for the penguins:
r/linux: BREAKING: Linus merged /dev/llm0 into kernel 6.16
linkedin: Belgium Introduces “Freedom Fee” on US Commercial Software, Open Source Spared
Arenanet and Guild Wars always does something for April Fools, ranging from making everyone have bobbleheads, or see giant cats in every city, to an entire 8 bit inspired adventure with elaborate new maps and different combat and item system. This year's iteration is a bunch of achievements which involve doing things like a challenging end game dungeon as a small vicious cactus creature, partipate in a fashion show, or open your own cat cafe.
Dekoni Audio, a company that makes high quality replacement earpads for headphones, announced a toilet seat pad
https://www.carnival.com/duolingo?utm_source=DUO&utm_medium=em&camp=CRM_DUO_APRILFOOLS
Duolingo 5-year cruise was pretty funny to read
Brilliant!
I... Want raw fish in a seaweed sleeping bag
I'm just happy they brought back Duolingo on Ice. Also it's hilarious how threatening the masks are.
Something New is Coming... | Paul Sellers
Edit: If you follow the link in the description, you'll find that his team actually created a website with some fun facts about the video. 😂
Litter Robot is giving away a free candle with any purchase.
Rhett and Link (Good Mythical Morning) did a "Gut Check" (taste test) of 40 different McNuggets.