Tag: April Fools

Each year ThinkGeek runs some of the most plausible products in its April Fools’ Day gags. We sort of love it and sort of hate it. The cool part each year for me is trying to figure out which of the pranks proves popular enough that the company will actually produce and sell it.

One of the most iconic things from the first season of Westworld was the mysterious snake tattoo that wrapped around the body of Armistice. Now cosplayers looking to replicate her distinctive look can do the same with this full-body temporary tattoo from ThinkGeek.

April Fools day may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to enjoy some late discoveries from the Internet’s favorite prank day. Among the many wacky items that turned up on ThinkGeek’s site yesterday is this one that I’d actually like to own.

April Fools’ Day is ThinkGeek’s Christmas. The company once again prepared several fake products for our amusement, with the best one being the Useless Light Switch. It’s like the useless machine, only it doesn’t just turn itself off, it takes down the light bulb with it.

Every year ThinkGeek comes up with an April Fools’ joke product that you want to be real. The EnCounter Wearable Interactive Quest is one of those ideas. It’s a fitness tracker that turns your movements and activities into tabletop RPG quests.

Watchmaker Analog Watch Co. takes advantage of the smartwatch craze to drum up some publicity with what is most probably an April Fools’ joke. It’s called the Ant Watch, a small ant farm in the shape of a wristwatch.

I have never been big on camping, but the Tentanic might just change my mind. In case you’re wondering, the Tentanic is a tent of massive proportions, with a name that was drawn from one of the most well-known cruise ships in history: the Titanic.

Blizzard have dialed back on their April Fools shenanigans. This year they’ve literally scaled down their pranks. The company is promoting a mobile game set in the StarCraft universe, where we’ll get to control one of the most important figures in Terran history: the supply depot.

If there’s one thing we can count on Google for ever year, it’s a bunch of hilarious, geeky April Fools pranks, and this might be my favorite of 2012. It’s a new capability for Google Chrome called Multitask Mode.

It seems that the Snakes of MGS: Peace Walker are taking a cue from their Assassin predecessors. Top video game producers Hideo Kojima and Patrice Desilets contracted hay fever while making this trailer for the upcoming PSP game, so you better watch this until the very end.

For any writer of tech, April 1 is a day of reckoning. This is the day when you never know if that cool item you see on another site or online is real or if it’s a fake put there to be believable enough to trick consumers into trying to buy and writers into covering it.

The in-house nerds of online data backup expert Backupify have come up with the ultra-powerful, paradigm shifting, completely concocted Backpedalify, “a new service for government and elected officials to ensure honesty in politics.” Backpedalify takes a public official’s previous statements and restores them to what they actually mean.

The folks at Art Lebedev Studio are having a little April Fools’ fun once again, with funny and just slightly absurd designs with neat concept art. One of their “latest designs” is the Cylindrus, a USB hub shaped like a magician’s top hat and, well, actually that’s all there is to it.

More April Fools fun! This time it’s from Japan. Someone at Japanese Internet forum 2chan posted what looks like a copy of a video game mag  bearing this juicy newsflash: Check out the whole screenshot at Comboadictos or at EventHubs, where commenters are pointing out that the text in the article is actually about Chrome Hounds.

The specialty of Art Lebedev’s design studio is in stylizing the mundane. But their idea for a grill is just plain cruel. Called Gridus, the barbecue grid copies the look of a spreadsheet, ensuring that the user’s mind will be thoroughly driven insane as the concepts of “vacation”, “relaxation” & “cookouts are fun” are shattered.

I’ve seen a lot of geeky shirts, but these ones take the cake. Or not. Think Geek‘s April Fools offering for this year are “interactive portal shirts”, that mimic the portal effect popularized by Valve’s first-person puzzler.