@Yuuki Hmm?

@Derpy Hopefully nothing, because even the most gentle and tender "tricks" empower and embolden people who think it's okay to use April 1st as an excuse to endanger others' wellbeing for the sake of a "joke."

But who am I kidding? It's the Stack.

(To be very clear, before I get misinterpreted: messing around with close friends can be okay if you've clearly established permissions and boundaries between each other. That is a completely different topic than a business which thousands of people rely on for their day-to-day professional livelihood, publicly pulling pranks on their entire user base.)

(And no, not even with an opt-out, because if they want to do it the thing needs to be an opt-IN. No matter how gentle and tender the prank they pull, the Stack's public and authoritative positionality empowers bad actors to use the Stack's pranks as justification for their own.)

I'm not a huge fan of April 1st myself

but there are also some pranks people just pull because they feel like it even outside of April 1st, and I dislike or even hate most of those too

Absolutely. Glorifying untrustworthiness and lack of consent is awful any time of the year; it's just especially messed up to have a whole day dedicated to undermining a foundational element of society.

Yeah I agree

I guess what I'm saying is, the day itself isn't responsible for all of the specific type of behavior

That being said it would be nice if it were not a thing

Anyway, all I can ever think of when I see like, one of those videos of a person or even multiple people pulling a prank on someone is how mad I would be if they did that to me

Especially the "jump out at you with a mask or costume" ones

The day dedicated to it, I think, makes more people think it's okay to do the rest of the time--even if they don't themselves, April first reduces the societal friction which would prevent people from doing it as much generally.

Which I have seen a couple times on like, Twitter and Facebook despite being wholly uninterested

@BESW yeah I can definitely agree with that

I doubt it would eliminate the practice of pranks but it could very well decrease the frequency

By a fair margin even

It's related to the principles behind stochastic terrorism: by creating an environment where bad action is accepted as normal, you empower people who are inclined toward bad action to actually act badly. And people who are inclined to escalate, are more likely to do so.

I do sometimes enjoy really small pranks like that thing I saw where someone hung up a pair of those glass door handlesas if they were a door

While creating an environment that does not condone bad action, reduces the number of bad actors and the escalation of bad actions.

Its not scary or humiliating (also you can't just do it wherever you want)

But I can still see someone being upset by it too

Yeah I mean

That's why it's better to have clear boundaries set up about what you can or can't do with this kind of thing

And if you don't have that with someone you shouldn't prank em at all

I myself have a pretty low threshold of tolerance for it

My Grandmother dropped ice down the back of my shirt once, I freaked out beyond the proportion of what she expected

It didn't help that I never saw her as the type of person who would do something like that

Hey I can't stand jump scares

Even the like sort of fake ones

Luckily this kind of social influence works the other way too: an environment that normalizes compassionate action will in turn empower compassionate action.

Like the family cat jumps out instead of the monster

@Ash I most likely will yell first, I probably won't hit anyone but I can't say that as a promise so much as how it's happened so far

@Ash I find the scariest part of a horror movie to be when I don't see the monster

If it's on screen it's actually not all that scary anymore

Generally

Except Alien

That thing still freaks me out

@Ash I'm not a huge fan of it either, but I've been subjected to some more of it than I would have liked

@BESW that's a pretty good one

@Ash it was mostly as a kid, my parents thought we were all,... More into that kind of thing than we were

Not just me but my siblings too

We watched the X-files and Alien And the Shinning and The Exorcist and stuff

Or as much of it as we could variably stand until we just walked out on it

@trogdor Oh, man, I walked out of the theatre just watching Jumanji as a kid.

Somehow I sat through all of Alien and regreted it for a week while I couldn't sleep

Meanwhile I walked out of the Shinning pretty fast

Those giant mosquitoes gave me nightmares.

Huh

Jumanji wasn't that bad for me

I also walked out of the pre-credits sequence on the first X-files movie.

Ugh the X-files movies

Those were horrible

I was super squish as a kid. The ear worms in Wrath of Khan noped me out of the room, but I came back after.

I'm still very anti-jump-scare and prefer watching scary movies when I can pause them and go do something else for a while.

But I also now really LIKE a lot of scary movies provided they're scary because of good craft and interesting ideas.

@Ash Jumanji II, however, was awesome.

Yes!

yeah that was great

There's a sequel coming out this December, but unfortunately they're bringing back the same cast and adding new people, instead of making it a totally new cast.

@Ash I just don't see any reason to watch most horror movies,.... and most of them are just 20-jumpscares and some body horror as I understand it and it just,.... I see no reason I have to see any of that

@BESW that's too bad, it would have been nice to see a new set of "adventurers"

As much as I loved most of the cast for II, I think the franchise would be better served by mixing it up every time around.

it's not that the cast they had was bad, but part of the fun was that it was new

@BESW yes exactly

Kind of like how one of the best parts of the Mission: Impossible movie franchise was having a new and very very distinct director each time.

(I still wish they hadn't tied Cruise's pet project to the Mission: Impossible brand, though.)

I wish they hadn't tied him to it

period

my favorite movie with him in it is the one where he dies several times

personally I felt like the Mission Impossible movies were just,... ok action movies

though that's coming partially from not being into the franchise beforehand probably

The Mission: Impossible movie franchise is, straight-up, Tom Cruise's pet project. From the second one onward he's been the driving force behind it, choosing the directors and all.

But it has very little to do with the original TV show, except superficially.

And that's a shame because while the TV series' politics were very much about Cold War proxy manipulation and then later about racist War on Drugs nonsense, its structural premise remains unbeaten and un-replicated and probably always will.