A few days ago I shared some news that the Eurovision song from Israel would be named “Your land is mine now” to later realize it was from an onion kind of website, lol.
I hope I’m not alone in this kind of f’up.
I got reverse onioned a little while ago. There was an article about a kids version of the AR-15 called the JR-15, and it was so ludicrous and I didn’t know that website, I thought it was a satirical article for a while… Weeks later I mentioned it as a joke, but my brother said it was real and I checked and saw he was right.
AR is short for Adult Rifle
I just can’t figure out why we have a school shooting problem…
- says the only nation where this regularly happens.
They got rid of gun shaped transformers (megatron) and gun shaped Pez dispensers. You can’t expect Americans to do more than this.
My favorite childhood toy was a metal-and-plastic, kid-sized Winchester 1873. It came with plastic beads it could shoot - they were all lost within days, but it still made a “pop” when you cocked and shot it. I tried to carry that thing everywhere; I clearly remember the trauma when my parents refused to let me take it to church, or school.
Anyway, I’ve always assumed my experience and desires were pretty standard for kids: they like guns. Is that uniquely American? Do German and Chinese kids not run around with gun-shaped sticks or toys “shooting” at each other?
Edit: typo
Sure they do. The difference is they don’t do it with real weapons because people generally don’t own real weapons. When they do own one (for hunting or sport, never for personal protection), it’s locked in a secure safe by law and requires successful completion of a fairly tough training with a proficiency test at the end.
Was the JR15 mentioned above a real gun? I have a hard time imagining a functioning rifle chambered in 5.56 that would be small enough for a child to handle. And AR15s aren’t that big; a young teen can handle them fairly easily.
I guess my point is that the AR frame is about as small as you can make a functioning 5.56 rifle anyway. You could put a shorter barrel on it, maybe lighten the stock, but now you’ve just made a carbine. The upper isn’t getting any smaller… so what’s “JR” about it?
Scaling an AR down so it just looks like one, but is chambered in something shorter like .22 short… I guess you could call it a JR15. Seems like a cheap cop-out, since that upper is the defining feature of the AR15. Although a guess there are derivations chambered in Blackout, Grendel and so on, and they’re all considered based on the AR platform.
Hence, my assumption it was a toy.
Apparently it’s a .22 “long”.
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LOL I guessed at the caliber. .22 long isn’t much longer than short, in the grand scheme of things.
What a crazy development.
I only occasionally see that here in Asia. It exists, but I feel like it’s much less. I immigrated here maybe 12 years ago from the West. The overall level of violence is much lower than I grew up with (even in Canada).
Most young people I know consider handling guns more of a chore. In Vietnam, learning to disassemble, clean, maintain, and reassemble an AK-47 is a mandatory class. My wife got top score :)
Anyway, we stumbled on a great way to make guns uncool, I think. Personal possession is illegal here except for shotguns, it’s for some very specific scenario that I don’t exactly recall. I knew of some remote workplaces with one, in case of wild animals. We get some, but not many, illegal firearms.
About 20 years ago I was so outraged by Bonsai Kitten that I asked a friend’s mom to help me write letters to ISPs and law enforcement to try to get it taken down.
It was a site with pictures of cats in glass jars, but it had very graphic details about how they supposedly kept cats alive in jars and grew them into weird shapes… I still think it’s pretty tasteless, but it was clearly someone’s idea of satire. It felt like a big deal back then, but these days it would be nothing more than a bad meme.
It kinda was a big deal back then. This was the early days of mainstream internet hoaxes and a lot of people actually believed that shit (my teenage self included).
a lot of people actually believed that shit
Wot. Srsly?
Wow, looks like I hit the Internet really, really early. Because by the time that stuff came out, I laughed myself silly at how ridonkulous it was.
Early internet joke/hoax sight was “drill a hole in your head”. pictures of people with drills in hand and bloody bandages looking all blissed out. I think it was shocking for some because the internet was so new people didn’t think you just blatantly lie without a disclaimer.
I remember that one!
You were not alone, it was taken down (and rehosted/mirrored) multiple times because of complaints.
Thirty years ago, I told a friend that Australians come from Australia, Romanians come from Romania, and Canadians come from Canadia. She called it Canadia for thirty years.
We’ve been together for ten years and she’s only just found out that it’s actually called Canada. Boy am I in trouble.
Maybe you can double down and day it’s more of a French Canadian thing?
Going to college in New Orleans, we had a game where everyone had to convince at least one tourist that the river was pronounced MissisSIPPi, but the residents of the state preferred it if you’d say MisSISSippi.
I accidentally call it Canadian sometimes
Someone on Bluesky claimed that the Tesla Cybertruck was emitting “human sewage” or “fishy glue” smells with a convincing edit of a Insider News article. Then they convinced me more by editing/making from fiction a Cybertruck owners discussion board to say someone was posting about their Cybertruck smelling like dog pussy. To be honest, when I saw that I should have known it was fake, but I can absolutely believe the Cybertruck smelling rancid from failing electronics.
I believed the fake article since I had a similar situation with a failing minifridge. There was a strong electronic smell coming from it and while it wasn’t really “fishy glue” I knew something was failing and disposed of it immediately. I also remembered a YouTuber having issues with her home wiring emitting a fishy glue smell.
Yup! The fishy glue smell is real, but there’s no legitimate reports of the Cybertruck emitting those, as much as people would believe that.
I think your instance wins best name
Do April Fools jokes count? I was bereft after reading an article 13+ years ago from a trustworthy gaming site that said Armor Games (a popular flash game dev at the time) was taking over all development for the Elder Scrolls games.
(In retrospect, maybe that wouldn’t have been the worst thing after Skyrim came out)
Is “ate the onion” a well known saying? I’ve never heard It before
I’m not sure how well known it might be, is when you take a The Onion article seriously.
It comes from the phrase “ate it up” (meaning to gullibly believe something) and The Onion, one of the most famous satirical ‘news’ outlets.
It means to believe a satirical news piece.
If you are unfamiliar with The Onion, a satirical news site, it would not make sense.
I think there is a subreddit that is called that or similar.
for australian prime ministers it is. at least, it is in recent history
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I got pretty excited to see an advertisement for Hardee’s mini biscuits and gravy. It was like tiny biscuits swimming in a bowl of gravy like cereal and it looked delicious . Then I realized it was April 1st.
I honestly thought that kangaroos were poisonous. That they had a kind of stinger on the elbow.
I even managed to convince a few people of it, including two Australians.
Then later I couldn’t find it any more on Wikipedia. Apparently it was a prank edit years ago.
Kangaroos don’t but platypus do.
What doesn’t the platypus do at this point?
Speak English…?
Only by choice, let’s be honest.
I shared Naomi Klein’s support for the “No Label” party on Facebook many years ago. It was of course satire.
Since then I really look into the things people share before I share them myself. Even though I generally trust these people.
This happened in a biology class where we had groups of people trying to get the DNA out of fruits and vegetables, my group had chosen an onion, in an effort to try and be the cool kid I ate some of the onion, no one noticed.
Do fruits have DNA?!? Like unique DNA like human do?
All plants, animals, mushrooms, bacteria, etc have DNA. Any time a living thing reproduces there can be unique mutations that give the offspring a unique DNA. And, especially if it is a sexual reproduction (having two parents, like in most fruits) the parents DNA is mixed together to form a unique combination of the two parents.
They do! Though I think their genome is a lot simpler
Oh man, sometimes yes but sometimes not so much. Know how humans have 23 chromosomes? And we’re diploid, which means they come in pairs of 2?
Some plants have a few more pairs than that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy And some plants have way WAY more than 23 chromosomes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_by_chromosome_count There’s a plant at the bottom of that list that has 1260 chromosomes.
I only took 1 botany class back in college, so I don’t know or remember enough to talk about this in more depth. I really only know enough to be shocked by how crazy a plant’s genuine can be.
The way I’ve had it explained to me, plants as a general rule have a much, much larger genome than animals. The reason is simple. When an animal runs into a problem like not enough water, it can just get up and move. Plants are rooted where they are, prey to whatever comes along. They have to develop an arsenal of genes to deal with different situations, whether that’s drought resistance or producing various toxins so that animals don’t make a meal of them. It’s not like animals don’t do this to some degree - the immune system is incredibly elaborate - but not as much.
Whoa, very interesting! Biology is so fascinating
Except for onions, ironically.
April fools on /r/askhistorians
It took me way longer to realize an article about how Alaskan airlines was giving passengers a pass to bring your own pocket tools on one of their flights that it really should have. My only real excuse was that the site wasn’t the onion.
I learned a few years ago that the Duke is, in fact, not frozen waiting to be resuscitated. Of course I only learned this after arguing with my prof in film class about it. Classic urban legend. Now I’m worried about any other hoaxes I might have absorbed in the pre-Internet years. At least I know that the Glomar Explorer was not looking for manganese nodules.
Wait until you hear that Disney’s Frozen was only created so that searching for “Disney Frozen” would result in the movie intead of Walt Disney’s frozen head.
Who’s frozen? Who is “the Duke?”
Ah yes, that probably showed my age right there. The Duke was the nickname of John Wayne, who died of cancer in 1979.
Wait, there’s a conspiracy theory Wayne was frozen? He died before cryo was even remotely feasible - that’s got to be even more fringe than usual.
I fell for an April Fools joke years ago saying that an upcoming character to be released in Smite was The Morrigan, then confidently posted about it on Reddit weeks later.
This was years before she actually was released, and long before development was started on her.
I was very excited for the release of Star Wars : The Force Awaken trailer. On that day, I knew the trailer was out, so I searched “force awaken trailer”, on YouTube, watched it and shared it…
Annnnd it was a fake trailer.
I assume all trailers on YouTube are fake
