April Fools’, Cabbages, and RuneScape

My April Fools’ Day was mostly tir­ing.  I’m still play­ing catch up from my week­end at Imagi­con.  My sleep pat­terns are return­ing to nor­mal, and I actu­ally am back to work­ing out com­pletely.  Yes­ter­day, I was one day late fin­ish­ing Day 30 of my yoga chal­lenge and did 140 pushups.  Today I decided that there was so much stuff that I just wasn’t able to do yet (Crow pose, any­one?) that I would do the month over again, at least until some­thing bet­ter occurred to me.  Phys­i­cally, I’m back on track again.

My house brown­ies didn’t do their nor­mal job of clean­ing up the house over the week­end, but instead decided to throw an unchap­er­oned  party.  The house was finally in liv­able con­di­tion again this after­noon, but then I made a rookie mis­take.  All the rain lately has made for some very cooped up kids, so I decided to let them run amok a lit­tle bit while I fin­ished up the dishes and some odds and ends.  I should have gone out­side and watched them, instead of leav­ing the door open and lis­ten­ing for their voices.  The boys decided that all the deli­cious mud was call­ing their names, and had them­selves a good old time.  I dis­cov­ered their guilty, sat­is­fied, mud-caked faces about five min­utes before I was sup­posed to walk out the door, of course.

I did man­age to snatch a lit­tle chill time in, though.  RuneScape has a his­tory of great April Fools’ Day pranks.  One year, every time the in-game decency cen­sor starred out a word, aster­isks were replaced with the word “cab­bage.” In 2007, there was a news post all about how Jagex thought they had been neglect­ing the lowly cab­bage, and how they were in process of devel­op­ing cab­bage related armor, beast­ies, and runes.  They even claimed that on April 31st (hint hint) all play­ers would be turned to cab­bage!  They had to actu­ally explain that the news release was a joke later on in the day how­ever.  Last year’s prank was fairly tame.  Dragon is the best metal in the game, so play­ers nat­u­rally thought that the release of a “dragon kite” was a spiffy new shield.  Alas, it was a toy kite with the image of a dragon on it, buyable for a mere 100 gold pieces.

RuneScape is great for veg­ging mind­lessly, and most espe­cially today.  I logged in to see peo­ple hurl­ing cab­bages at each other, and wield­ing them like bowl­ing balls.  I ran past a cab­bage patch and picked one up.  Sure enough, I had the option to “Wield Cab­bage.”  After wield­ing, I could then “Chuck Cab­bage.”   I tele­ported to the world’s main cab­bage patch, and saw that the cab­bages were all ani­mated!  They were hop­ping up and down, and when a player tries to pick one, it runs off!  If it escapes the cab­bage patch, the options turn to “kick” and “tap” cab­bage.  There’s an alleged prize (a cab­bage) if I kick it all the way over White Wolf Moun­tain, down past Ardougne and Yanille, and into Oo’glog where the Ogress Spa is.  I’m esti­mat­ing that it will take me about an hour of kick­ing and prod­ding this ani­mated veg­etable all that way.  Yes, that’s what doing with the rest of my evening.    No fooling.