April Fools 2010

Here is the text of the April Fools message that was posted on Blazing Games. Note the first letter of each sentence and the date at the bottom. I (Billy D. Spelchan) am still president of the company, and as this month's release shows, we are still slowly transitioning to HTML 5. Flash will probably be our main development tool for the next few years, though.

At Blazing Games, we are proud to announce a deal between ourselves and Microsoft. Sadly, Billy D. Spelchan has agreed to sell his shares of the company and has terminated his position as President of the company, we wish him best of luck with his future endeavours. 

Part of the deal will require that all of our Java and Flash games be replaced with Silverlight versions of these games. Work on this transition has already begun and the non-silverlight games should be removed from the site by the end of this week.

Rich Internet Media in the form of Silverlight is the future of the internet. HTML 5 features simply do not match the power and potential of Silverlight. Our former president's views on open standards clearly are outdated.

Internet Explorer will become the browser of choice for viewing Blazing Games. While we will not be taking any moves to prevent users of other browsers from accessing our site, testing will only be done on Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7. We recommend that visitors upgrade their machines to Windows 7 as soon as possible.

Lots of people, such as our former president, have the mistaken feeling that making a deal with Microsoft is the equivalent to selling your soul to the devil. We hope that crazy superstitions such as that are not going to impact our existing visitors enjoyment of this site.

For those of you who feel you can no longer support the site, we thank you for your consideration for other people by making site bandwidth available for the countless new users we will be receiving from a high placement on the Bing search engine. Clearly Bing is vastly superior to that googol thing that our former president used.

Our open source efforts will continue, though we will be switching from the virus-like GPL license to the much more business friendly Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

OSX users do not have to worry about Silverlight as Microsoft has assured us that they will always support the OSX version of Silverlight. While not all the advanced features of Silverlight will work on the Macintosh, OSX users always have the option of purchasing a copy of Windows and installing it on their Bootcamp partition.

Linux users are urged to give up their anti-capitalist ways and install Windows on their computers as that is what their machines were designed for. Those Linux users who are running old, obsolete hardware should do their part to restore the economy by purchasing new hardware capable of running Windows 7.

Small changes to our games, such as changing the One of those Weeks' Blue Screen of Death into the Linus the Penguin of Doom and changing Coffee Quest into Clippy Quest will be done at the request of our generous corporate partner but feel that such minor changes will not alter the enjoyment of those games.

M. Caton
President,
Blazing Games Inc.
April 1, 2010

April Fools

Obviously I have nothing against April Fools Day as that was the day that I started Blazing Games. I thought that starting a game website right after the dot com bubble burst was a foolish thing to do so what better day to do it. The site has been running fine ever since, at least as long as I don't pay myself. Legal, Accounting, Hosting and a few other fees are covered by the advertising. But while I enjoy making games and running the site, the anniversary holds a deep darkness. You see, April also happens to be the day when the internet stops working for around 48 hours. Technically this annual internet flaw starts March 31st in North America, but the root cause of the glitch is the changing of the date in countries a day ahead of North America to April 1st. Even in North America, some computer systems use the GMT time for their date. This glitch which I am talking about is all the fake "news" articles and posts and gags that start to appear which means that most of my news feeds are not reliable for the next couple of days. This would be tolerable if the article writers made it clear somewhere in the article that it was an April Fools joke, after all the point of April Fools is to let the person know they have been fooled. Why is this a big deal? Largely because most people don't remove their April Fools content after the day is over, which means I may stumble upon it months later when doing research or worse yet have to explain to somebody else that the article was a joke. Of course, going into a 48 hour news withdrawal is also an annoyance.