What is your most embarrassing "ate the onion" moment?
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 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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I like that you are passing off a clear case of your own unexamined antisemitism as a cute conversation starter.
Cool cool finger guns
Edit: anybody downvoting really should be obligated to explain how somebody falling for such a thing isn't an antisemite at worst or a pure moron at best.
Antisemitism is about hating jews because they're jews. That's completely separate from criticizing a nation for crimes against humanity. The first is a group of people with no central government, the second is an administrative entity with a military that is violating the Geneva convention in another country.
If you press a lot of the people you are getting your information from, you will in fact find they hate Jews for being Jews.
When you are claiming the world's oldest conspiracy, you have to start from the position of, "I not one of the other antisemites who has claimed this thousands of times over the years and always been wrong, it's true this time.
If you truly believe this far right conspiracy is true now, that's fine, but if you are at all wrong, you are the same kind of person who has always made this claim.
When I was younger I used to play at a well-known football academy. Some of the better players stayed on, and one of them (easily the best player in our cohort) signed a professional deal. He was 10x better than me, a player that was probably considered pretty good by normal standards.
Compared to pros he was nothing. He never played a game, had his contract terminated, and he eventually found his level in the 9th tier of English football (lower regional leagues).
Age aside, Ryan Reynolds would look hilarious out there. At his fittest, I still think he'd almost definitely get injured trying to go up against a pro defender. Similar to the sort of smurfing videos you see of pro fighters destroying a local gym in disguise, the difference between even someone at National league or League 2 level to a "good" footballer is crazy.
Can't remember what the article was, but it was a local one for an area I don't live in (I think it was a Canadian one). Anyway, ate the onion in a large discord server I had just joined. I was mostly just trying to become part of the community. Nobody corrected me for a couple of hours until some smug bastard said something along the lines of "...at least I know it's a satiric publication."