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 hope I'm not alone in this kind of f'up.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
I believed a headline that Ryan Reynolds threw on a Wrexham shirt and played half a game as a substitute.. it was April 1st.
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.
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 they are so willing to believe something so utterly ridiculous. It doesn't paint the best picture for them.
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.
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."
I thought you were talking about Tony Abbott and his onion moment for a second there ..
That song's a banger!
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