bug conference day 1: I went to the conference location this morning and got hit with a surprise 700 dollar charge because despite being a presenter AND a member of the bug club I somehow wasn’t ~officially registered~ for the conference yet. I went to a talk on bees, then tried to find something that wasn’t bees but everything was bees. So I walked to the art museum
tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows
for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016
each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen
you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster
in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could
lest we forget
This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.
- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.
- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.
- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.
- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards
- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)
- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work
- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon
- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak
- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself
- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great
- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone
a whole chapter of my tumblr memoir will be “lizard election 2016”
it was the first project i ever led myself, and i thought i’d be fired for sure by the end of it. completely worth it. would do it all again.
my only regret, echoed by @zacksultan and a few of the other creatives, was that we didn’t get BuzzFeed and other press in the war room with us at the time. it was magical.
ALT
