TL;DR: I created a rumor that our company was being bought out, which by sheer coincidence had implications at the CEO level.

Back in the mid-90s, the day before April Fools Day, I wrote a fake Wall Street Journal article about Toshiba buying up our company's stock, i.e. a hostile takeover. As a clue that it was fake, I made the Toshiba spokesman's name Igata Takashawa. I scribbled an illegible name on a printed copy and left it on a random manager's desk.

Within 2 hours my dept suddenly had an emergency all-hands mandatory meeting. The room was packed, and projected on the wall was my article. It was utter pandemonium in there, everyone talking at once. Because of April Fool's it was also "funny hat day". A few people had funny hats, but our manager had gone all out and was dressed like a pirate - black pants, big white shirt, red bandana and a giant gold plastic earring. He was British and strongly resembled actor Bob Hoskins - bulldog-like build, blustery attitude. When I walked in he was standing on a chair waving his arms trying to get everybody to shut up.

It seemed upper management was very disturbed by the article, and wanted whoever created it to come forward. They promised no recriminations (yeah right) and only wanted to know the reason for it. I kept my mouth shut.

A friend of mine, who worked near a bunch of managers and overheard their conversations, said their tone was like, "Why Toshiba?" and "Why now?" - as if the story might have a grain of truth.

It came out months later that by sheer coincidence our company had been working jointly with Hitachi on a top secret military project - a portable, battlefield ultrasound machine to detect plastic sharpnel, which didn't show up on x-rays. The engineers called it "the tricorder" because it resembled the one Spock used to carry. The boys at the top wondered if the article was a subtle message that the secret had leaked out, which could affect their ability to get future government contracts.

Anyway, I left that job within a few months but my friend stayed for 7 or 8 years, and he said every April Fools Day the "Toshiba incident" still came up in conversation.

The bartender says, "What is this, a joke?"

When Truculent got blown up by c4 it shouldn't have torn him to shreds. The explosion should have destroyed all his insides and momentarily expanded his invulnerable skin like a balloon, which should have contracted to a boneless sack of goo. At least that's how I would have done it. Maybe they thought of that and decided cleaning up the mess had more comedic effect.

This is hypothetical - the glasses don't fact-check what people say, they somehow detect willful deception, like people expect polygraphs to do, but with high accuracy. Would people welcome these, fear them, object on privacy grounds? I think it would be very contentious. Would people feel different if they only fed the information to the wearer but didn't record or send it anywhere? What exactly would the issues be?

He almost always called it "the Second World War", not World War Two.

Every summer we put up a collapsible shade canopy on our back deck. To make it high enough for tall people to walk under, I screwed short pieces of scrap 4x4s onto the legs, like stumpy little stilts. They worked but they were ugly, and had to be roped in place in case the wind ever tried to carry the whole thing away. This meant setup and takedown took time and it all looked sloppy.

So I designed and printed a trim set of stilts on modular joints that twist-lock into fittings permanently screwed onto the deck, tapered and nearly flat so people won't trip on them. They're barely noticeable and the whole project is super mundane, but I'm inordinately proud of them because I am a dull man.

edit: as requested, I added an image of one of the "stilts". Besides what I already mentioned, another reason I did this was that with the 4x4 stumps attached, the frame didn't fit in its fabric storage cover when taken down every year, and I didn't want to unscrew and reattach the 4x4s every time. The new stilts attach to the canopy legs with one small screw, and they'll all fit in a zippered side pocket of the cover. The other reason for doing this, and if I'm honest the main one, is my love of 3d design lol.

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This seems dumb to me. When people said they saw a tweet you knew it was from Twitter - instant brand recognition. A "post" could be from anywhere. Throwing away that distinctive identification seems stupid to me.