Mizohican: Chp 566. Trolling Mizo Bloggers

For those of you who visit my blog regularly, you may know that sometimes I like to troll my friends. Some of you may have seen my earlier trolls, like when that one time I managed to convince a friend to connect to the internet using just a cigarette lighter (the famous chhanban episode) or that other time when I fooled all the visitors of misual.com including the other admins with an infinite loading gif of a YouTube player (aaah that infamous "sex scandal").

I even trolled my girlfriend some time back (the upside-down text incident) and the result was... well... hilarious, but courageous. People told me I deserve the Bharat Ratna Award for having the guts to troll one’s own girlfriend :D :P

I guess that’s just me. It’s not like I look forward to trolling people all day long. But when I see an opportunity, I do have this really bad habit of grabbing it! :) And this time, I not only got to blog about trolling people, but the people I happened to troll were all bloggers! :D

So there’s this "Mizo Bloggers" WhatsApp group some of the prominent Mizo bloggers like TSa Khupchong and Zofa Chhangte had created. It was indeed an honour to be added to that group, and I felt right at home because I already knew most of the other members of that WhatsApp group.

People post links of their latest blog post updates in that group, and we discuss about various topics and ways to encourage or promote blogging within our Mizo society. We also discuss about various issues that some of us might want to blog about in our next update.

The other day, while people were just talking about some random topic, Lal Jo-a aka Father Sphinx brought up the fact that he couldn’t see some of the smileys other members were posting. Now as some of you WhatsApp users might know, WhatsApp recently updated their app with features that included emojis having different skin complexions, and a middle finger emoji! But only those who updated to this latest version could see those new emojis.

The conversation started off like this...

And that was when I saw the opening!

Since some of the members hadn’t updated to the latest version of WhatsApp, I decided to make up my own emojis and see how others would react to them...

To avoid confusion, I am using a simple black background as my WhatsApp wallpaper in the ones that I am displaying here. The ones with a "fiery guitar" as the wallpaper was what I was using when this incident actually took place the other day...

Below is the enlarged "screenshot" version of what I posted in the group above -

What I did was simple. Since I am on AirDroid (a very useful app developer’s tool that connects my device directly to my PC via the same wifi network so as to quickly test new apps or games once the apk has been built), I quickly modified the screenshots I took on my phone using Photoshop on my PC and pasted new icons over them and then sent them out to the WhatsApp group again.

And it worked, impressing the other members when they saw my "screenshot". And nobody suspected anything because I was able to do this task quickly.

Yup, I went a step further and replaced those "customised" smileys with actual photos of the other group members! Was I going too far?

But that also worked! :D

As you can see, I was really starting to enjoy it :D

And after that I was caught up with work again and we stopped discussing about it around noon. I also didn't want to push too much so as not to arouse their suspicion. It was only around 5PM that day that I decided to slowly divert back to the topic...

Yup, more quick editing were made...

Time to start making up some bullshit solution... :)

Yup, this was the final ingredient I used to make this troll a success. I took a screenshot of my WhatsApp "settings" section, and cheekily added a new menu section called "Activate face emoji". Now if you’re a designer or naturally well-observant, you’d notice I wasn’t using the exact same font as my WhatsApp theme (I too had my own office work to do, didn’t have time to make it perfect) but I hoped it would fool a layman who might not notice the slight differences in curvature of the e, c, a and t.

And yes, it worked as well! :D My friends bought it...