WTF Happened April 2026
Welcome to the April 2026 edition of WTF Happened! This is a recap of the highlights of the month of April in the year of our lord Gaben, 2026. These recap articles cover world news, tech news, a little U.S. politics with a sprinkle of non-U.S. politics and a bunch of other stuff with the goal of highlighting the biggest news of the month! The general goal is to give you highlights for the month for a variety of topics, not to give you the most important events in chronological order, even if that will sometimes be the order we use.
World News
Another Failed Assassination Of Trump
This is getting ridiculous how incompetent these shooters are. They never seem to hit anything of consequence. Trump went to the correspondents dinner on April 25 and was evacuated from the premises after a failed shooting. The shooter was apprehended moments later and Trump had a public briefing afterward where he used this as an excuse to explain away his White House remodel.
Veterans Arrested At U.S. Capitol During Iran War Protest
Police explained that the protest was illegal because it was inside the congressional buildings, which is not allowed. Protesters were given opportunity to leave the building and protest outside but refused and were arrested because of that refusal to vacate. (The Hill) The footage posted all over social media (like this one) of this event showed a peaceful protest with plenty of room to conduct business as usual, so it amazes me that they'd be arrested for their protest when the arrest alone warrants greater news coverage than they ever would have gotten on their own. The message these vets were trying to get across was that we should stop the war any way possible to save lives on both sides from needless bloodshed and that each soldier has a right to refuse to go to war and should refuse to go to this one.
Ukraine Shot Down Drones While Flying Old Planes
Some really crazy footage of Ukrainians shooting down drones using planes and guns was posted to the r/PublicFreakout subreddit May 1. This footage was a short compilation video of actions really performed back in April or earlier, but looking at the footage, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was some time travel themed war game trailer generated by AI, because the Ukrainian soldiers flew prop planes and the clips were extremely short and jerky. One of the planes shown was the Yakovlev 52, a training plane from 1976. These planes were still in production until 1998 but even then, that's nearly 30 years ago.
Controversial Plan For Healthier School Meals in England
There was legal pressure for schools to have healthier meals in England, bbut now that a plan is in place to have healthier meals, people are pushing back, saying there's a "devastating effect" on an already struggling sector. (Guardian) This pettiness would make the United States proud. Healthy meals is a good thing, people! Stop painting it as bad when the cost goes up if the real cost of the old way of doing things was students' well-being.
Port Montreal Port Expansion Underway
There's this port called the Contrecœur Terminal. Don't ask me how to say that. It's too small, I guess. Canadians are getting to build it bigger thanks to a big $1.16B loan from CIB which was confirmed April 9, and I'm told it'll generate revenue or something. This port expansion will bring more import/export potential and create job opportunities near the eastern coast (sort of, it's on a river that comes in from the Eastern coast and comes close to the United States border) and will do so without killing the environment around it. (Port-Montreal.com) I really don't know why you'd make a biigger port in Montreal when you could make a port further out in some place like New Brunswick, but my best guess is it's easier to carry heavy weight on the water than to truck it everywhere.
"Click To Cancel" Rule For NYC
With all the dark patterns and schemes behind corporations' subscription business models, Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection have announced a "Click to Cancel" law that would require all companies to allow a single click process for unsubscribing from any service offered to NYC citizens. (Bsky) The law is not yet finalized, but after a 30-day review period, it's likely this law will pass unchanged or barely adjusted. It's a good protection act in my opinion as a former Adobe customer. Even if this law is passed, it doesn't mean the end of dark patterns, it just makes it harder for companies to get away with such practices without consequences. In the end, we have to advocate for open source alternatives whenever we can so we can live in a world where no software company has leverage over the populous like Adobe used to... and kind of still does. Read my "Stop killing old software!" article if you're interested in my point of view on this subject.
NASA Artemis II Launch & Moon Fly-By
On April 1st, Artemis II launched with the mission to fly around the moon and back to Earth. The mission was a success and resulted in some new images of the backside of the moon as well as some fantastic images of Earth. (NASA)
Here's a picture of Earth from Artemis II:
And here's a picture of the side of the moon, showing part of the front side and backside:
You can see more fantastic images and videos and audio from Artemis II here.
Memes & Internet Jokes
Your Indie Band Name
This chain meme took off on Bluesky around the end of April. It went like this: You quoted the previous poster's band name and reposted the image, which said "Your Indie band name is: Your favorite fruit + the last reason you took painkillers" and say your own band name in the response. Mine was Banana Beat Saber but I changed it to Banana Hiking Accident. (Bsky)
Robin: Stand User
Someone found an old photo of Robin Williams doing some weird dramatic pose and decided to sketch it for practice. This resulted in one user saying "Robin would have been an amazing Stand User 
" (Bsky) then others took this observation and went further with it, making some fanart and mock-ups of Robin Williams as a stand user in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure universe.
A Ballroom For Protection
Following some insanely stupid thing Donald Trump said about why his ballroom renovation was necessary, tons of big name celebrities and normies alike went to social media to announce they're building ballrooms for their own protection. This trending joke was funny in the saddest way. 
First New Photo From The Moon
During and following the successful Artemis II moon fly-by on April 1-9, we saw a meme popularized where you would say "First new photo from the moon" and then post an image from a popular media you like that's set on the moon. You can search for the memes here, but I included a few highlights below.
Celebrity News
The Vampire Diaries Star Admittedly Broke After Retiring
Ian Somerhalder, known by many as one of the vampires in The Vampire Diaries or the handsome dude in Lost, left his lucrative acting career quite early due to trying to start a business and ending up in an 8-figure debt. This wouldn't be April 2026 news, but I thought "Oh, wow, I haven't heard about that guy in ages," so why not point out an interview about something that happened years ago! It's a stark reminder that not everyone who looks well off is actually well off. You can read more on E! if you're curious, but there really isn't a lot of detail given.
Looksmaxxing Influencer Suspected Overdose During Livestream
Some guy with the silly handle Clavicular didn't want to get a normal job, so he took up drugs or something and started showing some skin and said a bunch of stuff about looking good... and I guess he's famous now? Is that really all it takes these days to be a celebrity? Well, this guy has hospitalized after overdosing on something during a Kick stream. (Page Six) Also, he was said to be a suspect in an ongoing investigation into the shooting of an alligator in the Everglades. This guy's getting around! Page Six even went as far as to call him a "incel-ebrity" - Lmao. I will start using that term for people like Asmongold.
Internet News
Bluesky Major Outage
I'm a big supporter of the Bluesky social media platform, but nothing on the internet is perfect, including Bluesky, which will sometimes result in downtime. On the up side, while the Bluesky site was down most of a day, some third party feeds were still working, and many users were able to still use the alternative feeds to post new content and stay connected. Users who used only the main bluesky site were unable to log in and unable to see notifications or post new content for most of April 16. Some residual downtime showed on the following day, but it was mostly resolved by the evening on April 16. Many of the users expressed relief that they'd not have to read depressing news for a day. Those users apparently don't use any other part of the internet at all.
New & Upcoming Movies
Mortal Kombat II
MORTAL KOMBAAAAT! *Ahem.* Mortal Kombat 2 came out May 8. I had been hyped about this movie since last year, and I created a Scorpion mask to wear to the theater to celebrate. The feeling before this movie released was that we waited an extra year to watch this but it might be worth the wait. In retrospect, I believe it was well worth the wait, but it wasn't nearly as memorable as the 90s movie.
Spider-Man
On April 13, CinemaCon saw the opening sequence of Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse, the third part of the acclaimed animated Spider-Man movie trilogy. (DiscussingFilm) We also saw a publicly released new trailer for the Spider-Man: Brand New Day film, coming July 31. View the Brand New Day trailer here.
New & Upcoming Shows
Scrubs Season 11
Scrubs revival series got renewed for season 2 AKA season 11. (Bleeding Cool) To this day, I don't think I've watched all of the original series, because it aired in syndication out of order and was one of the last shows I watched on an actual TV channel before moving to streaming platforms.
Good Omens 3: The Finale
Good Omens, starring Harry Potter's David Tennant and Passengers' Michael Sheen, received its finale in the form of a confusingly short 1-episode final season that showed up on Amazon Prime Video under the guise of a "season 3" with the first and only episode being titled "The Finale". I went into it not knowing the final season had been reduced to only one episode, so I mistakenly thought it would have more episodes later. The show ended on a cliffhanger rewrite that was hardly satisfying and felt like something out of The Good Place. I'm trying to be vague in case you haven't seen it, because I still prefer you watch the show if you liked the previous seasons. There wasn't enough payoff to earlier hints toward the end of the story, and it felt extremely rushed. I was hoping to have a whole season about Hell, because in season 2, it was starting to hint that Hell was a better managed version of Heaven that might be used as a reference to improve Heaven's heirarchy and security. Hell was giving Beetlejuice's afterlife vibes. We unfortunately won't be getting that content in season 3.
The Punisher: One Last Kill
A trailer for Punisher: One Last Kill dropped on YouTube on April 9. It was slated to be released on May 12 on Disney+.
The Boys Season 5
Season 5 of The Boys stretched across March through May with most of the season shown on Prime Video through April and early May. The finale will be shown May 20.
Invincible Season 4 Finale
The final episode of Invincible season 4 'aired' April 22 on Prime Video. The finale was amazing but also left us wanting so much more.
Gaming News
Portal 2: Community Edition
Portal 2: Community Edition released April 17! This is a community mod project that aims to modernize Portal 2. Check it out here! It's free!
Metro 2039 Announced!
I got an email about this upcoming game from the DeepSilver newsletter on April 17.
You can see in the above cropped screenshot that they were intentionally vague about the game's features and release date but were driving traffic to this reveal trailer on Vimeo... albeit locked behind a marketing landing page with tons of JS and ads.
Anno 117 Expansion DLC: Prophecies Of Ash
April 30 saw the Anno 117: Pax Romana expansion titled "Prophecies of Ash" and earned a "Mostly Negative" score on Steam for a combination of its vague use of AI for assets and its absurd marketing lying about what the DLC actually offers. The volcano featured in marketing is hardly in this DLC at all... hidden to the side of your city with a camera system that doesn't offer easy viewing of the volcano. I say wait for a major sale discount and buy the game and this DLC for cheap, because they both feel cheaply made and not worth supporting. Ubisoft has become lazy over the years and isn't really trying at this point.
TerraTech Legion
On April 30, the full TerraTech Legion game was released on Steam. It's a great action roguelike, and yes, I streamed it several times already! Highly recommend this one!
Invincible Fighting Game
We all knew it was coming: an Invincible fighting game! Invincible VS released on most major gaming platforms April 30. Check it out on Steam if you're interested. The story of it is not a rehash of the show's story and is actually a fun elsewhere style story very loosely inspired by the show. It does still require some suspension of disbelief as some power scaling is very broken in this game with certain weak characters being pitted against characters they have no chance of ever beating.
War Of The Western Deep Demo
a short sword in War of the Western Deep.
This game looks too good to come from an indie studio, but the Steam demo came out April 11 with the release date yet to come. (Bsky) Granted, it has that furry appeal, but to me, it's more like going back to the old Disney cartoon movie of Robin Hood. The art style is simply gorgeous!
Limited Run Promised No Future Delays
Limited Run was started to offer physical copies of digital media, primarily video games. They're also known for delaying shipment of orders for months and sometimes even canceling orders weeks or months later due to not being able to fulfill orders. They've had a ton of controversy over the years, and you can read up on said controversy via Gamespot. However, Limited Run has promised no future order delays for future products and shown a commitment to change by saying "the date is the date" and firing old management. They're restructuring, and unfortunately and ironically, that also means more delays for existing orders.
New VR Games
April 1 saw a new roomscale VR game titled Space Control. This game looks fun but in that way that it's not something I'm hyped to play at release. The game released on Steam and Meta at the same time, though, which is to be respected. I'll likely grab this one after I get my hands on a Steam Frame to see how well it holds up on new PCVR hardware.
April 8 saw a PC SteamVR port of a previously Meta-focused VR game titled The Pirate: Republic of Nassau which promised a semi-realistic pirate adventure experience with many VR-focused interactions and gameplay mechanics, including but not limited to swimming with your hand movements and swordfighting in a physical way. According to the marketing and some community discussion, one of the selling points of the game is its trading system where you can truly live the pirate life by raiding ships and selling the goods back to people. Reviews were "Mostly Positive" on Steam... but I would wait for a sale since the game has been out for a year on Meta at the same price and likely will require some months to get some patches for known bugs on the port. Besides, it's an indie mobile port, so its graphics aren't great by PCVR standards.
On April 14, we saw Game Dev Simulator on Steam. I'd like to play this one. It's exactly $10.00 at release, so it's affordable, but there's also a demo to try. It appears to be built on a Unity VR framework titled Auto-Hand from the looks of it. I'd love to see what this dev accomplished with that framework, and the trailer makes the game look like a ton of fun... if not a bit too creepy!
On April 16, The Amusement released on Steam. This had a demo about a month earlier and was really promising. I passed on grabbing the full game for now, because my VR gear was being sent into a repair company, but I will likely grab the full game whenever I get through the rest of the VR backlog in 3-4 months!
On April 23, 2026, Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes released on Steam. The game was on sale for $26.99 (USD) on Green Man Gaming.
Right at the end of April, the hype surrounding the new TMNT game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, really started to push the game's release, and pre-orders became available on the Meta store. However, the Steam version didn't get the same treatment. The Steam version looked a little better, and I honestly despise Meta as a company, and I knew I'd be wanting to play this on Steam Frame eventually, so I grabbed the Steam version as soon as it released.
There was a Itch.io VR Jam on April 23, titled VR Jam 9. This game jam resulted in exactly 3 indie small titles being produced under the theme of dungeons & dragons. I was participating at first but backed out after some other participant was ugly with me and ruined my motivation. That and I really didn't like the theme and saw no reason to try for this when there was no prize.
Anyway, the participant entries were as follows:
1. Full Contact Dungeon Bowling VR
2. Snerling Story
3. Souls of the Necromancer
You can view the entries here. The voting period is over, but you can still download and play these prototypes.
On April 29, we saw a demo for an edutainment app called Cloud Journey VR on Steam. This one looked like it might be promising, but the full version has a vague release date. I'll have my historian wife give this one a go sometime.
Tech News
Snapchat Unveiled New Smartglasses
The smartglasses craze continued with Snapchat unveiling a new generation of their smartglasses, Spectacles, with augmented reality capabilities. (KTLA) The profile for these glasses was huge, so I'm not very interested in them personally at the moment, but I think if this profile can be used for wireless VR soon, that will be something I could get into as an improved at-home VR experience as well as an improved arcade VR experience.
Apple Vision Pro Officially Getting Steam Link
Those who were early adopters of the Apple VR/AR/XR ecosystem likely didn't get a lot out of the experience at release, but Apple's definitely trying to work out new functionality and improvements for both the software and hardware side of the expensive Vision Pro headset. Recently, PSVR2 controllers were confirmed to work with the headset via Bluetooth. On top of that, on April 3, Apple and Valve both confirmed Steam Link is coming to the headset. (Tom's Guide) For those still unaware what Steam Link is, it's an app that lets you stream Steam apps and games to other hardware via local network or the internet, essentially allowing you to play your gaming pc from anywhere with a good connection to said gaming PC with lesser hardware like handhelds and phones... and now, XR headsets AKA spatial computers.
Godot 4.7
On April 9, Godot version "4.7 Dev 4" released. (Godot) This release came with some technical features that I really didn't care to read about, but it did show the engine was taking performance seriously. Version "4.7 beta 1" released April 24 with tons of bugfixes as well as major additions to the animation extension, input, and physics systems. (Godot) There's also some quality of life updates to the scene editor, making it a lot more competitive compared to the big contenders in the industry.
The Robot Olympics: Humanoid Robot Half Marathon
On April 19, the Humanoid Robot Half Marathon was hosted in China. The goal was to show what humanoid robots are currently capable of without human guidance. According to MSN, approximately 40% of the participating robots were fully autonomous this year to show off some companies' capabilities with making robots that can avoid obstacles and follow guidelines. However, many of the robots were still guided by humans. This is the second year of the marathon event, so it'll likely keep growing and attract greater interest next year with more autonomous robots participating. For now, however, we can rest easy knowing that the robots are still failing hard and getting put on similar stretcher to humans.
Claude Design Sparked Open Source Alternative
As recently as April 17, Anthropic officially announced Claude Design in open beta (Anthropic). This tool was basically Claude's regular AI with enhanced visual tools to allow rapid UI design iteration. This sparked a renewed interest in open AI alternatives for UI design tools. Thus the Powerpuff Girls were born! I mean, thus Open Cowork AI's Open-Codesign was born! On April 23, Open-Codesign v0.1.4 released with some usable features, including a ChatGPT tie-in to allow you to get similar design tooling out of ChatGPT models. Of course, Open-Codesign isn't as easy to use as Claude Design and won't generate as appropriate of results. You'll also likely still have to subscribe to a service to get optimal results without a data center worth of PCs.
Closing Story: Data Centers
Recently, we've seen a lot of data centers popping up all over the world thanks to the AI bubble. According to More Perfect Union, many communities were uplifted from data center development despite media coverage claiming the communities welcomed the data centers. The communities apparently didn't want such developments, but the higher-ups didn't prevent these companies from imposing their own wishes upon not just the surrounding area but the direct neighborhoods and have even affected the municipal water supply negatively.
The data center problem extends to not just pollution but also power hogging. These data centers require a lot of electricity to operate, and the people behind these data centers are not even trying to make their power independent from the local municipality. This results in power costs being higher for residents because the power demand is too high.
In some cases, the power for data centers is taking power away from residents. Local power providers, which can be privatized companies, are now abandoning residents to focus on data centers because it's more profitable. Look at Lake Tahoe, California for a good example of this. (Tahoe Daily Tribune) This issue is a reminder that we should not rely on privatized businesses for vital services.
Alright, that's all I have to talk about for now. Oh, by the way, I finally decided to uninstall ARC Raiders. It was too much of a time sink, and my friends simply weren't playing anymore, so I gave it up. I'm going to continue the "Don't shoot!" meme into the rest of the year regardless. I'd revisit the game if it was given a non-PVP mode, but until then...
