My random tales:
One night, playing bunch of Halo, I got an Xbox 360 voice message. “Message to all recent players. Fukushima nuclear power plant just exploded. You should stock up on iodine tablets.” (I almost sent back a message saying “thanks for your concern, but I’m in the Chernobyl fallout zone and I turned out just fine thank you”)
Pluto photographs from New Horizons? Frigging NASA retweet. (Edit: Actually I think it was a retweet of someone making a Disney meme about Pluto the Dog)
Most recently, I got a random Discord message from a British YouTuber I follow saying “the Queen just died, please be respectful and stuff”.
I was eating Pizza at Amici in San Rafael, CA when news came across that Princess Diana died. Someone at the table said we’d all remember that moment for the rest of our lives. It’s been true me.
Might as well share my weirdest proto social media thing.
9/11.
(I’m in Finland. This happened in the afternoon.)
I was leaving work. I distinctly remember a coworker being alarmed about news.
I turned to the usual news source. Slashdot. Massive bloody thread about airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.
OK, that’s pretty bad.
I finally turn to TV news. …OK, stuff is far more in flames than I expected. I think I caught one of the towers collapsing in live TV.
But the following days, my primary news source about 9/11 was, actually, IRC! There was a channel on Freenode where a bot posted headlines about 9/11 investigations. Because the actual news websites were bloody dead under the massive traffic.
Fucking public freakout weirdly broke a lot of news for me back on Reddit.
George Floyd, the protests, crazy trump news, Myanmar… Strangely what sticks out is the Target fire extinguisher lady on a rascal that ended up being parodied in Atlanta. Like, I saw that shit live completely accidentally.
It was crazy how before something had a chance to hit the news, someone already had a full video (sometimes even with context) posted.
The user base was terrible at times, and likely is now again. But there was a period when so much crazy shit was going on, that it actually had rational takes the crazy was diluted enough.
It was just nuts to have a random Livestream up, and see huge national news stories unfolding live or at least immediately after filming.
I don’t think people realized how all that shit lead to political engagement in 2020, people were fucking pissed and motivated.
I live in an area that got “smoked” during the Canadian wildfires last July. I found out by reading about it on Lemmy. Only then did I look out the window and realize that it wasn’t sunset. I’m such a shut-in that I found out about the event I was in the middle of by reading about it on the internet.
I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.
