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 learned that justin timberlake got arrested from a steam notification that said “Justin Timberlake (DUI enjoyer) is now playing Team Fortress 2”
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 discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.
I was on a MUD (old multi-player internet text rpg) called Three Kingdoms when Princess Diana died. Over a hundred people online at the time from all over the world.
It was a huge shock for everyone, followed by a strange communal grieving for a well-known and liked international figure.
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.
