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 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.
911 attack. I was sleeping on the couch at a friend’s place and he was apparently awake gaming online (yes that was already a thing in 2001). He came into the living room and apologized for waking me up but he wanted to turn on the TV because someone on the game server had said there had been an “incident”. This was a few minutes before the 2nd WTC plane hit. So it wasn’t yet clearly a terrorist attack. Ended up watching the coverage all day.
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.
