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 was living with a family in a suburb to Bath in the UK, the son in the family and me was with his friends Bristol for a day, when they suddenly started talking about bombs, yep this was the London bombings in 2005…

At first I didn’t realize what happened, I am Swede and English is my second language, so I had a bit of trouble actually understanding it all.

When we got back home, I called my parents who were in Canada on vacation at the time, they were at a restaurant and had not heard the news yet, so they were very confused but happy that I was fine.

I can just imagine them at a restaurant, getting a call from their son calling to say that he is ok and not to worry with zero context and then hearing about the attacks that way, that must have been quite surreal, but also ment that they was never worried.

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.

@umbraroze When the queen of England died, I learned about it from a Goku parody account on Twitter that said “I just got word from King Kai that the queen passed through the Otherworld check-in station!”

I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.

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.

I worked at Equifax during the big breach. (I did not know about it beforehand.) One morning I was chatting with coworkers about stuff and they were talking about a crazy massive breach and how stuff would need to change. At some point I said something like “who got hit?” I hadn’t checked my email (or the news) yet.

But, to be honest, I think hearing it like that may have actually been best. Hearing in on the train on the way to work would’ve been scary.

On the reverse side I told a bunch of people on Furcadia that 2 airplanes had just hit the twin towers.

Do not Google Furcadia on your work PC.

Too many to list from the Destiel News meme on Tumblr