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 watched a conspiracy theory video with a friend for laughs in early 2020. I think January or February. It mentioned some kind of virus from china that was gonna take over the world. We laughed about it.
I knew about COVID way ahead of the general population because of WallStreetBets (WSB). Before becoming what it is now after the Game Stop thing, WSB was a little known gambling subreddit of degenerates that jokingly called themselves autists after that guy that made millions predicting the 2008 subprime lending collapse (Michael Burry).
Users on WSB were predicting a major disruption because of some new virus in China and were betting against the market. There was a day where the market just suddenly went into freefall. It had 2 circuit breakers (stop all trading for 15 mins to prevent a disastrous runaway collapse) in one day. While the entire world was going to hell because of a deadly outbreak and resulting collapse of the global economy, the users of WSB were cheering it on because they were making a few thousand bucks.
It was one of the most ridiculous experiences I had ever witnessed and been a part of. I am so happy to have been there for it.
We had a big screen in the office at the time, and we had a map showing the current spread. It went from interesting to alarming very rapidly.