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Luke O'Neil@lukeoneil47.bsky.social |
In 2020 I asked a bunch of friends to write about the day they first realized the pandemic was real and was going to be a whole fucking thing. Featuring Samantha Irby, Aisha Tyler, Linda Tirado, Jeb Lund, Josh Gondelman, Kim Kelly and more.
www.welcometohellworld.com/the-last-nor...
59 replies 80 reposts 378 likes
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trengerkaffe
@trengerkaffe.bsky.social
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Don't remember the date, but heard about the outbreak in China and knew instantly that this would spread. When it came to Italy and lots of norwegians were there on holliday, we sewed masks from vacum cleaner bags. (made sure they were bio and not synthetic).
1 replies 0 reposts 8 likes
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𓅓🌈 skyler🔆𓅖
@glittergore.bsky.social
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despite not being in high school I was still in the group chat of my old HS robotics team. the pandemic got real the day that suddenly all the competitions were cancelled. thousands of robotics teams spending ~$50k+ yearly and it was all cancelled after the robots were already built
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🏴☠️ Tayla she/me Age...Too old.
@taylasroleplay.bsky.social
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You should ask them thr first time they met someone who still denies it's real.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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themostnormalalien.
@dramaticdaisies.bsky.social
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Me, in labour, waiting for the anesthesiologist who was literally hours late (busy helping to put people on breathing machines) the nurse comes in telling me there's a single free breathing mask in the hospital so I can at least get laughing gas while we wait.
1 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Yvonne Martin
@ymartin.bsky.social
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Feb. 25, 2020. I remember more carefully packing my bag at the end of the day because our school closed down early and saying to a friend who was standing at the door to my classroom that it felt different from Swine flu, etc. Anyway, a new era of online teaching started for us 3 days later.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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SteveMND
@stevemnd.bsky.social
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Yeah, my "well, this is clearly going to be A Thing" moment was when our regular #ttrpg games—which I had been hosting regularly for the better part of two decades—had to be shuttered. Sadly, our local gaming group never fully recovered.
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Don Harrold
@practicaldad.bsky.social
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My wife is an MD/MPH and as soon as we saw a news report from China showing the ER waiting rooms, we literally said "shit!" I was purchasing masks, gloves, and sanitizer the next day and toilet paper two days later.
1 replies 1 reposts 22 likes
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Seamus Petrie
@seamuspetrie.bsky.social
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It was the night of February 29. My spouse told me, “Uh, Amazon is out of hand sanitizer.” And I foolishly said “no big deal, just get some from a 3rd party vendor.” And she said “no - you can’t buy hand sanitizer *anywhere* on Amazon right now.”
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Magically Hip
@rwilks.bsky.social
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When Ireland cancelled St. Patrick's Day and the Vatican cancelled Easter, I could see we were in for some shit.
1 replies 1 reposts 25 likes
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rabagast
@rabagast.bsky.social
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january 30, 2020 02:55am i'd been tracking the case numbers released by WHO in excel to visualize the development for myself. i was unemployed and stayed up late each night for the new numbers to be released. they came later every night. 7789 cumulative cases by jan 29, this was the moment i knew.
1 replies 0 reposts 17 likes
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Ontario Man
@barrhavenist.bsky.social
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The wildest thing is how it’s still going and almost everyone is pretending it isn’t
0 replies 1 reposts 13 likes
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Studley
@studley11.bsky.social
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This is amazing, including the comments here.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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@technicalsquirrel.bsky.social
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mid-February. I sit up and notice when the news is about a plague from Asia, and the numbers don't go down. Was telling everyone "this is some shit" and everybody was like "no it's fine." That response is what told me it wasn't going to be fine.
0 replies 0 reposts 10 likes
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skyybeans
@skyblu.bsky.social
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I remember saying "see you in a few weeks, maybe" to some coworkers. I still haven't seen some of them (and we still work for the same company and live in the same general place)
0 replies 0 reposts 17 likes
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The future producer of “Himbo Heist”
@legalminimum.bsky.social
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I was still working for Pokémon at the time and was on my way home from Tokyo, at Haneda airport. My gate had a sign from JAL saying “we are wearing masks to protect you from COVID-19” and I thought, shit, if Japanese people need to explain why they’re wearing masks, this could be a fucking thing.
4 replies 0 reposts 26 likes
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Brainmist
@brainmist.bsky.social
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I started obsessive watching the info coming out of Europe, particularly Italy, in maybe mid-February. That month I flew through Texas for a conference, and overheard people commenting about concern with international travel.
1 replies 0 reposts 5 likes
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randy
@scrubleague.bsky.social
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These are great and depressing I'm probably gonna have to spend a week or more getting through this
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Kwisatz Sazerac 🖤 🐀🐀🐀
@acekatana.bsky.social
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A group of folks from my organizing crew went to stay at a cabin in big bear to celebrate an election win (one dude couldn’t make it because he had “a bad flu” 😬) and like as we drove back down to LA everyone started checking the news and realized shit was going wrong… felt like a zombie movie
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Molegria
@molegria.bsky.social
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I had a big dance event coming up in March 2020; we'd been rehearsing for months. I had the plane tickets already. I remember our teacher saying, at some point in early February, "we're going in a HAZMAT suit if we must". A week after that, the event was cancelled.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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The_Turtle_Moves
@theturtlemoves.bsky.social
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We were at the Louvre a few days before the museum staff shut it down because they didn't want to be exposed.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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BWJones
@bwjones.bsky.social
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February 26, 2020
I was on a plane back from giving a talk, modeling the COVID data from Europe, and realized it was absolutely here in America.
There was someone in the row in front of me hacking up a lung.
I sent an email to my lab, shutting the lab down. prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/202...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Jonesy
@therealbk.bsky.social
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Maybe a week before they actually closed schools in California. We had a tech training, the trainer brought a big tray of Safeway cookies. No one would eat them.
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Eva is a GenX Trans Hippie🏳️⚧️(she/her)🍉
@emcarlsen.bsky.social
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I was living in my car, in the same syburb where I experienced my worst childhood trauma, just waiting out the clock until I died, wringing whatever bits of vicarious pleasure I could from seeing online all the trans girls who were being spared the extreme cisnormative horrors I faced as a child.
0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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Matt
@cinematt.bsky.social
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Mine was calling the (UK) government helpline back when cases were not daily, to tell them we had a guy who’d just flown in from Northern Italy and was sick as anything, coughing all over our waiting room, and their response was basically ‘but does he definitely know he has it?’.
1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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Tizzlewatt
@tizzlewatt.bsky.social
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I saw in the NYT the following "Novel SARS type virus found in Chinese wet markets. My mouth went dry
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Mariah
@veggiemusubi.bsky.social
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I knew trouble was coming in Jan 2020 when I heard a report that lunar new year travel in mainland China was cancelled - to stop that scale of regular mass migration in china meant things were really out of pocket - a few days later a case was reported in Phoenix AZ and I knew we were in for it
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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CompactPrism
@compactprism.bsky.social
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When my company told us we're going remote, I told my boss I had to leave immediately. I had just moved and there was nothing in my fridge. That was the busiest and least stocked I had ever seen that grocery store. I had to go to an entirely different store to stock up on liquor.
1 replies 0 reposts 9 likes
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Aaron Huertas
@aaronhuertas.bsky.social
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I worked with a guy who buys a lot of paper for mailings and he said the global market was going to be disrupted because of a bad viral outbreak in China. Shortly after that, a climate scientist in Washington State with a policy backgroung rang a massive alarm bell to her network.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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not by enough
@notbyenough.bsky.social
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All the teachers were standing around in a darkened hallway talking about the news that this school week was also going to be cancelled and we were all kind of awkwardly standing near our own doors to keep apart while the math teacher confidently asserted that her carnival cruise would still go.
0 replies 0 reposts 14 likes
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Greg Walker
@gregwalker.bsky.social
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My kid was born 3/18. The days leading up to, and after, were a lot…
1 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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HelenAbomination Carter
@secretlentil.bsky.social
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Thank you for this project and for talking about the subject.
bsky.app/profile/secr...
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Cadbury Creme Egg Enthusiast
@thx3188.bsky.social
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March 13th. I was playing hooky from work and decided to use my mug club discount at one of the local brewpubs for lunch and a beer since I figured they could use the business (Nashua had slowly become a ghost town as the confusion began and the toilet paper dwindled).
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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LaineyPoo
@laineypoo.bsky.social
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When they told me to shut down my business (violin shop) because it was non-essential. We did survive the shutdown thru non-contact customer support of our rental instruments and govt. subsidies. I submersed myself into my sculptures and had an amazing creative period.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Karen Geier
@karengeier.com
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You should reprise this by asking people to reflect on a weird thing that happened to them during that first year. I would love to read about it
2 replies 1 reposts 41 likes
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Schroedingercat
@schroedingercat.bsky.social
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Mine was 3/14 when I was in my pediatricians office and mentioned my concern that my son's symptoms matched those reported about covid. The nurse said "AH that's all just overblown. You know how the media is!" That's when I realized no one would take it seriously until it was too late.
0 replies 0 reposts 9 likes
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@theloveblowe.bsky.social
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Was in SF for work around the first week of March. A concert I was going to was canceled, I looked up some stuff, and the situation “hit me.” On my walk to lunch, I rearranged my flight home to be the next available out of SF, turned around, and headed back to the hotel to pack.
0 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
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Kristi Wallace Knight
@kwknight.bsky.social
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I was taking a class at the CC. One of the students was immunocompromised and always wore a mask. In Feb the teacher started wiping down the desks before class. One guy worked with preschoolers, he got sick. On Mar 4 I was sick. Mar 7&8 I didn't move from the bed except to pee.
1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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M.A. Hamilton
@hourofignorance.bsky.social
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If you were a nurse or a teacher in California or New York, you were “dead man walking.” You knew the virus was spreading, you went to work, but you couldn’t avoid it. You were afraid of bringing it home to your family. Others were isolated and their experience was different, except for the TP.
0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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microwave dangerous
@isengard.bsky.social
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I was working for a Japanese company, and in December 19 Japan was going through what was purportedly a really bad flu season. They were calling it the Red Flu, and when my boss went on a business trip back to Kobe we all joked that he was going to bring it back with him. Surprise!
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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populuxe 🍃
@populuxe.bsky.social
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one of those last days in the office when we knew some shit was coming, but hadn’t yet been given the okay to leave, i was asked to make a list of potential guests for a reading series that we all knew would never happen —so i went thru my twitter follows & listed 50 or “new” writers, including you
1 replies 0 reposts 24 likes
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Stephanie Butler
@sfbutler33.bsky.social
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Knew it was real + knew society was going to fail the assignment simultaneously when I was the first to tell #2 boss that I planned to WFH. #2 fired off an email to #1 calling me “the very definition of nonessential”.
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Kohala
@kohala.life
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I was in Seattle for the birth of my first grandchild. Saw scary tweets about a new virus in China and then the report of the first US positive in Everett. I knew it was a thing when Wuhan shutdown. Masked up for the flight and stocked up when I got home beginning of Feb.Everyone thought I was nuts.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Chabitz
@chabitz.bsky.social
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For me it was when my grandmother’s assisted living place advised they were probably going to go on lockdown (I want to say this was the same day we had our first confirmed local case) so I went to Sam’s to buy her a metric ton of Depends and other assorted paper products. It still feels surreal
0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes
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Eric Dunn
@corpkiller.bsky.social
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The Tomas Pueyo blog is what did it for me.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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non-binary disaster bisexual
@persian-slipper.bsky.social
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I knew shit had officially hit the fan when I heard on the radio all the major sports leagues were canceling their seasons.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Goodie Howell
@goodiehowell.bsky.social
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Pennsylvania closed all the liquor stores. I knew we were in for it then
0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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Dr. SmolAnalyst booked it outta Omelas
@smolanalyst.bsky.social
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The last normal day, I had class in the morning and the WHO declared a pandemic so I got a couple extra library books and met up with a guy for our third date, leaving my bike behind. Six months later I retrieved my now rusted bike in time to move with my new spouse to another country.
0 replies 0 reposts 8 likes
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@mrsgmusic.bsky.social
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When they cancelled our hockey tournament. On 3/11 we were still planning to drive to Buffalo. People had just started to really pay attention to what was going on, but thought we'd still be OK. Hockey cancels for nothing! On 3/12 we got word that it was canceled, & on 3/13 1st case popped up there
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Tony Somogyi 🟢 🇺🇦
@tonysomo.bsky.social
[ View ] |
It would interesting to get a sampling from them of the day they thought the pandemic ended and why?
4 replies 0 reposts 19 likes
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Eric Bailey
@ericvbailey.bsky.social
[ View ] |
When the NBA cancelled all games.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Casey Wagner
@cannibal.holiday
[ View ] |
I'd started adding extra stuff to our grocery orders in December of '19, and my mother mentioned to my aunt that they should do the same and she laughed at her. And then a few months later they were in a panic because they couldn't find toilet paper anywhere.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Cbusguy
@cbusguy.bsky.social
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here in Ohio, it was the bar ban on St. Patricks Day, b/c if it's a reason to drink, we do it. Mardi Gras is a lesser thing here but lotta ppl skipped that too. The the Governor stepped in. governor.ohio.gov/media/news-a...
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Castle Bravo
@castlebravoli7.bsky.social
[ View ] |
When the NCAA tournament was cancelled and the NBA season was suspended within hours of each other
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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whetstone
@whetstone.bsky.social
[ View ] |
📌
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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atomic bog
@jessicapancakes.bsky.social
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aw man i couldnt read linda tirado's piece all the way after your last interview with her. damn. damn.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Thisfox
@thisfoxhere.bsky.social
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Interesting that they are so upset on eating at home in that quote that they call it "eating shit". Don't most people eat most of their meals at home? Don't homes have kitchens and stoves for that purpose? How foreign it is that they think it is bad/foul to eat at home.
6 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Mars Rover
@marsrover.bsky.social
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I took this photo Mar 9 2020 from a downtown Seattle skyrise in the 4 o'clock hr. I was one of the few still going to the office because I loved it. This street passes right in front of Amazon's HQ and is typically CHOKED with traffic & pedestrians at this hour. The next day, office locked & gone.
1 replies 0 reposts 17 likes
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Philadelphia Separatist
@tippedminimum.bsky.social
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I was a waiter at a very busy, famous restaurant in Philly. Saturday March 14th 2020 was so busy it felt apocalyptic and deeply wrong. We had a group of NBA players after a report of widespread infection in the league. I called out the next night and didn’t work again until April 2021.
0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes