Doomsday
Doomsday
This newsletter is actually the opposite of doom scrolling, despite today's title.
Today we’re going to learn about some doomsday scenarios that just … never played out.
The Daily Rabbit Hole: What, if anything, went wrong during Y2k?
“Shortly after midnight Greenwich Mean Time, a printer outage was reported at the Oakland, Calif.-based Oceanic Systems Center.”
A) I love that the Internet just has an article for us from Jan 10th, 2000.
B) This is the opposite of a “wait, what?” moment. The words “printer” and “malfunctioning” are practically dependent on each other.
If you were alive in the year 2000, you probably have some memory of Y2K. Whether you and your family were preppers, onlookers, or just merely existing - nearly everyone has at least one story that relates to this event. Nothing really happened. A classic case of potential panic leading to actual panic. However, there is a date that caused distress to a particular type of person.
February 17, 2011 marked 15 years to the day that the first ever Pokemon game was released. It also marked the day that the batteries inside the cartridges were set to go kaput, making it impossible for you to save your games any longer.
Technically, as with anything relating to batteries, it could have been sooner or later than that specific date but it did cause some minor blow-ups on the Internet starting as early as 2002.
Also, I’m guessing this is a “today I learned” moment for many of you who never rediscovered your Gameboy from 2011 to now. That the game cartridges themselves had a battery that allowed you to save is something you really only discover after the pain of not being able to do it.
The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: Remember all the hullabaloo about the Mayans predicting the world ending in 2012? Yeah. They never did.
“It turns out that on 21 December 2012 one of their big units rolled over, similar to our date of 1999 turning into 2000. So it's like a new decade or century, that's all.”
November 18, 1992 …
Unless you are a comic book lover, this date isn’t likely to stand out. Yet, it is the date of release of the issue where Superman dies in a battle against … if you’ve been been paying attention you guessed it … Doomsday.
The most fascinating part of this is not that we can easily find people discussing the character arc readily available on the Internet, but the fact that when you read this description of the ongoing saga between the Justice League and Doomsday it makes it all the more perplexing that DC has never been able to replicate the work that Marvel has done over the last decade and a half.
But maybe remaking a Batman origin film for the 50th time will work this time. What do I know?