For the longest time, on cohost, I kept saying "man, I should try to organize something to meet up with the Bay Area folks".
It almost became a running gag because I would post about it, and never act on it for many reasons. So when the shutdown of cohost was announced, and after seeing the Seattle and Philly "cohost wakes" being planned, I went "fuck it, we ball".
I posted about it, people said they'd be interested, Nicky and Diane helped me actually find a spot and time, and I announced it. I was diligently keeping track of who had replied and how, to have an at least vague idea of how many people would show up.

18 days later, earlier today as I write this: we had 40 people show up!! I don't actually have a group picture to show because I wasn't the one who took them and not everyone wants to be visible publicly in such a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.

In fact, I barely had any time to take many pictures myself! The only ones I have are of Cohost 2, a huge scroll of paper that Nicky brought so we could make posts by hand.
It was a lot of fun, wish I took more pictures. But I feel chatting with people, recognizing folks from the website and having a good time was more important than taking pictures, you know?

People hung out, some of them played a fighting game with specialized controllers^[1], people talked about the website, nerd shit, linguistics, and a bunch of other things. Emails were gathered so people could organize and try to make this a more recurring thing, now that we know we can motivate at least some people to meet up.

Cohost really was like a website, it was a website that somehow got us to actually touch grass and is making us think about touching more grass in the future. And I think that's really neat.

Eggbug forever, - damien

P.S: if you were there and have pictures you're willing to share with me, I'd love to see them! Email me at damien@erambert.me.

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1. I know these weren't sticks, but I'm also a fighting game noob lmao ↩︎