Readers may recall that at the Seattle Cohost wake, I helped establish a mailing list—Emerald City Eggbugs—for local COVID-safe events to help keep the local Cohost community intact and allow it to expand into something new in its own right. To help kickstart that process, I've scheduled the inaugural Emerald City Eggbugs event, a showing of the Wachowskis' 1996 film Bound at the Beacon Cinema in Columbia City.

If you're in Seattle and you want a fun, COVID-safe time with cool friends, please come join us! Here's the critical information:

When: 11AM on Sunday the 24th of November
Where: The Beacon in Columbia City, 4405 Rainier Ave S. It's about a 15 minute walk from the Angle Lake station, and the 7, 9, and 50 stop right outside the door
RSVP: On Partiful
Price: $10 suggested donation to @nweiz on Venmo. I hope to make this a recurring event, but renting theaters isn't cheap so this would help me keep it sustainable. But if $10 is hard on your wallet please come anyway! NOTAFLOF
COVID: Please wear a mask (N95 or better) and run an over-the-counter test day-of or the night before. If you can't afford one, Mask Bloc Seattle can probably hook you up. Outsider Comics in Fremont usually sells them at-cost as well. The theater will be selling concessions, but we ask that you eat them outdoors rather than during the film. The theater itself is not a masks-required space at other times, although we will be the first event of the day and I've asked the person running the show to mask and test as well. I'll also be bringing a CR box to help filter the air while we're there

I'll see you there!

As soon as it was announced that Cohost was shutting down, I knew I at least needed some way to grieve it in community. I'm not a particularly observant Jew, but I do take to heart the idea that grief is a community experience. Cohost was never an experience of any individual in isolation, so its loss shouldn't be experienced in isolation either.

I talked to my wife and Xandra who had also made some rumblings about some sort of meet-up, we decided on a place and time, and I sent out an open invitation‎^[1]. We knew Seattle was a pretty big Cohost city, but based on the Philly and Boston turnouts we expected maybe thirty to forty people.

The last dedicated count we got was fifty-eight, but people kept showing up after that so I believe in the end we had more than sixty attendees. Lydia even came up from the Bay Area, shocking everyone there who knew her! I was completely blown away by this incredible outpouring of love for Cohost.

It was an intensely emotional mix of mourning and joy. We had a moment of silence for the loss of Cohost, we came together in a cheer of "Eggbug Forever!", but most of all people just hung out and chatted. We even had our very own rainbow:

Rose and I also came up with an idea for a little local mailing list for COVID-safe events. To help spread the word, we made a zine. I only printed fifty copies, which I thought would be plenty, so for anyone who showed up after all the zines were gone or who couldn't make it at all, I've reproduced it below: