I once actually thought that when movies and shows were developing, I thought that they were being made within the year of their release date. I didn’t know that these projects were sometimes done in advance or took years to make.
That when ‘Commercial Breaks’ happened during shows, I thought they meant that the actors needed a break before resuming. Not realizing that episodes are already made and commercials just interrupt things to just sell you shit.
When I learned food and drinks were energy for your body, I actually thought that when I got sleepy or tired, I just needed to drink or eat something. Not realizing that it wouldn’t have mattered.
I thought hard work would be enough to make a living.
In fairness to yourself, it used to be.
But they’re not being entrepreneurs! /s
Along those lines…my dad worked hanging drywall in new houses. I went to work with him many times. He busted his ass all day, sweating and covered in gypsum dust, blazing heat with hardly any ventilation, to bring home little pay.
On one of the rides in to work with him it occurred to me that if pay were decided by level of effort, he would be rich. Guys that wear ties to work and sit in air conditioned offices with their pencils and pens…they were living the easy life and making much more than their worth as I saw it.
Honestly that naivety hasn’t fully left me in adulthood. I have more appreciation for many office jobs, but the people who put their bodies on the line for work in shitty conditions are not paid nearly enough by and large. It’s a fucking criminal arrangement.
I do both sides of this at my work, both office and do real work. I keep telling the guys who don’t do the office part that they are the ones that should earn the most. Most of them are old and just think they are fine as is sadly. This mentality is sad imo.
I wonder where I would be if my work ethic didn’t get raped for all its worth.
At one point in time, it was. Now it’s the opposite.
Did depend on what race you were mind you.
Everybody forgets this. The time when “a single income could provide housing, transportation, and collage for a family of four” only existed for white men. Thinking this was universal is just lefty false nostalgia nauseatingly similar to MAGA.
No, everyone forgets the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
lefty false nostalgia
I don’t know anyone left leaning who thinks that
Or it’s your American defaultism showing.
You can, just not at the same company. You just have to hop jobs as soon as you get experience.
that adults knew what they were doing, and knew the stuff they were so loudly talking about. Was I naive.
I suspect that the louder a person talks, the more likely they are clueless about the topic.
Was also a big revelation to me that effectively arguing a point is a separate skill form actual knowledge and wisdom. The truth doesn’t care what you do, know, think, or how you talk about it.
The sad thing is that people don’t even argue points. I wish people who lacked knowledge and wisdom would argue. Instead, they just rebroadcast whatever propaganda they were fed most recently, untroubled by anything like critical thinking or introspection, and mostly unchallenged by their peers.
I generally agree, but I just have pressing personal experiences where I prefer they don’t argue. Aside from arguing not fitting well into a chilling context, there are friends who are in cults, or were brought up with the weirdest shit and lack critical thinking skills, or have mental health issues where it would crash their world, there isn’t much point arguing. Nobody changes their minds and it’s just stressful mental masturbation. Better to set boundaries, respect each other and argue or give resources if both parties are willing. Again, this is about a specific context and my experience; you folx do you :)
“Are you here for the 5 or 15 minutes argument?”
.montepython
There’s a Calvin and Hobbes strip about this. I think it’s the run where their house was broken into and Hobbes was missing. Calvin came to the same realization and I remember it really sticking with me as a kid.
Two big realizations I came to embarrassingly late in my youth.
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Adults are fallible and sometimes I know better.
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I can change the world around me to suit my preference if I just make it known.
I listened to the same 5 CDs over and over for years because I never thought to ask my mom to take me to buy music.
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Even as a kid I knew the adults were full of shit. Like, “why are you bullshitting me? Do you think I’m dumb?”
Obviously kids weren’t supposed to have critical thinking skills, and that was my problem, apparently. It sure got me into a lot of trouble…
I still have this internalised. I sort of assume that everyone around me knows what theyre doing and what theyre talking about.
Not a belief, but a confusion: I didn’t understand how maps with a “you are here” marker knew where you were. 😅
This is cute and I got a big kick out of it.
This particularly confused me because in cartoons they always animated the damn sign like it was Google Maps
I thought the ribbon cables inside PCs was where memory was stored. I remember at like age 6 watching my older sister upgrade the RAM of our family computer (a 486 machine I think) and seeing all the mess of ribbon cables in the inside and I assumed that was memory. I guess because it reminded me of the tape inside a cassette?
I remember upgrading to a brand new 486, mind you ;)
I remember upgrading from a Commodore Vic-20, with 3.5 KB of RAM, to a Commodore 64 with 64 KB. I was already in university at the time.
Hit the turbo button and go from a measly 30Mhz speed to the insane levels of 33Mhz.
For the younger Gen and the non computer savvy: Yeah. We went from 1 cpu core that would go like 30Mhz in the early 90s, to having 12 cpu cores running at around 5,000Mhz now. All while getting way, way, easier to build a PC from parts.
- If a lawyer’s client tells them they did it then the lawyer should just turn them in.
- After watching cars commuting in opposite directions, which seemed pointless to me, I thought everyone should just trade jobs so they live where they work.
- I thought girls had ballsacks without the shaft.
- I thought you could make a car that didn’t need gasoline by attaching a magnet to the back and then attaching another magnet with an arm so they repel each other. Imagine my disappointment when I built a prototype and it didn’t work.
I thought girls had ballsacks without the shaft.
Eric Cartman, is that you? There was an episode where he tried to kick a girl in the balls. It did not work.
After watching cars commuting in opposite directions, which seemed pointless to me, I thought everyone should just trade jobs so they live where they work.
Unironically has some truth to it. As someone who feels strongly about minimizing my commute, I am baffled about how many people I have known who have long commutes for no significant reason.
Rarely there will be a reason like “My kids have a better school here”, but often after digging a little I find out someone is actually paying higher rent and commuting 45m+ to a lower rent area because moving is a hassle or some similar motivation. I knew a guy who commuted 3 hours one way in Alaska because he liked having a big yard. Like, when do you see it? You get home and immediately sleep.
Absolutely crazy to me. Never more than 30 minutes again unless I truly have no choice.
i do wonder why more people don’t just live where they work, spending and hour or 2 every day just shuffling inbetween work and home never made sense to me.
is it just an affordability thing? if some real estate mogul wasnt a rent-seeking piece of shit and just built a business around building/selling as many quality homes/apartments as possible for a decent profit (instead of maximized extraction at every level, as it is now) wouldn’t more people chose to live closer to work?
I would choose to work closer to where I live, not the other way around unless the only available job was hours away. That said, there are jobs closer to home than my current job, but I think they kinda suck.
Okay so in our case it’s very California-specific. We managed to buy a house (hooray!) after the housing crash. Because of the way California handles property taxes, we will never move unless we decide to leave California for good. If we take a job that is not close to us, too bad, we’re factoring commute into the offer, because we can’t move. My husband seriously considered a job that would require either a 1.5 hour drive or train ride because the money was amazing but ended up taking a much lower-paying WFH job, and the commute was a huge factor.
magnet to the back and then attaching another magnet with an arm so they repel each other
You just invented the Maglev xD
I thought you could make a car that didn’t need gasoline by attaching a magnet to the back and then attaching another magnet with an arm so they repel each other. Imagine my disappointment when I built a prototype and it didn’t work.
A perpetual motion machine! I love it!
I got two for ya:
- When people got injured in movies, such as having a body part chopped off, they found someone who was already missing that body part, surgically reattached a new body part, and then chopped it off for real. Decapitations were played by people on death row.
- When you flush the toilet at night, a scary clown will come out and get you, unless you quickly run and hide under the covers. In my defense, my uncle thought it was funny to tell this to my sisters and me so that we’d scream and cry and run at night while my parents were trying to sleep.
I believed number 1 as well! I took it even further because I didn’t understand “acting” fully. I thought it was actually that to be a “doctor actor”, you basically just trained to be both and then they followed you around with a camera while you actually did all of those things. So everyone in a show/movie was actually their profession or something close to it.
Deaths were different for me tho. I thought that as an actor, you decided when you died by taking said part. So it was up to each actor to choose the best death scene for themselves because it would be the only one they got. Better actors got offered better deaths while lesser actors only got to die as henchmen and whatnot. There was a whole life insurance/payout idea that played into all of this. But basically I thought actors fought for the prestige of dying on camera in the coolest ways possible.
I didn’t think that they fought for death scenes, but yes. I had a similar thought. Essentially, they were gonna be killed by the Justice system and had to pick how they’d die.
I had similar thoughts to your first point, but I didn’t understand “acting.” So I just thought that a movie doctor was just a doctor who was hired for the movie. When my parents explained that “they’re just pretending,” I understood that not every doctor wanted to be in a movie, so some people had to pretend to fill in the gaps.
Yeah, I basically assumed that if you died as a henchman or something, you had a really bad agent or people just didn’t like you. Only the A-list actors got to have their big moment dying. But I did believe that the payout was enough to take care of your surviving family, which is why people did it. Kinda some weird ass hunger games type idea way before the books ever existed lol
Henchmen who got shot were like a special class of stunt double in my mind. They were paid to get shot and then have surgery and recover just to do it again in another movie. I did think they had a limit to how many “lethal” stunts they could do before they had to retire or go out on one last insane stunt.
I always wanted to be an actor so I could be a sci-fi actor and get to go to space. I thought those were the luckiest people.
I thought shows were actually filmed in the places where they take place
Same! That’s why I wanted to be a sci-fi actor 😂
Oh, and time skips were real! When you saw a flashback or something, that was actually filmed years ago and then they waited until the actors got older and filmed the rest. I assumed there were crazy logistical hurdles to get this to work but it was all real.
Imagine how long it would have taken to film This Is Us
Your uncle is a legend.
When people got injured in movies, such as having a body part chopped off, they found someone who was already missing that body part, surgically reattached a new body part, and then chopped it off for real.
If I remember the commentary correctly, for the black knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they actually had an actor with one leg in the suit performing once the knight lost a leg, then when he’s on the ground with no legs, they dug a hole to hide the actor’s existing leg. The voiceover is of course seperately recorded and not by the actors in the suit
I thought that a bank account is like Scrooge McDuck’s lair with piles of money and treasures and every time my parents told me that we can’t afford something I just told them to withdraw from their bank account.
I also thought that roundabouts were for when you don’t know where you’re going so you can drive circles there.
I also thought all TV shows were live and the actors took breaks during the commercials.
Growing up our backyard neighbors were Buddhists. They had done up their whole yard to be a missive zen garden type deal. Ponds, little rivers between those ponds, a big ol gazebo and sand pit… lowkey a dream backyard. As a child it was a point of endless curiosity over our talk rotting fence. I would try and sneak peeks when I could but it was an ongoing mystery to me because our yard was muddy and ugly.
When I was young, like >7, sometimes if I did something bad my parents would lift me up and carry me to the fence yelling that they were going to feed me to the budda people.
Naturally, I was fucking terrified of Buddhists. It wasn’t until I was maybe 15 or so when we learned about them in school that I realized Buddhists aren’t actually cannibals.
Tldr Buddhists are cannibals
When I was young, like >7,
I’m sorry, couldn’t help myself… Do you mean <7?
Nah they still get threatened like that by their parents
Yeah I was high when I typed this, I was like 4-7ish years old
That’s hilarious! Reading this I can’t tell if your parents were pulling your leg or horribly racist. Please tell us your parents have a sense of humor.
Buddhists are NOT cannibals.
Close, they just have a great sense of humor AND they’re racist! 😃
That adults were intelligent
I used to think the sound of cicadas was the sound of sunlight, because it always seemed louder the brighter it was.
lol this reminds me of how many people who are born deaf are surprised to learn that the sun isn’t loud, because it seems like the sort of thing that ought to be.
I was curious if you were to analog the solar wind to sound (ie. measure solar activity) how loud would the difference be between nominal activity vs. coronal mass ejection, and it is surprisingly quiet according to the clanker’s math. Basically the difference between the background noise of a library vs. a clothes washing machine
That truth and justice will always eventually prevail
1 Foreign countries are rich af because they can afford to eat food that cost 10,000 currency
It was just the Korean Won lmfao, that’s when I learned about the existence of other currencies, it was first time I stepped foot outside of China, I was 8.
2 You can just magically get money from checks, so why not write a bigger number?
Then my dad told me about bank accounts and you need real money for the check to work.
So no infinite money glitch sadly :/
Personal checks didn’t exist in China btw.
3 My mom put me in an afterschool program without telling me. I thought I got in trouble and was being punished, since I barely understood English words. I cried for like the hour duration of the afterschool program.
For context: In China, being held afterschool is a punishment if you didn’t memorize the story/poem that you were required to memorize.
4 Santa. Tbf I caught my parents pretending to be santa and leaving me a gift, I was half awake and saw them, but thought santa still existed, just didn’t visit me. Then at one party, I noticed “Santa” looked suspiciously similar to an uncle, who was no where to be seen. Also sounded exactly like the unclem
Then I eventually realized religions was just bullshit too.
5 I thought babies were conceived from kissing. Like maybe like you also had to sleep in the same bed then the souls of the couple bind and that somehow allows another soul to reincarnate into the womb of a woman.
Then I was like: what if mom kissed dad, do I have another sibling that’ll take the attention away from me?
Nope, later my mom told me she got forcibly sterilized by the goverment, no need to afraid of a little sibling.
And also I overheard classmates talking about porn lol and then I learned human anatomy
6 “Tell me the truth, son, I promise I won’t get mad”
That was a lie
Loading Screen Tips: Don’t trust your parents, it’s your closest blood-related liars
7 “Police are good” -nope
I remember those Hong Kong Drama shows… it’s always cops vs “bad guys”, the cops were always portrayed as good, and if its bad, its just a corrupt cop working for the criminals, then the “good cops” will find out and arrest the bad one.
Reality is they never investigate crimes you report, because who would spend their time catching a thief when they could just enjoy donuts and coffee.
Unless they get bored and wanna ruin innocent lives. Then they’ll harass you.
ACAB
How did the forced sterilisations work?
Also I used to think people got money by buying things, that’s what change was. Once a kid asked me for all of my money and I refused because I thought that would mean I could never make money again
The exact term my mom said was 結紮 (link to Wiktionary) (I didn’t even know of this word before she used it)
(I think she was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubal_ligation)
My mom didn’t elaborate every tiny detail. Mom is weird af, she always tells me about One Child policy stuff as guilt-tripping, as in like “look how much I sacrificed for you, they would’ve stopped you from being born”, but then you press deeper and she doesn’t like to talk about it, must be uncomfortable to talk about the details or something like that.
I think you’re just told to go to an appointment and do the procedure. Or else government send people to take you there.
My mom told me she was supposed get a IUD after she has her first child (especially since her first one was a male so there’d be no exemptions, cuz in rural areas, if the first one was female, you could apply for an exemption.) She was told to go to some appointment in like 3-9 months after my older brother’s birth. But then she (and presumably also my father and older brother) just went from Taishan (rural) to Guangzhou (city), then she never went back to Taishan until she had me.
I honestly am still not sure what exactly happened. I think that whole ordeal was probably very traumatizing so I doubt mom even remembers all the details.
I think its a combination of jurisdictional issues, and government finding out about my existence a bit too late to enforce the policy. I think It was the people from her village in Taishan was responsible for enforcing the policy, so I think being in Guangzhou, I don’t think the Guangzhou authorities cared about enforcing policy on someone not under their Hukou. Like I don’t think the central government really do the law enforcement, they just delegate shit to someone else, then if something goes wrong, they have a perfect scapegoat. They blame the local authorities and shield the central government from criticism.
My mom also once told me that, on the course of wanting to give birth to me, she allegedly bribed government officials so they’d “look the other way”? And once she told me she forged a IUD certificate so they thought she already had an IUD? And she also said someone nearly found out about the 2nd pregnancy, but the person felt it wasn’t his reponsibility so he didn’t report it, and deferred the enforcement to someone else, as in the “not my job” attitude to it.
Honestly idk what even is real, not sure if my mom even remembers correctly, or if she might have exaggerated details as a part of a guilt-tripping thing to make me feel bad.
History is very blurry, sometimes things happens and afterwards we are like “okay what the hell happened?”, still trying to process the events…
I mean I wasn’t the only one, I think there are like tens of thousands of “‘illegal’ births”.
(Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihaizi I think there are a total of like at least 10 million of these “‘illegal’ births”)
In a way, it’s sort of like parents having drunk sex and you were “accidentally” born, except in this case, my parents did wanted me, but the government didn’t cuz “overpopulation” or some BS. I think most people “born illegally” don’t really talk about it, but I’m just weird and I get obessed with everything and I have an existential crisis because of this fact. I often think about that alt-timeline where I never existed.
I set fire to my house because of a Cartoon Network ad.
At some point there was this animation that Cartoon Network used as an intermission between shows or ads. IIRC it was just stop-motion of some gray clay or play-doh thing that changed shapes, and became various characters from the CN shows, then in the end it transformed into the CN logo, but I was a very young kid so I’m really not sure I remember all the details correctly.
Anyways, one day when I was around 6 or 7 years old an aunt and uncle of mine were visiting, and they were smokers. I had just watched the aforementioned intermission and was wondering how I could get that magical grey mass that transformed into the various CN characters. Everyone else was in the 2nd floor and my uncle was showering, so I looked around the 1st floor trying to find something that I could use to create this magical play-doh.
When I saw my uncle’s lighter on top of some cabinet, for some reason my 6 year old brain thought that I could set some styrofoam on fire to get the magical grey mass. The styrofoam box was on a shelf made of wood and straw, so you can probably guess how well that went.
After holding the lighter against the styrofoam I saw that the flame started spreading on its own, so I put the lighter back where I found it and ran upstairs to make sure that nobody had seen what I was doing. After 2 or 3 minutes I walk back downstairs and without even entering the laundry room where I had started the fire I see a ton of smoke in the kitchen. After that I ran back upstairs and told my mother that there was a fire (only after asking her several times if she would get mad at me). The main entrance and the laundry room’s back door were blocked by the fire, and the kitchen exit was already being engulfed in smoke, so instead she opened one of the windows in the 1st floor and put me and my younger brother outside through the window.
I don’t know what exactly happened after that since I was just scared and running around the house confused, but from what my mother told me my uncle ran out of the shower in a towel and the neighbor noticed that something was wrong as well, so with the help of my mom and aunt they were able to put out the fire with the water hose we had in the backyard. Most houses in Brazil are made with bricks and concrete, but our house had some parts that were still made of wood since they were part of an older house that my parents bought and reformed, but thankfully the fire was mostly contained to the concrete side of the house, with only the laundry room, as well as some of the wooden parts in the kitchen and some wooden doors catching fire.
(only after asking her several times if she would get mad at me)
It is wild as kids we internalize quickly the angry consequences of fucking up, but usually we aren’t given the proper guidance, rules, or explicit explanations upfront to avoid it.
- I thought all women had balls.
- Testicles act as urine tanks.
- Sex is a procedure done in a hospital, under the supervision of doctors. A couple goes to a hospital to perform sex when they plan on having a baby.
- Penetrative sex involves parting butt cheeks and “dropping the penis in”. This was my first wet dream lmfao, where I was “dropping my dick” in a hot friend. Except, the friend was a boy and so was I.
- Thinking I was straight.
(Clearly, I got access to porn quite late, and sex Ed didn’t exist at school or home)
