Ask Lemmy

"Benny Hill owns Thames TV, he named it after his Thames van" (pronounced to rhyme with "frames").

That adults were intelligent

That the future would be better.

That brain surgeons must make like $20 an hour, since that seemed like a huge amount of money to me. Even though that equates to around $80 today, I was a bit off, since even one that made a relatively modest $700k a year would be making roughly $350 hourly.

i read about black holes in an encyclopedia and how nothing can escape from them when getting too close and thought that they're a real threat to me in daily life. i'd look around when i was outside making sure that i'm not getting close to any so that i don't get sucked in. i must have been very good at avoiding them since i never saw one.

the same encyclopedia had a part about human reproduction and showed an illustration of sexual penetration. i thought it looked uncomfortable and wondered why anyone would want to do any of that, and seeing how many people have kids i came to a conclusion that people do it because it's mandatory and you are required to do it. i was very much not looking forward to the day it's my turn to have sex, until i realized that you simply just don't have to.

in kindergarten my mom was talking with the caretaker about a "life-booster" that "wakes her right up". i interpreted it as it making her wake up because she's terrified by it. for a week i was living in dread, thinking that this "life-booster" was some kind of malevolent entity that wants to kill me, who might be nearby and watching me. i imagined it as some kind of evil goblin and i checked my room thoroughly every evening to make sure he's not hiding anywhere so that i'll survive the night. after a week i realized that they were talking about coffee and that's the thing that people drink to be more awake and that it makes no sense that there'd be a monster out there that's looking specifically for me.

A shame to admit this, but I believed in God until I was 12.

We lived by a tiny sea bay, I thought that the place on the other side (despite having been there!) of the water was Sweden.

Before a show would start on PBS, A splash screen would pop up and say “brought to you by X”. I foolishly believed it was saying broughtued by and had no idea what it meant for something to be broughtued.

Neighbour took me out on a dog walk on a hill and to stop me stepping on rabbit shit she told me that was where baby rabbits came from. Took a few years to untangle that in my brain!

I'd look at commuters going the opposite way on the road and scoff at them for going the wrong way. Grandma's house is this way you fools, why are you going the other way?

I thoughr babies were literally made by kissing.

That everyone secretly wants to be a girl.

That the world is fair, that here's good and evil, but no shades of grey.

That people in power do it for the good of the people

That things would get better with time.

I thought they killed actors for the scene. Someone just needed to be sacrificed, apparently. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

• Cops are good

• Hard work pays off

• I might own a home someday

• The government isn't out to get anyone

• People are inherently good

• Drugs are bad

My dad's 4WD had a 'sub fuel' button and he told me it was for submarine mode. The car had a snorkel but the underwater mode was disabled and I believed that shit until an embarrassingly old age.

What an absolute asshole.

My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus' teachings.

9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, "Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times."

Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn't hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, "Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I'm happy about dead firefighters." They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.

I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I'm just over here like an absolute dupe who didn't pick up on the joke.

Strawberry milk came from pink cows and chocolate milk came from brown cows. My parents lied to me.

I remember when I first started playing Oregon Trail I thought dysentery was pronounced Dynasty.

I do that with a lot of words actually.

That if we put up enough efforts, we'll achieve world peace? I held this stupid belief till high school.

That adults are trustable, and will honour their words? This died young.

I thought hard work would be enough to make a living.

that adults knew what they were doing, and knew the stuff they were so loudly talking about. Was I naive.

Not a belief, but a confusion: I didn't understand how maps with a "you are here" marker knew where you were. 😅

1. That movie/TV actors would put on some kind of rubber/latex masks on to get into roles, i.e. I didn't think that most of the time they look like how they look like in everyday life. I'm not talking about makeup to age someone or turn them into a non-human character.

2. For a short period of time I would think that the news anchor on TV could see me at the same time I was looking at the screen - so I was very cautious as I was passing out of the shower and through the living room still in my bathrobe.

3. That there was a god, and if you pray really hard, your wish would come true. That was an idea from a friend - I kind of knew she didn't really believe in it either and was just repeating something heard earlier, but I figured it was worth a shot. Needless to say I quickly saw through the crap.

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 first heard about daylight saving time, I thought someone was capturing daylight in jars to release in the winter

That hamburgers were called "handburgers" because you hold them with your hand when you eat.

I thought that fire inheritly pushes things, and that all you needed to do to make a rocket, was to take a sizable flame, like a campfire or something, flip it upside down so that the flame pointed down instead of up somehow, and attach it to the bottom of something.