Ask Lemmy

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. 😅

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.

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?

• 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 got two for ya:

1. 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.
2. 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 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.

• 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

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

That adults were intelligent

God

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.

That truth and justice will always eventually prevail

I used to think the sound of cicadas was the sound of sunlight, because it always seemed louder the brighter it was.

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

• 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)

I wasn’t sure why “youth in Asia” was such a popular topic.

::: spoiler

People were talking about euthanasia.

:::

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

When I was in 3rd grade, my older siblings conspired to manipulate me into thinking our bathroom mirror was haunted, and that the ghost could travel to other mirrors, so for a few weeks I was terrified to go the bathroom.

Then one day it hit me that I hadn't seen anything and I challenged the ghost, which of course, did not make an appearance.

Learned an important lesson that day about "faith", trusting people, and how silly it is to believe in things when you have no practical reason to do so.

Definitely stupid on my part.

I thought the world was physically black and white in the days when pictures were in black and white, and that colour was somehow exclusive to the present and immediate past.

That the future would be better.

There was a TV show in the UK called Crimestoppers, where they would show reenactments of crimes to try to find witnesses. I used to wonder why they didn't just arrest the criminals while they were filming.

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

That my parents didn't have parents. I knew my grandparents well, I just never connected the dots.

Your first two thoughts used to be correct. Movies were put together and released within the same year. In fact many of those Hallmark Channel style holiday movies are shot in the spring/summer for a fall/winter release. During the early days of television, all TV was live and set were reset during those commercial breaks.

I thought baby birds shot rabies out of their mouths, so I would never stand in front of one.

That all people are equal in the eyes of the law/justice