Things you thought were a real problem growing up, because the tv said so

1. Ring around the collar
2. Dishpan hands
3. Forgetting to add the fabric softener

Drugs

I have to scrub the ring around the collar out of my husband's shirts all of the time, I've had dish-washing dermatitis before, and if you don't use fabric softener or dryer sheets, you get static cling.

I have never encountered lava, piranhas, or quicksand in my life

Slipping on a banana peel

Quicksand yes,also riptides.

Killer bees.

Ring around the collar however, is real and I have had to combat it from time to time.

The realization, after looking down, that you'd walked several steps off of a cliff.

wolves

Being tied to railroad tracks

amorous housewives

Latin American revolutionaries

Cat burglars

dandruff

wolves

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac), Saturday, 1 July 2023 16:40 (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

speak for yourself

lol i predicted that

i have to live my truth

nervous breakdowns

things I thought were 100% necessary: shaving cream, aftershave.

Shaving cream is such a nice, cheap luxury

Forest fires … and they were correct

the horror of lifelong job security in a "dead end job"

innocent things being misinterpreted as racist/sexist by PC extremists

eco-terrorists (where the fuck are you now? have the world's security forces quietly killed you all?)

nuclear holocaust

still wouldn't rule it out

yeah, we've had a good 30 years of not worrying quite so much about it though.

Flying pickets

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOGRkZjU5OWMtZjYzZi00NTZmLTkzNTEtZjA0Y2E1ZjkzMTUzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg

They were a real problem though.

they taught me to be fearful of awful British acapella bands who dress like prats!

noise pollution

things I thought were 100% necessary: shaving cream, aftershave.

― epistantophus

you use an electric, then? i can't get a close enough shave with an electric. you know what shaving cream is good that nobody actually uses, barbasol. it's cheap and it works.

i never used aftershave, i do think moisturizing and exfoliating is amazing and everyone should do it

disco

Punks putting safety pins through their noses.

not being able to put my arm back on, should it come off

my arm coming off would be a real problem... but the TV did make me inordinately concerned about this remote possibility

apples with embedded razor blades

you use an electric, then? i can't get a close enough shave with an electric. you know what shaving cream is good that nobody actually uses, barbasol. it's cheap and it works.

I just shave with soap.

satanic cults

A new ice age

Getting a kite caught in overhead cables.

Falling into a slurry pit.

Without those public information films people of my age in the UK watched at school, we would have nothing to talk about at dinner parties.

I think I've mentioned this somewhere here before: a friend of mine, during a rather sheltered upbringing, watched a lot of Murder She Wrote and as a result believed that the chance of being murdered was an ordinary and regular hazard of being an adult.

Communism

lol visiting

Rattlesnakes

Newt Gingrich

amorous housewives

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac)

Window cleaners and milkmen.

as ymp said, killer bees

This time last year I would have said inflation, not now though obviously.

getting burnt by sparklers
getting electrocuted by standing too close to pylons
chip-pan fires - my mum never did that, so going to a friend's house for dinner and they had a chip-pan = FEAR. didn't help that there was a bad one in a house at the end of the road my primary school was on so used to walk past the burnt out husk every day

The Bermuda Triangle - though prob more from books/magazines than TV.

amorous housewives

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac)

Window cleaners and milkmen.

― emil.y, Saturday, July 1, 2023 10:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

plumbers

Spontaneous human combustion.

If you watch a lot of American sitcoms, you know that it is terrible not to have an elaborate marriage proposal or a perfect wedding venue. Also, your wife will leave you if you forget your wedding anniversary (because we are like that, wives. We have nothing better to do than get in a huff about not getting flowers on Valentine's Day or a grudging dinner out on our anniversary).

xp

I learned about that from the Reader's Digest: Strange Stories, Amazing Facts book. Then decades later I was on my son's trampoline and the strongest static spark I'd ever experienced arced from my finger to the metal frame as I climbed off. obv it wasn't quite like the jolt you get from a mains power belt, but I sure felt it.

The Bermuda Triangle - though prob more from books/magazines than TV.

When I was maybe five or six I saw a documentary about the Bermuda Triangle, and it was likely my first experience with true-life mysteries/conspiracies a la Bart Simpson’s ufos-are-real/reverse vampires/adults are hiding information from us!

In looking up the film just now, I did a double-take at the music credit:

http://whatismymovie.com/t/images/379216.jpg

The Japanese

not really a problem, but canal boats are something that have not been as relevant to my adult life as I expected from watching tv as a child

someone driving w/out headlights on = a member of a gang doing an initiation, so don't flash them.

this isn't a thing, an urban myth, yet it features in several movies/tv ("Death Sentence" w/ Kevin Bacon being the worst)

Loooool me and my husb joke about that all the time because his mum used to constantly warn him about it

The world ending according to the prophecies of Nostradamus

And white slavery

static cling

Sarah McLachlan.

Turns out she's not real!

i.e., she’s a mech

noise pollution

try living someplace with 100k+ ppl per sq mile, it is a sanity-destroying problem.

Salsa that comes from New York City.

Dandruff

TS: Selsun blue vs head & shoulders

The beef: where the fuck is it

This thread idea is amazing. Would people be interested in a "Things you thought were real life because TV/movies said so" thread?

squeezing the toilet paper

fiendish drug pushers that hand out free samples outside schools

Having to clear my name after someone robs a bank disguised as me

that you only get one phone call from jail

oranges injected with mercury

( https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-an-orange-became-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction-1ec355f8e342 )

The world ending according to the prophecies of Nostradamus

― sarahell, Sunday, 2 July 2023 15:44 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

jesus yeah

xxp

on the set of Germany, Year Zero the starving German actors couldn't stop themselves from eating up the prop fruit for one scene, so the set crew injected it all with carbolic acid, pretty harsh but no doubt effective.

Possibility of Keith Chegwin or Chris Evans or Danny Baker turning up outside our house at an awkward time

Roland Rat, children morally corrupted by

Definitely the Bermuda triangle and quicksand.

that you only get one phone call from jail

― sad Mings of dynasty (Neanderthal), Tuesday, July 4, 2023 2:02 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

wait

Possibility of Keith Chegwin or Chris Evans or Danny Baker turning up outside our house at an awkward time

Naked, in the case of the first named.

don't go to effing war zones. I can remember briefly seeing the corpses of 4 Dutch journos/camera operators killed during a massacre in El Salvador on some pre-watershed news program in the 80's. I can't remember if gratuitous shots of corpses on the news was more of a thing back then.

speaking of public information films i was genuinely scared as a kid that if you accidentally left an electrical appliance plugged in overnight it would blow up and burn the house down

now it's just rational stuff like the Yellowstone supervolcano that keeps me awake

speaking of public information films i was genuinely scared as a kid that if you accidentally left an electrical appliance plugged in overnight it would blow up and burn the house down

this still worries me. leave the toaster plugged in when we're out... what if it EXPLODES

in the old days the electrical safety of the old cartridge fuses at your mains board was pretty basic, it was a lot easier to electrocute yourself or die in a fire caused by an electrical fault. Now if you plug in a dodgy toaster the RCBO will trip.

Plane reactors catching fire or breaking down because of a flight of geese. I was also convinced there had to be at least one parachute onboard that I could grab.
Also the risk of getting hit on the head by random objects falling from planes.
Other dooms from the sky: comet coming too close to earth, solar flare, black hole swallowing us, final judgment and apocalypse happening without notice when I am not ready.

Oh yes, another one, speaking too loud in the mountain and triggering an avalanche.
Getting blind after looking at the sun for one too many seconds.

Brain aneurysm

For the inverse thread: I know that if my house is on fire I can make like Bobby Ewing and jump in the nearest available swimming pool before running in and saving everyone.

speaking of public information films i was genuinely scared as a kid that if you accidentally left an electrical appliance plugged in overnight it would blow up and burn the house down

My wife has this fear. Unplugs everything used to cook before sitting down to eat a meal.

Seeing CPR on every other show, but reading about how CPR routinely breaks bones, made me flip-flop from thinking TV oversold to underselling it.
It still didn't scare me enough to learn CPR or even basic first aid.

Because of old-fashioned and basic war films and Westerns on the telly when I was a kid, I thought that when you got shot you just died. That was it. I can't even remember how old I was when I realized it was possible to get shot and live.

The Japanese

― the best minds of my generation destroyed by woke (Bananaman Begins)

specifically the _japanese economy_

Rabies, chiefly because of an absolutely terrifying COI film that I just searched for on YT and I'm not going to link here because fuck me dead.

> when you got shot you just died.

and when you died, blood trickled out of your mouth

It's a FACT.

no other blood, though

yeah the british obsession with rabies is one of the fascinating things to me, there's a couple books called "scarred for life"... i understand when it's not a risk the idea that you might have to deal with it seems scary, but seriously, i grew up in america and rabies was (a) rare and (b) treatable as long as you just told somebody if you were bitten by a rabid dog. (it turns out that most rabies cases in the us come from bat bites anyway! nobody ever made any PIFs about importing bats.)

i'm definitely not going to ever watch that film. i mean holy shit why would you even scare the fuck out of kids like that.

I was terrified of killer bees too. I was staying at my grandma's house in Speke (a place with no reported killer bees) and unwisely watched a documentary about them, must have been late 80s. I couldn't sleep, then when I did sleep I had a nightmare about a load of them flying in through the keyhole, and went around blocking up all the keyholes in the house, just to be on the safe side.

in the realm of possibly real things, when I was staying in a hostel in Budapest in 2002 I remember some other backpackers arriving from Bucharest and telling me about an American girl they met at a hostel there who had been bitten by a stray dog and had caught rabies.

yeah the british obsession with rabies is one of the fascinating things to me

It was always portrayed as coming from abroad you see, from Europe, so dovetailed neatly with insular (literally) xenophobia.

That you could die from one bite from a black widow instantly

Also, if you're not careful, someone might swing a pocket watch in front of your face and then you'll be hypnotized....

If your house is burgled, the burglars will steal EVERYTHING- except for your telephone, so you can call the police.

A Massachusetts woman who was missing for a week was found stuck in the mud at a state park

- Going to a party where somebody sings too high and the cocktail glasses shatter

Invasion of the fire ants

Oh man, in 5th grade I remember trying to explain to anyone who would listen that the killer bees were on the way and it was gonna be REALLY BAD.

But then "Bring the Ruckus" started and everyone started vibing

Tetanus, up there with rabies

i saw this picture of a guy with tetanus in my dad's scientific american when i was maybe 8 or 9 and concluded i did not want ever to get it

https://doctorlib.info/infectiology/infections-central-nervous-system/infections-central-nervous-system.files/image408.jpg

Possibly Australia-specific: European wasps crawling into your can of Coke and then you accidentally swallow them and they sting you in the throat and you die

Xp I thought the effect of one of the major poisons was illustrated with a similar picture to that tetanus one.

Strychnine, definitely seen a very similar image used in a tv documentary. Possibly Horrrors of the Victorian home illustrating the dangers of unmediated pharmaceutical practise of the time. Things in glass bottles looking tempting to kids or a spate of spousal murders.
Thought for a moment it was cyanide. Though seeing effect depicted differently in war films when German spies take it so wondering at the moment.

xp have heard about bees stinging you on the tongue having fatal effect if one doesn't have an epi pen handy. Not sure if that was from tv. & is more likely true.

Don't you notice a can buzzing if a wasp is inside it.
Have had nasty experience of wasps nesting under alcoves or window ledges and attacking out of the blue though.

All this talk of insects reminded me of Earwigs ! In French they are called perce-oreille (ear-piercer) which I of course took literally and thought that several people must have lost their hearing after taking a nap in the garden for earwigs to deserve the name.
I was shocked many many years later (not so long ago) when a friend told me that his eardrum had burst following an infection, which he described as painful but clearly he hadn't become deaf.

Having to drink castor oil as punishment for when you are bad.

Invasion of the fire ants

― that's not my post, Tuesday

ants making off with your entire picnic spread

pretty sure 40% of America thinks your arrest is invalidated if your Miranda rights aren't read to you at the scene thanks to movies and TV. Lauren Boebert actually incorrectly told someone who was arrested for underage drinking at a high school football game that she could go free because of this.

lol

to take this a more serious direction, I feel like urban legends spread through tv (i.e. poorly informed local news affiliates) email chain letters, social media, and word of mouth have distorted the public view of what sex/child trafficking actually are, and is why QAnon bullshit like Pizzagate actually got legs.

People seem to conflate it with outright kidnapping, images of people being snatched out of Targets and hurriedly rushed onto a plane out of the country, never to be free again, when the trafficked are usually victims of people they know, who deceive them with promises that give them power and control over them and create a dependence that the trafficked cannot escape from. (few trafficked are actually kidnapped).

Liberal-minded people often fall for the "your car is being tagged with codes or there are zip ties on your car, you will be trafficked soon" or "Wayfair is smuggling people!" urban legends and because of their desire to not be seen as insensitive, the ones that know better don't want to point it out.

This is how you get assholes like Operation Underground Railroad/Ballard leading anti-trafficking operations that often impede other ongoing operations to free trafficking victims, or worse, they 'free' people who weren't being trafficked to begin with, because Ballard has often conflated willing participants in sex work with trafficking victims. Or turned victims into the hands of other people who will enslave them because they have no fucking idea what they are doing because they're right-wing nutbars.

It just boggles the mind, the idea that the people who are supposed to be powerful, dangerous criminals are also simultaneously leaving bread-crumbs all around town that they're going to do crime to you. Which is, in a sense, how these rumors start - similar to the "don't go to the mall on Halloween, terrorists have something planned" urban myth that spread after 9/11, it's meant to give people a feeling of control ("if I just pay attention, I'll avoid the place the terrorists bomb/I'll avoid being trafficked!").

Like that movie Sound of Freedom out right now is a pretty dangerous film, in that regard

xxxxxxp re sitcoms

the first time we left our young kid with a babysitter, i felt anxiety that was totally informed by 80s sitcom episodes (or a specific episode?) where new parents can’t enjoy their dinner because they are worrying about the babysitter

to be fair, my first time babysitting, I got a phone call, and it was kind of weird, asked me if I'd "checked the children".

"It's nine o'clock, do you know where your children are?"

I love that parents had to be reminded back in the day that they had kids, because they had likely forgotten after a few high balls.

"they're out selling drugs, I told them not to come home until they hit their quotas"

satan worship

turns out, it is the solution

I did a healthcare course a decade and a bit ago. The teacher kept on trotting out vague stories about kids being kidnapped all the time, I tried to get her to realise she was trotting out moral panics regularly. I mean this was repetitive, at least once a lesson and possibly more. She started saying I didn't want to be 'that guy' which I found a bit hypocritical at the very least since I was trying to get her to get over an annoying habit.
Seems to be a pretty unprofessional practise to keep trotting out sub tabloid fake news every lesson.

Not sure if she was getting that from tv or what.

I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was pointing out that Satan was a Christian deity so part of the same continuity as Yahweh and not as relevant outside of that, or possibly the Abrahamic tradition.

LIke invented folk devil.

THough possibly as such a tradition that has been picked up and played with in that guise.

abandoned juynkyard refrigerators that you can't open from the inside so if you hide in one while playing hide and go seek with Punky Brewster, you come very close to death.

One of my earliest memories is of getting trapped in a trunk in the basement, playing hide and seek with my friend

frigidaire perfect protection for surviving nuclear blasts or is that more film than tv?

also from film, Halloween in this case, always always look in the back seat of the car before you drive off. if you don't look, you could miss the homicidal manic about to strangle you. i still look ... haven't seen anyone yet but you never know

Refrigerator death

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn4Vhkmb4Lw

Electric eels

Cursed Hawaiian idols

Wait, those aren’t?

If your house is burgled, the burglars will steal EVERYTHING- except for your telephone, so you can call the police.

― The Triumphant Return of Bernard & Stubbs (Raymond Cummings)

i wouldn't do that, not after what they did to my toothbrush

I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was pointing out that Satan was a Christian deity so part of the same continuity as Yahweh and not as relevant outside of that, or possibly the Abrahamic tradition.

― Stevo

they're all part of the Tommy Westphall Universe anyway

see the fascinating thing about the satanic panic is that it turns out all of that ritual abuse was happening, it was just that it was _christians_ who were doing it. same as it ever was.

having your brake lines cut

I feel like burglary in general should have diminished considerably by now. I don't know the precise statistics, but do people really even have THINGS worth stealing anymore?

Personally I have a decent amount of money (relatively speaking), but it consists of ones and zeroes in computers owned by a bank. We don't have expensive electronics or silver or gold.

I own a bunch of guitars but they aren't collectors' items - just workaday instruments that cost a few hundred dollars. And in any case, I wouldn't expect your average burglar to know what would have resale value. AND, further, if I had an expensive guitar I would already know its serial number and be able to track it if it were sold.

Same thing re: mugging. "Gimme your wallet!" Yeah go ahead and take my wallet. It's got three dollars in cash, plus a half-dozen plastic rectangles that are about to be useless.

Go ahead. Take my wallet. You've severely inconvenienced me, but it likely won't benefit you. Those cards will all be canceled within an hour or so, and I can dispute every purchase you make. All you will get is a ~$40 piece of leather and a year's supply of bookmarks. Then I need to go to the DMV to replace my driver's license. Many wow. Such criming.

We've got this far without anyone mentioning demonic possession?

Between that and nuclear war, everything else seemed like small beer.

I feel like burglary in general should have diminished considerably by now. I don't know the precise statistics, but do people really even have THINGS worth stealing anymore?

― Exit, pursued by a beer (Ye Mad Puffin)

one of my friends had her car stolen last weekend. portland is the second biggest city for car theft in the usa, behind cleveland. was her car _worth_ stealing? probably not. theft isn't really a rational economic decision.

Cars are a different story. You can sell bits of car.

But no one wants to break into my mother-in-law's house and steal her Precious Moments figurines.

Nor does anyone want my wife's seven pieces of reasonably nice jewelry that were on sale at Macy's.

No one is going to break into my house to steal four extremely worn-out Calphalon skillets, thirty silk neckties, two Nerf guns, seven dollars in pocket change, approximately a thousand CDs, or approximately eight thousand books. It's just not worth it. I am not sure why I even bother locking the doors.

(I do have a first edition of Old Man and the Sea - probably the only potentially valuable book I own - but no burglar would know that, nor what to do with it.)

As I see it, there is simply no way to move most household merchandise for quick profit. If there were a way to do so, I would probably have done it a long time ago in order to buy weed or pay the electric bill.

s'what you think, I'm at the pawn selling yr vintage Yahtzee for coin

Neanderthal, you are welcome to it; otherwise it'd be there in the next yard sale

(Damn, now I have Michael McDonald in my head singing "Yahtzee Be There".)

a lot of car thefts are just tiktok kids doing kia boyz shit in the midwest now

kia was the most popular make to use a really dumb ignition switch design and a weak center column. you can just smack it hard under the steering wheel, pop out the ignition switch assembly, and the cheap middle section pops in half and you can turn it with a screwdriver in like… a minute. they didn’t go to chop shops, they just drove like like jackasses and dumped them

on the other hand, a manager of mine lives in a very safe suburb, but someone figured out a lot of people in the area were formerly-rural folk who didn’t think much of leaving their keys in the car (!!) in this sleepy midwest suburb and long story short, his pickup was found in a chop shop in the exurbs partially disassembled

third part: I think nothing of just driving into chicago, but the first time a former coworker drove his czech in-laws to downtown, they were pulling up to a hotel and the guy who was outside his car waiting for the valet to get his car just in front of them was by the trunk pulling bags out and a kid that looked 12 years of age hopped in the drivers seat, keys still in ignition, and took off

none of these things happen on the regular and when they do I ask people, first because of this thread, if they were in fact in an 80s movie

oh, and the one thing no one thought would be a problem when I was growing up: catalytic converter theft!

someone close to me as a kid (identify blurred to protect the offenders) had a chevy nova right after they factory installed those. it was a lemon. stalled out at stoplights, etc, so an enterprising person cut it off and talked a local auto place into welding a straight pipe on, but it took some convincing because the intentions were clear

these days it’s be obvious it was theft. and my workplace is highly monitored by security, but someone parked at the end of the parking lot — for fitness purposes, a nice walk at the end of the day is nice — and someone had the nerve to pull into the end of a corporate parking lot and thieve a catalytic converter! all the cameras pointed toward the building and not down at the end of the lot

it was so brazen, kind of impressed

on the other hand, a manager of mine lives in a very safe suburb, but someone figured out a lot of people in the area were formerly-rural folk who didn’t think much of leaving their keys in the car (!!) in this sleepy midwest suburb and long story short, his pickup was found in a chop shop in the exurbs partially disassembled

Before I moved away, a lot of rich assholes in the NY and NJ suburbs were getting robbed because they were leaving the digital remote-start keyfobs to their fancy cars sitting in the cup holders and thieves were just walking up the driveway and driving away with their cars. This was seen by the local news as a crime wave rather than a stupidity tax.

tbf my coworker was like “well, you got me there”

My parents have a Prius. Their local police told them to keep their keys in a special box (lead-lined? I dunno) because thieves could do some sort of drive-by wireless cloning thing and steal the car.

I honestly have no idea if this is a real thing, but my parents do, in fact, keep their Prius keys in like a Faraday cage or whatever.

Personally I own two completely shitty banged-up and almost useless cars. I rarely drive (I work from home and can walk/bike/subway to almost anything).

If someone stole my 2008 Mazda hatchback that has no radio, I might say something approximating "oh dear god, thank you" but I recognize that this is a niche opinion

Thieves broke into my wife's previous car twice but it was such a piece of crap you could barely start it WITH the key, so they were unable to hotwire it either time. Just fucked up the column each time, which was annoying.

I remember some younger kids trying to convince me that there was some giant, Godzilla-sized spider in the Amazon and the US had sent F-16s but the missiles had little effect.

that’s true

2008 Mazda hatchback

A Mazda 3? I had one too. I would have been pissed if someone had stolen it. I sure was when my kid wrecked it.

Jimbeaux, yes! I love my Mazda 3 inordinately. It is the absolute best car I have ever had for playing minor music gigs in an urban / demiurban / suburban setting.

It currently holds two drumsets, three amplifiers, three guitars, and a PA - while still fitting in "compact" spaces. It is irreplaceable and I don't want to lose it to planned obsolescence.

That said, I also have a 16-year-old child. When one has a 16-year-old child, having a beat-up busted automobile (that is worth approximately nothing) may prove helpful. Just sayin.

Otm. Like I said, my then-17-year-old managed to wreck mine. And it wasn't all that busted up before then, either!

Getting caught in a well
Being cursed by a talisman
Gargamel

I definitely had a few Gargamel nightmares

pit bulls

Oh I remembered a very real one:
That I would be in a stairwell and a weird man would pop out from behind the door to attack/kill me.

See also: Getting murdered in a parking garage.

Getting caught in a well
Being cursed by a talisman
Gargamel

I couldn't change, though I wanted to
Don't let the days go by
Gargamel

that you could easily fake your death with a convincing funeral and actual death certificate and then just pop back into someone's life a few years later.

"but we buried a body?"
"no that was a hyena"
"but there was an autopsy done!"
"yes, on the hyena"
"but they said you died of a heart attack"
"no, the hyena died of a heart attack"
"but I cashed out your life insurance"
"ok now we have a problem"

Xp Precedent: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn

Yeah pit bulls.
I was sitting outside at the bar recently and there was a group of loud dudes with a pit bull right across from me. Very unnerving

if you don't use fabric softener or dryer sheets, you get static cling

only if you have polyester sheets which, gross

Static cling is real! I was mocked very loudly in the cafeteria by a bunch of upperclassmen my first week of high school bc I was wearing my very cool long johns underneath my jumper dress and it was all hiked up due to
STATIC CLING

Static Cling is my new band name, thanks

Static Zing

TS Static Cling vs. Shared Cling

I often ponder how many shark attacks are going on in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm assuming it's non-zero as the Mississippi River has not gotten less polluted by agricultural runoff, so the zone where fish were dying (and sharks lacking a meal) likely is still an issue.

There were non-stop stories about this in the news when I was a young adult, peaking toward the end of August and beginning of September of 2001. Then it kind of fell out of the news cycle for reasons.

i think(?) there was a time when i thought there might plausibly be sharks in the swimming pool, tbf on tv it usually turned out to be a kid with a prop fin.

do school bullies really give wedgies, shove other students into lockers, tape 'kick me' signs to their backs etc? the irl bullies i remember had a different playbook

so in choir class, Freshmen were usually hazed when we rehearsed in the Color Guard room. the seniors would usually grab one of them and put them in the closet and lock it, and listen to them bang the door , letting them out at the end of the rehearsal. I spent one shift in there, as did my best friend at the time (who I still hang out w/ to this day).

when I took over as Senior leader, I put an end to 'that' practice, though not because I was some white knight, mostly because I wanted us to fuck with Freshmen in ways that wouldn't potentially get us suspended from school.

kia was the most popular make to use a really dumb ignition switch design and a weak center column. you can just smack it hard under the steering wheel, pop out the ignition switch assembly, and the cheap middle section pops in half and you can turn it with a screwdriver in like… a minute. they didn’t go to chop shops, they just drove like like jackasses and dumped them

― mh

my girlfriend drives a kia, they sent her a letter saying they'd send her a free club. i mean, easier to adjust for than the shitty _everything_ on my ford focus (whatever year was the worst one for that, that's the one I have). i think they've paid to have the transmission on that thing replaced twice already. i've driven it 30,000 miles.

xp I was picked up and thrown into a garbage can once, and I had a sign on my back that said "My pussy smells like dried apples."

Lol
Sorry

It's OK, I just ended up as a shell of a human being because of things like that.

I thought carnivorous plants were fictional and not a real problem

Deflator: I agree that the bullying playbook has changed but I don't know exactly how. I suspect a lot of it moved online and off-campus.

Fwiw I live with, and adore, two actual teenagers. They are dorks and gay and special-needsy and physically weak. They are not popular jocks or prom queens.

Yet, they do not get wedgied or shoved into lockers or trashcans. At least in my area, society has somehow collectively decided not to do that shit.

Maybe it's just moved to other modes of cruelty (ahem, Republican governors and legislatures). But kids these days seem kinder, in the aggregate, than the ones I knew.

so in choir class, Freshmen were usually hazed when we rehearsed in the Color Guard room. the seniors would usually grab one of them and put them in the closet and lock it

weird! at my school the chess team did this

I was picked up and thrown into a garbage can once, and I had a sign on my back that said "My pussy smells like dried apples."

well, fuck

Yet, they do not get wedgied or shoved into lockers or trashcans.

i meant when i was in school (20+ years ago), but a lot of the jr/high school tropes you'd see on tv didn't apply so idk?

i do get the sense that kids these days are more sheltered and spend less time away from their parents, it would follow that they're less assertive and aggressive. you're right that the Biff archetype from Back to the Future didn't grow up to be the pathetic loser who doesn't know how to conduct himself, he's an elder statesman now. This is the fucked up alternate universe that Michael J Fox would have averted. does that mean it's less discouraged, or is bullying more covert now? it used to be hidden in plain sight from adults.

my feeling is that bullying is maybe taken more seriously than it was when i was a kid. i mean they didn't even fuckin' bother trying to hide bullying me, it was out there in the open. and when i told adults they'd say "well of course they're gonna bully you if you don't stand up for yourself". of course when i tried i was held responsible and they didn't ever seem to be. story of my fuckin' life, right there.

and being queer, shit, forget about it. the f-slur was endemic. people played "smear the queer". i didn't actually know i was queer, but there were a lot of us who either didn't know, or didn't say. frankly i suspect that the kid at boy scout camp who had every line of dialogue from the _wizard of oz_ memorized might perhaps have been a friend of dorothy.

frankly i suspect that the kid at boy scout camp who had every line of dialogue from the _wizard of oz_ memorized might perhaps have been a friend of dorothy.

I had similar thoughts about my friend's older brother, who seemed to get his hair cut every week and wore purple suede ankle boots.

So this conversation has metastasized and I confess that I don't know where the crossover happened.

If it is my fault, I apologize and will strive to do better. Carry on.

In approximately 1981 I was picked up and shoved headfirst into a garbage can. Repeatedly. I have gotten over it but not forgotten it.

My children have never experienced anything like this. And, I can say with reasonable confidence they never will.

These days, kids have significantly more subtle ways to undermine and/or victimize one another. I don't fear a call from the school saying that someone beat up my kid on the playground.

My fears are more like doxxing, deepfakes, online brigading, and backchannel Discord ostracizing.

― Exit, pursued by a beer (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, July 21, 2023 3:45 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You get shoved in a 1981 trash can and it's over, it's done.. it may leave a scar but it's done

Some of this online shit will be around to haunt you for years to come

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, July 21, 2023 3:48 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

There is definitely thread drift afoot here but yeah, Andy speaks truth here.

― Exit, pursued by a beer (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, July 21, 2023 4:04 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's my fault, i wrote a reply in keep notes and pasted it into the wrong thread.

― all this time I thought you were British (Deflatormouse), Friday, July 21, 2023 4:08 PM (forty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's still messages from me under my gov't name on Usenet saying homophobic stuff in 1995-1996 when I was a fundie Christian. fortunately they don't show up in Google search anymore.

and also there's someone else with my name in Chicago that I can pin it on

is it Peter Cetera?

sorry.

yeah. I feel bad, but it's hard for me to say I'm sorry

the Peter Cetera post was unforgivable, idk what's wrong with me

well, ok, you redeemed it somewhat, thx

so i don't know if tv bullying in the 90's resembled irl 80's bullying that had evolved by the time i got to middle school, or if nyc is a bit atypical or what. both things would make sense

I got bullied everywhere. even in church. like wtf was that.

i got bullied for sure! but i did not get wedgied or shoved in a locker

it was more like verbal abuse, threats of physical harm that were occasionally carried out, occasional earnest 'let's drop the act, i'm on your side here, why don't you just conform, i'm trying to help you fit in here' kind of talks

Peter Cetera once bullied me. I think it was the fourth of July.

but now you're feeling stronger every day

i def did not try to blend in, idk if i came across queer necessarily.

elementary school was mixed, middle school was very rough. high school... idk, by the time i got to school the reaction was more like 'that kid is so weird that he's potentially a little scary' or for whatever reason i was mostly not targeted. but if someone made a remark, f-word or something else, i'm a normal guy and you're a weirdo so i should pick on you kind of shit, i would actually make fun of them for doing so, like that is so fucking corny, what do think this is, saved by the bell?'

The idea of the hole in the ozone layer kept me up at night.

Then again, that was a real problem, which was addressed by real action.

there's still messages from me under my gov't name on Usenet saying homophobic stuff in 1995-1996 when I was a fundie Christian. fortunately they don't show up in Google search anymore.

and also there's someone else with my name in Chicago that I can pin it on

― linoleum gallagher (Neanderthal)

i have a really good joke here but it only works if you know my deadname

anyway the good thing is that you can always change your name! i recommend it highly, worked out great for me.

my name is now Dom Passantino

i'm afraid to ask but, bullying in church??

I don’t remember being bullied but I did get body slammed in front of my jr high school

at the Methodist church from 3rd to 8th grade, basically everybody took turns insulting me in Sunday School and youth group, usually from the moment I arrived until the moment I left, saying things like I was ugly and I drooled, usually while the teacher/leader just let it happen cos lols. because the door was wooden and there were no windows in the Sunday school room in 5th grade, I usually took 5 minutes before I entered because I couldn't see who was in the room and to see if my main adversaries were there (and they usually were)

at the Fundie church in high school, it wasn't really 'bullying' because most of them were extreme Puritanical idiots, but a lot of people who talked behind my back but only when they knew I was around the corner to hear them talk about how ridiculous or pathetic they thought I was.

no surprise why church didn't work for me, although it had more to do with "making no sense"

You'll take some comfort when the Great Old Ones return and eat these bullies' brains.

(hugs)

idk what to say to that except hail Satan.

What is a fundie church

fundamentalist

a brief departure from the bullying stories - did we talk about acid rain? that used to be really scary and was going to destroy the environment. maybe it's called something else now or it was fixed? the environment was pretty f'up in the 70s. like how did we fix acid rain, smog, the hole in the ozone layer and prevent rivers from catching fire but we have no will to stop global warming.

Because inconvenient truths make convenient wedge issues.

the technologies used to combat smog and acid rain largely recycled more harmful byproducts of combustion into carbon dioxide

Overpopulation, before the concept of population peaks was widely understood. Still a real problem I guess, just not something that will expand indefinitely as the world's population is predicted to peak in around 2100.

I can remember John Craven's Newsround doing a report on the world pop reaching 5 billion and not really giving a shit. At the time the prospect of nuclear annihilation was all the rage.