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.

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.