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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I dont remember the age, but it was before Kindergarten, thought men came into the house at night to load the next days shows into the TV.

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[-] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

I thought the abbreviation for pounds (lbs) stood for "lullables."

I have no idea why.

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[-] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

That meritocracy exists.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago

Girls pee out of their butts.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

Also, that all cats were girls and all dogs were boys.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

That God was real and had existed for all eternity.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

I remember watching Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. I remember that I thought he was wearing some sort of muscle prosthetics bc I thought people couldn't be that muscular. It's funny because by today's standards he wasn't buff at all.

[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

That an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being created all of existence, knew everything that would ever happen and everything its creations would ever do, but still either doomed to damnation or lifted up to paradise each one of them as a result of them doing exactly what they'd been programmed to do

[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

That sun and moon switch places during day and night. Like in a cartoon.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

The world was in black and white shortly before I was born.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

Each video game copy was customized and knew exactly what you would try to do always.

Not from button inputs. That never crossed my mind. Literally thought it was some magical fake interactive movie and the wizards who made them accounted for everything and knew you better than you did.

Needless to say, learning about code and how you can make things read button inputs was a mind-blowing moment for me. I learned what the secret behind the magic was.

I have ever since then been far more curious on how and why things work. Learning about the methods behind the magics.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

I thought superheroes were real and all lived in New York. To be fair, it was my only contact with Western culture.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

I thought vaginas were just hiding 20-30 tiny miniature penises inside, and that's why they couldn't use urinals because it would spray everywhere

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[-] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

Everyone in the whole world is the world champion of something. Could be something normal like running, or jumping, but it could also be something really niche like solving the Rubik’s cube with your tongue while being under water with your hands tied behind your back. You just need to find what you’re really good at and that might be your thing.

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[-] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

I thought that everywhere was ocean except our town, my grandparents' town, and the interstate we used to get there.

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[-] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

When I was young, my mom told me that Dad went to work too make money. In my head, I had envisioned him going to an office and running machines that made coins. Imagine my disappointment when I got to visit him at work and there were no coin making machines.

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

I thought Eleanor Roosevelt was Black. I have no idea how I got that idea and it stuck with me until partway through college.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

If you stir chocolate milk counter-clockwise you can separate the milk and chocolate syrup.

In order to learn how to whistle you had to eat enough pickles first.

Found a rock that kind of looked like a coin and thought I could carve it into a passable counterfeit and repeat enough times to become rich.

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

That night was caused by really thick clouds. I think I saw light through dark black clouds during twilight and assumed night was caused by black clouds covering the sky. I went to test this theory by flying out of London at night but I fell asleep before we took off.

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

When I learned balls have a significant role in child-making my first though was women got pregnant by surgically transfering a man's testicle to their belly. Then I realized balls come in two's and I do in fact have more than one sibling

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

Cliffs were fictional. Like the kind you can fall off of.

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

There was a brief moment where I thought video games had to program every possible combination of pixels so it could react appropriately to what I was doing at any given time in a game. I had no idea how things rendered. I didn't know they were individual sprites that animated separately. Thought it was all just one big thing and they had to draw every single possibility with nothing dynamic going on.

Then I played Wolfenstein 3D on PC and realized how impossible that would be in 3D. Funnily enough, those little pocket games they had in the 80s and 90s like Game & Watch kinda were doing exactly what I thought every game was doing, but they were much simpler games for a reason.

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

Professional wrestling was real

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[-] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

Adults act mature and rationally

[-] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

Though I wasn't actually raised religiously, just the prevalence of religion in society led to many of my early theories have religious components.

I thought that between dying and being reborn you spent your time in heaven as an angel. While there, you could select your next parents from all the currently pregnant people on earth. I imagined giant 'rooms' full of computers in heaven, where every pregnant woman had a profile you could check out (mind, that was in the early 90s - I like to think I secretly invented social networking^^). Once you decided on a mother, you'd be kicked down into her womb and be reborn. I did realize pretty soon after that this theory doesn't hold water when you see that many children are not born into happy families, but for a short while I was certain I picked my mother from all the possible mothers around the world. She was very charmed by that :D

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[-] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

That god was real and he actually gave a fuck about me

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[-] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

Cows that are completely brown give chocolate milk.
My mother said it as a joke, but at the time it made complete sense to me. By logical extension, there must’ve been a farm with pink cows for the strawberry milk.

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[-] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

I remember reading a Robin Hood book when I was maybe 6 years old, and it mentioned that Robin Hood hated 'bloodshed.' I thought this was an actual shed or something where people went to fight. I hadn't learned the other meanings of 'shed' yet.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

I was assured that power-hungry politicians would face checks and balances, and get voted out for saying insane things.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

I used to think all food for adults were called Sad Meals, as opposed to Happy Meals (like at McDonald's).

I thought some wild stuff as a child that feels more fantastical than strictly dumb. Like I thought everyone was psychic except me and could hear my thoughts. I thought time worked differently depending on who I talked with. I thought the earth was both flat or round depending on where you were standing. I'd often get dreams and reality confused too. For some reason I thought dogs were people who had been cursed into becoming pets, probably because of me seeing the donkeys from Pinocchio. I thought half of people were robots fueled by pieces of the sun they'd pluck out of the sky.

This one is common, but I thought water simply phased through your body if you touched it. There was an episode of Bill Nye where he mentions that water "goes through your hand" and says it just like that. So I thought water simply phased through hands.

I think I was just abused as a kid and neglected

[-] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

I earnestly believed that quicksand was going to be a far more prevalent danger in my life than it has.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

I started learning BASIC when I was 7 and used to think that the POKE command was a magical incantation that could do anything. Like you could make an entire game with a single POKE. You just had to find the right one.

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

If I had to pee really bad I would eat bread or crackers because it would absorb the pee and not make me have to go.

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago
[-] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

Because of Barbie dolls, I used to believe that girls didn't have nipples

[-] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I thought answering machines were something just made up by TV shows because we never had an answering machine.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I used to think that how your belly button looked was based on a surgical procedure following birth, and "innie" vs "outie" was an indication of a surgeon's skill. I was legitimately surprised when my son was born and you find out they clamp the umbilical cord and just wait for it to fall off.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I thought that actors on TV shows and movies were acting in real time, and that they had a special ability to do the exact same thing over and over again.

As I grew in the Spanish speaking world, I also believed that Hollywood actors spoke Spanish, and that their voices changed dramatically only by switching languages.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I live in Ontario and Quebec was undergoing a referendum to leave Canada when I was a kid. I asked my Dad if Canada would still be the second biggest country if Quebec left.

He was impressed by the insightful question, but in reality I thought Quebec was just the tiny town where my Grandma lived.

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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
400 points (98.5% liked)

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