When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    14 minutes ago

    I had to go to a private Christian school in third grade - not because we were religious, we were not, but because gang violence was getting serious in my town and the private school was seen as the safe option my mom decided on for a year even though we couldn’t afford it.

    Again, not religious, but Christian school meant we had to go to “Chapel” every day - Sing bible songs and get the typical religious indoctrination. Anywho… In the chapel, there was a giant rectangular speaker box suspended up at the center of the ceiling. Not sure how but with all the talk of Jesus dying for your sins and everything, I became convinced that that speaker box was his coffin. I thought he was there, suspended above us, every day at Chapel in our little school

  • TheCreativeName@lemmy.ml
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    32 minutes ago

    I thought that you would get your grandparents by just going into a train station and picking some random (preferably older person) to be your grandparent.

    I was convinced that my parents had done that for me, and that’s why I had grandparents.

  • Lenny@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Wedding rings were there to show who was married and who was available. Once you wanted to get married, you just found a friendly person who didn’t have a ring, and then you asked if they’d marry you. I mean, that IS what happens I suppose, but my 8 year old brain played it out like someone asking a nice stranger for the time.

  • leadore@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Not sure what age I was, maybe 4. I thought the music on the radio was live, that the musicians went to the radio station to sing and it was broadcast from there.

    • bruhSoulz@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      Yo thats so real. I thought music videos were people literally singing live while the beat just played in the background or something. I always felt something was off or that it was too hard to be legit, but couldn’t figure out what was really up😂

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 hours ago

    I’m gonna sound so stupid, but I thought checks just gave you free money. I thought my parents were wasting a check by writing such a small amount, and ask them something like why not write a bigger number?

    Then they explained that you need money in the bank to work. I was too young to even be embarrassed, I was just like ok cool, didn’t even realize how dumb I was.

    In my defence, I was like 9 and I just arrived in the US and never heard of a “check” before.

    • bruhSoulz@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      I think u being a Lil too harsh on yourself, when I was a kid I thought bank receipts could be turned in to get money😂

  • Tuxman@sh.itjust.works
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    6 hours ago

    I thought the “Gulf War” was in fact the “GOLF War” and was happening at a golf course near our home… like … halfway to see uncle Peter!! 😅

    • Camille@lemmy.ml
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      17 minutes ago

      Either I’m stupid or I’m right and relieved, but in French, I think, they’re the same words which led me to not understand why the “golf war” until quite late (early 20yo I think). I didn’t think it was about golfing or anything but… what golf are we talking about lmao?

  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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    8 hours ago

    I remember knowing that knives will cut you and make you bleed, and that when people were shot in movies they would bleed, therefore bullets must be shaped like little blades.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I believed a kid who told me that every 4th of July, former US presidents who were still alive - which I somehow imagined was a large group - stood in a circle around the statue of liberty and held hands singing, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”

  • pixelscript@lemm.ee
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    8 hours ago

    I thought the glyph for “heated seat” in cars depicted a raised fist with the pinkie finger extended rather than a chair with heat waves eminating from it.

    The Tea at the Treedome episode of SpongeBob SquarePants further convinced me I was seeing it correctly, and I since knew it as “the fancy button”. In some regard, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

    “When in doubt, pinkie out!”

  • DeaDvey@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    That all television, even live action, was just made by someone who could draw really fast.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      I actually had similar theories though in the end I concluded that a person definitely couldn’t be doing it, but I did used to rack my brains how the machine did it so fast. I had to do a project on how TV worked and was invented when I was in the 6th grade and it didn’t help at all, the whole electron gun thing didn’t explain it to me at all because I was imagining the gun like, drawing objects like trees and buildings and people and none of the boring confusing stuff I read helped me understand how this gun knew what to draw and could do it so quickly.

    • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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      4 hours ago

      …i thought little people lived in my parents’ radio and television who put on shows for us…

  • HandwovenConsensus@lemm.ee
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    13 hours ago

    My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.

    So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

    I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      4 hours ago

      When I was a kid my dad would often pull up the NORAD Santa tracker on Christmas Eve, and that combined with seeing the film War Games at way too young of an age had me believing in Santa for much longer than I should have because “why else would the federal government devote so much money to tracking him?” I think it was specifically seeing the exact same animation of him being welcomed into a country by a pair of fighter jets for the third year in a row that finally killed that line of reasoning (because obviously the NORAD Santa tracker site is shot with television cameras or something)

      Kid logic is wild

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    I was always phlegmy and coughing as a kid so I became convinced I had diphtheria and would die soon, and thought it would be terrible to let my parents know this sad fact. Turns out it was because 1980s parenting meant smoking anywhere and everywhere at all times and cigarette smoke makes me ill.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Wow. When I started doing theatre in 1983 smoking was becoming evil. Restaurants were required to have nonsmoking sections. The drama instructor quit and was a militant anti-smoker.

      • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Yes there was starting to be some pushback and health education, but most people still smoked at home, and literally everywhere in the home. Your child’s bedroom was fair game. It’s a terrible thing to be in the car in the winter with the windows rolled up and your parent chain smoking away until your eyes swell shut. I know an older nurse who used to work at the pediatric hospital, and she would follow the pediatrician on rounds with an ashtray as he rounded on these children, trying desperately to keep the ashes off the children.