Reading all these adventure books and comics made me really fear quicksand as a child… I was living in East Berlins suburbs. The most comparable thing to quicksand would have been a mud puddle!
I was always worried about perfectly round holes in the ground and falling into them. Looney Tunes really over-represented how common they were.
Especially since anyone can paint them on the floor anywhere!
They also led me to believe that quicksand would be a bigger hazard in everyday life.
Happened to me once. I was super drunk walking home and didn’t see an open manhole in front of me. I got super lucky, though.
From my drunk perspective, I’m just walking along when suddenly the ground is nearly at my eye level. Then I realised I’m dangling there, with just my head and elbows outside. I just dragged myself out and continued on home.
I have no idea how I managed to fall inside with both my legs at the same time and why my arms didn’t hurt like hell, not even in the morning.
The part of the brain that goes “we’re doing reflexes now and you don’t get a say” is wild.
I don’t think reflexes were involved here, more likely it was lucky arm positioning at the right time. But what do I know? I wasn’t quite there to witness it.
And you’d deserve it for saying “on accident”
Don’t forget ‘for no reason’. As opposed to reasonable accidents.
Are accidents an accident if it didn’t happened accidentally?
Then they’re incidents.
Isnt “for no reason” referring to why the person feared that, not that the accident had no reason?
When I was a kid there was a Norwegian children movie called “The hunt for the kidney stone” where a kid travels into the body of his sick grandpa to find out what’s wrong with him (kidney stone). After the movie I asked my mom what kidney stones are, and where they come from. “You can get them if you eat too much salt, for example” she says, and after that I was TERRIFIED every time my parents would put salt on anything.
I read a story somewhere of someone getting them from the oxalates in peanut butter.
They were eating like 1 kg a week for a month or two though.
I just found out spinach is crazy high in them too! I love spinach…
Every time i was somewhere where i could see a big fall, i would get scared, thinking i would intentionally go there and fall to my death without noticing
I had the exact same fear when I was a kid, and crossing bridges was always very stressful for me. Even today, as an adult, it still bothers me a little, and when I’m driving I keep having these intrusive thoughts like: “What if I accidentally drive off this bridge?”
I’m mildly scared of railings overlooking lower floors and such, thinking “I would get seriously injured if I somehow accidentally lean over this railing so much that I flip over to the other side and fall down.”
A, yes, quick sand, the bane of my childhood.
My mom once actually stepped in quicksand (thankfully only up to the top of her boot). It was in Canada. Yes, Canada has quicksand! She was visiting my uncle in Saskatchewan.
Unlike the movies, it fits its name. One minute she was walking, then suddenly it was like she fell into a pit, but couldn’t get her boot out. I can’t remember how the story ended. This was like 35 years ago that she told me about it.
You know, seeing you in the wild I think is kinda like seeing quicksand. Very rare, usually fatal, but if you live - probably a great story.
Let’s see if I get out alive.
Judging by she telling you this story I’d say it went quite okay.
Yeah, I just mean I don’t remember how she got out.
Couple of years ago, I walked through a forest somewhere in the middle of The Netherlands, called the Waterloopbos, and I came across a blocked off area with quicksand warnings.
I kinda wish I had lost my shoes there, because the shoes I was wearing weren’t good for forest walking.
That was the first and so far only time I had seen quicksand in my 44 years of existing on this blue marble.
Roaming black holes
Gamma ray bursts
The germans invading
Electrified bodies/puddles of water
Yknow, the usual stuff kids are afraid of…
I don’t think this is the usual stuff mate
Chubbyemu made me fear gas station sushi.
gas station sushi
I didn’t know those 3 words existed in that combination and I’m frankly appalled that they do
For every time someone eats gas station sushi, someone has to eat a PB&J from a 5-Star restaurant to maintain the balance of the universe; otherwise you get weird things happening like The Fruit of the Loom logo losing the cornucopia, or Donald Trump becoming president.
Chubbyemu made me fear a lot of things
Tbf kost things a child will cut contain atoms so it’s not as far fetched as it sounds
I remember freaking out when the last season of Friends aired - what, there are people vacationing in Bermuda? Are they insane? I was in my late teens
When I was in my late teens, I ended up on a boat from Ft Lauderdale to the Bahamas. Theres no way no to go through just a little bit of the Burmuda Triangle. I remember freaking out / being super excited, wondering what crazy stuff things would happen on our journey. Of course, nothing happened. I was so disillusioned.
Dude I would have shat my pants.
Truth be told I would still shit my pants.
That’s the true danger of the Bermuda Triangle.
By now, satellites and GPS can just navigate us around the triangle, kind of like with hurricanes.
The triangle is HUGE, and due to where it covers, a lot of shipping went through it, and still does iirc… Saying its dangerous because ships wrecked there often isn’t that far off from calling Earth dangerous since every human has died there. It’s a true statement, I suppose, but the context helps understand it’s not a very reasonable one.
My understanding is there’s a lot of coral reefs in the Bermuda triangle and, like you say a lot of shipping with through there. So it makes sense a lot of ships went missing in that area.
Sailors are a superstitious lot so there were stories about it being cursed. Kinda like how it’s bad luck to carry bananas on a sailboat.
Crew of Soyuz 11: “Well, screw you too!”
Haha, I was worried there were some obscure deaths I didn’t know about.
Yeah the mystery of the triangle was puffed up by disingenuous authors who lied and fudged details to pretend ships went missing all the time. Things like reporting ships missing but not their eventual returns, claiming there were no storms when records showed otherwise, including sinkings and crashes that happened well outside the triangle, and a bunch more.
When the the data is analysed; the number of incidents is the same as anywhere else on the planet.
Reminded me of the Bakers emperor where one of his alchemists is trying to split atom with hammer.
Watched a childrens show that showed a snakebite. Was unable to enter my bed for years without searching it for snakes throughoutly.
That’s not a bad idea.
Australian detected
Sometimes I look at the wide open sky and think “What if gravity suddenly reverses and I fall up into the sky and then space? That would be really dangerous.”
You should anchor yourself to things.
Just need a tri-solar syzygy!
I had a clear childhood memory of when gravity temporarily vanished and we all had to duck and cover under our desks. Years later I learned how gravity worked. A few years after that I realized my memory was impossible though it felt very real. This may be the root of my trust issues…
Human memory is wild. We’re extremely good at inventing things that never happened, or adjusting memories over time as we recall them into something completely different than what actually happened. And it can feel so real.
This is like a non-Christian version of my childhood fear of “The Rapture.”
Stephen King wrote a story of just that happening to a guy. Except gravity didn’t reverse he just kind of lost mass, but the result was the same.
The dangers of dieting.
Dude wasn’t even dieting what was crazy is for all intense in purposes no one could tell he was losing weight. He looked the same weight but when he get on a scale it show him losing weight. You really should read it. For some reason its a stand alone novel, but its actually really short for a Stephen King novel.
Same mass, less weight. So he was gravity resistant.
Yes and also should tell you the title Elevation by Stephen King.
I swear to God I’m not trying to be a dick, but just so you know the phrase is “for all Intents and purposes.”
It’s a pity you have to preface it that way.
My uncle told me he sailed through the Bermuda Triangle all the time. I thought he was full of crap.
Just stick to elements lighter than iron and you’ll be fine.
