my childhood

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super256colors:

“Please give me [sound of mid 90’s disc reader reading/buffering… it’s indescribable if you’ve never heard it]… one half tray of salad… Please give me… [more brief disc reading noise] one half tray of… Thank you! [loud munching noises]“ 

JumpStart 1st Grade, Knowledge Adventure, 1995 

#oh my god, #this is an astonishingly specific nostalgia trip, #“what kind of school cafeteria will just give you one half tray of cookies and one half tray of ice cream” i wondered   (itsbenedict)

Tags:

#games #my childhood #yes this #I have not thought about this game in a *very* long time

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hugintheraven:

exigencelost:

Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:

1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.

2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.

3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.

4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.

5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.

…wait, did you guys never lie awake at night as kids wondering what breathing would feel like if you didn’t *need* to do it

practicing holding your breath, partly to expand the *total* length of time you can hold it but also to try to expand the time length of the initial segment, of neither breathing nor feeling the lack

(though all too aware that feeling it for a few seconds at a time is probably a very different experience from feeling it indefinitely, from *knowing* that you can feel it indefinitely)

—

(I remember I started at a total length of around thirty seconds and managed to work my way up to about sixty, maybe sixty-five. I haven’t practised in ages, but just now I tried it and was able to do sixty seconds on the first try, and might have been able to squeeze a few more seconds out of it. Is it like riding a bike? Does puberty do something to increase your lung capacity relative to your oxygen consumption?)

Tags:

#Twilight #death tw #asphyxiation cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #my childhood #(for anyone with their proofreader goggles on or otherwise paying close enough attention to notice: #there are two different spellings of the verb form of ”practise” in this post and both of them are deliberate) #(child!me spoke American and adult!me speaks Vaguely Canadian Mishmash) #((although I did start experimenting with Canadian spelling fairly young #–I knew from the age of 8 that one day I would live in Canada– #and that time period probably did overlap)) #((but I think ”practise” was among the later ones I adopted)) #(((I started off with ”favourite” and ”colour”))) #tag rambles #our home and cherished land #(((also I played a lot of Neopets and Runescape so some Britishisms leaked through from there))) #(((but there was definitely an aspect of ”I’m going to have to get used to it someday and might as well start now”))) #language

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cryptovexillologist:

In middle school I was really into RuneScape, and weirdly terrified of any of my friends finding out, even though I’m sure none of them would have given a damn

In hindsight, this looks like really clunky thematic foreshadowing of me realizing I was gay in high school

God is a hack writer

It takes practice to learn how to keep secrets, and the best practice material is secrets that don’t actually matter, so that if you fail it’s not a big deal.

(I say this as a person who also kept her Runescape-playing secret for a while as a kid. I managed four months before anyone found out, which is not bad for a ten-year-old.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #games #my childhood #Runescape

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gasmaskaesthetic:

brin-bellway:

gasmaskaesthetic:

honeywives:

people who slander dandelions are so boring. oh you don’t like weeds?? you don’t want to see my yard absolutely covered in fairy pom moms motherfucker??? get bent 

as a small child I used to argue vehemently that dandelions weren’t weeds, because “weeds are plants you DON’T want!”

I know, right?!

On the bright side, nobody else caring about “”weeds”” means they don’t mind if you pick them and make a beautiful bouquet for your mommy. Or try to see if you can figure out this “flower crown” concept you’ve vaguely heard about. Or dissect them and test their various liquids on a piece of tree bark to see if any of them dye it an interesting colour.

(*Looking* at flowers is one of the most boring things to do with them, and it’s a shame that roses and the like are reserved for such boring purposes.)

You, you get me.

Tags:

#dandelion #flowers #my childhood #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

honeywives:

people who slander dandelions are so boring. oh you don’t like weeds?? you don’t want to see my yard absolutely covered in fairy pom moms motherfucker??? get bent 

as a small child I used to argue vehemently that dandelions weren’t weeds, because “weeds are plants you DON’T want!”

I know, right?!

On the bright side, nobody else caring about “”weeds”” means they don’t mind if you pick them and make a beautiful bouquet for your mommy. Or try to see if you can figure out this “flower crown” concept you’ve vaguely heard about. Or dissect them and test their various liquids on a piece of tree bark to see if any of them dye it an interesting colour.

(*Looking* at flowers is one of the most boring things to do with them, and it’s a shame that roses and the like are reserved for such boring purposes.)

Tags:

#dandelion #flowers #my childhood #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sigmaleph:

@brin-bellway not reblogging the whole post but

The method of addition described in the OP [adding 7+6 by observing that 7+3=10, 6=3+3, so 7+3+3=10+3= 13] is implicitly being contrasted with some “normal” way, and I’m curious what that normal way actually is. Anyone know?

I don’t know if this is the “normal” way, but I do mental arithmetic by having all the single-digit additions cached (so 7+6=13 is a one-step result of the method), and doing stuff similar to the OP if I am unsure/forgot/dealing with longer numbers I don’t want to do digit-by-digit. Note that OP is implicitly doing some results caching of their own to remember that 7+3=10 and 3+3=6

[previously on]

—

I find 3+3=6 much more intuitive and cache-y than 7+6=13, because the first one isn’t overflowing into another digit.

The way you echo back the description of the method, while not wrong really, makes it sound a lot more abstract than it feels in my brain. It feels more like the numbers are made of something with the consistency of dough or soft clay, and I tear a chunk off of one number and stick it onto the other one, then look at the sizes of the resulting two piles of number. Or maybe pouring water from one jug to another until it’s full and then looking at the amount leftover in the first jug, kind of like that puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance†. (I always did like that movie as a child, though I would tend to forget that not all of the movie was puzzles and end up unpleasantly surprised by the beginning and end.)

—

Quite possibly caching everything is the normal way, yeah. I know it’s the normal way to do 1×1-digit multiplication. The kids in my Girl Scout troop made fun of me for not having the times tables memorised: I never bothered and just worked them out on the fly as needed. Some of them have ended up ingrained through sheer use, but I never did put any deliberate effort into ingraining them.

(ingrained-through-sheer-use rather than through any deliberate effort is also how I learned to touch-type [link])

—

†For those of you unfamiliar: you get a 3-gallon jug, a 5-gallon jug, and a fountain (from/to which you may both take and give water). Measure out 4 gallons. (also do it in two minutes or a bomb goes off, because supposedly this is an action movie and not edutainment)

Tags:

#my childhood #math #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #death mention #bullying mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

naxzella:

finding out people dont usually add numbers by first adding something to make a ten (for example 7+6= 7 plus 3 is 10 plus another 3 is 13) & that its actually an adhd thing is the WILDEST shit literally ive lived like 10 years (or however old i was when i learned to add and stuff) thinking thats how everyone does it. what the fuck

 

cabronallorona:

What

 

overherewiththequeers:

It’s also an autism thing, apparently.

 

teaboot:

W H A T

 

leap-yeap:

Oh yeah! This is also part of why autistic people/people with adhd struggle in math classes. Our brains process math and numbers in a totally different way. Many people on the spectrum struggle with the “show your work” part of math because we can’t exactly tell you why it works/how it works. We just kinda do it

 

black-infinity-parked-outside:

It’s also a maths dyslexia thing!

 

maryellencarter:

So I don’t innately do this but I was taught to do it? Now I’m really confused.

(I wonder if a disproportionate number of people who homeschool for primarily religious reasons, and/or of the people who create curricula marketed to that audience, are autistic or ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent. It would sure explain the absolute scathing scorn for the idea that children need “socialization”, and possibly the popularity of theme-integrated “unit studies” and self-directed “unschooling”… and it could evolve pretty easily by those originally being the kids who did a *lot* better homeschooled than in public schools… hmm.)

(Every so often I circle back around to the question of whether any of the things that make me think I’m autistic are inborn or whether they all come from my upbringing. Because my sperm donor is definitely autistic and also an abusive asshole, and my bio-incubator may be autistic or ADHD or something else along those lines but by *god* does she have the executive dysfunction in spades. And they’re both controlling as fuck. So the only way to socialize Correctly was his way, and the only way to get anything done was her way, and given childhood neuroplasticity… does it really matter if I was born autistic or whatever I am? Am I just irreversibly whatever-it-is now and I should be learning to work with it, or am I accidentally meandering back toward neurotypicality (and what does that mean for my online friendships if so), or was I actually neurodivergent all along and it’s just the extroversion confusing me? :P)

Not sure about fundies as such, but FWIW I was in secular homeschool groups (though this included a fair number of relatively laid-back religious types who didn’t mind hanging out with the rest of us) and they were very autistic. And they got distilled to increasingly high concentrations of autism the older they got, because allistics were a lot more likely to leave for public school. Groups of homeschooled teenagers tended to be upwards of 50% autistic, and a lot of the rest had autistic siblings.

—

The method of addition described in the OP is implicitly being contrasted with some “normal” way, and I’m curious what that normal way actually is. Anyone know?

Tags:

#autism #homeschool #my childhood #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #abuse cw #math #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

thezohar:

overthestars-and-offtoneverland:

lollytea:

i like how writing realistic worlds and characters is so important for so many writers to the point where they agonize over it. meanwhile lemony snicket was just like “death to reality. im gonna write this whole ass series and with god as my witness, absolutely fucking NOBODY is gonna act like a person.”

Daniel Handler, after downing whatever the hell he was on: The baby has piranha teeth and can take a trained swordswoman in a fight. 

All of us: Fucking genius. 

readers: what time and place is this set in?
Daniel Handler: Yes.

(While this is funny, also I do wonder what reading A Series of Unfortunate Events as a young impressionable child may have done to me?)

((other than a suspicion of eye doctors, I mean [link]))

(Kid!me took everything seriously. Like, I understood the concept of fiction–at least with books; lack of exposure to fictional songs meant I didn’t really understand that songs could be fictional until around early-mid teens–and to *some* extent (but only some [link]) I had a sense of humour, but I wouldn’t have known absurdity if it bit me. And indeed, I did not notice as a child how absurd A Series of Unfortunate Events was.)

Tags:

#A Series of Unfortunate Events #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #my childhood #if there’s nothing out there‚ what was that noise?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lizardbros:

 

diggly:

ITS THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

#always work out what year you are claiming to have been born in  #it’s easier if you’re born in a nought year (agapi42)

I generally used 1980, but that was for online stuff where I didn’t need to physically pass as having been born then.

(And no, it actually *wasn’t* porn: it was online contests. I still remember that one contest Reese’s ran that had super-common “consolation” prizes of a free Fast Break chocolate bar. My family had so many chocolate bars by the end, it was great.)

((Fast Break bars aren’t *especially* good–I wouldn’t ever pick them over the other chocolates at the checkout–but for free I was happy to take them.))

Tags:

#(I’m a week late on responding to this but oh well) #((I guess this also counts as a belated answer to that Question of the Day post about what laws I’ve broken)) #((although more of a term and condition than a law)) #((these days I *do* abide by the letter of contest rules)) #reply via reblog #my childhood #food #Hot Fuzz

brin-bellway asked: Re: kid shows based around buses, what about Magic School Bus?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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hypnoticharlequin:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

hypnoticharlequin:

Did they ever do toys of that?

I’ll admit, I forgot that was a thing as it was never something I saw as a kid. I don’t think it was ever shown in my country? It was something I only really found out about later on and mostly via pop culture osmosis due to how often it was referenced in US media.  

*

Probably? Not sure if I had any Magic School Bus toys myself, but it was a big enough thing here† around the turn of the millennium that they probably made some.

Yeah, I just checked and there were indeed toys. Here’s a couple examples that came up in Google Images.

(I loved Magic School Bus as a kid, so I thought of it immediately.)

—

†”Here” being used fairly broadly. I was living in America at the time, but I know I saw Magic School Bus being broadcast on Canadian TV even into the 10′s. (They might still do it for all I know; I don’t have TV service these days.)

Well, I didn’t know that.

That dinosaur bus is legitimately adorable, I’m so tempted to see if I can find one on Ebay or something. 

According to Wikipedia, they rebooted it last year as Netflix exclusive, so that is something!

Tags:

#(September 2018) #conversational aglets #Magic School Bus #my childhood