Weird stuff you did as a child

I might've been timing my jumps to make sure I didn't get hit — so at least I kind of thought it through. I'm also pretty sure the recess monitors stepped in before I could have the chance to get my ass kicked into oblivion.

A similar thing I did at recess when I was a kid was climbing up slides and/or sliding down head-first (the latter I did because I was acting like a penguin, since I was obsessed with penguins as a kid). Again, I don't think I ever got injured, but I was scolded for it... and yet I kept doing it anyway for whatever reason.

For some reason, I always liked the sensation of chewing on the control sticks of my PlayStation 2 controllers.

Edited by RWBYraikou888 on Apr 11th 2024 at 10:26:31 AM

I used to watch this cartoon called Chilly Beach which aired weekday afternoons on CBC after The Simpsons.

For some odd reason I would look away from the screen during the part in the intro with Jacques holding a plate of poutine.

I ate a bunch of post-it notes one day. No, I didn't have pica or anything. I was just on total autopilot while playing computer games

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 13th 2024 at 1:55:36 PM

A few months ago while my family was cleaning out our basement, I found a collection of stories I wrote when I was a kid. It was about a group of characters that were inspired by some of my stuffed animals (whether they were Living Toys or just standard anthropomorphic animals was unclear), and they were going on a boat through the ocean.

Highlights included:

• It opened with a Content Warning that there was an "enimy boat" [sic], and therefore, the book is only suitable for ages 3+ (Apparently, I thought villains were considered a mature topic. To be fair, it is fairly common for works aimed at very young children to have No Antagonist.)
• On one page, I drew a rainbow in the background, but didn't have a yellow marker... so I just wrote the word "yellow" in that part of the rainbow instead. This was also on the same page that marked a chapter called "Problems"... unintentionally making it look as though the chapter was called "Problems Yellow".
• Much of it was a Random Events Plot consisting of drawings, with very occasional writing. I'm not entirely sure what was going on.
• At one point, a flamingo "tragicly died" [sic]. The next chapter was about him coming Back from the Dead.
• It just stopped at some point, presumably because I forgot about it.

Yeah, that was a testament to my childhood Ping Pong Naïveté.

When I had the "do it yourself book" of Diary of a Wimpy Kid as a kid, the comics I made were nonsensical:

• One of them I just drew a bunch of cats.
• One of the "Creighton the Cretin" comics didn't even have a punchline; it was just a weird conversation. I think I wrote it because I remembered when I was much younger, we lived in a different place that had ducks nearby and Dad kept telling me "Don't scare the ducks" so even after I'd moved out of there, I considered scaring the ducks to be a big no-no:
  Random Boy: "I like birds."
  Creighton: "I like birds too."
  Random Boy: "Wow!"
  Creighton: "You scared the ducks!"
• One of them involved a bully saying to another kid, "Look at your weird lunch!" (which, looking back, isn't much of an insult), then, when cornered by the teacher, trying to defend himself by saying, "It was his lunch!".
• The "Ugly Eugene" comic went like this:
  Eugene: "AHH! Three eyes!"
  Three-eyed boy: "I do have three eyes. My name is Dan."
  Other Boy: "And my name's Tom."
  Eugene: "What!?
  Tom: "Tom!"

My closest childhood encounter with that thing that some people say the Internet is for happened in my earliest attempt to download YouTube videos. While trying to find out how to do that, I stumbled across the Metacafe website (described by Common Sense Media as "older than YouTube but not as kid-friendly"). The information I found made me think that this website would let me download videos, so I made an account under the name of Smiley Joe (which was a nickname that my mom wrote down in her journal about my toddlerhood). While signing up, there was an option to receive video links in emails. I clicked on that option, since it reminded me of the Genius feature on iTunes that introduced me to Hampsterdance: The Album.

The only video I ended up watching and saving to a library on that website was Johnny Cash's "Nasty Dan" song from Sesame Street. Sometime after that, my mom wasn't happy when she looked at my email from Metacafe. She told me that what I had signed up for was "crap" and that she didn't like that the email was recommending me videos about "college girls" despite the fact that I entered my age. I know for sure that I unsubscribed from the emails, and I probably closed my account. I remember my mom saying, "NO, Smiley Joe.", but I don't remember what that was in reply to.

Of course, my mom didn't explain what was inappropriate about the linked videos, so I couldn't help but wonder if a cousin of mine somehow became inappropriate for me to interact with when she started going to university, but I never asked anyone about this. I didn't try to download YouTube videos again until the mid-2010s.

And now, here's a bonus thing I did. When I couldn't tell a couple of my Grami's sisters apart, I would check their thumbs, since one of them had lost half a thumb to a lawnmower.

Edit: Missed a bracket.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on May 15th 2024 at 3:34:53 AM

i stabbed a kid with a pen in fourth grade.

i don't know if i'm legally allowed to go into further detail.

When I first saw Lady and the Tramp as a kid, I was too young to understand that the Spaghetti Kiss was meant to be romantic; I just saw it as "that funny spaghetti thing". As such, when my parents and I had spaghetti for dinner one night, I wanted to do it with my mother.

Besides my earliest visits to the movie theatre and the Mickey and the Beanstalk thing I already mentioned, I can remember another time in my childhood where I didn't watch the closing credits: it was when I rented Candy Land: The Great Lollipop Adventure on VHS. I think I found it weird to hear a song talking about an adventure beginning when the movie had just ended, so I stopped the tape. I don't think I watched all the closing credits until I got my own DVD copy of the movie.

When I was five, I would judge movies based on whether the protagonist accomplished their initial goal. Examples: "Undercover Kitty was stupid because Minoes chose to reject the cure and remain human", "The Emperor's New Groove was fun, but Kuzco should've got his Kuzcotopia". What is Character Development?

Edited by MathsAngelicVersion on May 17th 2024 at 3:48:38 PM

When I was a toddler, I apparently (I don't remember, but my grandpa sure does) put too many "nana"s on the end of the word "banana".

I intentionally limited how much I ate baked potatoes to try to make it a treat whenever I had one.

One morning when I was about 6, my friend unintentionally hit the mute button on the computer, and we couldn't figure out how to fix it before we had to go to school.

When I managed to figure out how to turn the sound back on later in the day, I was so proud of myself that I told my mom that I should be in the newspaper. Mundane Made Awesome, indeed.

I wore 'being the Weird Kid' as a badge of honor in elementary school lol

- I watched a lot of NSFW stuff when I was wayyy too young. I remember showing my friends some of it, too.. yeah, very happy I grew out of that.

- I also went on gore/shock sites a lot because I thought they were edgy and cool.

- Funnily enough, I used to preach the gospel to my classmates during kindergarten

- Used to eat a bunch of inedible stuff.. candle wax, legos, dirt, thread, coins.. I had to go to the ER because I ate a coin once. It' s a long story.

...and probably way more that I can't remember right now.

Edited by oufrelou on May 20th 2024 at 3:52:47 PM

Before I went to see Yogi Bear in the theatre with my parents, I pretty much vowed to myself to pay attention to the movie and not get bored with any of the animation-less scenes. I fulfilled my vow, and I must have felt mature for doing so, but I felt I didn't pay enough attention to the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner short before the movie, so I later got my Grami to take me to the same movie.

Does this count? For a long time, whenever I heard the word “ignite,” I immediately thought of Sailor Mars. ^_^;;