Weird stuff you did as a child

How can an eight-year-old have a kink?!

From what I've seen, by having mainly unrestricted access to the internet and social media at a very young age.

@ antenna_ears

I also did that too, when I was around 7, again out of curiosity.

I'm just happy that the burn I got wasn't a second-degree one.

Edited by BrightLight on Nov 21st 2020 at 10:54:53 PM

I recently remembered two more, and they both involve SimCity (the 2000 edition)

For the first one, I put down railroad tracks in a spiral around the entire map.

For the second one, I tried to built a city in very mountainous terrain. ^_^;;

Agree with BrightLight. I mean, sometimes they develop a kink and are way late to the game in recognizing it (like me).

TBH, moe sounds kinda like me when I was 13, though I didn't write any stories involving it. And plus, it has gotten me grounded on five separate occasions.

Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Dec 4th 2020 at 12:41:50 PM

I've had my kink since kindergarten.

...what is wrong with me

I used to tell stories for my mom to write down, and I have them in a Duo-Tang. Some of them are fanfics, including a couple of Curious George stories. There was also a time when a dream inspired me to make a story about the Teletubbies watching fireworks.

However, a couple of my stories are not original; they are simply me retelling a couple of my favorite TV episodes in my own words. I did this with the Corduroy episode “Yours, Mine and Ours” and the Rolie Polie Olie episode “Rewind”.

For a while when I was a kid, I had a weird irrational dislike of “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and would mute the radio or TV if it started playing and/or get upset with people if they started it up.

By this point, I don’t even remember why I suddenly hated the song so intensely (I had listened to the song plenty of times before without issue), but in any case my siblings would torment me by singing the song over and over again because they knew how much I hated it until I finally got over my unexplained dislike of the song.

I had weird things like that too:

• I'd be scared of the scene where the witch melts in The Wizard of Oz. It's not that I was feeling Sympathy for the Devil; I didn't mind her dying, but for some reason, the idea of someone melting scared me.
• I was terrified of that deep-voiced guy who shows up at the end of Muppets from Space.
• I hate Sick Episodes now because I feel bad for the characters, but when I was about six through seven, I had a mild phobia (not serious anxiety, just a sense of unease) of them. I think I just hated sick episodes so much that if I thought it was leading up to one, I would get antsy in anticipation. That meant I'd get nervous whenever a character sneezed or coughed or even so much as hiccuped, mentioned they were thirsty, etc. I thought anything could be a sign of doom. I even remember citing Handy Manny as my favourite cartoon, since there's no episode where Manny gets sick. Only a few episodes later, however, "Manny's Sick Day" came out..

People melting is scary though......even when it's the villains

The similar thing for me is that when I was 8, I was terrified of the Mac startup sound. I always covered my ears and moved away from the computer when starting it up.

That reminds me. When I was little, we had a potty training book that had a button that made a toilet sound. I think the idea was for it to make kids not scared of the real toilet sound, but ironically, I was scared of the sound that button made. So my parents had to actually take the button out of that book for me to want anything to do with it.

Okay, I’ve already mentioned some of my weird fears here, but here are some more:

The first time I saw Pingu was when the episode “Pingu and the Snowball Fight” (non-remastered version) aired right after Teletubbies on a TV channel called Access, which is now CTV 2 Alberta. This airing featured the intro and outro from Seasons 3 and 4, instead of the original instrumental one from the first two seasons, and when the outro appeared, toddler me was very startled by the fact that Pingu’s head wasn’t facing the camera, unlike the final result of the intro! In fact, just like what happened with the Disney Interactive and Chuck E. Cheese’s promos, I felt like I was in Stunned Silence for a few seconds afterwards!

In the video Psalty’s Funtastic Praise Party! (which was actually filmed at the same theater as Barney in Concert), I felt unsettled by the opening scene with the character Risky Rat (I heard that my two closest cousins were also scared of this scene, but I had falsely remembered it as a female mouse getting very close to the screen) as well as another character who had a deep voice (that’s what I thought of when I read the thing about Muppets from Space on this page). Because of these two things, I only watched this VHS once in my childhood.

Another video I only watched once (when I was very young but old enough to remember this kind of stuff) was Barney’s Home Sweet Homes. One reason was the Big Bad Wolf, which I read that other kids have been scared of, but the other reason was because of the way someone looked when he was playing a harmonica!

Speaking of harmonicas, young me would look away from the scene in Elmo's World: Happy Holidays where Elmo tries to play a Chanukah card like a harmonica.

I used to have an audiocassette copy of The Donut Man’s album “Good Shepherd”, which features the same “David and Goliath” song that scared me on a video. At first, I was okay with listening to the song, but then, eventually, the fact that I knew the video had scared me “sank in” and I had my mom fast-forward the cassette through that song, including the dialogue that opens it. By the way, this fast-forwarding memory happened in our car.

When a certain Disney movie gets released next year, I’ll tell you the bizarre details of my childhood phobia of the title character!

Edit: Correcting “into” to “intro”, since I made that typo the first time I was supposed to type “intro” in this post.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Mar 7th 2022 at 2:17:36 AM

When I was 8, I wrote several short Pokemon-related stories. There were 4 oddities:

1: A story that implies that Dialga's catch rate is way lower than it really is (and this was before ORAS changed it)

2: One titled "Hump Jump" (I called the small cliffs "humps" for some reason, if that makes it seem more innocent, though even naming a short story around those cliffs in of itself is odd)

3: One about Voltorbs covering up all the water around Johto and then blowing up, probably causing an apocalypse, at least in Johto

4: A similarly horrifying one about Gravelers appearing in super high numbers, there being, and I quote, "so many that even Lance's Pokemon could see them." The Gravelers crushed everyone in the Pokemon League followed by all of them self-destructing. This one is really messed up to me in hindsight in spite of the Beige Prose

My friends and I would switch around the lyrics in the opening of “The Christmas Song.” So it would sound like this: “Jack Frost roasting on an open fire, chestnuts nipping at your nose.”

When I watched the VHS Detective Tigger, there were two scenes that I would rewind and rewatch repeatedly. The first one was the climax of “Sham Pooh”, which involves a honey tree and a fountain of honey, and the second scene was the part of “Eeyore’s Tail Tale” where Rabbit turns Eeyore’s detached tail into a “Worm Wrangler” and lures some bugs away from his garden and onto a small boat.

There were also two scenes from Felix the Cat: The Movie that I would rewind and rewatch repeatedly when I rented it from my city’s public library. The first scene was during the first circus performance when Felix’s magic bag vacuums him up (since I liked vacuum cleaners) before shooting him out on a cannonball, and the second scene was when the audience members of the next circus performance used some kind of tube transport system to get to their seats.

After the first time I watched the movie, I would stop watching it after I was done rewatching that latter scene, since having another circus performance seemed repetitive to my four-year-old self. When I was about to watch the movie my way, I would say “I’m going to watch short of the long movie.”

And now, a bonus:

When my city’s swimming pool got a tall thing that kept dumping water, I would stand under it, then after getting water dumped on me, I ran around the thing while singing “I’m George Jetson!” before having water dumped on me again. I did this cycle repeatedly.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Dec 21st 2020 at 12:11:39 PM

I think I was in second grade when this happened. My class made a craft involving marshmallows, and we wrote our names in Sharpie on the marshmallows. But a little while after that, my Sweet Tooth proved too intense and I ate the frickin' marshmallow with the Sharpie writing on it! Luckily nothing too severe happened to my body. Moral of the story: Sharpie writing is nontoxic!

That’s funny and cute. I probably would have done the same thing. XD ^_^;;

Some more crazy stories from my childhood:

• My mom told me that when I was a baby, I once was with this other baby and at one point, I took the other baby's pacifier and put it in my mouth. Grody.

• When I was around 6, I once held a tissue over a lit candle to see what would happen. Needless to say, it caught fire. Nothing major happened, I'm just glad I'm not a pyromaniac today.

• I once had these little stories in my head about characters from multiple media properties I liked living with each other in a treehouse.

• I also had stories in my head about a 1/4-inch dog named Tiny having adventures, presumably inspired by Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Edited by jacksonk987 on Dec 24th 2020 at 2:57:39 AM

Here’s something straight out of the days of VHS rentals, which happened when I was kindergarten age or younger:

The first time I rented my city’s public library’s VHS copy of The Best of Dr. Seuss, the previous renter had left the tape unrewound during the end credits of The Butter Battle Book. I let the tape play the rest of the credits, expecting that I would have to rewind the tape right away, only for Daisy-Head Mayzie to start after the credits. I just kept watching from there; therefore, the first time I watched that tape, I missed out on The Butter Battle Book. I think this happened in my grandparents’ living room.

Speaking of movie rentals, rentals from VHQ would have the covers replaced with generic VHQ covers with a movie description on the back. Because of this, young me imagined what it would be like if they put a VHQ promo at the beginning of all their rentals. My imaginary promo started with a lady saying something that started with “At VHQ...” and ended with her saying something like “...and this is the movie you’re watching now.” After this, an announcer who was probably male would read the movie description from the back of the generic VHQ movie cover, then the VHQ logo would zoom in from the top of the screen.

Because I was young and wouldn’t have been able to understand a lot of the dialogue if that promo was real, I didn’t really think of any other specific dialogue other than the following nonsensical line from the lady: “P-H-P-H spells ‘perchip’”. This was inspired by me seeing the name “Phillip” in the “Guess Who” tabletop game, but what a strange line of placeholder dialogue that was!

Now, here’s a bonus thing that’s similar to my toddlerhood fears, but happened when I was older:

When I was watching an opening montage on Nelvana VHS’s, I would look away from the Redwall, Medabots and Cardcaptors clips because I thought they looked scary/mature.

Edit: Adding Medabots

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Jan 19th 2021 at 3:53:34 AM

I remember when I was little my dad said he got heartburn from eating too much and I confused it with a heart attack so I was scared he was gonna die.

There was one day (I don’t know when) when my Grami was looking after me at my house all day. During this day, I was watching PBS Kids, and the Arthur episode that aired twice that day was “Vomitrocious/Sue Ellen Chickens Out”. While Grami and I were watching the morning airing, during the “Word From Us Kids” segment in the middle of the show, Grami started laughing and calling it funny because it was “a show about throwing up”. Unfortunately, due to the Family Guy Incident, I got ticked off at her for calling it funny.

Because of this, when it was almost time for the afternoon airing of the same episode, I told Grami to leave me alone while I watched it again. So, she stayed in my parents’ bedroom for about half an hour. That’s right, I didn’t even let her watch the second half that was unrelated to what she laughed at! And she managed to get by alone for half an hour in a house without Internet!

I'd make up my own names for different shades of colour... including "beauty brown" (a kind of light brown) which, embarrassingly, I used to describe the colour of my aunt's friend's skin!

I used to borrow VHS’s and DVD’s from my cousins just to watch the logos on them. One time, I had been watching the Paramount logos from the DVD of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star at my grandparents’ house, and my cousins were there and about to watch the whole movie in the spare room. They wanted me to watch it with them, but I didn’t because of the PG-13 rating. When I was watching the opening of the DVD with them, and the rating screen appeared, one of them said, “But it says here: ‘[my real name in plural form] can watch’!”

Edit: On a related note, when I was watching the logos on Mr. Deeds, I would look away from the violent montage that leads to the DVD menu.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Mar 3rd 2021 at 8:07:54 AM

When I played edutainment games as a kid, I sometimes tried to lose the minigames just to see what would happen. I usually thought the losing animations were funny.

Because of this, I actually had a real-life Springtime for Hitler moment where I was trying to get the questions in one game wrong, but I kept choosing the right answers completely by accident.

On the topic of edutainment games, a present I once received was a CD-ROM for second graders featuring Buzz Lightyear. However, my nervousness about doing something wrong in the game was causing me to be afraid of Emperor Zurg, but I didn’t tell anyone about this.

Because of this, when my Grami was having trouble finding the games on the disc, I didn’t help her. Also, when the end credits of the game played, which featured a clip of Zurg, I was so nervous that I tried to ctrl-alt-delete right out of there! However, that didn’t work and only caused the credits to freeze, I think.

On the topic of Toy Story, I remember a time from when I was younger than that where, after attending an out-of-town VBS program, one of my closest maternal cousins and I were walking around outside the church while repeatedly saying, “Andy, Andy, Andy. That’s all he ever talks about.” I also remember acting out Toy Story 2 with a boy at an indoor playground.

Also, one time at a Christmas family reunion (I think it was in 2004), the aforementioned cousin and I were going around singing “Green Giant!” to people. We also went around saying other things that I don’t remember.

Edit: Correcting “crtl” to “ctrl”.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Mar 7th 2022 at 2:33:51 AM

The Garfield book Garfield's Cat Nap ended with Garfield going crazy and messing around with the Food Pills-producing computer, which made Future Jon say "You've overloaded the computer! It's going to explode!" The story itself ended with Garfield waking up from the dream before it actually happened, but I liked to make it sound like it really did happen. I would add Future Jon screaming like a weirdo and throwing the book in the air while making an explosion sound. I loved doing that. XD