u/CaspertheGhostsFarts asked:
What is one thing you had never noticed before it was pointed out to you, but now you notice it all the time?
Here were some of the answers.
The Wild Beasts Howl And The Wild Winds Blow
Giphy
That in ancient cultures 40 was used as a general "quite a few." Not an uncountable amount, not infinite, but more than you want to casually count. In these old civilizations, where literacy was a treasure, being able to count to 40 was as much as most people cared to do.
Now any time I hear Bible stories, it strikes me (again) how silly literal interpretation based on the English version is.
Rained for 40 days and 40 nights = it rained for quite a while.
Fasted and prayed for 40 days.... wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.... it is EVERYWHERE
Tricks Of The Trade
My friend showed me how sometimes in a movie, when there's a character approaching the camera, they'll glance down at an out of shot cue-spot taped on the ground before the scene starts so they know exactly where to stop walking. Ever since he pointed that out to me I notice it in nearly every movie I see
The City That Never Sleeps
In NYC we have sewer drains on pretty much all the street corners, if you look on the curb above them you'll notice little spray paint marks.
Been living here for over 50 years and when one of those trucks came by my house to suck all the debris out the driver pulled out a few cans and marked it. I asked him why, he said that's how they keep track of when it was last cleaned, they have a color code chart that they check.
Now I see it all over the place.
For an image of what I'm talking about take a look here.
Diction Is Important
When I was about 10 years old, I took vocal lessons for a little while. For one of the songs I wanted to learn, the teacher told me that I kept singing "choo" instead of "you." She said people do it all the time when singing, and it always annoys her when she hears it in a song. Now I hear "choo" constantly when the singer is trying to say "you."
Not Actually A Viable Option
Giphy
In movies when people crawl through the air conditioning ducts. Somehow it always seems to be perfectly lit INSIDE the duct, no air flowing, VERY clean and NO screws to tear them up. I have worked around enough commercial HVAC equipment and installations to know that these are the stupidest things I have seen in movies and shows. In the real world you would not be able to see, be fighting very cold and fast air flowing while getting tore up by all the screws used to put the ducts together plus it will not be at all clean. Whoever came up with this misleading idea for entertainment is a jerk and a liar.
The President's Entire Platform
This may sound weird, but ad hominems. My best friend, who was on a debate team, introduced me to the term. For anyone who doesn't know, an ad hominem is when you attack the person rather than the argument/position he has (ieeg telling a guy he is "too young" to understand politics).
Since he told me about it, I've noticed how almost every person I try to have a discussion with, at some point, says an ad hominem to try to discredit my point by referencing me instead of explaining why the point is wrong. I realized then how often I use it during arguments, and I now actively try to stray away from it.
An Eye For Detail
I read somewhere that pretty much everything you see on screen is meaningful. Because literally every second of screen time costs so much money to develop (between cast, crew, editing, production, etc.), there is almost nothing "throwaway" that happens on the screen. If you see someone coughing, that's usually not just someone who is randomly coughing, as you say.
I had a somewhat related experience when I saw a recognizable actor in the background of a movie (it was a hospital drama, I think the one where Alec Baldwin has a god complex). My wife and I said "well, there's the bad guy." No way he's randomly in that shot.
Everything on screen is meaningful in some way. If someone randomly mentions that her brother is an elephant trainer in Kenya, that's probably going to be important later. If the movie takes a second to show someone putting an object on a table, it's because the movie needed to show you that object on the table.
It kind of changes the way you watch movies and television, honestly.
Aids For Enforcement
A small, inconspicuous blue light installed near a busy intersection that operates exactly in time with one of the signals. It's viewable from an area where a waiting police officer (who cannot actually see the traffic signal) can then know without a doubt who ran the red, and is then in a position to easily and safely make a traffic stop on the offender. I was on a ride-along a few years ago with one of our local officers who pointed this out to me. This particular one was slaved to a left-turn signal and it was positioned on the back of the signal pole such that the officer was ready to pull over scofflaws as soon as they completed their illegal left turn.
Oddly Sexualized Film Techniques
If an action movie has a female character with combat skills, you can bet there is a scene where she throws an enemy by doing this weird move where she wraps her legs around the enemy's head and spins.
Fight choreography in movies has gone to complete sh*t in the last 10 years and it's mostly poorly done fast cuts that are really hard to follow. John Wick excluded.
A Twinge Of The Eyes
When somebody points out input lag on a gaming system.
Another example is someone pointing out that Mario Kart 8 ran at 59fps instead of 60fps. This meant that every second, one frame would repeat itself and the game would stutter for 1/60 of a second. You couldn't notice it until they pointed it out and once they did, you could never unnotice it.
Here's what I mean. Also worth mentioning it was fixed in the switch port.
Just another straw article....
1. Blame it on the r-r-r-r-r-root beer
I was 18 years old. I was at a company dinner for a computer store that I worked at at the time. We were going out of business, so they threw us one last hoorah at a steakhouse. Ribs, steaks, oh god it was so good.
I've been a teetotaller my entire life, so I was enjoying a root beer as usual. A really beautiful waitress came to my table to talk to us. I'd had 3-4 root beers at this point, so I was feeling really confident, and I said something like "So, uh, you...you like...waitressing?" or something equally clever.
Many mistakes were made that night, but the biggest one happened right here. After I asked her the question, I kept my eyes locked with hers to demonstrate my confidence, held my drink to my mouth, and tried to locate the straw with my lips instead of looking at it. My lips fished around the glass for the longest eight seconds of my life, and in that moment, time completely slowed down and this look of absolute horror grew across the waitress's face. With each passing second she realized what a complete loser I am. I must have looked like a horse whispering something in French. By the time I actually found the straw, she got the hell out of there, and I was left alone slurping down my last root beer, among all my coworkers. There wouldn't be a single refill from that point on; I didn't need to ask to know it.
My friends made fun of me for years. I'm 29 now, and they still bring it up when we get together for dinner sometimes. I never used a straw again after that night.
2. Moth-er of pearl!
My husband found a pantry moth that had died stuck to the inside of his straw. After he'd already been drinking from it for a while.
3. Dammit, Brad! I told you to stop putting straws in my camel's backpack.
When it broke the camels back. That was my only camel.
4. On a more serious note: animals need us to quit it with straws
Serious answer: That video of that turtle with a straw stuck in his bleeding nose. It was so sad.
5. On another serious note: it's hard to be sexy with a straw
I was trying to be sexy at the bar and as I went for the straw I poked my eye. Not very sexy.
6. Thank goodness for laziness
I had jaw surgery so I was (am still) numb from my bottom lip to my chin. This made it somewhat difficult to drink from a glass so I (Continued)
Let's face it we've all done things we'd rather our parents didn't find out about. Well these brave souls share some secrets they would NEVER tell their parents.
1/24. I shot myself in the leg when I was 8 and fixed the hole with a wad of toilet paper and some duct tape. There's still metal in there 20 years later.
2/24. As an adult I was visiting my Mom. She was divorced from her 2nd husband and at the time she had a "roommate". One day they were at work and I answered the phone in my Mom's bedroom since it was the closest phone to me at the time. I needed to take a message and opened the top drawer of the nightstand on instinct to find a piece of paper. Big mistake. Right on top was a double sided dildo, a Hustler magazine on top of a stack of Hustlers, and a love letter to her roommate. Trust me when I say that I only read the first sentence or so and put it back in the drawer. Here we are almost 20 years later, lives with a different woman now, she's never come out of the closet, I've never outed her and never will. It's her decision. I love her no matter what and I think I'll call her today because it's been a couple weeks.
3/24. My grandmother had a collection of fairly expensive rings and when she died she left one to every woman in the family. I was 13 and told not to wear mine out of the house because it was a bit loose on me. I did and lost it within a month of her death. Every now and then my mom asks about it and I'm just like "yeah it's in a box in one of my drawers, I don't wear it because I don't want to lose it."
4/24. Stole my dads car when I had no licence and then had to race him home so that I didn't get caught with it. Made it in time. I will never tell him this. Ever.
5/24. Less than a year after my brother bought his house (with considerable help from our parents), he and a friend were looking at a gun in his living room. Being young and careless, his buddy pulled the trigger, blowing a nice, big hole in the refrigerator our parents bought for bro. It was a nice fridge, too. After promptly sh*tting himself, he and the friend hauled a** to a local second-hand appliance store, and bought a reasonably similar-looking fridge, which stands in his kitchen to this day.
6/24. I didn't slip in the shower. I fell through the wall while my girlfriend and I were banging.
More confessions on the next page!
7/24. I used to play my game boy advanced every night for about 2 years, never told my parents and certainly don't plan on it.
8/24. When I was like 10-12 I threw a soccer trophy at my door during a tantrum. It put a hole in my side, but not all the way through.
I stuck a bumper sticker for my favorite college team over it.
I'm 28 and it's still there.
9/24. I stole my moms earrings to give to my girlfriend in 3rd grade. She never found out...
10/24. Burnt a portion of our fence down when I was 14 by putting out a cigarette on it. Told my parents it just spontaneously caught fire and I heroically helped our neighbour put out the fire before our house burned down.
11/24. When I was in primary school I was playing tag and thought it would be a good idea to go through the out-of-bounds area. Unfortunately there was a small rabbit hole or something that I tripped on and then fell and cut my forehead on a rock just on my hairline. Unaware of how bad the injury was, I just continued playing and at some point I ran past a teacher on duty and she said I had to go to the nurse (there was apparently blood dripping down my face). Turns out I had to get three stitches. Naturally, Worksafe were all over this sh*t. They had to know how something so serious could have occurred, and asked me to take them to where it happened. I was really scared and couldn't tell them I went out of bounds because I couldn't get in trouble. So I told them that I didn't really remember but would have a look anyway. Turns out that I found a bolt sticking out of a pole and blamed that. Worksafe audited the whole school and found several more, so we were not allowed outside at lunchtime until it was fixed. The only problem was that the people who came to fix it, couldn't start for a week. So every day for a week we were stuck in classrooms at lunch and recess time, all because of me. Still haven't told my parents.
More unbelievable stories on the next page!
12/24. I got lost in the woods hiking. The police had to rescue me. It was a whole big scene. I texted them with the little battery life I had on my phone and told them I was staying at a friends, so that they wouldn't worry. The police eventually found me, and I got home at 5AM. They thought I was at a friends, and I've never told them the story.
13/24. When I was 8 I used to like sleeping in my grandmas bed with her because she was over 90 and had the most comfortable bed in the universe. One night I peed the bed having one of those dreams where I pee during the dream (don't fall into the trap kids). When we woke up, my grandma was under the assumption that she had peed the bed and not me. I just acted like I was super understanding because of her old age. I'm sorry Mama Nene.
14/24. I put my foot through my bedroom door after I lost an online match on UFC 09. The guy kicked my a** and then pm'd me abuse so I went bezerk. I told my dad it was over a girl who faked pregnancy with me and that she was phoning me. Truth is I hadn't spoken to her in months and didn't want to admit it was over a video game.
15/24. That the month I was "living a month in Spain" was actually spent in jail. I had friends to post fake Instagram pictures for me too.
16/24. When my dad and I lived with his then fiance years ago, her oldest daughter and I used to fool around.
17/24. I skipped college for like 4 months.
I was studying to become an english translator. The first month there was so f*cking bad, I couldn't stand the subjects, and as I hadn't finished high school yet (exams left), I couldn't keep going to college anyway.
So I spent the next months pretending I was going to class, while actually taking really long bus trips back and forth and reading books near the river.
Its the douchiest thing I've done and I can't let my parents know.
18/24. My dad recently asked me how I paid for my college when he knows I don't have a job. I'm never going to tell him that I became a local drug lord for 24 months and moved hundreds of lbs of pot through frat houses and cashed out when I was free of student loans.
More unbelievable secrets on the next page!
19/24. When I was 13 and my little bro was 11, we stayed at the mall WAY past when we were supposed to come home, like a few hours. This was the time before cell phones.
On the way home we hatched a scheme. We devised a lie that involved us being detained by a mall security guard for running down a back hallway of the mall.
We even came up with a real person to base this security guard on, in case we were questioned separately. We pretty much described to our mom the pro wrestler Dean Malenko. It was perfect.
Little did we know, there was a guy in our area posing as a cop and abducting children. Mom called the cops. My brother and I separately had to give statements about what happened.
The thing is, the lie held up. The cops told Mom that there was a good chance this was the guy. IIRC there may have even been a little blurb in the news about a sighting of this guy at the mall we frequented.
We threw a wrench in an investigation, caused a minor local scare, scared the sh*t out of our Mom, and ruined our freedom to walk to the mall by ourselves for 6 months, all because we didn't want to get into trouble for being 3 hours late getting home.
20/24. I broke my moms waterbed having sex, the same night she came home really drunk and when she woke up in the morning, she thought she did and didn't remember.
21/24. When I was a junior in college, I lived off campus with five other guys in a shady neighborhood. One Tuesday night while a few of us were high and watching tv, a couple thugs busted our door, broke in, and robbed us at gunpoint. They were looking for a drug dealer. It turns out they had the wrong house; the dude from whom everyone at school bought their weed, coke, and pills lived one house over. (None of us ratted him out because that would've brought more trouble)
These guys tore our place apart looking for our nonexistent stash, and when they couldn't find anything, they grabbed some random worthless decorations, getting antsy to bounce. One of my roommates- big, burly, but usually reserved- grabbed one of the guys as they were leaving. He must've snapped. The thug turns around and lets two shots fly that both hit my friend: one in the leg, the other in the gut.
He lived but was in the hospital recuperating for a month. None of us were able to recover from what happened, so after the short, fruitless investigation was over, we withdrew from school and went home.
I stayed until the end of the semester. When I went home, I just told my parents that I wanted to transfer to a school closer to home. I never told them why I made that decision. I have two younger brothers. I didn't want my parents to be afraid to send them away to school; I didn't want my brothers to be afraid to leave home and explore.
22/24. I found their "home movie" when I was looking for something to enjoy alone...
23/24. My dog ate a whole pot cookie left out once. My mom thought the neighbor tried to poison my dog by throwing something in a Ziploc bag over the fence since the poor pup was falling over and 'fainting'. In reality the pup stole my Friday night from me.
24/24. I went on Disney channel's website without their permission. I'm gunna burn for that one.
Some people were more hesitant to share their most personal stories.
"Nice try mom."