Fear

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.
- Judging by she telling you this story I'd say it went quite okay.
- 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.
- 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.

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!

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...

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."

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.
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.
This is like a non-Christian version of my childhood fear of "The Rapture."
You should anchor yourself to things.
Just need a tri-solar syzygy!
look out for red clouds above you, scp 858

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

Don't forget quicksand... I spent all my childhood afraid of falling into it. Somehow it was an unwarranted concern.

See I always knew it was fine because I was never in as jungle or swamp, because that's where it always is in movies and cartoons.
Sand evěrywhere
- I hate sand.

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.
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 uncle told me he sailed through the Bermuda Triangle all the time. I thought he was full of crap.

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!
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 only my head and elbows outside. I 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.
They also led me to believe that quicksand would be a bigger hazard in everyday life.

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
- A lot of things make me fear gas station sushi.

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

It's even funnier when you remember that like 99% of all matter is empty space, and electrostatic force is what keeps everything from sliding past everything else.

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'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."
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?"

Neutrinos: tf is an atom I’ve never seen one

Fun fact: The Bermuda Triangle actually lives in your closet and plans to get you in your sleep.

But, it told me it lived under my bed?!
- Something under the bed is drooling.
- It's a triangle, so it's under your bed, in your closet, and in the attic.

Just as a reminder that even if you turned an entire atom into pure kenitic energy, you wouldn't even see a flash.

Math stuff:

So E = M c^2

I'll choose a carbon atom because it's a round number (don't think about that statement too hard)

So carbon has an atomic mass of 12 atomic mass units. In grams (divide by Avagadro's number) is 1.992 E-23 grams.

Shove that into E=mc^2 and you get 1.790 nanojoules, which is 4.974 E-16 kilowatt-hours. Or at 12¢ per KWH is 5*E-15 cents of power.

So to power a 500 watt gaming rig, you'd need to burn about 20 nanograms of carbon at 100% efficiency, per hour.

Just stick to elements lighter than iron and you'll be fine.

Reminded me of the Bakers emperor where one of his alchemists is trying to split atom with hammer.

My childhood fear was getting the vaccine shot for the swine flu which was a big issue in the mid 70's. My 5th grade class received new text books and there was a photo of a kid getting the vaccine shot. Instead of a needle it was delivered by a big device that looked like an uzi machine gun and I was terrified of it. Time passed and I never got the shot. That's when I learned how the news works.

I have nothing to worry about while I'm in bermuda. I mean I'm not exactly triangle-shaped. Didn't these people ever have toys as kids? Sheesh!

And the triangle goes in…

The square hole!

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?
- Isnt "for no reason" referring to why the person feared that, not that the accident had no reason?

I will never not cringe at "on accident" instead of "by accident"

euchhhh.

To imagine you wrote this sentence by purpose.
Where does this this linguistically phenomenon come from?

Is it a mistaken use of "an accident" with the preposition to reflect the personal involvement?

Mistakes like "Could of" make sense to me because in my accent "could of" and "could've" are identically voiced.

I can also completly understand where we get "alot" because alot is just the beginning of an acorn, minus a few hundred years of lazy pronunciation behind it (an oak corn =acorn)

Google is telling me it's because younger people will use "on accident" as an antonym for "on purpose". That sounds feesible as an origin. Now I'm questioning if "by intent" is grammatically correct, I've been staring at words too long.
- "By intent" doesn't look right to me, I would've said "with intent".

Tbf kost things a child will cut contain atoms so it's not as far fetched as it sounds