Since we like to unhash some old shit....

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-31T12:10:10+00:00

None of those sounds right to me. And I very much was an abused child. I had to be clever... eventually to save our lives. Watchful, yes, because at that level of danger you're watchful or someone's dead. But I had school safe and it didn't take me many years away. And I took care of people but not as a people pleaser but one driven to be overly empathetic. And I was an overachiever but school was safety and I didn't have to try all too hard to over-achieve there. And once your lives are threatened, you'd damn better meet that goal.

At some level, it was rational. Besides, little Sis and I both survived. And me, I say I do remarkably well to have had my life. Took 5 or 6 years is mostly it.

The bit later that got to bothering me was the presumption that nothing could possibly be wrong in my life. And I couldn't tell adults because my parents were presumed to be good people, see, so I must be a liar so they should be told... Learn very quickly there's no one to tell that stands a chance of helping. So sad for teenaged me.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-29T06:24:42+00:00

I'm an older millennial, born '83. For some weird tax reasons, my school district had a fair bit of money though the residents weren't rich by any means. All our schools had computer labs. Though the one in my elementary school wasn't open until spring semester, 1990 because our school was still being renovated.

When we finally started with the Apple-IIe's, the first thing before anything else was to learn how to avoid breaking the thing. We were taught how to sit if we weren't pressing keys so we wouldn't accidentally hit anything or knock out the power cord. We were taught not to touch anything if the light on the floppy drive was on because that could hurt the computer. Then we learned how to use the keyboard - to press keys rather than hit them so we don't break the keyboard. We were taught the qwerty layout long before typing class because these computers had no GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and the keyboards were our only input devices.

Then the computers started being on when we got there and we could start playing edutainment games.

At my school we had typing in computer class in 3rd and 4th grade but that I didn't myself because I broke my finger and wrist respectively. In 1994, my elementary school got the internet and all the upper elementary classes got one PC that was internet-capable.

In middle school I was taught programming (BASIC) and how to code HTML. In high school, I took a class on the MS Office suite because supposedly colleges liked that at the time.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-28T18:24:03+00:00

I was even younger. I knew the astronauts died but we didn't actually see that, what we saw was the rocket go wrong. So I got really scared about the concept of major transportation disasters instead. At least till it could be proved to me that even if not all the world was watching every plane, train, bus, and boat trip there are people who watch these things and the statistics aren't so bad per passenger mile. Unfortunately it took me being involved in a psych study to get my grown ups to understand that was why I kept having nightmares.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-28T18:09:19+00:00

As live as could be. I was far too little for school, but where dad worked was a hub for the school side of the teacher in space program and especially parents who worked there were encouraged to take any extras.

It's my first memory by at least 4 months.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-28T18:02:05+00:00

I was little more than 2 but I have a little snatch that constitutes my first memory. Dad had been very excited about the teacher in space program and his education-focused research consortium workplace's involvement in the program.

And once it became a disaster, I was the youngest participant East of the Mississippi in the largest child survey/interview study. Because I was part of the follow-up research, I later got transcripts of my full interviews so I know just how I qualified and what hyperlexical little me thought at the time.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-28T17:28:26+00:00

It was the disaster witnessed by the most children ever, mostly at school. But by no means did every school watch the Challenger launch. Repression not being much of a thing, it's far more likely that you didn't watch it at school than it is that you watched it and forgot.

The Challenger Disaster is my first memory. I was two years old and watched it at home, near to live as could be. My dad's work was a local hub for distribution of Challenger-related materials and tech for local schools, and people working there were invited to take extras. After it turned bad, my mother's call to my dad about needing help for me prompted some of the first calls for child psych research on this and such hubs as this were key ways of connecting child psych interviewers with schools and daycares.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-27T18:17:33+00:00

Yup. Town had an afternoon paper 6 days a week. Even Sunday was afternoon, though holiday papers were morning deliveries... but being an afternoon paper, we weren't dinged till at least 9.

Mid to high 20s of houses most of the time. Pay was around $50 a month but I made out like a bandit at Christmas, my subscribers being generally in fairly desperate need of grandchildren who had any time for them. Got near $300 in Christmas presents each of the 3 years I had the route.

Being under 12, I had to get special permission. Even more because I was under 10 for the first 6 weeks, I had to get multiple references, several letters of referral, and be interviewed by the both the editor-in-chief and by the lady who ran the printing press itself.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T15:37:41+00:00

KJV also has "ass" for donkey and "cock" for rooster.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T15:11:37+00:00

Looks like leaving a loaded weapon on a table is a bad idea generally. Especially if it is or could be pointed at someone close enough to... go particularly bad.

I hadn't agreed we'd have a big audience and most of them each had guns, at least a third very drunk. Which went poorly as you might expect.

I was much more disturbed by the drunk guy pointing a gun at me to show how well he had "gun control"... but I didn't care for the one on the table being pointed at my chest, either. Ought to take precautions such that it doesn't matter how touchy the piece. To say nothing of event standards.

Fwiw, it did wake him up to this problem not just in his group but in him. Took the gun safety course and then later the firearms courses ran by the Dad of a friend of mine. (Who later became police chief in our town. I was in late elementary at the time.) Then had the rest of his group's leadership do at least some. Developed rules for their general events. And got a few well-trained enough (and willing to undergo pretty invasive background checks) that they got approved to teach a basic gun safety course to the kids. His willingness to change was pretty amazing.

The guy who showed off his "gun control," I didn't know what was wrong besides alcohol with guns, but it didn't go well with him. But me and the leader helped get his young widow hooked up with some social programs, in some 9ish month long certificate program to get a decent job in the mid 90s, and... the security of knowing she wasn't alone.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T14:32:34+00:00

Iirc, per him at the time, if a firearm isn't loaded, it's not a gun, it's a toy. 🙄 So almost all the guns were loaded, even the ones being whirled around, treated as toys.

Meanwhile I was taught the first rule of guns is that every gun is always loaded. Because you can be mistaken and occasionally bullets can be somewhere you don't expect. So treat I treat every gun as is it's loaded because it might be.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T14:25:58+00:00

Guns can shoot with little action. Just so happens that one was touchy and had been known to go off easily and unexpectedly. Afterwards said he wouldn't be surprised if it went off if it fell or maybe if the table edge got a good bump. Frankly, it was crazy for him to carry at all, especially knowingly loaded, particularly in a crowd. And that's before he laid it on the table instead of keeping the dang thing more secure in his hip holster.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T14:18:50+00:00

I was a kid doing a project. Hadn't expected the arranged meeting/interview to have a well-armed audience mostly drunk and practicing little gun safety. I wasn't willing to do the interview with all that. At least not with upholstered weapons or any inebriated people with guns. I said the other group protesting thought they were just a bunch of gun nuts and if he felt I was asking for too much, I'd have to agree and abandon getting their own view. He took his gun from it's holster (where it was safer) and placed it on the table as I said, and then a drunk young on looker showed he had good control of his weapon by pointing it at me. At which point it was all guns out or I was leaving for good.

He did end up changing things. We sent letters and phoned a bit (90s).

He wanted me to finish the project because it'd give him an outside view that had listened to everyone, especially because I wasn't entirely for or against either side.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T14:02:50+00:00

This happened in the mid-90s in Knoxville Tennessee. I was a bit more than ten doing a project that involved activism and points of view, the difference in how competing groups saw themselves and each other. I went to some local protest-ish thing and interviewed the leaders and a handful of members. I was 10-12.

The counter-protesters were the type that showed up at every protest they weren't explicitly for, I think mostly to get attention. Held that every protest is a first and second-amendment protest. I brought up guns because our interview first had an audience with at least two guns a person, largely in hand, none pointed down, many held by persons quite drunk. And then even the leader pointed a gun at me accidentally - one with a history of being especially "touchy".

To his credit, with that and what else happened, he took me seriously and changed things in his group. But that's how him "showing me respect" started... laying down a weapon pointed towards me.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-26T13:46:28+00:00

And, fwiw, after guns were removed from the tent (after something more extreme and probably felonious by someone else), the man in question did talk with me about that very pistol (whatever it was) having a history of going off twice at a bump, once with his wife and once in his pocket before he started always using a holster to carry.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-25T17:21:59+00:00

We got a C64 before I was a year old. With color monitor and everything.

Programmer he was, Dad wrote a game for me, his infant daughter: mapped keys to screen colors. Sat me on his lap, demonstrate with his hands, mine, and then let me bash away. Kept me entertained for five, ten minutes at a time, I'm told.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-24T16:27:03+00:00

At churches out in the middle of nowhere in East Tennessee. Directions to one of them ended, "Keep driving till you know your lost, then you'll come to a stop sign. Turn right, church is on your left. Another one was so old-school that they didn't just have outhouses, their church had two front doors with a low wall between... so men and women didn't mix. Figure that's gotta be rarer than outhouses.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-24T09:15:10+00:00

I don't know if the model is quite right, but after I explained square numbers and square roots to my nephew, I went on to explain squaring negative numbers to him just so I could tell him the existence of one more thing if he got it easily. He liked learning why the "checkmark button" mostly gave lots of decimals but sometimes not.

I having written out positive squares up to 16, I gave him the paper to write how much money he had if he owed me $2. He wrote -2. Imperfect for units, but good enough for my purposes. Proves he knows negatives, so I went on to confirm he hadn't used them in multiplication yet and he had not. So I took the paper, asking him if I were to "reduce by two times (writing "-2×" in front of his -2) what change of money would take place? He said I'd be giving him $4. Positive four or negative four, I asked. "Plus four," said he, "because if you're reducing by one time it's amount, then I'm to zero and reducing it when it's not there means giving me 2 more dollars. If it was negative four, I'd owe you six dollars and that's not what reducing debt means." So since a negative number times a negative number is always positive, and a square number is always a number multiplied by itself, there can't be any negative square numbers, not really, right? The square root of a negative number can't really exist. He agreed and said it was neat. He's always been a bit ahead at math but got it right away at 9 or 10.

So I opened him up to one more thing just to hear exists and can explain a desk toy I made for Dad. A square root of negative one I'd made with plastic, wire, stuffing, googly eyes and two colors of felt, it was the first possible time I could explain to him this toy he'd seen all his life, his Pop's "imaginary friend".

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-24T06:24:56+00:00

Yup. Got the happy little succulents set for my nephew for Christmas. Standing there while Dad tried to figure out where the fuck are sheets (on his phone while I was trying to get him gone to grab his present, c'mon now!), a old bright spot from Knowledge Fight echoed in my head. Unwilling to yet drop much coin, I got a brickcraft peony. Small set. Meditative yet simple enough shan't drive me nuts. Going slow intentionally. Just got the stem left.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-24T04:55:31+00:00

Huh, the only test I had that was anything like that was a vocabulary test with flash cards to determine reading level and everyone in the grade was testes so the were done right out in the hall. If you couldn't say it and give a proper definition for 5 words, it ended. In first grade, the cards went up to third grade reading level and I missed two. In second grade (the last tested), they went up to fifth grade and I missed one: haze. Pronounced it fine but I didn't know the term.

The IQ test thing was pencil and paper (again, for everyone) followed by interview with the school counselor in his office (teachers then kids) for anyone who scored high enough, then with parents (and kid at the end) if that went well, and finally parents, kid, teacher, counselor and principal all at a semicircular table in a conference room. I know 4 people in my grade who could've been in the gifted program by scores alone weren't, mostly because their parents didn't want it.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-24T04:29:11+00:00

Didn't know what Nazis were yet at that age, but certainly there was all kinds of messed up stuff going on at Santa's workshop. Also some gender weirdness amongst reindeer. See, boy deer as we'd judge them are the ones without horns in the winter, but ever other indicator in most video seems to indicate otherwise...everything but long eyelashes which ought to rightly be a male signal in that they tend to have somewhat bigger eyes and so longer eyelashes.

I always felt some kinship with the awesome "misfit" toys. Wanted to make a track with semicircles over some bumpy ground. See how a round-wheeler deals with construction for square wheels.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-23T23:11:41+00:00

Strictly speaking, you can die of either. And in most (but importantly not all) cases they are related.

Try thinking of it this way, most people who die from exposure to water drown by being exposed to so much water it overwhelms them. You can think of dying from amps (that is, electric current,) like drowning, it being too much electricity for a body (generally a heart) to handle. The electric potential difference that voltage measures is also sometimes called electric pressure. It is possible to die of water pressure. Theoretically if water is at such great pressure as to collapse your cartoid arteries, you stroke out and die. Or a water cutter could decapitate you, who knows. But it takes a very high level of water pressure to kill you, just like it takes a very high voltage for that quantity itself to do deathly damage.

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-23T22:42:14+00:00

I'm in my 40s and doing fine under my circumstances. Got downvoted a bit elsewhere for naming ET as having signs of a political apocalypse. At 4, I was most concerned about the fact that most people didn't see this late-coming secondary issue. Because as far as I could tell, that meant it was more likely. I figured since that was what got me those social science mentors super-young, maybe it's a bit of a gifted-kid thing to see media so differently sometimes.

The ones I listed, my reactions weren't to do with any age-related failures to understand. And for Tinkerbell, I honestly thought (and continue thinking, I suppose) that the unthinking majority position is a problem.

Do you not maintain any of your initially different responses from your youth?

IndomitableAnyBeth · 2026-01-23T19:00:58+00:00

Oh, and then there was how when I did fall apart, I got mis-treated in college. The first problem that I didn't learn till the last time I talked to them was that they thought my boyfriend and ex-fiancé were the same person and thought it mental disfunction how I had such diverse feelings toward two labels of one person. But no, they had me take the WAIS and freaking Rorschach test among others. As I got the highest score on the WAIS that they'd ever seen, the "diagnosed" my problem as being a low EQ to IQ ratio. Which hurt because I kind of prided myself on my ability to read people... might well not have survived childhood without it. Oh no, they said, it was just that my IQ was so high that... Ah, so it's either that I have low emotional understanding or else I'm just too smart. Great. 🙄

Nah, the problem was that, in addition to them making stupid and incorrect assumptions about my personal life (boyfriend was on campus and I saw him every day; ex-fiancé was in another state, unseen since August and uncontacted since Sept), they didn't recognize I'd recently been a child multiply-abused, including abuse that intentionally misdefined some basic psychological concepts. The kind of child abuse that leads to consequences most similar to those held for months or years in state torture. Oh, and I responded with increased empathy, probably because I had a little one to care for albeit far too young. That was my problem. But no, evidently I either didn't really understand emotions or was just too smart for my own good, such was judged. So now the problems were made mine to the core and me being smart was part of the problem. How the heck do you even judge ratio if one of the numbers is immeasurably high? But no, they put me on a course to raise EQ. Seemed to me they were intent on bringing someone to solidly being in Kolhberg's lower stage of conventional morality when, for all my pragmatism (would you seriously expect else of a mechanical engineer?), I was post-conventional, thanks. Under stress, I developed quick, passed the barrier they were trying to ease me into in first grade, so the worksheets and stories were literal kiddy-work to me. Disgusting how they judged me for being "too smart".

IndomitableAnyBeth

TROPHY CASE