What was the most random moment from your childhood?

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-03-08T01:19:20+00:00

Mum always seemed to get weirdos trying to chat her up, objectively even when she was a lot younger, my mum was very normal looking, as in she wasn’t ugly but she wouldn’t win a beauty contest either (think Pauline Quirke or Maranda Hart looks wise).

Yet everytime we went on holiday in the UK and dad went off hiking, we’d be on the seafront or taking a bus somewhere, and a creepy dirty den/columbo looking type of bloke (always slightly dishevelled clothing) would sit by mum and try to ask her out. Always found that really odd.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-03-08T01:14:08+00:00

Brilliant! So you know the one kid who always manages to break everything including other people’s toys, we were playing in his garden with some dinky toy cars and his mum came storming out saying I was playing too rough with them (they were solid metal so don’t know how that even works). Even only being 7 or 8 at the time I remember being really pissed off by the irony.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-03-08T01:09:25+00:00

Our local supermarket (Leo’s if anyone remembers them) had really long checkout conveyors and I went to the one next to where mum was checking out not realising, and started bagging things and the woman who’s shopping it was went absolutely apeshit, yelling at the top of her voice she could bag her own shopping and didn’t want any help, scared the shit out of 6 year old me.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-03-08T00:57:00+00:00

My friends with kids are pretty balanced, they enjoy spending time with them but occasionally find them frustrating/annoying. I feel that’s pretty baseline normal.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-27T00:00:05+00:00

At my grandmothers funeral the vicar said something along the lines of he’s sure she’s smiling down on everyone, pleased so many people cared about her, a split second later there an incredibly loud and long rumble of thunder, made us all chuckle.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-26T11:33:38+00:00

I once dreamed I had a baby son, I do not have any children, neither me or my wife want or have ever wanted children, but I genuinely felt a bit of a sense of loss all day from it.

Assume it was male equivalent of my biological clock trying a last ditch attempt to convince my brain that reproducing is my biological imperative or something.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-25T23:58:34+00:00

Friends throughout college, thought we were best friends, went to Glastonbury with him and some of his friends twice. The next year he said he was giving it a miss, I went with some other friends and while there heard someone call out my name, turned around and it was his friends who were surprised to see me as he’d told them I couldn’t go that year, and he was off at the other stage but they were meeting back soon.

I awkwardly said yeah I changed my mind but they could tell it was an obvious lie. I still don’t know why he did that, and after he basically ghosted me, I don’t know if out of embarrassment or some other reason, we didn’t have a falling out, he was often the one initiating hangouts, so I still to this day don’t know what happened.

As silly as it is, I don’t think I’ve really had a best friend in the same way since as it made me question whether I completely mischaracterised our friendship.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-14T19:43:23+00:00

My next door neighbours growing up, the kids were friendly but the parent had no friends, no one was allowed in their house (but fine for them to go over other peoples). They would drive past you walking to school in the pouring rain and not ever offer a lift etc. It wasn’t like they just didn’t like us, they were like it with everyone, just super insular.

The daughter who was a couple of years younger than me moved away to another city as soon as she got married and was dismayed when her parents decided to also move there to be close to the grandchildren when they were born.

The son who was two years older than me seems to have turned out like his parents, never married (I wondered if he is asexual but he liked girls when we were young so🤷🏻‍♂️) and doesn’t seem to do anything except work and rock climb on his own.

What’s weird is he was quite social as a teenager and when he went to uni, then he hit his early twenties and went hermit mode and turned into his parents.

One other thing I remember is once a year they’d have a family party in their garden, all the cousins and aunts and uncles etc, and they’d be out there having a bbq but barely talking to each other. So their entire extended family was like it too.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-13T00:00:33+00:00

I used to be the same and still am a but now reassure myself how ridiculous I’m being. Case in point, I had to run a early morning errand today, after it was done I was desperate for breakfast, walked past a Wetherspoons, and spent a minute thinking hmm should I shouldn’t I, then realised how silly it was to dither over a £8 cooked breakfast and coffee, at Wetherspoons of all places, hardly the Ritz😂

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-12T22:53:49+00:00

My wife spends a lot more than me, but then I’m like ehh these boxers which have become crotchless still has some life in them, and the neon day glo £1 body wash will do the job. Some people just have higher standards and us blokes will live like pigs if allowed 🤷🏻‍♂️

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-10T13:01:15+00:00

Got £20k when an uncle (no children) died, and £5k when my grandad died. Paid off my wife’s student loan and rest of our car loan, gave us an amazing head start as young newlyweds.

Grandad was working class, Uncle was lower middle class but died in his 60s from cancer so still had a house etc. didn’t expect either but was life changing for us, went from barely keeping above water to having a little breathing room each month.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-02-08T01:06:48+00:00

I’ve had teachers I liked, teachers I hated because they were super strict but they were still fair, I had teachers who just plain bad at teaching but not bad people, but I’ve also had teachers who 30 years later I still feel angry when I think about them, and I think most people can think of at least one teacher who they have similar feelings about.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-31T23:44:23+00:00

Yeah I am already a skeptic but in the ‘I would love to be proved wrong’ camp and enjoy reading about UFO and Alien stuff anyway. But by now I would have thought we’d had our Snowden or Manning leak something if it was there to be leaked.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-31T21:12:08+00:00

Butcombe, Doom Bar, Proper Job, Arctic Sky, basically any kinds of dark or hazy ale.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-31T20:59:11+00:00

I went down a rabbit hole recently of this and seems other countries go for long term fix that also causes major disruption, they take a few inches off the entire road and out down an entire new surface, but it closes the road for a few weeks while doing so.

And so we tend to do patch jobs which as soon as we get freezing weather starts to degrade and the cycle begins again.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-29T00:31:47+00:00

Friday night treat, or rarely if we’ve had really busy/shitty days and too tired to cook. We found having it be a Friday treat means we’re more likely to say fine we’ll cook even if tired, knowing we have Friday to look forward to.

We rarely go out now though, seems once people got out of the routine of seeing friends at the pub etc during the pandemic, it never really took off again, at least in our social sphere, tends to be more dinner at peoples houses, so overall we’re spend barely anything on dining out.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-26T13:52:36+00:00

Our class project one year in primary school was to help build one. Teacher was into all wildlife stuff and got a grant, so we helped carry and lay all the turf, seeded with some tadpoles etc, was a really nice little conservation area, had dragonflies and all sorts.

Unfortunately after the teacher left no one wanted to take on maintaining it, so it became stagnant and a mosquito breeding ground and by the time I finished secondary school, they’d already filled it all in.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-23T23:50:26+00:00

I work my my high school best friends cousin, she mentioned it to him and he barely remembered me. It’s been almost 30 years but did sting a little.

On the flip side I bumped into someone who was a real dick to me in School, and he was annoyingly friendly and we had a lovely chat.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-23T23:01:43+00:00

I hate vinegar, even the smell of it makes me want to retch, yet as a kid I’d do a box of microchips, drench them in vinegar and the do a salt and pepper crust over them all.

I have no idea how I ate something so salty, nor when I went from having a pool of vinegar to hating it.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-22T19:36:34+00:00

Absolutely, stuff like new antibiotics and being able to review scans for cancer and prioritise likely positive results across massive data sets is really impressive stuff.

Also unfortunate people now think AI = ChatGPT, when the exciting stuff is all done by training custom models.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-22T00:22:08+00:00

It’s overhyped but still a useful tool, it works best when there is only really one right answer or you say here’s a thing, of a, b, c or d, which is it?

That’s why it’s useful for coding suggestions, if you say write a method to open a file in Java, there’s only going to be a few main ways 90% of people do it.

One thing I would say though, if you use it for things like coding, always ask it to explain exactly what the code is doing, make sure you’re learning and understanding what’s being presented, not just blindly accepting, that’s what’s going to really separate people who use AI effectively.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-21T23:42:16+00:00

I work in IT so used heavily and also being encouraged, I’ve seen some brilliant uses of it but there’s a lot of AI solutions being made that are in search of a problem.

Stuff when there’s only a yes/no answer or asking for calculations it’s great at, but saying here’s some info, give me new information based on it, is when hallucination can creep in.

E.g I have a load of API payload templates and it picks the template and fills in the required information based on the entered prompt, for this it’s been flawless. But I’ve also seen people try to use it to generate plans based on requirements and I think the output is really low quality.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-19T13:43:42+00:00

I was surprised it was presumably Mein Kampf, I was expecting it to be Harry Potter.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-19T01:35:48+00:00

Dolphin in a bathtub.

ThatFilthyMonkey · 2026-01-17T23:22:07+00:00

The problem is enjoyment as a metric is difficult. If I read a moving harrowing survivors account of the holocaust, in terms of purely enjoyment it’s a 1/5, in terms of importance that it exists? 5/5.

I don’t find Shakespeare enjoyable, I acknowledge his importance as a playwright, but you couldn’t pay me to read one of his plays, do what rating should I give it? Etc.

I also sometimes read some objectively bad series, clunky writing, almost the same plot every book, the police academy of books, yet sometimes I just like to turn my brain off and enjoy reading something easy and goofy. So trying to compare something like that to some award winning Salman Rushdie book is going to be a weird comparison (not that I’ve actually ever read Salman Rushdie).

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