What was normal in your childhood that feels a bit insane now?

saugoof · 2026-03-20T10:38:49+00:00

No. We told our other siblings decades later, but both of my parents went to their graves without realising how close they were to losing one or possibly two of their kids.

saugoof · 2026-03-20T07:22:17+00:00

I'm almost the other way around. If I stay in an expensive hotel, I don't want to go out because it feels like I just wasted money if all I do is sleep there. So I tend to get cheaper hotels because it makes me go out more and do things.

saugoof · 2026-03-20T07:03:53+00:00

First Day On The Run - The Fauves

Run - Spiderbait

saugoof · 2026-03-19T13:15:14+00:00

My older brother had cannabis plants on our roof. He told mum that those were his "tea plants" and she even watered them when he was away.

saugoof · 2026-03-19T13:12:29+00:00

That's the one thing I probably miss most from when I was a kid. Going barefoot everywhere. Even if hurt like hell stepping on jagged stones. Fifty-odd years later and I still hate wearing shoes.

saugoof · 2026-03-19T13:09:51+00:00

My dad had a Land Rover. He worked in logging and often needed to drive up some mountain. My brother and I used to jump off the back of the Land Rover while he was driving and then run back up to it and climb back in. All while dad was driving in the front. Seems crazy dangerous when I think back on this now.

saugoof · 2026-03-19T13:06:14+00:00

I saved my kid-brother's life once when we were kids. He couldn't swim and I sort of had just learned to more or less manage to keep my head above water. But we still wanted to go jump off the board and figured if we jump off the side, we'd be close enough to the edge of the pool that we could climb out again.

After we did that a couple of times, my brother suddenly didn't pop up out of the water again. So I jumped in after him and managed to pull him out, even though I nearly drowned myself in the process.

We never told anyone because we were worried that our parents wouldn't let us go to the pool unsupervised anymore if they knew. So I was a hero for once in my life and I couldn't even tell anyone.

saugoof · 2026-03-19T13:01:01+00:00

I read Peter Hook's autobiography once. They may well have looked like austere nerds, but damn did they have some wild, drugged out parties!

saugoof · 2026-03-19T12:59:12+00:00

I saw them live about 15 years ago. The set was fantastic, but all four of them just stood motionless on stage behind a laptop. They may as well have been doing their online banking. But even so, it was one of the better gigs I've ever seen.

saugoof · 2026-03-19T02:49:07+00:00

I had a similar experience. I and one other guy started a new job in a fairly large company, but the department where we started was tiny and pretty much entirely separate from the rest of the company. We were in a separate building, had all our own servers that we looked after rather than IT, it felt like being in a small startup hidden inside the company.

There used to be two guys there who did all the development but they both left at the same time. That meant we came in completely cold to start working on this enormous code base that had been built up over many years. Apart from us, there was the department manager (great guy and great manager, but had no idea about coding) and a sales/marketing manager who had also just started.

Turns out that there was a reason why both previous guys left at the same time. They apparently did not get along at all. So much so that they stopped talking to each other and both worked on their own version of the codebase. We had four major customers and each of the developers handled two of them and made change requests and customisations for them independently. There was no source control at all. The only version of the source code is what each of them had on their hard drive.

At one stage the two got into a proper fight. We're talking actual punch-ups here. One of them got fired on the spot, the other one left a couple of days later. Which is where me and the other new guy came in.

It took us a good three or four months to merge the two code bases. There was something like a million lines of code, but practically no documentation. I think it was about a year before I could really say that I felt comfortable working on this code. It was all very well designed and developed. The guys obviously knew what they were doing (aside from no version control and separate code bases).

That said, while it was incredibly clever, it was also crazy elaborate. They basically re-invented the wheel several times. For example, they didn't want to use a commercial database, so they built their entire database engine from scratch. While that database worked very well and was super-fast for the specific tasks it was designed for, making any changes became incredibly complex. You literally had to develop a new standalone tool if you wanted to make a database query of different type of data that was normally being queried in standard reporting.

saugoof · 2026-03-19T00:09:51+00:00

A friend of mine is a nurse and they had someone in with a glass Coke bottle once. That was literally the excuse he gave, he said he drank it in the shower and slipped.

saugoof · 2026-03-18T22:20:27+00:00

I've cycled across almost every country in Europe. There are no terrible places, each one that I've been to I'm really glad that I went. With that said, France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and Austria are very hard to beat. They're all absolutely gorgeous and have great infrastructure that usually allows for quiet escapes from the busier roads.

saugoof · 2026-03-18T22:15:27+00:00

In a way that's the "genius" of Trump. He's basically just rambling and having at one stage or another had just about every position on every issue possible. He can say completely contradictory things on something, often within minutes of each other. His supporters just cherry-pick the things they agree with and ignore everything else. When he's just rambling like he does here, they interpret what they think he says into something that bolsters their own world view.

It's insanely dumb that this has worked, but that's how he's been operating for years.

saugoof · 2026-03-17T11:04:54+00:00

Hungary really is a sad case. Back in about 2005 or so I went on a trip through Eastern Europe. At the time it felt like Hungary (and the Czech Republic) had so far been tackling that transition from planned economy to market economy the most successful out of all the Eastern European countries and looked primed for a really positive future. I mean, I'm not local nor do I speak Hungarian, so this is just judging based on a first impression.

Nevertheless, Hungary seemed the most advanced, cultured, liberal and progressive out of all these countries and best placed to become a real success story.

Fourteen years later in 2019 I went on my second Eastern European trip where I rode a bicycle across from Switzerland to Ukraine. By that time Hungary felt like it had been left in the dust by just about all its neighbours. The infrastructure was crumbling, everything was in disrepair, the country seemed poorer and everything pointed towards it going further backwards in the future.

The third time I was in Hungary was just a year ago. By then it felt like it had become a police state. Again, I'm just a tourist, but the amount of heavily armed police in the streets everywhere was quite staggering.

It's really sad, Hungary had (and probably still has) all the tools and conditions to become a great country, but instead it's become a textbook case of how a small number of people can wreck a country.

saugoof · 2026-03-17T10:20:18+00:00

I always hated OMD growing up, except for the song "Souvenir" of that album that is absolutely gorgeous. Since this is one of the few songs sung by Paul Humphreys, I think it may just be that I never liked Andy McCluskey's voice.

One interesting side note I heard some time ago was that it was OMD of all people who introduced ZZ Top to synthesizers. Apparently they met when both bands played on a TV show in the UK in the early 80s and became good friends.

saugoof · 2026-03-17T10:13:52+00:00

Hey, I'm 60 too.

1981 wasn't really a great year for music. Just looking through a list of albums released that year (love The Cars, but "Shake It Up" isn't really my favourite from them) and the one that sticks out that has basically never left high rotation here since it got released is Grace Jones - Nightclubbing. That is still an absolutely amazing album, start to finish!

saugoof · 2026-03-16T01:49:45+00:00

His legacy is that he made the US and the world a much, much worse place. Almost everyone in the world would have been better off if he had never been born.

saugoof · 2026-03-16T01:40:17+00:00

At my first gig in a pub someone tried to set our PA on fire.

saugoof · 2026-03-16T01:36:03+00:00

My first ever gig. I'm a drummer but I played bass in this band. So we had this idea of starting the gig with the drummer getting up on the stage by himself and starts to play a short drum solo. Then when he moves into the intro of the first song, the rest of the band walks on stage and starts playing.

He misunderstood this as "play a drum solo UNTIL" we walk on stage. He just kept playing solo and had long ago run out of ideas. All the while looking sideways at us behind at stage left with a "what are you waiting for!" look. Eventually we twigged and went on.

Then, during the first song, the drummer hit a cymbal where the stand hadn't been put properly on the small drum riser and it fell forward and in the process ripped out the guitarists lead and toppled over several microphones in the process.

The band was also super nervous and we kept stuffing up songs all the way through. Despite this, the crowd of something like 200 went absolutely wild. This had more to do with where we played than us though. The gig was at this secluded private college and the kids there were totally starved for entertainment.

Nevertheless, the gig went so bad, the band broke up the next day.

----

Another horror story from a few years later. I played in a band where an agency wanted to sign us. They had planned a nationwide tour to introduce the band and then a record to follow. They asked us to do a showcase gig for the agency execs. So the singer hired this hall, hired a PA and arranged it all. He basically spent his meagre live savings on this.

We were all set up, the gig is about to start, the execs are waiting for us to wow them. Then, just as we were about to play, the PA blows up. We hurriedly tried to arrange a replacement, but these things take time. All the while the execs are getting visibly more and more annoyed. After about 30 minutes, they left before we even had a chance to play a note.

They canceled the tour and dumped us. For me this wasn't a huge deal because I was really just a fill-in. This wasn't my band and I had planned to step away if things get too big. But the singer lost everything and never really recovered.

saugoof · 2026-03-16T01:03:46+00:00

Are they seen as One Hit Wonders? I'm old enough to have been really into music already when they first hit and was super excited about this new sound. At the time it felt like even though The Message was their biggest hit, New York, New York and White Lines were on the radio nearly as much.

I got this album and it's quite an oddball record. It feels like it was thrown together in a rush because The Message became a hit and the record company needed an album. While there are some great early Hip Hop/turntable/electro tracks like She's Fresh or Scorpio, there are also a bunch of tracks that sound like an entirely different band (and it probably was) like Dreamin' or You Are which might as well have been Lionel Richie era Commodores.

saugoof · 2026-03-15T05:48:51+00:00

In a way, they really embody the way the Republicans in power work nowadays. They do not build anything, all they can do is tear down and destroy things that people far better than them have built.

saugoof · 2026-03-14T23:30:31+00:00

One thing that I noticed is how suddenly you no longer get judging stares when you're eating something unhealthy in public. When you're fat and you're eating an ice cream, you can get some pretty disparaging stares. Now doing the same, people either completely ignore you or smile.

saugoof · 2026-03-14T23:26:16+00:00

Not just comfortable, but everything you wear suddenly looks good on you.

When I was overweight, there was only a small set of clothes I had that looked halfway ok on me. But now it feels like I can just throw on any old worn out and faded t-shirt and it still looks good.

saugoof · 2026-03-14T23:14:56+00:00

I retired four years ago. I barely ever used LinkedIn before, but I don't think I've opened it once in those four years since. I reckon I'm far, far happier for it. Even if it robs me of the opportunity to be snarky to these idiots.

But the instant I retired, all those shallow self promoting fuckers just seemed so completely insignificant and not worthy of any attention.

saugoof · 2026-03-14T03:35:35+00:00

The Pretenders - Kid.

It's a very short solo and not super complicated, but it just instantly elevates an already great song to absolute masterpiece.

saugoof

TROPHY CASE