Kinda sorta copy/pasted question from Reddit. But wanted to see what your answers are like on here!
I was just moved to Italy. I knew no one and I had to do some history assignment for Uni. I went to the city archive looking for some documentation and I was incredibly lost.
Some middle age man approached me and starting helping me around. He talked with everybody there and they all respected them. He was really nice to me all the time. I got into the archive and got everything I wanted. But I was more creepied out each minute. The guy had starting talking about how spaniards(me) and italians needs to be friends because our shared history of friendship with Franco and Mussolini. At the end he asked for my number, he really looked like he was trying to recruit me. I gave him a fake one and moved away. Never got near that location again in all the the time I spent in the city.
Does anyone else find it odd that a lot of day old accounts make their first post here specifically, or is that just a coincidence?
We need to leave … now.
Could be a lot of lurkers finally found something worth posting too.
…or as history has taught me, BOTS
Well just about every askreddit post I’ve made was removed and then reposted by a mod. I can see why people would want to try here.
askreddit so overmoderated by the sub filters and reddit AI.
that’s not a bad idea, though
There was a pretty noticeable moment a few years ago when lemmy seemed to spring to life with activity. Mainly those screenshot posts from other social media or those newer image macro things. I’m 99% sure that’s when somebody turned on bots to make lemmy look more lively.
If they post interesting stuff, who cares?
Reddit is very interesting, yeah.
Is it?
I was like 12 and I was baby sitting two ~eight year olds. Went to the local elementary with them to use the big toy. There was a group of three boys there and one had what looked like a real gun, yes this was in America. I said NOPE! and immediately turned my kids and myself around and got out of there as fast as possible
The other one was when I was about the same age and my best friend and I were walking around in the neighborhood by her house. It wasn’t a nice area but it’s not like anywhere I spent time was. Some man in his like 40s probably rolled up to us in his big yellow car and started talking to us to get in his car and go to his house, he was drunk, we told him if he told us where he lived we would walk there if he would go buy us beer. He kept hitting his chest like in the wolf of Wall Street and talking nonsense, I tried to scoot away to look at his license plate but he snapped at me to come back. Eventually we got him to agree to go buy us beer in exchange for us walking to his house. As soon as he started driving away we ran as fast as we could back to her house and called the cops and told them everything, including where the guy lived since he told us
Me and my brother lived at our grans in our mid to later teens, we lived in the living room, and as teenagers do, we would be up till late playing video games and browsing the web on our laptops, my brother had the latest macbook and we had the latest consoles. Late one night in the AM, I had been gaming and my brother was probably making music on his mac, the living room was not well concealed from the outside, gaps in curtains, windows on the foot path and being on the ground floor. A knock on the door, young and dumb, I answered, it was a tall mid to late 20s guy, a little sketchy looking, he asked if we knew of a party near by, he had been looking for it and wasn’t able to find this party. Me and my brother had no clue about a party. He left and we closed the door, and that was that, but then another knock at the door, same guy, but this time his eyes were darting about through the front door, he asked us if he could come in, which was an obvious no, on attempting to close the door, he wedge his foot in the gap. Me and by brother had to shoulder the door to close it.
We didn’t leave, just felt freaked out and a little trapped. It was one of those moments where I hadn’t reflected all that much at that time, but now in my 30s, I do find myself thinking what if.
I knew there was a mountain lion somewhere in the area once when I was hiking. Got tf out immediately.
I was living with my sister in a condo. We frequently played pool at a place across the street. It was a sort of yuppy pool place, not a biker bar. It was located on the end of a strip mall. To get there, we walked to the end of the row of single story condos, then through some bushes and into the sidewalk, jaywalked across the street and into the parking lot.
So we’re doing this and just as we reach the sidewalk on the other side of the street, a car pulls out of the parking lot, like normal, and turns in our direction. Just behind it another car pulls out very quickly, not like normal, it overtakes the first car and forces it up onto the sidewalk where we are walking. Suddenly like three other cars pull in from multiple directions. We are literally standing in a police arrest scene. So glad when the perp went up on the sidewalk, he took care not to run over us. I guess the cops never expected people to suddenly emerge from the bushes and cross the street just at that moment.
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I was hiking with my buddy and felt a bit uneasy. Like my skin felt fuzzy, it was hard to explain. I yelled “Run!” To a friend, we ran down the mountain and dodged getting hit by lightning a few seconds later.
That fuzzy uneasy feeling was the static before a strike 😅
Correct. Although it feels different than just static. It feels like you are touching pillow filling and static. It’s hard to describe.
You just got to play lightning rod.
People think lightning rods are meant to attract lightning, but that is incorrect. Buildings are often covered with a whole bunch of little 1 foot copper spikes. The idea is a multipoint spray of electrons from the ground up to a charged cloud to balance the charge and reduce the chance of a strike.
During a storm, you can sometimes hear them making a hissing sound as they work.
When lightning is about to strike, anything kind of tall and conductive will do the same. If you feel that static charge building up on you, get your ass as flat as you can. You cannot predict where the strike is going to hit, so running is silly–you might well run toward a strike. Just lay flat and stay away from tall stuff. Don’t be the tallest thing either.
I believe youre supposed to crouch with your feet pressed together and your arms wrapped around your knees. This reduces contact with the ground and pressing the feet together reduces risk of the charge going up one leg and down the other.
When you lay down you are increasing the potential of the strike from one end of your body to the other.
Correct. What you’re trying to do is make sure the strike doesn’t go through your heart where you will almost certainly die. Your body can survive a lot, as long as your major organs don’t get fried.
yeah, if i understand it right the majority of the damage from a lightning strike is that you get a burn where the bolt goes. if it goes through your heart, your heart gets one hell of a burn. then you have to heal a burn from the inside out, which your body is not used to doing
The burns are one part, but with the heat, it’s the electrical current you need to avoid, since it can not only stop your heat, but cause arrhythmia which can kill your hours later if you don’t get to a hospital.
I did get down when I felt it. I heard stories online of how lightning felt before it hit. I just never thought it would happen to me. We were almost at the top of the cliff. I stopped to take some pictures. So, when we got away. We decreased in elevation quickly, probably 15 feet in under 20 seconds? Then we got to the tree line.
To me it felt like walking through invisible spiderwebs, strike was 50 feet away seconds later.
That’s a perfect description actually.
Where did it strike then?
If I had to guess, about 50-75 feet from where we were standing. There was some kind of radio tower near us. We didn’t turn around to figure it out. We ran.
Whew. Sounds loud as hell
Ironically, I don’t remember it being too loud. I do remember running down a mountain as fast as I could. I think I was just hyper focused on that though.
Sounds possible. Memory can be weird like that
When its very close it just sounds like a snap. I think because it overloads the eardrums.
Unless it hits a tree, and the tree explodes. That happened to me last week right outside my house. I’ve never heard anything quite as loud nor with such a large thump in my body. Felt a bit like my bell got rung for the rest of the day.
That would probably make sense. I genuinely remember it being loud, but not by hearing it, more of feeling it. You feel it in your lungs. My guess is due to the rapid pressure change. I was a bit too focused on getting off of the cliff/mountain we were at.
Where did it strike then?
the earth, somewhere ;-)
I was on a small hill when it started rumbling, we all felt the static in our hair. We quickly went down the hill.
I had a similar experience once. Lightning is crazy, man
At the very start of COVID. When many of my online and IRL friend groups started internalizing what I now recognize as Russian/Chinese influence ops (which were being spread by unwitting Western Useful Idiots – Conservatives and Libertarians)
They started not just opposing lockdowns, but actively spreading virus: no mask, it’s just a flu, CDC is lying, Fauchi is an idiot, etc.
It felt like being in a burning building. I grabbed my family, ran for the exit by cutting ties with the Influenced, and left them to burn. Now many of them are utterly consumed by propaganda and no longer recognize reality. 😢
I lost one in much the same way. It still hurts.
And as long as this and these aren’t properly addressed it will just go on. Russia loves it!
properly addressed
I legit wish there was real civic discussion about influence ops/propaganda.
I wish political parties were fighting about the best ways to identify and combat it.
I wish private organizations, news outlets, media companies, NGOs etc were talking about it and even pretending to acknowledge it.
“We are in a race between education and oblivion.” -R B Fuller
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Dude, even when it’s obviously idiotic, you should still tag your stuff with a sarcasm tag. Some people may believe that bullshit and, while it’s fun to laugh at that sometimes, it’s the wrong kind of laughter. Still, I like your deadpan humour; and I almost believed it was serious but the spelling was too good.
I admire your unfettered optimism
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I down voted you because your English skills show you’re just an idiot.
Have some more, then. Act like a troll, be known as a troll
Once I was in a holiday crowd when the people per square meter got too high, and the beginning stages of crowd crush started happening. Waves of kinetic energy were being transmitted through the crowd without anyone even trying, it just wasn’t possible to stop yourself from getting shoved forward. I told my now-husband we need to get out NOW, and we did. Nothing happened to my knowledge, no fatal crush or anything like that. But it was scary as hell during what was supposed to be a good time.
I stopped attending standing-room-only concerts as a result of experiencing similar. Absolutely terrifying, powerless feeling.
Almost by definition the stories in here should be pretty boring. Glad you had the awareness to keep yours boring.
Got to experience it in San Francisco one year for a Chinese new year parade. It really is scary, you are utterly helpless and nobody can do anything. Panic at scale is scary.
There was a medium sized tree that I braced my arms against and held myself away, wife between tree and I. Stood there holding myself out for a while but I was getting tired and wasn’t going to last a lot longer. Thankfully crowd broke and it stopped.
I still hate San Francisco, always some stupid shit happen every time I went. Fuck that city.
I experienced this feeling during new years in shibuya. It’s scary af, you can no longer move, you’re part of a human liquid. Never again
Ooft, I got in a similar situation at a big street party - the friend I was with was lifted off her feet briefly by the crush. We managed to wriggle out to a clear area and away. No deaths, but hundreds of people were injured.
Oh my god. My friends and I were doing a road trip around the US when we got lost somewhere crossing the border into southern California. We took some weird back road into the woods looking for a campsite that was on Google (we were roughing it as much as possible to be cheap), but it became super apparent that we took the wrong turn somewhere and we went deeper and deeper into the woods. It started to get dark and at this point my ex and I were like, “Let’s just go to a hotel, it’s already too dark to camp.” My friend, the driver, was convinced we were almost there and the campsites were just around the next corner and wanted to save the money.
At some point, we saw this tree across the road and the only way to keep going forward was into what looked like just a clearing where some rusted out cars were. Immediately my ex and I felt this overwhelming, hair-raising “it’s time to go” vibe and we started telling him to turn around. My friend pulled into the clearing saying something like, “No, this might be it, there’s cars parked here”. We pull into the lot and kinda do a loop, just to put the headlights on the surroundings and see what’s all there. Like I said, it’s an island of gravel, short, dry grass, and some rusted out cars in the middle of dense, mountainous forest.
My friend is juuuuuuust about to park and gloat about ‘finding the campsite’ when some feral looking dude comes barreling out of the woods like a cryptid, sprinting at the back of the car. My ex and I start screaming like loons as this dude closes the gap and my friend punches it and starts driving back down the road we came in on. The dude just stood in the road behind us with something metal (I think a pipe) and watched us go in a cloud of dust and taillights.
Absolutely HORRIFYING experience and we still have no idea what the fuck the situation was there.
Most likely scenario was a homeless person, scared out of their mind that someone was robbing what little they had found and making their one safe place unsafe.
Smart move getting out quick, but probably a sad story behind the fear.
I ended up in a similar situation, except I was hiking the Appalachian trail alone. I decided to stop at a creek and get some crawfish for my dinner and to boil water. While I was turning over rocks I heard some distant rustling and got this feeling I was being watched. I unclipped the button on my knife holster because that made me a little more comfortable. I heard from another hiker that this area wasn’t safe and that I should pass through and go past the shelter a few miles. He looked very tired and sounded nervous under his breath and didn’t take time to explain and he speed walked on.
Back to me catching crawfish, I ended up eating like 5 or 6 of them and ate the rest of the wild berries and mushrooms I collected from the morning. I heard the rustling but it sounded much closer. Close enough that I could tell it was something that weighed a good bit. I took that as my warning and got out of there.
I was a good two or three miles from the creek when I remembered what the guy said and how nervous he was. That feeling I was being watched never went away. I decided to dart into the woods and form a fishhook maneuver to see if I was being followed. It was something my friends native American grandfather said to do when hunting in a area with lots of bears or mountain lions to avoid leading them back to your camp. And sure enough it worked because their wasn’t an animal following me but a person was following me.
I slowly moved back to the trail and walked about 100 ft on the hard packed soil to not leave a footprint trail then I darted in the woods and ran for a good 20 or 30 minutes before hitting a road. At this point I decided to hike 5 miles to a motel and just sleep. No way I was sleeping in the woods with a maniac on the loose.
This is a rough photo of where this happened, and what the fishhook maneuver looked like.Man, your story gave me goosebumps.
everytime I tell people my experience I get that feeling of being watched again. It’s scary thinking that could have ended very bad for me if I didn’t get that warning from the distressed hiker. I have heard stories about there being being creeps on the trail, but never encountered one before my experience.
what the fuck the situation was there
opioids and/or amphetamines, at a first guess
Nah, he just thought OP had a real pretty mouth
That was just Jesse. You probably didn’t notice the Winnebago.
I kinda had the opposite happen.
I was working for a charity doing some reconstruction in an ex war zone. That weekend was a major festival. I’m not of the area nor the religion so I volunteered to keep an eye on our camp instead that weekend.
I finished my breakfast in the canteen and was about to walk the perimeter and do my checks when, inexplicably, I decided to stall and have a second coffee. Something I never did.
As I went to sit down a massive explosion happened outside, shattering the entire area me and my clipboard should have been in. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. The canteen we were in was made out of shipping containers and probably saved our lives.
In the early 2000s, I had just joined the US military right out of high school and found myself stationed in Japan for my first assignment.
I loved Japanese culture and had started a college course on basic Japanese language so I could communicate with the locals and find my way around without getting lost in a foreign country.
One day, one of the civilians in my office was retiring and he chose a fancy hotel in the next city over to host his retirement ceremony. They had a bunch of meeting/party rooms we could host our ceremony in. It was fun, but I’m a bit introverted, so at some point, I stepped out into the grand lobby of the hotel to recover some energy by myself. There was a grand piano in one corner with some petite Japanese lady playing soft music on it. I learned against a large pillar and quietly listened for a bit.
All of a sudden, a meeting room door nearby banged open and some Japanese businessman stormed out on his phone. He was agitated and speaking angrily into his flip phone (smartphones didn’t exist yet). He stopped on the other side of the pillar from me and continued his loud discussion.
I had gotten absorbed into some Japanese drama TV shows and had learned to identify the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) slang. This guy was using the same dialect. I got a chill down my spine; it was my first time running into a Yakuza member in real life.
The guy finished his call and turned to leave… and stopped when he saw me standing practically next to him. His anger flared up and he started speaking aggressively at me in Japanese. Probably pissed that I was listening in on his call.
I caught a few words here and there, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough for full sentences yet, especially spoken rapidly at me in an angry tone.
When he paused, I said in English, “Um… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” I knew how to say it in Japanese, but I didn’t want to give him any inkling that I knew Japanese.
His entire demeanor changed. He grinned from ear to ear and said, “Ah! America-jin, ne? Good! Good guy!” He gave me a rough pat on the shoulder and then turned and went back to his meeting room.
I thought he was gonna drag me into the meeting room with his buddies and I’d never be found again, so I was relieved when he smiled and left me be. I went right back to my party and made sure not to go anywhere by myself for the rest of the evening.
“Don’t shoot! I’m American! I’m stupid and didn’t understand a word of what was said!”
Haha! Yup, basically.
Fortunately, a lot of Japanese folks were obsessed with Americans and American culture when I was living over there, so if you could convince them you were American, they would bend over backwards to help you with anything.
I flew back into Japan after a vacation and I had a 25-hr layover in Tokyo before flying back to my military base. I slept in a hotel that night, then went to the airport the next morning and asked if they could bump me to an earlier flight so I wouldn’t be stuck in the airport all day.
The lady at the counter said they had a flight leaving in 15 minutes and she would ensure I got on it.
Then she took off her heels, grabbed me by the hand, and literally ran me through the airport! She pushed me to the front of the security line, then we sprinted all the way to the terminal. They even held the plane an extra 10 minutes to ensure I got on it. I felt bad for holding up a plane, but damn! What service!
Wow. What a legend that lady was.
So uh are you Japanese by heritage?
No, but I have dark hair and have been described as having a Mediterranean look, so a lot of people around the world assumed I was from Europe at first glance. The Yakuza guy didn’t immediately pin me for an American until I spoke English.
This was also way up in northern Japan, where very few foreigners can be found, so their exposure to us is limited. Lots of Japanese people stared at us in public if we went anywhere except the town our base was in.
Not OP but I take it that you’re asking because you’re trying to figure out why they weren’t visually assumed to be a foreigner and why they were assumed to be able to speak Japanese?
Yes.
2010 Loveparade. First we got told that there would be a different entry, which there wasn’t, which meant we needed to walk quite a while. On the way we had a few situations, where people pushed a lot and it’s not a nice feeling, when you have a considerable mass and you get pushed easily. We made it to the last big check and we where greeted with a clear view to the tunnel. At this point there weren’t big queues visible and it was just a short walk. I said to the 2 friends I was with, that NOW I want to go home. It was not a gut feeling or something, I just knew I don’t want to continue and I want to go home. One friend decided to stay, as we where this close and another agreed with me and left with me.
The friend who stayed, did cut his visit shorter, lucky for him. For people who don’t know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster It was one of the biggest crowd crushes disasters. 21 dead, 652 injured. It happend in that tunnel, which I looked into and decided to go home. That criminal trial is considered one of the most complex ones of the post war period. In 2020 they dropped the trial. The issue was for these crimes, they only had 10 years and they said due to the limitations of covid, they said they will run out of time.
Okay, now I’ve read about crowd crushes and am living in fear of groups of 3 or more people
The fascinating part for me is that sufficiently dense crowds of people (> ~5/m^2) exhibit behaviors similar to fluids
In this case, I was the one that caused the gut feeling. For context, I’m a middle aged disheveled-looking dude.
My kids made a play date with their friends at a local park. The park is big and has two entrances, but they didn’t know where their friends were so I just went to the first entrance I came to. At this entrance there was a playground where only a woman and her two kids were playing - no one else in sight. I drove past them to see if it was my kids’ friends (it wasn’t), and the woman gave me a weird stare. In hindsight, she probably couldn’t see my kids in the back seat - she just saw some rando slow-rolling past the playground. Anyway, I drove around to the other entrance, but no one was there either. So we called up the friends’ parents and learned that they were running late and that we should meet at the first entrance with the playground. As soon as I pulled back in to the playground entrance, the woman saw me and gathered up her kids in a panic and ran for her car. I was trying to figure out WTF she was worked up about when it dawned on me. I parked, my kids got out, and when she saw them she calmed down. I’m sure I gave her a heart attack for a minute though.
