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Things you know NOTHING about that everyone else does

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    #26
    I tend to remember trivia easily, so rarely find I know nothing about a subject. For example I'm with the opening post on cars emotionally, but despite myself I know some vague details about them and can sort of fake a conversation on the back of that. It probably wouldn't pull the wool over the eyes of an enthusiast for long, and I really wouldn't be bothered trying to do so anyway as I really don't give a toss about them.

    However there are a few in the TV show sphere where something with mass appeal is a complete blank.. All the reality TV shows for one, Great British Bake Off, Pop Idol, etc. Also the long-form TV/box set thing mostly passes me by baring a few shows whose first series is possibly worthwhile. I had a 6-month free Netflix trial once and was totally underwhelmed by it and was never in the least tempted to sign up or renew. Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad etc. are therefore things I know next to nothing about.

    The most lacking in knowledge that I can remember though was about The Life of Pi before I went to see it at the cinema. For those interested I doubt the following will come as spoilers so I won't bother using the tag, things I didn't know about this story included that Pi was a human character rather than a number and that a Tiger was involved. Seeing the film means I now know the story, meaning it's been replaced as a book I know hardly anything about beyond the source of the title by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I used to conflate those two books as one being a sequel to the other, or otherwise somehow related.
    Last edited by Janik; 20-07-2018, 00:25.

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      #27
      It may seem like “everyone” knows a lot about all these things, but that’s probably not true.

      Nobody but professional critics really know everything about TV. Maybe a aficionado could in the 1970s or the 80s, but these days nobody has time to watch everything good or everything popular. There’s just too much of it.

      Likewise with pop music.

      I’m not so concerned about keeping up with pop music. There’s just too much. Even a fairly narrow sungenre can lead to a very deep Spotify rabbit hole - like my surf guitar play list has about 3000 tracks and growing.

      Closing oneself off to the new or different is probably not a great way to go through life, but we can never know everything we might want to know, see everything we might want to see, read everything we want to read, etc. Trying to do that just leads to anxiety. It’s more important to cultivate the right attitude and respect for learning rather than trying to fill your brain with an endless pile of data. I’m not sure exactly *what* that attitude is, but I’ll report back if I found out.

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        #28
        Medical stuff. You can score easy prank points with me, just by saying "Ooh, my glaucoma membrane sciatica is playing up again" and watching the reaction, as I try to nod knowingly and wonder if I should be offering you a cup of tea or CPR. Whatever CPR stands for.

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          #29
          Instagram and Snapchat.

          I feel like I get asked if I'm on Instagram about 2 or 3 times a week.

          And at the moment house-related stuff.

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            #30
            Originally posted by WOM View Post
            Not quite yet, if the shouting, cursing, recriminations and calls to murder emanating from my basement [at this very fucking moment] are anything to go by.


            <In cracking teenage boy voice> "Jimmy. Jimmy. Jimmy shoot. SHOOT. BEHIND THE TREE. Other guy....what's your name? No, other guy. Hi Lucas. Leave that for me. I got it. I got it. CAN YOU NOT!!!! Kill him. KILL HIM. Lucas...another one behind the wood pile. Okay, I left you some ammo. NOOOOO! Okay, I gotta go for dinner...."


            Non-stop for almost three months now.
            My 11 year old is completely addicted. To the extent where I can get up, go to work, get home from work and spend the evening watching tv, then go to bed and not have actually seen him all day.

            In terms of things I don't know - gardening is probably the big one, which is ironic given my surname (Gardiner). I barely know how to mow the lawn, and don't get me started on weeding, most of the time I can't tell the difference between a weed and a general plant.

            Like some others have mentioned, I rarely watch the big and popular TV programmes, I know literally nothing of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and other things that have been huge over the last few years. I made myself watch the second series of Westworld because I saw a preview programme the week before it started and I really got into it, but the others I just don't have the time for.

            Mortgages, Stock Market and pensions are also something I know less about than I probably should.

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              #31
              I've developed a "things I'm proud I know nothing about" attitude recently, where it's not ordinary ignorance you're admitting to, but a wilful ignorance to show your superiority to the taste of the masses, or particular sub-groups.
              On that basis I admit to knowing nothing or almost nothing about:
              • superhero films

                • reality TV shows

                • video games

                • the music of Ed Sheeran, including what he might sound like

                • Which GIFs to use as reaction to Twitter posts

                • What’s happening in the Bundesliga other than Bayern Munich walking the title every time

                • How and why smashed avocado is seen as fashionable when it’s surely been a staple of loads of people’s diet for many years



              Living abroad helps a lot.
              Last edited by Haddock; 20-07-2018, 07:33.

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                #32
                I earned a living for 15 years writing about how and why Minis and BMWs are great to drive. I've never driven a car in my life and have no idea how cars work.

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                  #33
                  Love Island.

                  And truck stuff. I mean, I know the mechanics and generally what's wrong if I have a problem.

                  But whether Scania is better than Volvo or Mercedes? How many Hp a truck has etc? Unlike nearly all my colleagues, I just don't care.

                  So long as I can listen to my audiobooks and my football properly, I'm happy.

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                    #34
                    Originally posted by treibeis View Post
                    I earned a living for 15 years writing about how and why Minis and BMWs are great to drive. I've never driven a car in my life and have no idea how cars work.
                    Love it!

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                      #35
                      Originally posted by Simon G View Post
                      My 11 year old is completely addicted. To the extent where I can get up, go to work, get home from work and spend the evening watching tv, then go to bed and not have actually seen him all day.
                      Yup.

                      "Dude. Wrap it up soon."

                      "Why???"

                      "It's almost 11:00 pm."

                      "Oh..... Really?"

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                        #36
                        I don't relate to the popularity of playing video games with other people, especially strangers. For me, a major point of playing video games (or watching TV or film) is that I don't have to interact with other humans for a while.

                        I'm concerned that many kids seem to only be socializing online. That can't be good, can it? I suspect they're worried about it too, but get sucked in and can't get out because of the dreaded FOMO. Perhaps we'll soon be at the point where parents are happy to hear that their kids are drinking, smoking weed, and having sex because at least it means they're getting outside and socializing a bit.

                        I also suspect that the vast popularity of games that revolve around shooting and blowing things up is not healthy. I don't think they *cause* kids to shoot up their schools or anything like that, but it certainly says something unpleasant about our culture or species that almost every game that I see advertised on instagram* is about war. Making the characters cartoony doesn't really help either. I see it as a symptom more than a cause, but I don't know what to do about it.

                        *Instagram has tons of ads for these, and I always try to report them as "violent or prohibited content" hoping their ad algorithm will take the hint, but Instagram keeps showing them to me. I no longer play any games on the iPhone. It's just too small and fiddly and the whole "pay to play" thing is dumb. If the game is really good, just charge a fair price. Don't suck people in and then string them along with little in game purchases and make it difficult to enjoy without them.

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                          #37
                          Cars
                          Anything celebrity or reality TV related
                          Most DIY
                          Most social media blow-ups (it's weird being able to measure my old-fogeyness by what proportion of memes I recognise as the centre of gravity of such culture has long shifted from blogs/message boards to social media, and I don't do social media)
                          Most sport outside my teams - I paid no attention to the World Cup and watched 1.5 games.

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                            #38
                            I don't think knowledge about reality TV or celebrities is really that widespread.

                            The ratings for those shows are good by today's standards, but are actually pretty small and would have counted as abysmal just 20 years ago, let alone 30 or 40 years ago when families really did all watch TV together in the evening and there were only three networks.
                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-ra...983%E2%80%9384

                            Mad Men, to name a show that got a shit ton of support from critics and the media in general (justifiably), never got more than 4 million viewers (or if it did, it wasn't much more), so probably 95% of America didn't watch it or maybe only watched it once (I'm assuming that very few people just watched it a few times. It's very much an all or nothing kind of thing). HBO says Game of Thrones gets like 30m across all platforms, but I suspect a lot of those are the same people watching it multiple times and I think that number is international, not just the US. Not 100% sure on that. But still even if it's 30m different Americans (plus millions more internationally) that's a pretty small piece of the culture.

                            Even the Super Bowl, which has managed to mostly sustain massive TV numbers and ad prices even as the rest of TV ratings steadily erode, is still unwatched by 2/3 of Americans, according to the ratings data. And the NFL - a property so valuable that networks lose money on the rights fees just to get the exposure to the rest of their programming - is pissing in the wind compared what Muhammad Ali fights used to get or, say, India v Pakistan in the last Cricket world cup, which reportedly drew over a billion viewers (which is astonishing even given the size of those two countries).

                            Fox News is certainly malign, but on any given night, less than 1% of America is watching it. By comparison, nearly 30m people watched Walter Cronkite every night back in those days when the US had about 100m fewer people in it and a higher percentage of houses with no tv.

                            I suspect the same is true with social media. Though a recent survey found 79% of internet users (68% of all U.S. adults) use Facebook - by far the most popular platform - and that two-thirds of America reported getting at least some news from social media. So you can see how, given our terrible voting system and turnout numbers, we get Trump. I can't find exact data on this, but I suspect that the *some* part of "reported getting at least some news from social media" is doing a lot of work there. For example, apparently only about a quarter of twitter accounts have actually tweeted in a given month. So I suspect that maybe 10% of social media users are creating 90% of the garbage. Or something like that. Maybe its 30-80 or whatever, but it's certainly not anything like "most people."
                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 20-07-2018, 18:08.

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                              #39
                              Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                              I don't relate to the popularity of playing video games with other people, especially strangers. For me, a major point of playing video games (or watching TV or film) is that I don't have to interact with other humans for a while.

                              I'm concerned that many kids seem to only be socializing online. That can't be good, can it? I suspect they're worried about it too, but get sucked in and can't get out because of the dreaded FOMO. Perhaps we'll soon be at the point where parents are happy to hear that their kids are drinking, smoking weed, and having sex because at least it means they're getting outside and socializing a bit.

                              I also suspect that the vast popularity of games that revolve around shooting and blowing things up is not healthy. I don't think they *cause* kids to shoot up their schools or anything like that, but it certainly says something unpleasant about our culture or species that almost every game that I see advertised on instagram* is about war. Making the characters cartoony doesn't really help either. I see it as a symptom more than a cause, but I don't know what to do about it.

                              *Instagram has tons of ads for these, and I always try to report them as "violent or prohibited content" hoping their ad algorithm will take the hint, but Instagram keeps showing them to me. I no longer play any games on the iPhone. It's just too small and fiddly and the whole "pay to play" thing is dumb. If the game is really good, just charge a fair price. Don't suck people in and then string them along with little in game purchases and make it difficult to enjoy without them.
                              I think some of the popularity among boys of violent video games is related to the fact that school playgrounds have been purged of mock fights and physical roughhousing, videogames have become the main outlet for their natural tendency towards physical play. One example of this is Colorado banning snowball fights nearly everywhere, I would guess many school districts across the US have the same policies in place.

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                                #40
                                Well, this thread is something of a relief as clearly not everyone knows stuff about things I know nothing about. For me its cars and gardening - I'm perfectly capable of killing any plant, so it's probably a good thing that I never went into the family business (farming).
                                For cars, it's not that I don't know how many hp or whatever a particular car has (which I don't, and couldn't even hazard a wild guess as to the order of magnitude), more that I have no idea what sort of vehicle a particular car is. So, someone might tell me "I'll pick you up at 9. I'll be in a blue Sentra", and generally all I'd get out of that is the time and the color and the assumption that some sort of motorized vehicle is involved, probably not a motorcycle as they said "in" rather than "on". Yet most other people seem to be able to identify a car model just by looking at it (even if they can't see the name on the back), which I just find baffling.

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                                  #41
                                  I haven't been able to do that since I was a teenager. When I was a kid, the different makes and styles of cars were intensely interesting to me, down to the shapes of their lights and the colour of their bumpers, and the evolution from one iteration to the next – e.g. the mark 2 to mark 3 to mark 4 Ford Escort. I was forever asking my dad "What's that one?" as we passed things on the roads. But I haven't cared remotely about them since then, plus (I think) the styling of different marques has got more and more homogenous since at least the early '90s, so there's barely a car on the streets nowadays that I can identify at a casual glance.

                                  Count me in as another who's blissfully ignorant of almost everything on this thread. Except plants: I know really quite a lot about gardening. Oh, and I'm a pretty good cook.

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                                    #42
                                    British kings and queens. I learned little about the history of the Royal family at school, never found it interesting, never filled in the gaps, and so have virtually no idea when or who any monarchs ruled or what they did apart from Henry VIII, Victoria, and the current incumbent. It's possible I'll fill in some of the details due to an interest in the history of the English language, but that's incidental.

                                    Betting. I know more or less how it works, I've placed occasional bets (for instance on Australia to whitewash England at the last Ashes), but it's incredibly rare, despite its seeming centrality in bloke life, and being into sport generally. And I've never felt the need to investigate.

                                    TV sets. This might seem niche, but considering I'm pretty into technology, I'm completely all at sea with HD, 4K, Plasma, LCD, Smart TV, HDMI ports, hard disc recorders, etc. I have no idea what any of it means. I think I might end up just skipping that stage of home entertainment tech, as I increasingly find myself catching up on films and stuff on the iPad.

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                                      #43
                                      Originally posted by Logan Mountstuart View Post
                                      Love Island.

                                      And truck stuff. I mean, I know the mechanics and generally what's wrong if I have a problem.

                                      But whether Scania is better than Volvo or Mercedes? How many Hp a truck has etc? Unlike nearly all my colleagues, I just don't care.

                                      So long as I can listen to my audiobooks and my football properly, I'm happy.
                                      I've always fancied driving a truck. I had a chance to get my HGV licence when in the military, but turned the opportunity down as it wasn't right for me at the time. Never got the chance again.

                                      My next job may well be driving cars around different dealerships. The idea of driving for a living is appealing. I've no idea why though, apart from the solitude. I mean the roads, fucking hell.

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                                        #44
                                        Diggedy Derek mentioned betting. I don't have a clue about it. Never placed a bet. Never even bought a lottery ticket. And that seems really confusing now with so many options and things like Thunderballs.

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                                          #45
                                          Originally posted by linus View Post
                                          I think some of the popularity among boys of violent video games is related to the fact that school playgrounds have been purged of mock fights and physical roughhousing, videogames have become the main outlet for their natural tendency towards physical play. One example of this is Colorado banning snowball fights nearly everywhere, I would guess many school districts across the US have the same policies in place.
                                          Violence was popular long before they banned snowball fights (for liability reasons) or video games existed - movies, TV, violent sports. But there are also lots of (mostly) non-violent sports and non-violent TV shows and movies, including many popular with boys. Shooting and fighting seems to dominate gaming more than any other media.

                                          Perhaps it’s just lack of imagination. War games, shooting games, etc are established genres, especially for multiplayer games, going back to the Atari 2600 age. Really original ideas and game mechanisms are harder to develop and harder to market.

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                                            #46
                                            Same on gambling. I understand how it works well-enough (except poker). I just don’t understand the compulsion (which is a blessing, of course).

                                            Tennis. I know the rules, and certainly see the appeal - certainly more than golf, ffs - but have trouble getting into any individual sport. It’s impossible to maintain the fiction that I ought to care who wins. It’s not really great for TV either.

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                                              #47
                                              How to just be a normal human being with a level of income that wouldn't leave me practically homeless if I didn't live with my girlfriend.

                                              Investments and that. Although my conception of 'everyone' knowing about these is probably exaggerated by the fact that every male in my dad's family until I was born seems to have a pretty good handle on them.

                                              For I think most other things, I think writing a pub quiz (and trivia questions for a mobile app, for six months a few years ago) has probably helped me to climb just above Rogin's NOTHING threshold. I might not actually know anything at all practical or practicable, or give the slightest bit of a shit about vast realms of science or the history of eastern Europe or cars or computer games that aren't called Football Manager, but if they come up in conversation there's a good chance I'll be able to say something about them, because trivia.

                                              To dd's 'Kings and queens', for a while now my bedtime reading – in large part because I go to bed much later than my girlfriend and can't very well turn the bedside lamp on to read a proper book* – has been the Wikipedia pages of every monarch of England (I'm going to go back and do the Scottish and Welsh ones afterwards), starting with Alfred the Great and working forwards (just through the Kings of Wessex, I didn't bother with the other ones; might do a few of them afterwards as well). I'm now up to Mary (who, fact fans, last night I definitively confirmed was not the same person as Mary Queen of Scots), and it's fair to say that from what I know so far your calls of Henry VIII and Victoria are probably going to be the two most interesting ones, although I am also looking forward to getting past Mary and on to Elizabeth I. With Henry VIII a lot more of the wider context of the times started coming into the articles, which is what I'd been hoping for all along. I was rather expecting Henry VII's entry, for example, to mention the fact that England's contributions to the Age of Discovery started under his sponsorship, but ... no, nothing. (Once I've gone through all the royals I'm going to do a run through Prime Ministers starting with Walpole, and then I'll try and draw up some sort of list of events I don't know anything/much about.)


                                              *Tablet's fine because I have an app on there that cuts out all the blue light, so there's no screen glare to keep me awake.

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                                                #48
                                                Originally posted by diggedy derek View Post
                                                British kings and queens. I learned little about the history of the Royal family at school, never found it interesting, never filled in the gaps, and so have virtually no idea when or who any monarchs ruled or what they did apart from Henry VIII, Victoria, and the current incumbent. It's possible I'll fill in some of the details due to an interest in the history of the English language, but that's incidental.
                                                Kings and queens would definitely be my blind spot on any hypothetical quiz show appearance I got involved in.

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                                                  #49
                                                  Kings and Queens for me falls into the category "things you know nothing about and couldn't care less"

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                                                    #50
                                                    Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                                    Perhaps it’s just lack of imagination. War games, shooting games, etc are established genres, especially for multiplayer games, going back to the Atari 2600 age. Really original ideas and game mechanisms are harder to develop and harder to market.
                                                    The first truly indisputable "computer game" as we would know them today was Space War in 1962. Note: WAR. You could argue that the 2600 was late to the party by 1977!

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