Just curious. I did not know: I think I knew that there were several joke threads following a similar pattern seen in a kind of silly older thread, but when people said “Closing parody thread” I a) had no idea that they were referring to that thread, and b) had no clear idea what a “thread” was- ie, was it a fibrous piece of the internet? What?
I don’t think I’m that unusual in that. Now that they’re so common I think people assume that everyone always knew what the parody threads were - but I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
(People who lived before the internet don’t need to reply unless they somehow didn’t know what a parody thread was.)
I was a couple of months from beginning school, so I had yet to have a teacher tell me about the moon. I was, however, well aware of the moon and other planets. I had seen numerous sci-fi movies, which I didn’t realize were fantasy.
When my mother called me in to watch Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon, I found it very boring. What was so great about walking on the moon when we had defeated alien races and had visited so many other planets? Nobody bothered telling me that this was the first time anyone was stepping on the moon, and if they did, I would likely have thought they were joking.
Well, this isn’t as dumb as it sounds. I knew what the moon was, before the landing, but no living person had ever laid eyes on the far side of the moon until '68. And prior to that, the first pictures of the dark side weren’t available until 1959… and they were dirty commie (Russian) pictures, to boot. So yes, I know of the moon, but in all of my days I will never know it fully… and the fact still remains that only a handful of people have ever seen the other side of the moon in person. Similarly, I knew that the World Trade Center, or Twin Towers, was one of the tallest buildings in the world and dominated the NY skyline… but could I tell you what businesses it housed or what the function of The World Trade organiztion was? No, I never knew it fully and I bet the vast majority of Americans didn’t know it fully, either.