They still have these in Taiwan. Plenty of hurt kids.
So that slide in the background, I remember the one at my local park being about five stories high. My mother insists I am wrong but I know what I remember. That slide in the background does look like it would fit the bill though.
I smoked my groin so hard on one of these while trying to jump on while it was ferociously spinning. It sucked at the time but the character it formed has stayed with me for life.
Is that character sterile?
Thankfully no! I may someday produce offspring who will also misjudge playground physics.
It’s on grass. It needs to be on concrete slabs which are uneven and sticking up.
I had seen that in one of my neighbourhoods.
It had already been broken by the previous generations.American Old: “Back in my day, we went outdoors and did things that built our bodies and minds. Why don’t you kids do that?”
American Young: “Cause you defunded all the public parks, demolished the outdoors to build parking lots, and sent cops to harass anyone caught outside the house without their parents.”
American Old: “Shut up, you woke antifa little shit. Nobody wants to hear you talk.”
Our big thing was daring each other to get the swings in the playground to go so high you’d flip right over the stand. You had to stand up on the seat and pump hard to get high enough. I always chickened out, but some of the kids did it. The problem was the chains were then wrapped around the stand, making it harder to swing.
And yes, the surface under the swing was hard asphalt.
And then Purple Aki was there and everyone hi-fived.
That didn’t happen.
Mythbusters did this. Its not possible - you have to replace the chain with solid bars.
But I think this is all entire human race thing. Idk anyone who has never tried this, or seen someone who has. No generational thing about it.
As a kid, going over the bar on the swings was a huge fucking deal!
I have vague recollections of some book or show where a kid went over the bar and as a result his body turned inside out. (Not sure if that was an actual thing or some fever dream I had!)
And the cartoon Recess had an episode where a kid went over the bar and disappeared, and all the kids thought he travelled to another dimension or became a god or something. (In reality he just jumped off the swing and hopped in his mom’s car, but nobody saw him because of glare from the sun)
Then you’ve never had Clacker Balls. At least half of my friends received concussions from those things.
…we used to have this hybrid see-saw / merry-go-round thing where pumping the two crossed see-saws advanced a central rotation mechanism on great exposed child-chewing gears…
Pfft! Grass?! Try sand that’s 3000° from the American Southwest sun, and full of broken Budweisers. Also, I’m not seeing any old, disintegrating railroad ties anywhere. How are you supposed to get your daily tar and lead content?
Man I miss those railroad ties and old rubber tires
Kids these days didn’t know the flavors they’re missing!
That’s what the child-sized cigarettes were for
Which generation is that, though? Like basically everybody experienced this as a kid.
No. Only my generation. The Best Generation.
Around here they started getting rid of them in the 80’s. The story I was told is that kids would play “dropsies” where you’d drop a shoe under the platen and then try to grab it on the next round. Some kids would throw it far under and the kid reaching for it could get his head caught under and it could break their neck.
That’s the gruesomest story I heard but I found many, many other ways to injure myself on these things.
Wow, that’s messed up, most what we did is just throw people off it or throw drinks at em when the thing was up to relativistic speeds.
We cared not for the danger, only that we’d reach the center at max speed
You’d get your older cousins to bring the thing up to orbital speeds when you were having a birthday party in the park. At least a couple times a year, some would get a broken arm on that thing, and once a generation a kid would end up underneath.
My brother swears he fell underneath, one time we were playing. Thankfully, he was towards the edge and he was small (at the time).
Teenagers with dirtbikes. Such glorious stupidity was something to behold.
I remember getting spun up to warp speed and one kid slipped and flew off. Not normally a problem but he happened to get flung onto his bike that was parked there. He did not ride off into the sunset.
That isn’t rust on the roundabout, it’s dried blood.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” needs to die out because that’s not how trauma works. You never recover full strength in a broken bone, never become fully cured of PTSD.
But you also learn how to handle pain be it physical or mental. It gives you a new perspective that helps you to handle difficult situations in the future. There’s obviously a point where you’re just fucked, but up til then there’s more of a trade off.
People tend to make that claim when they are adding pain to your life, as is the case with punishment. Life is painful enough to teach this lesson without anyone adding more.
I’ve not heard it used that way. In my experience it’s after something bad happens to someone or they’re going through some shit in an effort to reassure them that whatever is going on will pass and they’ll at least gain some mental strength from it. Maybe it doesn’t help at the time but looking back on stuff that’s happened to me it is a true statement.
not from uk but when I grew up we had this net spaceship thing you could climb into like a clubhouse. Made completely out of metal. In a place with both severe summers and winters. I for the life of me do not know how we did not end up with news stories about some kid or adult cooking or freezing or sticking to the walls in there.
