Fun fact: You can still order a current print volume of World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,349.00
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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My parents got me this set of the Childcraft children’s encyclopaedias when I was like 6? I inhaled those things for knowledge back in the pre-internet days!
Am considering getting one for my own kiddo when they get old enough, but like most things from my childhood - they look to have been discontinued.
Honestly surprisingly inexpensive given that about what a set of encyclopedias would cost you 35+ years ago. Not sure about World Book specifically but I know Britannicas were over $1k in 1990 because I remember a door-to-door salesmen trying to sell them to me. Can't imagine anyone other than a library buying these now, and even there they're probably all collecting dust.
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We only use 10% of our brains.
We only use 10% of our brain at a time. Because using 100% of your brain is called a seizure.
Source: Once used 100% of my brain.
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Yep. The rebuttal that stuck with me was "We only use 33% of traffic lights."
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And don't even ask us where we found porn.
We got it from Reggie. Don't ask us where Reggie got it
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If you had a question that nobody could answer, you’d go down to the library, open up a drawer with a bunch of note cards in it, look to see if any of the note cards had a word about a concept you wanted to learn about, hope that the card existed, was in the right place, and listed a book that would actually give you the information you wanted.
The first step would be opening an encyclopedia. A lot of households actually had an encyclopedia on their shelves for this very reason. Something which these "pre-internet" rumination threads always seems to neglect.
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Or you wouldn't go through the effort, you'd ask a trusted elder or a friend, they would lie to you, and you'd peddle that misinformation for decades while refusing that you might be wrong. Guess which one was more likely
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I remember looking up "dirty" words in the dictionary as a real young one with a gaggle of friends
This is why encyclopedia salesmen was even a thing.
If you didn't have that, go to a library.
Eventually there was encyclopedia britannica which was basically one of the coolest things you could have for free on your computer in that era.
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And there was a friend's older brother or cousin, who said some unbelievable horseshit, you thought was true for many years. And you didn't even ask.
That still holds true even with the internet around
Joe Rogan
Actually fucking Joe Rogan is the perfect analogy, he just has random people on that say some stuff to him and he is like damn that's crazy and doesn't even fact check it, and then what he likes he carries forward with him and what he doesn't like hearing just ignores
My 4th grade science teacher genuinely taught us that "blood is blue before it leaves your body and turns red due to oxidation from contacting the air"
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People don't imagine what it was like then. It was wild. Wild in a sort of you're all alone all the time, except when you physically is hanging out or at home, and no one knows what's going on. At all. Some people have theories but they are insane. School teaches you things that are compley useless for living right now.