I personally will never not trust my gut feeling.
Being born.
Living after I die. At least, I suspect as much.
Becoming a federal felon.
What did you do
Fire breathing
For context I’m a professional fire & sideshow performer. I have almost a decade of experience and am fire safety lead for a large fire arts retreat. But the name of the game is risk mitigation and fire breathing is too risky for my taste despite its popularity.
If you go on Wikipedia and type in fire breather, the second result is Fire Breather’s Pneumonia. I also personally know many people who have gotten large facial burns or have had to retire due to lung problems caused by excessive fire breathing.
The risks are technically still there with fire eating, which is one of my main skills, but I mitigate it by limiting my exposure and taking breaks. There’s also significantly less liquid fuel involved.
I’m just a dude, one afternoon when I was 12 me and the boys were doing bbq because it was a major religious holiday here.
I found a neat stick and I decided it would be fun to do a fire breathing trick with the kerosene. I hadn’t done it before but it worked and we had a blast.
I’m intact and in my 30s but I still cringe at the possibility of me getting a burned face that day.
I’m an entertainer as well and thought about fire breathing. I spoke with a couple friends who do it and them all casually talking about collapsing a lung a few times turned me off that idea.
Sword swallowing too. My friends do it but I’ve heard the term “perforated stomach” one too many times
That one never caught my interest. It makes me so nervous. I’ve gotten into stilts and jumping stilts over the past couple years and I’ve been doing face painting, balloons, glitter, etc. for half my life. I’d love to get back into juggling and unicycling but that will have to wait for a bit. I also really wanna try German wheel and aerial hoop!
Also editing to add: what made you wanna do fire and what’s your favorite way to use fire? I have a friend who just got a sword, another who favors fans, and most men I know use staff or poi. I personally have never spun or played with fire, but it fascinates me. Many of my friends will eat but not breathe it.
I started with fire before I ever really knew I wanted to be a performer, it just seemed fun, and things moved from there. My first prop was staff.
But a lot of stuff happened over the years and I hardly spin any more, other than at said retreat. Ok the flip side, I’ve carved out a name for myself as a sideshow performer doing dangerous and grotesque things. Bed of nails, blockhead, mental floss, butterfly knives, stapling, etc. But my expertise is fire, so I tend to always do that when the venue allows.
Fun fact, I invented two fire eating moves :) One is a split tongue torch hold, the other I named a black hole sun
Steal a bicycle.
Snort amphetamines.
Ride on the back of a train.
Unprotected one-night-stand.
Chase away a Grizzly and her cubs.
Climb onto a high-rise rooftop from the outside.
Break into a stadium to see Metallica live for free.
Break into an active US army base to play airsoft.
Break into Chelsea Stadium at night to steal a piece of the pitch.Looking back, it’s a miracle I didn’t end up in prison, dead, or worse, expelled.
This reads like the music video of smack my bitch up
Sounds like a helluva night.
This does read like a teen movie plot.
It was a happy childhood.
Break into an active US army base to play airsoft.
At first I was like “holy shit!”, but the more that I think about it, it’s probably safer than playing in a public park…
Yeah, you’ll encounter trained soldiers, not cops.
Break into a stadium to see Metallica live for free.
Jump the fence at an amphitheater when the headline band took the stage. Security handled me pretty roughly. I was to be ejected, but he didn’t tell the lady at the office where I filed a written complaint for his physical abuse. She let me back into the show and I stayed far away from where he was posted and watched the rest of the show.
I also simply jumped the fence (after trying every other option, cause it seemed too easy).
Security was nowhere to be seen, but some guests didn’t like how I got in for free while they paid 150€, and got pretty angry.
God damn
The '90s were wild.
Sounds like it haha
Man I wish I could have lived your life
Well, now I’m a middle aged Linux admin with a beer belly.
Damn! You’ve had quite the adventure.
Why the train one?
They had a spot on the back coupler you could sit on.
And there was an open street crossing in my town where they had to slow down enough so that you could run up from behind and sit down on it.
When it passed the crossing you just jumped off before it accelerated again.
College while working full time. Four years of barely getting any sleep while working full time and going to school full time. Even my teachers made comments about how late I’m staying up. They can see on their Canvas website that I’m turning in papers at 3 or 4 in the morning.
Paintball with 20-somethings. I expected someone to shoot me in the arse from five feet away for a laugh, I didn’t think they’d be on my team.
Panic attack (I hope)
It’s awful
Go 180 mph on a motorcycle. I’ve done it, and I won’t do it again. I’m a pretty solid rider, but 180 is above my reaction time. Things were behind me before I had a chance to react to them. So, I decided going that fast is stupid, and deadly, and I wont do so again. 120-140 however is manageable. I can react with time to spare. 105 is like a cakewalk. I’m just as comfortable at 105 as I am at 55.
You can do this in relative safety on a racetrack though. Doing this anywhere else is risking turning yourself and others into hamburger meat.
Yeah, I was young, and dumb, and invincible.
Marrying.
Did it once and it’s going to last until death.
That’s pretty wholesome
Unless someone is getting murdered.
“I promise to stay with you until one of us dies!”
I once was young and stupid and maxed out the speedometer of my car on a empty highway at the middle of the night. Now I can say I’ve done it and don’t need to do that again. Normally I hardly even drive above the speedlimit.
I did that in the middle of the day on an empty highway and I actually got caught (aircraft). The ticket was for 113 mph and I lost my license for 6 months.
I don’t speed anymore but it’s not for fear of a ticket. Actually I just found that being in a hurry was flooding me with cortisol, and I decided that you can’t control traffic, only how you react to it. I’ve been driving like an old man for like 15 years and it’s a lot more chill, barely slower, and a bit safer.
Getting caught by police aircraft sounds very American.
I’ve adopted the granddad driving style too. Now I get my enjoyment from watching people rush and make pointless overtakes, only for me to end up right behind them at the next traffic light.
America is so widely spaced out that there are some huge stretches of mostly empty highways, so the only feasible way to monitor for speeders is by helicopter watching over the massive stretches of road. Or at least that’s how it used to be, these days i bet they are increasingly just using cameras
I had a truck that you couldn’t max out the speedometer. At 97mph, the fuel line cuts off, leaving you basically costing down the highway until the speed drops, and the engine kicks (literal shudder) back on.
Also, Chevy trucks don’t like going past 90, so it makes sense to kill the fuel to protect the driver from themselves…
What speed?
I was barely able to reach 200kph
I got up that high on a race track once. It was one of those “drive a nascar” experience things. They used older models but they would still move. I couldn’t get up any higher than that because it was only a 3/4 mile oval. By the time I was accelerating on the straightaway, it was time to decelerate for the turns.
On public roads, I have done 180 kph in Germany (and still got passed).
I did almost 200 in my first Autobahn driving lesson and did 230 at some point after getting the license. No I think it’s stupid Germany allows those speeds. IMHO it should be capped at 120 on all public roads. Crazy what lack of rules, young people and overpowered cars can cause
It was way above my comfort level. The ride itself was smooth due to me driving a big saloon but it also felt like I was about to take off at the slightest bump
85MPH as that is as high as my speedometer reads in my 92 Camaro.
Lollll, my husband’s 1990 T-bird was the same, and when he got pulled over, the cop asked if he knew how fast he was going. “85, officer” (with Puss in Boots innocent eyes). The cop sputtered “you idiot, that’s not…that’s… your speedometer only goes that high!”, but wrote him the ticket for 85 instead of whatever irresponsible & arrestable number it really was.
That’s so odd, i thought usually sports car speedometers go higher than the car is actually able to achieve in order to trick people into thinking it’s actually capable of going that fast. But now that i think about it i guess that was just an assumption
I was once on an empty road that was straight all the way to the horizon and i got it up to 100. I woulda gone higher but my passenger didn’t want to
Just for funsies, I rented a Challenger R/T from the Hertz “fancy car” selection about 6-7 years ago. My boss asked me to pick him up on the way to work so he could see what the car was like. We hit a stretch of highway with little traffic, and I aired it out a little. Easily hit 100. Boss was tickled. I slowed back down to sane speeds before we got to other cars. That thing would give you whiplash if you floored it at a green light. So much fun. Glad it was only a rental. I’d have lost my license if I had it for a daily driver.
Suspension. I did a superman; 6 hooks in my back (they couldn’t pull up skin on my legs to run hooks there, so it was a little… awkward.) It was painful, sure. But the pain fades once you’re up there, and then it’s…
Boring.
You can’t really do anything much. You can swing around, but if you get motion sick then that’s not a good idea. I know a number of people that have experienced it as transcendental, and it just wasn’t for me. Everything was sore for a few days afterwards, but not bad. It just wasn’t for me.
It took me multiple reads to realize you weren’t talking about dirtbike shocks (suspension), doing dirtbike tricks (a superman), and receiving a back injury (6 hooks in the back). It sounded like you were advocating for people to buy quality suspension components if they’re going to do big jumps and tricks on their dirtbike.
Ha. Fair point.
No, this was the kind of suspension where they put hooks through your skin, and then hoist you above the ground by the hooks.
(I do ride, but only street bikes. And IMO, for street bikes, unless you track your bike regularly, your stock suspension is likely just fine.)
Note that the tone of judgement can’t be helped when asking this, but why would one want to do this to begin with?
I also wondered why you weren’t trying your bike tricks over a foam pit.
Go running.
You know when you build something up in your head to be really awful, then you try it and it’s exactly that awful?
I was once like that. I thought running was such a boring hobby. I stuck to it though, and it quickly became a hobby for me that I miss when I don’t or can’t do it.
I do 20-35km per week, including a half marathon (organized or self induced) once per month. Previous to last year, I didn’t exercise or go to the gym.
Yeah I hate running but like having run. I don’t anymore, it was terrible every time but the whole rest of the day on a day I ran would be better. Just never did the runner’s high or even runner’s tolerance kick in.
i did a training program years ago to go from zero to running 5km without slowdown.
i stuck to it over like eight months, it hurt all the way, and when i had proved to myself that i could do it i quit because it just got worse and worse
Kinda sounds like you were running way too hard.
Many people assume you need to run your ass off every time you go. Its just not true.
My shortest runs are quick, but I’m just cruisin’ for any long runs; slow enough to comfortably talk with someone and run for a few hours without stopping.
If you’re running and you hate it you need to slow way down.
basically couldn’t have gone slower.
Gender reassignment surgery.
Got born.
Just gotta try more
after a scuba dive almost went south, I agree on the gut feeling
I’ve always wanted to scuba dive. My ears are just so sensitive I don’t think I’d be able to
That’s rock concerts you’re thinking of
Those too haha
My ears give me difficulties too. You can try it out in a pool if you find classes. A divemaster finally showed me how to bend and twist my head while equalizing my ears to get my narrow ear passages to allow air to move around. Now I can usually manage a second dive when going out.
See, I even struggle going down like 6 feet
Same. But with a tank on so you can breathe, and a weight belt to help keep you under, you can focus on figuring out if your ears will allow it.
Just swimming or snorkeling with no weight belt, I struggle to stay underwater, and my brain has a hard time being patient with my ears, while I’m trying to paddle with one hand & hold my nose with the other so I can equalize.