What are your experiences with the Mandela Effect?
What are your experiences with the Mandela Effect?
See title. For those who don’t know, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remember something differently than how it occurred. It’s named after Nelson Mandela because a significant number of people remembered him dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he actually passed away in 2013.
I’m curious to hear about your personal experiences with this phenomenon. Have you ever remembered an event, fact, or detail that turned out to be different from reality? What was it and how did you react when you found out your memory didn’t align with the facts? Does it happen often?
Who the fuck remembers Mandela dying in prison??? The man was resilience itself!
Like 12 idiots on the Internet who then decided to never shut the fuck up about it.
I know!
He was constantly in the papers in the 1990s, major figure, every mac madra knew he was alive, where do they get this shite.
Yeah, I never understood that either. He was the president of South Africa from 1994-1999. Yes, he kept a lower profile in the 2000s, but I remember even as a kid/teen seeing articles and photos of him in the news. Bizarre.
Now the Berenstain Bears one, I understand. At the same time, I just chalk that up to spelling. For what reason would I need to know how to spell "Berenstain?"
Enough people that there's this effect named after this happening
Probably confusion with Steve Biko explains it.
US History doesn't like to focus on men like him
The Berenstein Bears one and the Fruit of the Loom not having a horn are the ones that have me questioning reality and my childhood.
There is a theory that the Fruit of the Loom one is actually a viral marketing thing. Like the company scrubbed it on purpose and is playing into it to build brand recognition.
I vaguely remember noticing the fruit of the loom logo change which makes it weirder for me
Same here. It had the cornucopia. Then it didn't. "weird" I thought. Then 5 to 10 years later I was reading the hunger games and needed to look up what a cornucopia actually was. "a horn usually containing fruit - oh - like the fruit of the loom logo" Then 2 years ago learning it never existed at all, and we all hallucinated it, there have even been paradies of it. It's fucking weird.
omg.... but..but.. I.. I remember the logo... changing.... oh god.
Berenstein is classic though.
I'm never sure if Castro is dead or not. I was sure for very long time that he died already but it would turn out that he's still there. I also don't remember any events specifically related to his death. His brother (?) took over and he kind of fizzled out before he died. Or maybe he's still there? I'm never quite sure. I mean, it's 2024 now, he's definitely dead. Or is he?
Castro lives eternally in the hearts of cool dudes everywhere.
He is since 2016, at least that’s what they want us to think.
There were probably a few things that contributed to the confusion. Hugo Chavez was very friendly with Castro and he died of cancer, before Fidel. Fidel was also super old, and his brother Raul took a more prominent role a few years before his death, so there was less visibility.
I remember there was an AskLemmy question on the Mandela effect, but a week later we all realized it was just a dream.
I'm contacting you from an alternate timeline to tell you that I'm still angry
Did your timeline manage to fuck up covid less? How do I immigrate? What stocks should I buy?
I'm sure it was called the mandala effect
You mean the Mengele effect?
Somehow I had always thought it was Klu Klux Klan instead of Ku Klux Klan. I'm not sure where I got that or if anyone else thought the same thing though.
similarly: some people say "visa versa"
That's an expecially bad one! (I knew a lawyer who said that lol)
The romans pronounced it "uike uersa" or "wike wersa" (two syllables for each word). The letter "c" was always a k-sound, and "v" was like our "u", it was the same letter for a long time. So another example, if you want to say "Veni vidi vici" the historically accurate way would be "Weni widi wiki".
I believe it's actually Clu Clu Land
I thought that until just now.
Glad to know I wasn't alone!
When i got into monster hunter 4 ultimate(the one with a good story) i was told that Deviljho, a voracious monster that will eat anything mid combat to recover its stamina, will eat its own tail if you cut it. Everyone believed it, no one tried to capture it on camera because of the hardware limitation(no "clip that", no shadowplay).
Turn out, millions of Monster Hunter fans remembered wrong because it's a hoax.
I fully believed that until a Reddit thread disproved it.
That gen 1 of Pokemon didn't have compound types (i.e. Pokemon with two types). In reality they did
I've never heard that before and find it baffling.
Bulbasaur comes out of the gate with two types.
Charmander becomes Charizard with two types.
The first (or second) non-starter you encounter is Pidgy with two types.
The required Viridian Forest had Weedle with two types and if you only got a Caterpie, that becomes Butterfree who also has two types.
The number of two type Pokemon that you can catch at the start of the game is massive. Probably about half?
I argued with my partner so hard about this.
Then we looked it up.
I was soooo wrong. And I was the one who got Blue and Red when they came out.
A witch turned me into a newt.
Glad you got better.
Maybe he didn't...
I get the "feeling" of a mandela effect far more frequently than i can solidly know for sure. I guess my first experience was decades ago as a child. I recall staring at a Bernstein bears book, and being oddly transfixed by tye fact that the spelling of the title did not match that of the authors name, literally inches apart on the same page. Later i experienced a schrodenbug or two (which i think is the same phenomenon), and one really solid social ME were a church ceased to exist (or got merged into a neighboring church). After the first few, now I fully admit I am WAY too quick to believe odd circumstance is a ME, and usually find myself reluctantly disproving that to myself with notebook/journal entries... only to later wonder how they might change too.
Wait isn't there a movie like this but it's Shaq as the genie. Kazaam.
Heh yup! That’s part of the effect, a whole generation potentially conflated Shaq’s movie with a movie that was never made. Scroll down the link I posted, they mention it. So bizarre.
None but I live in New Zealand and have met a lot of strange people online who think our geographic location has changed.
Like you’re not in the bottom right? Absurd!
I could have sworn Signs was a legitimately good movie when I saw it as a kid but I rewatched it recently and it’s absurdly bad. The acting is terrible and the cinematography is nonsensical. Roger Ebert gave it a full four stars. I’m convinced there’s a universe I grew up in where it was good and it’s the same one Ebert is from.
Eh. That's just part of growing up. I've read the Shanarra chronicles 3 times: as a teen, a 20s, and 30s. Each time I noticed different things and interpreted events differently.
M Night had the hand of Midas for a while and I think a lot of people were on the hype train. I also think the general audience has become more discerning, epic TV/streaming series mean a single movie needs to pack a punch.
I could've sworn sprite didn't have lime in it in Australia, yet I can find no evidence of it ever being made without lime
I just found out that you can't take someone's lead in order to behave like they are behaving, you can only follow their lead.
I thought that taking someone's lead, "I'm taking their lead", is an actual expression, while apparently it is not.
It may not be the original idiom, but it’s definitely something people say. If the core expressions are “(I) take the lead” and “(you) follow my lead,” that lends itself easily to a merge: you take my lead. It’s not as common as the originals but it’s definitely out there. It will stick around because it’s really easy to unambiguously infer what it means in context.
The last word on this whole thing is this series of videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVYNbe1fsUk
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=aVYNbe1fsUk
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yLA_ZK8HX6o
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=x6-HbM0Rezg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I had some Berenstain Bears books as a kid and I remember noting at the time "huh, weird name but okay". So like, I don't get why people think it was "Berenstein"? It looks wrong, but it's always looked wrong.
We knew the title and didn’t look that closely.
I could’ve sworn Jim Beam whiskey was Jim Bean. A friend of mine had a poster of a whiskey bottle on his wall that I stared at every time I was there. He was a minor at the time and didn’t drink, so I always wondered why he had it up. Years later I saw a Jim Beam bottle and had a Mandela moment. The Berenstein Bears and Mandela dying in jail were things I believed, too, but I think the whiskey one is one I haven’t heard from anybody else, yet.
I had to go look it up to double check you weren’t trying to pull a fast one; I was 100% sure it was Bean.
Here's one I just experienced, was watching Star Wars: A New Hope and my brother asked me if I remember C-3PO every having a silver leg. I told him no, hes always been all gold. Next scene we watched his right leg from the knee down was all silver. Like wtf never have I noticed that before, I said meh maybe it was a Lucas later edit. Revenge of the Sith comes on the TV next and C-3PO's leg is so vibrantly silver that I could not even comprehend not noticing that contrast in past viewings.
You just noticed 'cuz he told you, it's not noticible.
it's because we were watching it on 21" televisions from VHS
I only ever really noticed it in the desert scene after the escape pod, when he’s arguing with R2. It looks silver there, the rest of the time it looks gold. I think I probably assumed it was some video quality thing, either on my TV or that a lot of movies from that time period have weird quirky video. Like Logan’s Run was the year before Star Wars and if something gold sometimes looked silver, I wouldn’t really even notice, that’s just how a movie from the 70s looks.
For me its the the Yellow sign on the Standoff Map in Call of Duty Black Ops 2.
I genuinely remembered there were 5 main characters in the Little Einsteins cast, even though there were only 4.
I guess I was imagining random weirdness.
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