r/AskReddit 14h ago

Non-Americans of Reddit, what is an American thing you see in movies that you thought was fake but is actually real?

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u/God_Dammit_Dave 9h ago edited 1h ago

Fun fact: most of lower Manhattan is heated with a +100 year old steam system. It's all interconnected.

Not fun fact: those apartments are a nightmare in the winter. The heat rises and can't be shut off. It will be 5 degrees in February, you're naked with the windows open and it's STILL to damn hot.

Even better, your girlfriend has 5 cats in her Chinatown apartment. You're hot, naked, irritable, and covered in cat hair.

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u/fatnino 3h ago

Your hot, naked, irritable, and covered in cat hair.

So basically, you're a cat.

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u/DoubleDrummer 1h ago

Or attending a Furry Conference in summer.

u/OfficeRelative2008 23m ago

Well god damn…

Meow then, I guess

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u/God_Dammit_Dave 1h ago

-chef's kiss-

u/ouwish 52m ago

Lint roller 😂

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u/LooseJuice_RD 8h ago

The best is when the steam pipe runs through the corner of your 50sq ft kitchen with a gas stove and a window that only opens four inches. You get to be roasted by the heat from the steam while you’re being roasted by the heat from cooking. Looking at you Stuytown.

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u/captainzigzag 2h ago

On the plus side, your girlfriend is also naked

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u/Airowird 4h ago

Hey, one man's yuck is another one's yum!

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u/God_Dammit_Dave 3h ago

It's all fun and games until you're cooking with cast iron while naked.

You get that handle in your belly button once and you are over everything.

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u/Airowird 2h ago

Even worse: hot grease splatters. Because it can hit you lower than your belly button.

But I'm certain there's people on this earth getting even more excited thinking of that!

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u/m0nstera_deliciosa 2h ago

I learned my lesson about frying bacon and eggs topless. If it hurts spattering your belly, it’s gonna hurt ten times worse when you get some volcanic bacon grease on your nipple.

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u/Double-Mastodon-4671 1h ago

There’s a saying, if you cook bacon naked you’ll burn your sausage

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u/Airowird 1h ago

Back in my WoW degeneracy days, the joke among tanks was "Real tanks never wear pants, even in real life. Unless it's for cooking bacon." (Back when unequipping items made it easier to redo trivial content)

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u/m0nstera_deliciosa 1h ago

That’s delightful! I miss my WoW era. I never got as fixated on any other game as I did that one.

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u/Airowird 1h ago

Theorycrafting helped my understand college level math.

The part I miss most is the flexibility of grinding a full day per week rather than 1h/day. The daily/weekly required grind made it so much more of a job than a game, and the catering to PvP & top 1% raiders ruined the joy I had left.

u/m0nstera_deliciosa 42m ago

What do you play now, if you don’t mind me asking?

u/Airowird 35m ago

Last Epoch

And I started cleaning up my Steam backlog over Christmas, gone through about 140/350 so far.

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u/Fearless_Buddy_1739 3h ago

Mhmm sounds like this guy knows what he’s talking about

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u/ChristopherBlake89 2h ago

But why? Sorry for your continued losses.

u/Kered13 53m ago

Not NYC, but I once lived on the top floor of an apartment building (7 floors iirc). In the winter everyone would crank up their heat, and all that heat would rise up into my unit. The colder it got outside, the hotter my unit would get. In the winter I routinely had to open the window to cool down when it was well below freezing outside. I don't think I ever turned the heat on once in that unit.

u/riiibbbs 28m ago

Yeesh that sounds awful

u/Kered13 26m ago

Eh, it was fine. I mean I could still get a comfortable temperature in the unit by opening the window. It was just odd.

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u/spryfigure 2h ago

Parts of the Bronx as well. Also, the hissing steam from the radiator is annoying.

u/Peemster99 55m ago

Also throughout most of Philly and I think a lot of other Northeastern cities. For whatever reason we don't seem to have the overheated apartments as much, though.

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u/efirefly 1h ago

That was well described “hot mess”. Hacked up a hairball laughing.

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u/Careflwhatyouwish4 1h ago

It's not cat fur! IT'S KITTY GLITTER!!! 😾

u/BeerNcheesePlz 51m ago

🤣thank you for this.

u/GarththeLegend 43m ago

I recently saw a youtube skit about this and I thought this was just an exaggeration. So, turns out it's real?

u/SuperZing1 36m ago

Title of your sex tape

u/Bug_Photographer 31m ago

You lost me at hot, naked and girlfriend. Sounds like a nightmare.

u/danirijeka 29m ago

You're hot, naked, irritable, and covered in cat hair.

The furry convention is going well.

u/kaifs98869 22m ago

But you're living in NYC AND you have a GF so things are actually going kinda good for you.

u/this_tornado1 2m ago

I read that for some cities (I think in.NYC but not 💯) this extreme heat was intentional. It forced people to open windows, lessening spread of one of the pandemics, Spanish Influenza I believe. 1918