I am very intrigued by hidden talents that make themselves known only when they suddenly become useful under very specific circumstances. I worked on a vegetable breeding farm for eight years, and...
I am very intrigued by hidden talents that make themselves known only when they suddenly become useful under very specific circumstances.
I worked on a vegetable breeding farm for eight years, and there were so many odd jobs that you discover a lot of hidden talents (as well as whatever you would call the opposite of a talent) in yourself and your coworkers. Your team ends up specializing around your different abilities, reinforcing them, and so everyone ends up having a motley set of job roles with seemingly no logical connection between them.
For example, I discovered that I am extremely good at spotting weeds in crops and unsurpassed at tying and untying knots quickly. I had a coworker who could reliably snatch flying insects out of the air without hurting them, a coworker who could could conjure an extra flower's worth of pollen out of every flower and get twice as much as anyone else, a coworker who could magically anticipate every tool or item that anyone needed and have it ready for them before they realized it themselves, etc.
This, to me, is one of the great pleasures of working closely together with a small team over a long period of time. You gradually slot together like puzzle pieces and become irreplaceable to each other.
Oh I love tiny hidden talents!! Being able to find weeds would be my take from the bunch!! Is picking out insects live useful? For pollination? What did you find out you have absolutely no...
Oh I love tiny hidden talents!! Being able to find weeds would be my take from the bunch!! Is picking out insects live useful? For pollination? What did you find out you have absolutely no aptitude for? Were you able to power through and become slightly less terrible at them ?
Yes, for us, catching insects was useful because we did studies on pollinators and on pest predators. Most of us had to wait for them to land and then go at them with a bug net, but this one team...
Yes, for us, catching insects was useful because we did studies on pollinators and on pest predators. Most of us had to wait for them to land and then go at them with a bug net, but this one team member could just pick them out of the air and therefore had a drastically higher catch rate than the rest of us. (Whenever the rest of us tried it, we failed miserably, and she had no idea how she did it and couldn't give us pointers.)
There are plenty of things I discovered I'm bad at! For example, I'm bad at threshing seeds and at chopping weeds out with a hoe, and I basically can't do any repetitive task without getting myself completely covered in water/dirt/manure/tomato goo/lettuce seed fluff/whatever material is around me.
Frustratingly, sometimes my skills and my anti-skills were in closely coupled tasks, making me just so-so at the activity. For example, I have mixed abilities at manual pollination: I am good at emasculating (removing the male parts of the flower) but bad at applying the pollen, and so I was just an OK pollinator.
These are definitely things that I improved on with practice, but that often involved experimenting with alternative techniques or strategies. You'd think the best way to do a given task is to copy the person who's best it it, but that's often not the case (e.g., if we all tried to catch insects out of the air, we never would have caught anything).
I wish I could retain knots, it's such a useful skill. There are 2 from my childhood I know well, but beyond them, whenever I teach myself a new knot for some purpose, it feels like the moment I...
I wish I could retain knots, it's such a useful skill. There are 2 from my childhood I know well, but beyond them, whenever I teach myself a new knot for some purpose, it feels like the moment I stop using it I forget it.
Oh, I wish I could retain knots, too! I'm all short-term memory and no long-term memory (not just for knots, but for all skills). I can tie and untie them quickly, but I have to brush up on the...
Oh, I wish I could retain knots, too! I'm all short-term memory and no long-term memory (not just for knots, but for all skills). I can tie and untie them quickly, but I have to brush up on the steps if I haven't done a given knot in a while, unless it's an extremely simple one.
For example, my supervisor showed me how to tie a trucker's hitch — a knot he knew extremely well because he'd been using it regularly since he was a little kid growing up on a farm — and then I was almost immediately able to tie it and untie it far faster than him despite no prior experience. But that is definitely not one I'll be memorizing longterm!
These days, I think it's much more important to learn the names of knots and when to use them than it is to memorize the knot itself.
https://www.animatedknots.com/surgical-tie-knot-one-hand-technique You do actually use two hands, but the movement is with one hand and it’s a lot faster
Cats! I know that's really common but that's what I've got. I grew up not understanding people and therefore made very little friends. I then spent a lot of time as a kid making friends with...
Cats!
I know that's really common but that's what I've got.
I grew up not understanding people and therefore made very little friends. I then spent a lot of time as a kid making friends with street cats around my area. I didn't have money so I didn't think to bribe them with food. A lot of it consisted of just sitting there persistently until we became friends.
My parents did eventually let me adopt cats and I had a few with various background circumstances.
But anyway, I got much older, have dealt with many cats that came into my life by then, have my own income and more space.
My friend who works with animals one day asked me if I could help foster a cat. He was a problematic cat with ptsd and wasn't getting any better around other cats so they couldn't send him to their regular fosterers. And anyone who can handle cats would have their own at home.
This happened during a time in my life where I didn't have a cat of my own so it was a good fit.
So I took him in and read many books on how to handle difficult and traumatised cats and tried hard to gain his trust and make him comfortable.
It worked out in the end, he got comfortable enough and was adopted. He now lies belly up in the sun a lot.
Since then, my friend would ask me to help foster difficult cats other people can't handle since I only take in one cat at a time.
So I say I'm quite good with cats. I'm no cat whisperer but I can handle them well enough.
I am also allergic to cats. But I love them so much anyway that we fostered a whole bunch when my spouse's childhood cats died at 20. I tried the injection thing but kinda skeptical about how much...
I am also allergic to cats. But I love them so much anyway that we fostered a whole bunch when my spouse's childhood cats died at 20.
I tried the injection thing but kinda skeptical about how much that really worked. It didn't feel like i got less itchy, red eyed, runny nosed, nor less wheezy even after the entire round.
What finally worked was happening upon a kitten I didn't react to. I continue to react a little to friends' cats and cats in the wild and cats at the shelter. But I can glomp and bury my face in and huff my cat's tummy and flank without issue. I can't explain it.
I've learned (through various forms of autistic stimming probably) to whistle in a great many ways. The standard whistle, the tongue whistle, the lower-lip/upper/teeth bird whistle, the two-handed...
I've learned (through various forms of autistic stimming probably) to whistle in a great many ways.
The standard whistle, the tongue whistle, the lower-lip/upper/teeth bird whistle, the two-handed hollow-fist whistle (across the thumb hole), I can whistle with any two fingers, and others I'm sure. etc etc. shrug
edit - forgot a couple: i can whistle like a police car, and dripping water too
edit edit - i can make whistling with both pinkies extremely loud (sounds/feels like that 'clipping' sound when a sound is really loud, like it cuts in and out several times a second, like a fast LFO?)
How funny, I was just recently discussing with my wife and friends how weird it is to me that no one whistles. I never hear anyone do it, but I do it all the time. My wife pegged a few years ago...
How funny, I was just recently discussing with my wife and friends how weird it is to me that no one whistles. I never hear anyone do it, but I do it all the time. My wife pegged a few years ago that I use it instinctively to regulate my nervous system when I'm stressed or depressed, generally to sooth any bad time. It started when I learned I could combined humming deep in my chest with a whistle, making a very vibrating whistle that sounds like it has an effect on it.
"Whistling in the dark"? What's funny is that I also have a vibrating sort of whistle that I can do, but it comes more from the tongue. I normally can't roll my R's when speaking, but I can do...
What's funny is that I also have a vibrating sort of whistle that I can do, but it comes more from the tongue. I normally can't roll my R's when speaking, but I can do something like it to modulate a whistle.
I tend to whistle when happy/relaxed/calm. Some people sing or hum in the shower; I whistle.
I whistle often when I'm alone. I can whistle any melody within my range, though I can only do the one type of whistle - with my lips, no teeth, tongue or fingers involved. I can do the...
I whistle often when I'm alone. I can whistle any melody within my range, though I can only do the one type of whistle - with my lips, no teeth, tongue or fingers involved. I can do the whistle+humming if necessary.
I have read that it's fairly common for people to lack a muscle that is required to make the rolling R sound. I have taken that to mean that it's the languages that use them that are wrong, not me. :P
I have read that it's fairly common for people to lack a muscle that is required to make the rolling R sound.
I have taken that to mean that it's the languages that use them that are wrong, not me. :P
Pro tip: if you're in a region where people don't know the difference (e.g. most of the US), you can fake it convincingly with the much easier Japanese R sound.
Pro tip: if you're in a region where people don't know the difference (e.g. most of the US), you can fake it convincingly with the much easier Japanese R sound.
Not to brag, but I can alternate back and forth between them smoothly, keeping tone and timbre. I use it to whistle tunes without audible breathing for long smooth periods of time. I guess that...
Not to brag, but I can alternate back and forth between them smoothly, keeping tone and timbre. I use it to whistle tunes without audible breathing for long smooth periods of time. I guess that would be my skill!
Oh hey, I relate to this! I can also whistle across my molars, which if I’m concentrating, I can get two different tones, but can’t get them to be very far apart (I can’t quite get two tones/notes...
Oh hey, I relate to this! I can also whistle across my molars, which if I’m concentrating, I can get two different tones, but can’t get them to be very far apart (I can’t quite get two tones/notes separation)
At least three therapists have told me I'm very insightful and introspective, about myself. That I have a sort of clarity and objectivity that they don't usually find in people in general , and...
At least three therapists have told me I'm very insightful and introspective, about myself. That I have a sort of clarity and objectivity that they don't usually find in people in general , and their clients in particular. This is also something many of my friends have said as well.
I guess it's served me well in a few areas of life. A number of times, when I rub up against something that doesn't make sense about my own attitude or feelings, I do a bit of a dive inwards to figure out what the incongruities are. Sometimes I needed to really do an about face about a deeply held belief and it sucks, but it would suck more to go on living with that sort of hazy dissonance.
I'm curious what you'd credit this to? It's not a thing most people come to naturally, as it's quite literally the opposite of intuitive. For me, to the limited extent that I practice this, I...
I'm curious what you'd credit this to? It's not a thing most people come to naturally, as it's quite literally the opposite of intuitive.
For me, to the limited extent that I practice this, I fully credit a span of years where I indulged in the sort of recreational activities that make one hungry and paranoid. When the latter portion was bad, I found myself jumping at small noises, or fabricating anxious fictions about stuff going on around me. I had to stop and think - is this likely? Is it something I would seriously consider in a normal mental state?
Eventually, that habit made itself useful elsewhere. I'm curious if there was a formative event earlier on in your life that made you question your intuitive conclusions similarly, even if the inciting event was not quite as fragrant.
That's a very good question, I'll have to think about it for a bit. I don't come from an academic type family, more of a "gotta survive" type where no one has time for deep talks kinda place, so...
That's a very good question, I'll have to think about it for a bit. I don't come from an academic type family, more of a "gotta survive" type where no one has time for deep talks kinda place, so it's not something nurtures generationally..,.
I’d consider myself similar. I think it at least partly comes from self-protection, and maybe another part from trying to figure out why I struggled to make friends. Learning how to control...
I’d consider myself similar. I think it at least partly comes from self-protection, and maybe another part from trying to figure out why I struggled to make friends. Learning how to control certain parts of myself and emulate other parts based on observations from peers, media, etc. Ultimately probably a deep-rooted desire to be a different person because I felt like there were root truths about myself which were wrong. I still struggle with accepting myself, and also getting in touch with my real emotions. I can do a very good job of “root cause analysis” on what makes me tick, but I’ve spent my entire life building a wall around feelings.
Oof, this resonated: When I was in a bit of a crisis, I couldn't feel terrible, but I knew that someone in my circumstances would probably be having a quite terrible time. With others, I was able...
Oof, this resonated:
I can do a very good job of “root cause analysis” on what makes me tick, but I’ve spent my entire life building a wall around feelings.
When I was in a bit of a crisis, I couldn't feel terrible, but I knew that someone in my circumstances would probably be having a quite terrible time. With others, I was able to talk through all the circumstances and factors, internal and external, real vs anticipated, and I could imagine alternatives and extenuating circumstance for all.....but I was too busy dealing with it all to actively feel terrible. "Deal don't feel" wasn't a conscious mantra, its just the default state because I just didn't have the time. This is super handy for toughing things out and getting s**t done mid crisis but really not ideal for long term. Cough dissociation cough
Watching movies help. Crying over someone else on screen helps.
I've been giving this some thought. I know it's been a few days, so if you've forgotten or lost interest that's totally normal, but thank you for giving me the chance to think about this....
Exemplary
I've been giving this some thought. I know it's been a few days, so if you've forgotten or lost interest that's totally normal, but thank you for giving me the chance to think about this. Extremely long wall of text follows.
I think perhaps I had (1) some unique circumstances growing up, plus (2) a particularly poignant inciting event that at least started me along a path where I spend time thinking deeply about myself and the nature of how one forms judgement/opinion of self/others.
(1) I grew up in poorer parts of Hong Kong in the 80s, where learning disabilities wasn't a thing, but hitting and publicly humiliating children sure were. No one knew I had ADHD; I was just labelled as a lazy, arrogant and deliberately defiant little girl. My first grade teacher printed, in big red letters, **屢勸不改**（incorrigible) in my permanent records report card. Her assessment was shared with my mom, and all of her colleagues, so that in subsequent years they'd all already know what to think of me before first day of class. She was one of the good ones. No matter how much they publicly humiliated me day after day, or how much they wood/metal-ruler'd my hand, I would still be missing some/most of the many worksheets or assignments or forget a book or lack a signature or lost stationary or *something*. No threats, no bribes, no heartfelt talks, no punishment was able coax the work from me that even the dumbest (they were ruthlessly elitist) kids could turn in. And probably the most maddening part to them was that I would test really well. Which means it can only be bad attitude and lack of moral character: I must be deliberately doing this *to them*.
On my 10th birthday, my family moved to Canada.
Suddenly, I was just a child who forgot a worksheet. That's okay, here, we've got extras. Oh my, you're able to fill it in really quickly! You must have worked very hard on this last night already. You forgot your ruler? That's okay, here, take one of the classroom ones. Book is missing? That's okay, bring it back in when you find it. To my utter amazement and bewilderment, I am told that in a matter of months, I've turned into a brilliant young girl who evidently works very hard, and was very well liked by the teachers.
Ten year old me had no explanation for the abrupt transmutation of what I was told was my static, immutable, permanent essence of what I am.
(2) Our elementary school has a 4 night 3 day summer camp to celebrate the graduating grade schoolers at the end of May. It would be the most anticipated event of our entire school careers, and many of the year's study has some aspect which tie in with camp. My sister went, and had the most wonderful time. My friends and I had talked endlessly about Camp all summer before our last year even started. Then my parents dropped a bombshell: I wasn't allowed to go.
Why? Because I'm not mature enough, they said. What? But Sister got to go! Yeah, because she's responsible, you're not.
This went on for the entire school year. My parents insisted no they were not going to give me permission, and that that was their final word. No deals, no promises, no amount of tantrums and tears and begging and attempts to reason worked: no was no. The sheer amount of time that this went, the unfairness of it all, and most of all, the fact that they laid 100% of the responsibility on their judgement upon my person was, and remains, deeply traumatic. I'll spare you the next 1000 word analysis of how much this event sucked lol. The end of it was that in mid May, a particularly gutsy teacher signed a document saying she'd be held responsible for anything that happened to me, and then I was extremely grudgingly allowed to go. My life would have taken a very... much darker turn were it not for this teacher.
Anyways, these events started me thinking a lot about internal identity vs external evaluation. When are adults wrong vs right? How can one tell when authoritative assessments are wrong? If people change and become better with hard work because they're good people, does it mean those who cannot shake it must therefore be bad people? What drives people to dig in and death grip a belief they cannot even articulate or logically debate? Adults have had wildly different assessments of what they all claim were my true, core, immutable quality and abilities as a person: what version of "me" is real? How do I reconcile loving parents who obviously care *so* much with people doing things they must know was causing me immense pain? (Adult me: it was fear. they were paralyzed by fear.)
So yeah those were the big two. And then a bunch of obvious everybody stuff like teenage crushes/romance, friend group dramas, playing arm chair therapist with friends' romance and drama, literature and media etc. I'm a big introvert and has a huge ego, so what's more fun than spending quality time dissecting and polishing every facet of me ? :) maybe I just got a bit of a head start with the whole "dude, who am I". I was 10 and it was deep.
Thank you very much for thinking it over, and for taking the time to write this up! It makes me think of the figurative use of the term "perspective", and how apt it is that we characterize...
Thank you very much for thinking it over, and for taking the time to write this up! It makes me think of the figurative use of the term "perspective", and how apt it is that we characterize epiphanies as coming after a view from a new angle. I think that it is always traumatic to be forced to confront and abandon something we hold true as a premise, because it leaves you with one less fixed point in your life, and one more uncertainty.
Nevertheless, without the experience of losing a premise that defines you, it is likely difficult to ever approach the idea of your definition as a reasoned, concrete thing instead of something blindly reflexive. Recognizing that the set of information others use to form an opinion of you is arbitrary and limited is something that most people don't learn until they're much older, if they learn it at all; recognizing that you operate in a similar, albeit more informed, fashion when assessing yourself is really not comfortable.
Thank you again for taking the time to write this up, it was an interesting and thought-provoking read.
This also very apparent in your interactions here on Tildes.
At least three therapists have told me I'm very insightful and introspective, about myself. That I have a sort of clarity and objectivity that they don't usually find in people in general
This also very apparent in your interactions here on Tildes.
Oh gosh *blush. I only wish I were a fraction as insightful about things other than myself though haha, which should also be apparent from my interactions on Tildes
Oh gosh *blush. I only wish I were a fraction as insightful about things other than myself though haha, which should also be apparent from my interactions on Tildes
I attribute a ton of my personal success to the fact that my family situation (personalities, ways of communicating) has led me to be very very good at both understanding what people mean, and...
I attribute a ton of my personal success to the fact that my family situation (personalities, ways of communicating) has led me to be very very good at both understanding what people mean, and converting what they say into a framework that someone else can understand in an efficient manner.
Technically I code and present data, but mostly I convert English to English from different vantage points.
You sound exactly like me, ha. I’m a data engineer and work on reporting and half my job is explaining data to non engineers and explaining business and customer needs to engineers. Outside of...
You sound exactly like me, ha. I’m a data engineer and work on reporting and half my job is explaining data to non engineers and explaining business and customer needs to engineers.
Outside of work, I seem to almost always know what someone means and their tone, emotion, etc. TBH it’s sometimes a curse since if two friends get into a misunderstanding, I get annoyed that I know what’s going on, but it isn’t always the best time to interject or just makes me look like a know it all bitch.
I'm betting I'm in the top 0.01% of humans that can remove a bra from someone else on the first try, I have no backup for this assertion. I can only remove a bra one-handed, but have a 99.999%...
I'm betting I'm in the top 0.01% of humans that can remove a bra from someone else on the first try, I have no backup for this assertion.
I can only remove a bra one-handed, but have a 99.999% success rate on the first try even with 4 clasps. This is an exremely niche skill, only useful to my wife whom taught it to me.
This feels like a curse one of the Greek gods would put on a mortal. "You will be able to effortlessly remove bras, and you will be happily married to one woman."
This feels like a curse one of the Greek gods would put on a mortal. "You will be able to effortlessly remove bras, and you will be happily married to one woman."
I love these. Some of not as useless as the blogger thinks, or at least not written specifically to be so. In-flight fight can do special effects mid-flight; snow-fake can for reals solve global...
I love these. Some of not as useless as the blogger thinks, or at least not written specifically to be so. In-flight fight can do special effects mid-flight; snow-fake can for reals solve global climate change unless there's a hard limit on the amount of flakes he can fake; heal-punch is obviously great as a cleric etc.
My personal one: being able to pull out exactly one moist tissue from any pocket you put your hand into, limit once a day.
Hey, me too! It’s something about the pinching motion! And it’s much more confusing when both my hands get involved! Very rarely I’ll do it to my wife through her clothing if I’m feeling mischievous.
Hey, me too! It’s something about the pinching motion! And it’s much more confusing when both my hands get involved! Very rarely I’ll do it to my wife through her clothing if I’m feeling mischievous.
I'm good at giving speeches. I've always been outgoing and charismatic, so that definitely helps, but I'm also a very empathetic storyteller. Make me the best man at your wedding and I guarantee...
I'm good at giving speeches. I've always been outgoing and charismatic, so that definitely helps, but I'm also a very empathetic storyteller. Make me the best man at your wedding and I guarantee there won't be a dry eye in the room.
Have you got any tips you think work well for you for those of us who aren’t as good at speeches? As a follow up, how do you know it’s going well? I sometimes assume everyone is bored or cross...
Have you got any tips you think work well for you for those of us who aren’t as good at speeches?
As a follow up, how do you know it’s going well? I sometimes assume everyone is bored or cross with me, to find out later it was well received, but it drove a lot of anxiety in the moment!
I'm not @BashCrandiboot, but I've also been told that I'm good at speeches, and one time I wrote down some specific instructions for giving Best Man speeches. They could be generalized. On Speeches.
I'm not @BashCrandiboot, but I've also been told that I'm good at speeches, and one time I wrote down some specific instructions for giving Best Man speeches. They could be generalized.
I am pretty damn good at flying small model helicopters. I doubt this will ever be useful, but specifically small scale collective pitch six channel helis. Some people make a career with model...
I am pretty damn good at flying small model helicopters. I doubt this will ever be useful, but specifically small scale collective pitch six channel helis.
Some people make a career with model aviation via crop surveillance or photography. All that stuff is easy to fly though, because they're gyroacopically stabilized and PID loops tuned tighter than a tympany keep the thing butter smooth all the time.
The helis I learned to fly with aren't like that. Just hovering in place is like trying to balance an inverted pendulum. It's much closer to how full scale helis control, but with collective pitch helis more size gives you more stability. I got really in to the smallest rc models (for price reasons really) and got used to how twitchy they are. Bigger models feel unresponsive.
I'd love to fly a real helicopter one day, but probably I'll not ever do anything with this skill.
Edit: I just reread the OP and realized that what I typed isn't really what was asked for. Sorry about that.
FPV drones are being used more in movies. Kinda similar to helicopters. That opening scene in Red Notice was filmed by one of the FPV racing world champions I think. They are also starting to be...
FPV drones are being used more in movies. Kinda similar to helicopters. That opening scene in Red Notice was filmed by one of the FPV racing world champions I think.
They are also starting to be used in Vietnam for planting crops and pesticide/fertilizer application (but like you said, mostly pre-programmed paths + gyro mode, so not as fun).
I had a neighbor who flew helis like that. I was a teenager and desperately wanted to try it. So he brought out his 'practice helicopter' basically a round board about 6" around with a vertical...
I had a neighbor who flew helis like that. I was a teenager and desperately wanted to try it. So he brought out his 'practice helicopter' basically a round board about 6" around with a vertical handle attached to the bottom. He put a heavy metal ball in the middle of the board and said, 'now just keep the ball in the middle of the board as you walk forward at a regular pace for 10 steps cause thats what flying a helicopter is like' I dont think I ever made it past 3 steps before the ball would go one way, then the other and Id overcompensate and it would shoot off the side.
Never did get to touch his radio controlled models nor did I ask after that.
That's a really clever way to train the skill! It's truly hard at first, but the learning curve is steep and it kinda all clicks at once. The real issue is thay when you crash, and you will,...
That's a really clever way to train the skill! It's truly hard at first, but the learning curve is steep and it kinda all clicks at once. The real issue is thay when you crash, and you will, they're also insanely hard to repair. The saving grace of small helis is their lower momentum means most crashes don't result in damage as long as you kill power as soon as you realize you're out of control.
If you're still interested, there are affordable small options now that also have the option to go into a gyro stabilized mode. I forget exactly the model name, but it was made by wltoys. V970 or something.
I can drive stick shift cars. Not very unusual (although quite uncommon nowadays). I can drive stick shift cars in San Francisco. For those of you who haven’t been there, San Francisco has some...
I can drive stick shift cars. Not very unusual (although quite uncommon nowadays). I can drive stick shift cars in San Francisco. For those of you who haven’t been there, San Francisco has some extremely steep streets. Here is an image to help show how steep these streets are. That isn’t even the unusual part. Here is the unusual bit: I enjoy driving stick shift in San Francisco. I will even go out of my way to drive the steep streets. I know a handful of people who are stick shift aficionados. Not a single one I have ever met likes driving in San Francisco.
I can relate to liking the stick shift driving too. My first car was stick shift, and while automatick shifting is very nice and very convinient manual shifting gives you more feeling of the...
I can relate to liking the stick shift driving too. My first car was stick shift, and while automatick shifting is very nice and very convinient manual shifting gives you more feeling of the control over vehicle.
I'm very curious, as someone who's experienced with hills.. is using the hand break a must for you when starting from stop up a hill, or are you able to give it a good amount of gas to get going?...
I'm very curious, as someone who's experienced with hills.. is using the hand break a must for you when starting from stop up a hill, or are you able to give it a good amount of gas to get going?
I live in a relatively flat area, so hand break starts is something I figured out more as a novelty than a hard need, and I've never had to put it to a test to find out if it's a must or not.
Honestly it depends on a way how you learned it. I practically never used hand breaks during stop/starts on the hills (if stop is quite short of course, no parking), but I have friends that use...
Honestly it depends on a way how you learned it. I practically never used hand breaks during stop/starts on the hills (if stop is quite short of course, no parking), but I have friends that use hand brakes most of the time.
Also a lot of it just comes down to personal preference and whatever feels best to you. I was taught by my grandfather (and then had to relearn it ten years later when I actually got a stick shift...
Also a lot of it just comes down to personal preference and whatever feels best to you. I was taught by my grandfather (and then had to relearn it ten years later when I actually got a stick shift car) and it was a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly what felt comfortable to me personally. There aren't too many hills by where I live, so the few times I would have to go up/down one I experimented with different ways of starting and stopping to see which felt more natural to me.
I only use it if the person who stops behind me is really close. Or if I’m in the Denver metro. If I was taught handbrake, I think I’d use it more often. But I wasn’t taught that way. I was taught...
I only use it if the person who stops behind me is really close. Or if I’m in the Denver metro.
If I was taught handbrake, I think I’d use it more often.
But I wasn’t taught that way. I was taught how to shift into 1st at the bottom of a steep driveway and “passed” when I could get us moving smoothly and park in the garage.
On the hills in San Francisco it’s pretty much required. Either a handbrake start, your car having hill hold, or something like heel toe shifting to keep some break while giving gas. Another fun...
On the hills in San Francisco it’s pretty much required. Either a handbrake start, your car having hill hold, or something like heel toe shifting to keep some break while giving gas. Another fun part in SF is pretty much every single other driver doesn’t think about the possibility of rolling backwards on a hill start, so they stop right behind your back bumper and there is no margin for error. If you don’t have much experience, it makes the whole situation much more stressful.
Particularly steep vehicles are fun. You yank the hand brake on hard, you release the foot brake, and you start rolling back as the hill gradually overpowers the handbrake. This is a unique...
Particularly steep vehicles are fun. You yank the hand brake on hard, you release the foot brake, and you start rolling back as the hill gradually overpowers the handbrake.
This is a unique experience in the US, but is not unique to the rest of the world. Wellington in New Zealand is famously hilly, and stick shifts/ manual cars are very common there.
As someone that comes from a country where automatic is only becoming common in very recent years due to financial incentives from the dealerships/government (more efficient use of engines and RPM...
As someone that comes from a country where automatic is only becoming common in very recent years due to financial incentives from the dealerships/government (more efficient use of engines and RPM across the entire driving population I've been told), it becomes second nature to guage when the clutch starts "grabbing" onto the gears.
That contact between the gears inside the engine/the gear plates (no idea what these pieces are called in English) keeps the wheels from turning when on a hill. Also guaging how much of a grab it has, you don't always want to start moving immediately when starting to release the brakes either.
On steep hills like this, as someone used to manual gears, I even find it incomfortable with hill hold functions in cars I am not used to, let alone automatic gears. With manual I can feel exactly when and how much of a hold I have through the clutch and gears. Meaning I have full understanding over when I'll start moving.
Hill holds or automatic gears will have different amounts of rolling before they grab on, or different amount of times before they release the hold, making it hard to manually adjust my input.
I remember driving a borrowed micro car once that even had me almost crashing into my garage in front of me. Was a downward incline towards my garage, and had parked in front of it. Needed to back up a bit before being able to turn around in the driveway. It took so long for the automatic gear to kick in that the car just started rolling forwards, almost crashed into the door in front of me before it "took" and the car started reversing. Braking just reset the entire process.
I just could not get a feel for the gas to brake ratio on that otherwise very nifty little thing.
Manual driving is fun because it's a challenge. Looks like San Fran is roughly the same steepness as the cul-de-sac for my childhood home in PA. Had a lot of fun doing that in snow and sleet,...
Manual driving is fun because it's a challenge. Looks like San Fran is roughly the same steepness as the cul-de-sac for my childhood home in PA. Had a lot of fun doing that in snow and sleet, especially on the way down where there was a T intersection at the bottom ramping off with a 10ft drop if you didn't stop in time.
I do generally dislike heavy stop and go with a stick though. It's what taught me my cruising strategy, because I'd rather poke along forever at 5 mph than alternating between 30 and 0.
Nice! I only drove stick in the snow once. I had almost no snow driving experience then so I was taking it pretty easy. I wish I was able to get a stick on my last car purchase, but they were so...
Nice! I only drove stick in the snow once. I had almost no snow driving experience then so I was taking it pretty easy. I wish I was able to get a stick on my last car purchase, but they were so hard to find and just getting harder now.
I feel like I want it to. Like there's a Chinese EV that has fake shifting (Ionic 6?) with paddle shifters and it does mostly sound like a gimmick. But thinking about it the thing I like about...
I feel like I want it to. Like there's a Chinese EV that has fake shifting (Ionic 6?) with paddle shifters and it does mostly sound like a gimmick.
But thinking about it the thing I like about manuals is being able to pre-select how much power I want X amount of throttle to have, how much engine braking, etc. I don't know if faking a manual is the way to do that in an EV but some more intuitive way to dynamically choose "sport/eco/hill-climb mode" or flip between regen braking modes or something would at least be an interesting thing to explore.
I am a huge fan of manual transmissions, and won't buy an automatic. When I bought a Tacoma for a work truck, I flew to Oregon to pick up a manual and drove it back to Los Angeles because they...
I am a huge fan of manual transmissions, and won't buy an automatic. When I bought a Tacoma for a work truck, I flew to Oregon to pick up a manual and drove it back to Los Angeles because they don't sell manual Tacoma's in California.
But with an EV, it basically is a manual. Because there is only one gear, the motor is connected directly to the wheels. You don't have the mushy feel of a torque converter or the random timing of a hydraulic actuated shifter.
The question of power/"engine" braking is all a matter of software.
The way it works on my EV(Kia EV6) is there are paddles behind the steering wheel, the left one makes it "feel" like you are in a lower gear and the right one, a higher gear. There are 4 levels. Basically it just makes the vehicle use regenerative braking more aggressively at each level. I.think it also makes acceleration more responsive but it's not that noticeable. In the max level it is a one pedal mode where you can come to a complete stop by just lifting off the acceleration pedal.
I drive in max level almost always unless I'm in cruise control. It's great, it basically feels like being at peak high rpm all the time, without using a clutch or shifting. And it's not hard on the engine or your gas milage!
You can take your foot off the pedal right before a 20mph curve and it will shift weight hard on to the front wheels, then be ready to deliver full power the instant you step on it. Then you can do the exact same thing on the next curve without shifting, even if it is a 50mph curve. The whole thing feels really smooth, responsive, and tight. It's honestly more fun to drive than any manual sports car I've driven.
You just reminded me of when my father taught me how to drive, and made me hill start, in winter, on a street so steep it later became a one-way street (you can only drive downwards). It was an...
You just reminded me of when my father taught me how to drive, and made me hill start, in winter, on a street so steep it later became a one-way street (you can only drive downwards). It was an old VW Caravelle that I actually accidentally managed to hill start in third gear (which is absurd).
My car is manual because it's old, and automatics didn't really become standard until around ten years ago where I live. You just made me realize if I ever have kids, I'm definitely going to be milking the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow angle of learning how to drive.
Ive gotten very good at judging people's character, specifically in choosing renters for my units. After nearly 40 years Ive developed a good system for vetting - asking questions, interviewing,...
Ive gotten very good at judging people's character, specifically in choosing renters for my units. After nearly 40 years Ive developed a good system for vetting - asking questions, interviewing, watching for clues, noting red flags and finally discerning who would be a low risk, highly dependable tenant and who would not. Its definitely a honed skill and the one thing that separates happy landlords with those who picked wrong and end up in a chaotic situation after which they vow to sell their rental and get out of the business. Vetting tenants well IS the key.
I wouldn't say I'm uniquely skilled at anything but I have a variety of little skills and interests that I don't use professionally and don't make me any money. Some examples: I'm very good at...
I wouldn't say I'm uniquely skilled at anything but I have a variety of little skills and interests that I don't use professionally and don't make me any money. Some examples:
I'm very good at memorizing melodies; I can learn songs with high accuracy with comparatively little effort and remember voices for a while too (not so good at imitating them, but I can replay them in my head. I'm my own music library.)
I'm really good at judging equivalent volumes for some reason, which is great for finding containers for storing leftovers in the fridge ;)
I remember all of those relevant xkcds.
I'm really good at perceiving the flow in a good Beat Saber level, and I believe the limitations of my fleshy body (and possibly my plasticky hardware) are the main reasons I'll never be a world class player. Possibly related, I'm a really good driver and thanks to my reaction speed have in the past avoided collisions in seemingly miraculous ways (though I hate driving).
The first one being about music and sounds had me primed for seeing that second one as “volume=loudness” and was wondering if it was like “perfect pitch but for loudness”... so like, perfect...
I'm very good at memorizing melodies
I'm really good at judging equivalent volumes
The first one being about music and sounds had me primed for seeing that second one as “volume=loudness” and was wondering if it was like “perfect pitch but for loudness”... so like, perfect amplitude?
Are you also quite good at picking out one instrument from a piece of music? :) always been envious of folks with perfect pitch. Having your own ad free, battery indepent and DRM free music...
Are you also quite good at picking out one instrument from a piece of music?
:) always been envious of folks with perfect pitch. Having your own ad free, battery indepent and DRM free music library sounds fantastic.
Got me into progressive rock because my brain plays music pretty much all day long, so I'll quickly get sick of anything I can memorize easily. Earworms are the worst. To help me focus I either...
Got me into progressive rock because my brain plays music pretty much all day long, so I'll quickly get sick of anything I can memorize easily. Earworms are the worst.
To help me focus I either explicitly listen to a music of a deliberate genre (I like metal for programming!) or a noise machine.
I don't think I can pick out instruments from a piece of music very well but that may have something to do with a complete lack of knowledge about what instruments there are and what they sound like. If they sound extremely different, then sure, but I can't tell a violin from a viola.
A few things in no particular order: As far as I know, I never forget a face and in general my memory is superb. My brain is excellent at keeping high level information about people. I'm regularly...
A few things in no particular order:
As far as I know, I never forget a face and in general my memory is superb.
My brain is excellent at keeping high level information about people. I'm regularly told that I'm great at connecting people which would otherwise not get connected if not for my intervention.
I'm a bit of a social butterfly or chameleon, finding it easy to drift between social circles and find a place in nearly any circle if I so desire.
I have an excellent reaction time and outside of writing (never bothered to practice writing with more than one hand) I'm ambidextrous. I was a switch-pitcher in college.
I've been top ranked in the world in more than a few major video games and generally pick up games quickly. I guess technically speaking this is a professional skill, as I did professionally video game at one point in time.
I can read people very quickly and accurately in person (note: this is a trauma response).
I spend a lot of time reading medical and scientific journals across a variety of fields, so I've got a wide breadth of medical and scientific knowledge.
A lot of folks remark that I'm an excellent cook, but I know close to zero "recipes". My brain vibes a lot more with organizing information like the flavor bible, and I tend to be a very off the cuff kind of chef.
I have been told that I have an uncanny ability to see both the 10,000 and the 10 ft views - that I can task switch between vision and execution easily.
Quite envious of all of those but especially this one. My brain doesn't seem to be able to store faces very well. If we use software to take an older photo of myself I've never seen before, move...
As far as I know, I never forget a face and in general my memory is superb.
Quite envious of all of those but especially this one. My brain doesn't seem to be able to store faces very well. If we use software to take an older photo of myself I've never seen before, move my face to someone else's body with different hair and clothing and context, I'm honestly not confident in being able to pick out my own face quickly from others with similar age/race/general description. I mean, I can recognise people after putting facts in place, it just takes me a while. Receiving new photographs of myself is always a mild shock. I have to heavily rely on clothing or other context clues (such as, I remember 8 of us were on that trip and here's friends 1-7, hence that one must be me), even for loved ones.
If you're ever witness to a small non violent crime you'd be really good at remembering and pointing out the bad guys! You could be that guy in a courtroom shouting "it was this man and this woman!" pointing at them!
It's probably also a great party trick when you remember names and faces of friends of friends of friends you only met one time years ago :D right?
As confident as I am in my memory, all available evidence shows that eyewitness lineups are simply not very accurate. Even if I thought I was correct, I'd never enter that into court as evidence...
If you're ever witness to a small non violent crime you'd be really good at remembering and pointing out the bad guys! You could be that guy in a courtroom shouting "it was this man and this woman!" pointing at them!
As confident as I am in my memory, all available evidence shows that eyewitness lineups are simply not very accurate. Even if I thought I was correct, I'd never enter that into court as evidence out of fear from accusing an innocent individual. Just because I can remember a face very well does not mean that other people with similar faces do not exist, that the time between the crime and the testimony wouldn't degrade my memory, that the pressure of being in a court room and the anxiety of providing evidence towards an innocent individual would affect my ability to make use of my memory, that the stress of the crime itself didn't cause me to remember incorrectly, or that the circumstantial situations of the crime wouldn't reduce my ability to accurately see a person (bad lighting, large distance between perpetrator and myself, etc). In short, on principle I would likely refuse to participate as an eyewitness because I do not trust in it as reliable evidence.
Ooooh, what if it was to provide alibi for someone's innocence? You'd be subject to most of those but perhaps it could prevent someone innocent from going to jail?
Ooooh, what if it was to provide alibi for someone's innocence? You'd be subject to most of those but perhaps it could prevent someone innocent from going to jail?
I'm not sure I understand the hypothetical anymore. Picking someone out of a lineup to be like "they did it" doesn't seem compatible with providing an alibi for someone's innocence without...
I'm not sure I understand the hypothetical anymore. Picking someone out of a lineup to be like "they did it" doesn't seem compatible with providing an alibi for someone's innocence without simultaneously accusing someone else.
“Yes Officer, I’m sure, that’s the person I recognise from the night of the crime. And I was in Las Vegas that weekend, so there’s no way this person could have been the one to commit that crime...
“Yes Officer, I’m sure, that’s the person I recognise from the night of the crime. And I was in Las Vegas that weekend, so there’s no way this person could have been the one to commit that crime in Brooklyn”
Ooh, I was fresh out of ideas on what rather unique skills I could present, but your comment about ambidextrousness reminded me of something. I am ambidextrous to a lesser degree (professional...
Ooh, I was fresh out of ideas on what rather unique skills I could present, but your comment about ambidextrousness reminded me of something. I am ambidextrous to a lesser degree (professional diagnosis back then was “likely self-taught to switch to the other hand”, so in essence I’m better with my weaker hand than is usual, but not truly ambidextrous).
Anyway, the skill is writing, pretty fluidly, in reverse (mirrored) handwriting. Both reading and writing. I just tested (on paper) to verify I can still do it fairly well too, haha.
Example (instead of a photo) because I’m not sure I explained it well:
I don't know if it's unique, but I have exceptional proprioception, probably attributable to playing sports my whole adolescence and most of my adulthood. Even compared to friends of mine that...
I don't know if it's unique, but I have exceptional proprioception, probably attributable to playing sports my whole adolescence and most of my adulthood. Even compared to friends of mine that played sports they often struggle with being repeatable or cross-applying their physical abilities to something they aren't familiar with. I'm not good at golf in particular, since I rarely know exactly where the ball will go (and can't hit woods at all) but if I hit a shot with an iron, I can hit the exact same shot and land the ball within 10yds if you asked me to. In darts I can hit the same spot if I get a feel for it. I was always a natural athlete and it took a lot of time to get that normally people are good at the one thing they do, and can struggle on other things. My friends who lift cannot hit a single shot at all decent in golf, my friends who play ultimate Frisbee can't kick a soccer ball well, and my friends who played music can't play ping pong. I can do all of those things to an above average competence. It's totally not really good for anything, I'm not and was never close to professional level at any one sport, but it's a bit of a neat trick to be better than most at a lot of different games, anytime I'm at a social event I can beat someone at darts and they'll say "play me at pong pong, or billiards, or air hockey" and still win :D
I tend to be good at most things, but excellent at very few things, but one thing I’m inarguably excellent at is situational awareness. I seem to always know what every object is around me, where...
I tend to be good at most things, but excellent at very few things, but one thing I’m inarguably excellent at is situational awareness. I seem to always know what every object is around me, where every person near me is, how many, etc, even if they’re out of sight. When driving, I’m able to predict others and “see” incoming situations so that I can avoid collisions, avoid heavy braking, etc. One example is if someone is entering the freeway, I can tell where they’ll merge in advance and if they’re the kind of person that will properly speed up or slow down to merge or if I will have to adjust my own speed in advance to accommodate. Another example would be if I’m in a crowded place, I seem to be able to navigate very well without inhibiting myself or others.
It’s nice always being hyper aware of my surroundings and not being surprised, but at the same time, it’s exhausting and I can tell most people don’t go through this (like when riding with friends who are better than average drivers and seeing the gulf between their awareness and mine). Living in a world where we don’t have to worry about wolves eating us or something it’s at best a niche skill, but it has helped me some and I do generally get annoyed at being ignorant at things around me, so it’s nice to avoid that annoyance.
Do you get annoyed when you're trying to get somewhere and there are a bunch of people zigzagging all over the sidewalk not looking where they're going completely unaware of how they're getting in...
Do you get annoyed when you're trying to get somewhere and there are a bunch of people zigzagging all over the sidewalk not looking where they're going completely unaware of how they're getting in the way?
Yes, I get incredibly annoyed at people that do that sort of thing. If we’re the only two people around, whatever, they probably didn’t know I was there, but the people that do that at sports...
Yes, I get incredibly annoyed at people that do that sort of thing. If we’re the only two people around, whatever, they probably didn’t know I was there, but the people that do that at sports event or something drive me crazy! I wish I could live with that level of ignorance for just one day to experience it, lol
That's a minor superpower for sure. You and I can do a Freaky Friday thing and both of us would have a great time, before transferring back with gratitude for our own abilities. :) The opposite...
That's a minor superpower for sure.
You and I can do a Freaky Friday thing and both of us would have a great time, before transferring back with gratitude for our own abilities. :)
The opposite can be nice: no matter what mundane noises are going on outside your window or if you're in a completely unknown neighborhood or new bed, it doesn't matter much, you're gonna be able to sleep easily and soundly when you're tired.
If you need to focus on something in a crowded room, the ambient sounds become muffled and then cease to exist at all. Peripheral objects aren't important either, it's okay, do your thing. It's sort of like there's a delay in the way your brain processes sights and sounds unrelated to task: if it's important, it'll rewind a few seconds and actually process it. If not, it all gets tossed.
The down sides are probably obvious to you though. I wish I could freely switch into even "normal" situational awareness mode when I really need it.
You’re describing a very similar experience to what I call hyperfocus (although I’m not sure I’m using it 100% correctly) It’s nice to have a moment of utterly distraction free focus on whatever...
You’re describing a very similar experience to what I call hyperfocus (although I’m not sure I’m using it 100% correctly)
It’s nice to have a moment of utterly distraction free focus on whatever I’m doing, but unfortunately I don’t get to turn it off, so it’s contributed more than once to missing my train stop on the way home after work...
The biggest thing that comes to mind is probably parking. Definitely not uniquely skilled but uniquely skilled at in within my family at least. Give me a car and a parking situation and I'll more...
The biggest thing that comes to mind is probably parking. Definitely not uniquely skilled but uniquely skilled at in within my family at least. Give me a car and a parking situation and I'll more often than not be able to park the car perfectly between the lines. I think I became skilled at parking because of my driving practice when I had my learner's permit. The only time my dad had to drive with me was after he came home from work. Since he'd be tired, he'd just make me drive to my highschool parking lot and park over and over for 30m to 1h since that required minimal intervention from him.
Flip cup: I never practiced or played it a lot but it's a common enough drinking game. But when i have played I'm pretty damn good at it. A pretty good intuition for narcistic people: I find that...
Flip cup: I never practiced or played it a lot but it's a common enough drinking game. But when i have played I'm pretty damn good at it.
A pretty good intuition for narcistic people: I find that occasionally I'll meet someone that "everyone" likes and they just feel off. Usually it comes out that they're a bad partner or something. I attribute it to growing up with two narcistic parents.
I have the probably not unique, but the experience in learning (to various proficiencies) 5 different instruments, mostly during high school. Piano Violin Trombone Drums Guitar To this day,...
I have the probably not unique, but the experience in learning (to various proficiencies) 5 different instruments, mostly during high school.
Piano
Violin
Trombone
Drums
Guitar
To this day, playing instruments remains a hobby (although I've not played at all in recent months) but I do appreciate the experience it's given me and for expanding my horizon when I was still in school.
I'm not sure if this meets the prompt, but this is entirely non-professional. I think I'm quite knowledgeable about the philosophy of religion, specifically philosophical arguments for God/for...
I'm not sure if this meets the prompt, but this is entirely non-professional.
I think I'm quite knowledgeable about the philosophy of religion, specifically philosophical arguments for God/for atheism, I'd think far more than many theists and atheists (god that sounds conceited, but this is nearly a full-time hobby for me.)
It started with falling into New Atheism and knowing the standard atheist responses to the common arguments which I imagine many if not most here can relate to. I figured the apologetic arguments were all trash, and I had the talking points to prove it. It turns out these arguments are far more complex than I gave them credit for. I'm not an expert on most of them, as it turns out you can likely spend a lifetime digging into any particular argument, but I have put in the effort with some arguments such as the fine-tuning argument and the argument from motion, though I have feelings about other arguments.
Fine-tuning and the hard problem of consciousness led me from atheism to agnosticism, though I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about the philosophy of mind. Mostly consciousness, and this sense that there seems to be meaning in the world pointed to by the existence of value, morals, purpose, and consciousness. I'm still working out what my worldview looks like, but I'm heavily influenced by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Philip Goff, and lately David Chalmers, though I'm still early on in the philosophy of mind stuff..
I feel like this is really stretching the boundaries of the question you asked, but I have excellent long-distance eyesight. Often I’ll be with friends out in the city, and someone will ask where...
I feel like this is really stretching the boundaries of the question you asked, but I have excellent long-distance eyesight. Often I’ll be with friends out in the city, and someone will ask where we are, or the name of the place we’re heading to, and I’ll be able to read street signs and business names from quite a bit further away than anyone else in the group. Not quite double, but like, maybe 50% further?
I’d love to get my eyes tested at an optometrist and ask them to just keep going, because I’d love to have it confirmed and to get a number associated with it.
Oh man!! You're Legolas :D as someone who used to have 20/20 and now has slight nearsightedness that's a good one to have. Yes if you haven't been to an optometrist in the last two years please do...
Oh man!! You're Legolas :D as someone who used to have 20/20 and now has slight nearsightedness that's a good one to have.
Yes if you haven't been to an optometrist in the last two years please do try to go. Likely already covered by your work insurance anyway. I'm sure they'll get a kick out of measuring you and keep going and going!
More importantly, it'll be a good baseline to measure against when you get older and start to experience age related vision degeneration.
I haven’t been to the optometrist in the last ever, because my eyesight (close and distance) has always been great, but you’re absolutely right that I should get a benchmark. Thanks for the...
I haven’t been to the optometrist in the last ever, because my eyesight (close and distance) has always been great, but you’re absolutely right that I should get a benchmark. Thanks for the encouragement!
I’m in Australia so on the one hand, medical stuff isn’t nearly as expensive as the US, and on the other hand my access to affordable medical anything is untethered to employment. So I think it probably won’t be free, but it definitely won’t break the bank either.
A friend/ex-coworker found out that I am very skilled at classic death metal "name that tune". At work when he wanted to test me I could usually name the song title, album, and band (of course)...
A friend/ex-coworker found out that I am very skilled at classic death metal "name that tune". At work when he wanted to test me I could usually name the song title, album, and band (of course) within just a second or two of hearing it.
Like the opening scene of Dr Strange! Do you still listen to a lot of classic death metal? When does the genre start to stray away from classic and are there any current bands you would consider...
Like the opening scene of Dr Strange!
Do you still listen to a lot of classic death metal? When does the genre start to stray away from classic and are there any current bands you would consider to be making faithful classic death metal?
That's a good question. I still listen to mostly "classic" stuff, which for me is from the beginning through the late 90s/early 00s. I'd consider Vastum, Witch Vomit, and Necrot to be solid...
That's a good question. I still listen to mostly "classic" stuff, which for me is from the beginning through the late 90s/early 00s.
I'd consider Vastum, Witch Vomit, and Necrot to be solid examples of faithful modern classic death metal.
I'm really good at changing the time on this old digital alarm clock that I've had since the 90s. If you hold the time button and the "forward" button it will really quickly speed through the...
I'm really good at changing the time on this old digital alarm clock that I've had since the 90s. If you hold the time button and the "forward" button it will really quickly speed through the minutes and hours while you hold it. As most clocks do. Well I'm really good at saying the time and letting go of the buttons at the exact time I want, like almost 100% accuracy. That's all I have to say about that.
I have the minor superpower, "Find good X". After working in a kitchen, lab, law office, datacenter, engineering office, hospitals, retail, military base, etc., and traveling most of the U.S.,...
I have the minor superpower, "Find good X". After working in a kitchen, lab, law office, datacenter, engineering office, hospitals, retail, military base, etc., and traveling most of the U.S., I've developed a talent for locating good restaurants, bars, stores, galleries, gas stations, hair salons, grocery stores, online marketplaces, wholesale markets, computer outlet, doctor's office, or whatever.
It's a weird, eldritch consumer skill that combines being able to research well, listen to gossip, appropriately weight reviews, and having thoroughly curated life experiences.
I am very intrigued by hidden talents that make themselves known only when they suddenly become useful under very specific circumstances.
I worked on a vegetable breeding farm for eight years, and there were so many odd jobs that you discover a lot of hidden talents (as well as whatever you would call the opposite of a talent) in yourself and your coworkers. Your team ends up specializing around your different abilities, reinforcing them, and so everyone ends up having a motley set of job roles with seemingly no logical connection between them.
For example, I discovered that I am extremely good at spotting weeds in crops and unsurpassed at tying and untying knots quickly. I had a coworker who could reliably snatch flying insects out of the air without hurting them, a coworker who could could conjure an extra flower's worth of pollen out of every flower and get twice as much as anyone else, a coworker who could magically anticipate every tool or item that anyone needed and have it ready for them before they realized it themselves, etc.
This, to me, is one of the great pleasures of working closely together with a small team over a long period of time. You gradually slot together like puzzle pieces and become irreplaceable to each other.
Oh I love tiny hidden talents!! Being able to find weeds would be my take from the bunch!! Is picking out insects live useful? For pollination? What did you find out you have absolutely no aptitude for? Were you able to power through and become slightly less terrible at them ?
Yes, for us, catching insects was useful because we did studies on pollinators and on pest predators. Most of us had to wait for them to land and then go at them with a bug net, but this one team member could just pick them out of the air and therefore had a drastically higher catch rate than the rest of us. (Whenever the rest of us tried it, we failed miserably, and she had no idea how she did it and couldn't give us pointers.)
There are plenty of things I discovered I'm bad at! For example, I'm bad at threshing seeds and at chopping weeds out with a hoe, and I basically can't do any repetitive task without getting myself completely covered in water/dirt/manure/tomato goo/lettuce seed fluff/whatever material is around me.
Frustratingly, sometimes my skills and my anti-skills were in closely coupled tasks, making me just so-so at the activity. For example, I have mixed abilities at manual pollination: I am good at emasculating (removing the male parts of the flower) but bad at applying the pollen, and so I was just an OK pollinator.
These are definitely things that I improved on with practice, but that often involved experimenting with alternative techniques or strategies. You'd think the best way to do a given task is to copy the person who's best it it, but that's often not the case (e.g., if we all tried to catch insects out of the air, we never would have caught anything).
I wish I could retain knots, it's such a useful skill. There are 2 from my childhood I know well, but beyond them, whenever I teach myself a new knot for some purpose, it feels like the moment I stop using it I forget it.
Oh, I wish I could retain knots, too! I'm all short-term memory and no long-term memory (not just for knots, but for all skills). I can tie and untie them quickly, but I have to brush up on the steps if I haven't done a given knot in a while, unless it's an extremely simple one.
For example, my supervisor showed me how to tie a trucker's hitch — a knot he knew extremely well because he'd been using it regularly since he was a little kid growing up on a farm — and then I was almost immediately able to tie it and untie it far faster than him despite no prior experience. But that is definitely not one I'll be memorizing longterm!
These days, I think it's much more important to learn the names of knots and when to use them than it is to memorize the knot itself.
Have you tried one handed knot tying? It’s a good skill to learn and might speed things up even more!
I am not familiar with that. Can you point me to an example?
https://www.animatedknots.com/surgical-tie-knot-one-hand-technique
You do actually use two hands, but the movement is with one hand and it’s a lot faster
Cats!
I know that's really common but that's what I've got.
I grew up not understanding people and therefore made very little friends. I then spent a lot of time as a kid making friends with street cats around my area. I didn't have money so I didn't think to bribe them with food. A lot of it consisted of just sitting there persistently until we became friends.
My parents did eventually let me adopt cats and I had a few with various background circumstances.
But anyway, I got much older, have dealt with many cats that came into my life by then, have my own income and more space.
My friend who works with animals one day asked me if I could help foster a cat. He was a problematic cat with ptsd and wasn't getting any better around other cats so they couldn't send him to their regular fosterers. And anyone who can handle cats would have their own at home.
This happened during a time in my life where I didn't have a cat of my own so it was a good fit.
So I took him in and read many books on how to handle difficult and traumatised cats and tried hard to gain his trust and make him comfortable.
It worked out in the end, he got comfortable enough and was adopted. He now lies belly up in the sun a lot.
Since then, my friend would ask me to help foster difficult cats other people can't handle since I only take in one cat at a time.
So I say I'm quite good with cats. I'm no cat whisperer but I can handle them well enough.
I love cats! But I am quite allergic. Is there any combination of remedies that makes having a cat even remotely possible for me?
I am also allergic to cats. But I love them so much anyway that we fostered a whole bunch when my spouse's childhood cats died at 20.
I tried the injection thing but kinda skeptical about how much that really worked. It didn't feel like i got less itchy, red eyed, runny nosed, nor less wheezy even after the entire round.
What finally worked was happening upon a kitten I didn't react to. I continue to react a little to friends' cats and cats in the wild and cats at the shelter. But I can glomp and bury my face in and huff my cat's tummy and flank without issue. I can't explain it.
I've learned (through various forms of autistic stimming probably) to whistle in a great many ways.
The standard whistle, the tongue whistle, the lower-lip/upper/teeth bird whistle, the two-handed hollow-fist whistle (across the thumb hole), I can whistle with any two fingers, and others I'm sure. etc etc. shrug
edit - forgot a couple: i can whistle like a police car, and dripping water too
edit edit - i can make whistling with both pinkies extremely loud (sounds/feels like that 'clipping' sound when a sound is really loud, like it cuts in and out several times a second, like a fast LFO?)
How funny, I was just recently discussing with my wife and friends how weird it is to me that no one whistles. I never hear anyone do it, but I do it all the time. My wife pegged a few years ago that I use it instinctively to regulate my nervous system when I'm stressed or depressed, generally to sooth any bad time. It started when I learned I could combined humming deep in my chest with a whistle, making a very vibrating whistle that sounds like it has an effect on it.
"Whistling in the dark"?
What's funny is that I also have a vibrating sort of whistle that I can do, but it comes more from the tongue. I normally can't roll my R's when speaking, but I can do something like it to modulate a whistle.
I tend to whistle when happy/relaxed/calm. Some people sing or hum in the shower; I whistle.
I whistle often when I'm alone. I can whistle any melody within my range, though I can only do the one type of whistle - with my lips, no teeth, tongue or fingers involved. I can do the whistle+humming if necessary.
I can't do any sort of whistle :( I've tried following any number of articles or videos to no avail . Nor can I seem to purr or roll my R's
I have read that it's fairly common for people to lack a muscle that is required to make the rolling R sound.
I have taken that to mean that it's the languages that use them that are wrong, not me. :P
Agreed. Plenty of wonderful languages without rolling Rs.
Pro tip: if you're in a region where people don't know the difference (e.g. most of the US), you can fake it convincingly with the much easier Japanese R sound.
Not quite as useful when you're trying to learn Spanish, where the rolled r and "Japanese-style r" are two separate phonemes, though.
I can only whistle while inhaling. I cannot whistle while exhaling.
Not to brag, but I can alternate back and forth between them smoothly, keeping tone and timbre. I use it to whistle tunes without audible breathing for long smooth periods of time. I guess that would be my skill!
Oh hey, I relate to this! I can also whistle across my molars, which if I’m concentrating, I can get two different tones, but can’t get them to be very far apart (I can’t quite get two tones/notes separation)
I can only do one kind of whistle, but I'm pretty good at it, relatively. It's the only wind instrument I know confidently enough to use off-the-cuff.
At least three therapists have told me I'm very insightful and introspective, about myself. That I have a sort of clarity and objectivity that they don't usually find in people in general , and their clients in particular. This is also something many of my friends have said as well.
I guess it's served me well in a few areas of life. A number of times, when I rub up against something that doesn't make sense about my own attitude or feelings, I do a bit of a dive inwards to figure out what the incongruities are. Sometimes I needed to really do an about face about a deeply held belief and it sucks, but it would suck more to go on living with that sort of hazy dissonance.
I'm curious what you'd credit this to? It's not a thing most people come to naturally, as it's quite literally the opposite of intuitive.
For me, to the limited extent that I practice this, I fully credit a span of years where I indulged in the sort of recreational activities that make one hungry and paranoid. When the latter portion was bad, I found myself jumping at small noises, or fabricating anxious fictions about stuff going on around me. I had to stop and think - is this likely? Is it something I would seriously consider in a normal mental state?
Eventually, that habit made itself useful elsewhere. I'm curious if there was a formative event earlier on in your life that made you question your intuitive conclusions similarly, even if the inciting event was not quite as fragrant.
That's a very good question, I'll have to think about it for a bit. I don't come from an academic type family, more of a "gotta survive" type where no one has time for deep talks kinda place, so it's not something nurtures generationally..,.
I’d consider myself similar. I think it at least partly comes from self-protection, and maybe another part from trying to figure out why I struggled to make friends. Learning how to control certain parts of myself and emulate other parts based on observations from peers, media, etc. Ultimately probably a deep-rooted desire to be a different person because I felt like there were root truths about myself which were wrong. I still struggle with accepting myself, and also getting in touch with my real emotions. I can do a very good job of “root cause analysis” on what makes me tick, but I’ve spent my entire life building a wall around feelings.
Oof, this resonated:
When I was in a bit of a crisis, I couldn't feel terrible, but I knew that someone in my circumstances would probably be having a quite terrible time. With others, I was able to talk through all the circumstances and factors, internal and external, real vs anticipated, and I could imagine alternatives and extenuating circumstance for all.....but I was too busy dealing with it all to actively feel terrible. "Deal don't feel" wasn't a conscious mantra, its just the default state because I just didn't have the time. This is super handy for toughing things out and getting s**t done mid crisis but really not ideal for long term. Cough dissociation cough
Watching movies help. Crying over someone else on screen helps.
I've been giving this some thought. I know it's been a few days, so if you've forgotten or lost interest that's totally normal, but thank you for giving me the chance to think about this. Extremely long wall of text follows.
I think perhaps I had (1) some unique circumstances growing up, plus (2) a particularly poignant inciting event that at least started me along a path where I spend time thinking deeply about myself and the nature of how one forms judgement/opinion of self/others.
On my 10th birthday, my family moved to Canada.
Suddenly, I was just a child who forgot a worksheet. That's okay, here, we've got extras. Oh my, you're able to fill it in really quickly! You must have worked very hard on this last night already. You forgot your ruler? That's okay, here, take one of the classroom ones. Book is missing? That's okay, bring it back in when you find it. To my utter amazement and bewilderment, I am told that in a matter of months, I've turned into a brilliant young girl who evidently works very hard, and was very well liked by the teachers.
Ten year old me had no explanation for the abrupt transmutation of what I was told was my static, immutable, permanent essence of what I am.
(2) Our elementary school has a 4 night 3 day summer camp to celebrate the graduating grade schoolers at the end of May. It would be the most anticipated event of our entire school careers, and many of the year's study has some aspect which tie in with camp. My sister went, and had the most wonderful time. My friends and I had talked endlessly about Camp all summer before our last year even started. Then my parents dropped a bombshell: I wasn't allowed to go.
Why? Because I'm not mature enough, they said. What? But Sister got to go! Yeah, because she's responsible, you're not.
This went on for the entire school year. My parents insisted no they were not going to give me permission, and that that was their final word. No deals, no promises, no amount of tantrums and tears and begging and attempts to reason worked: no was no. The sheer amount of time that this went, the unfairness of it all, and most of all, the fact that they laid 100% of the responsibility on their judgement upon my person was, and remains, deeply traumatic. I'll spare you the next 1000 word analysis of how much this event sucked lol. The end of it was that in mid May, a particularly gutsy teacher signed a document saying she'd be held responsible for anything that happened to me, and then I was extremely grudgingly allowed to go. My life would have taken a very... much darker turn were it not for this teacher.
So yeah those were the big two. And then a bunch of obvious everybody stuff like teenage crushes/romance, friend group dramas, playing arm chair therapist with friends' romance and drama, literature and media etc. I'm a big introvert and has a huge ego, so what's more fun than spending quality time dissecting and polishing every facet of me ? :) maybe I just got a bit of a head start with the whole "dude, who am I". I was 10 and it was deep.
Thank you very much for thinking it over, and for taking the time to write this up! It makes me think of the figurative use of the term "perspective", and how apt it is that we characterize epiphanies as coming after a view from a new angle. I think that it is always traumatic to be forced to confront and abandon something we hold true as a premise, because it leaves you with one less fixed point in your life, and one more uncertainty.
Nevertheless, without the experience of losing a premise that defines you, it is likely difficult to ever approach the idea of your definition as a reasoned, concrete thing instead of something blindly reflexive. Recognizing that the set of information others use to form an opinion of you is arbitrary and limited is something that most people don't learn until they're much older, if they learn it at all; recognizing that you operate in a similar, albeit more informed, fashion when assessing yourself is really not comfortable.
Thank you again for taking the time to write this up, it was an interesting and thought-provoking read.
This also very apparent in your interactions here on Tildes.
Oh gosh *blush. I only wish I were a fraction as insightful about things other than myself though haha, which should also be apparent from my interactions on Tildes
Oh I interpreted the second sentence to be all encompassing. In any case, your insight is always valued.
I attribute a ton of my personal success to the fact that my family situation (personalities, ways of communicating) has led me to be very very good at both understanding what people mean, and converting what they say into a framework that someone else can understand in an efficient manner.
Technically I code and present data, but mostly I convert English to English from different vantage points.
You sound exactly like me, ha. I’m a data engineer and work on reporting and half my job is explaining data to non engineers and explaining business and customer needs to engineers.
Outside of work, I seem to almost always know what someone means and their tone, emotion, etc. TBH it’s sometimes a curse since if two friends get into a misunderstanding, I get annoyed that I know what’s going on, but it isn’t always the best time to interject or just makes me look like a know it all bitch.
I'm betting I'm in the top 0.01% of humans that can remove a bra from someone else on the first try, I have no backup for this assertion.
I can only remove a bra one-handed, but have a 99.999% success rate on the first try even with 4 clasps. This is an exremely niche skill, only useful to my wife whom taught it to me.
This feels like a curse one of the Greek gods would put on a mortal. "You will be able to effortlessly remove bras, and you will be happily married to one woman."
Zeus giving you this ability on a whim and Hera or maybe Aphrodite adding the extra benevolence of true love to curb your enthusiasm :)
Make me remember this old blog: Superuseless superpower , with entries such as "In-flight flight " (you can fly, but only in a plane).
I love these. Some of not as useless as the blogger thinks, or at least not written specifically to be so. In-flight fight can do special effects mid-flight; snow-fake can for reals solve global climate change unless there's a hard limit on the amount of flakes he can fake; heal-punch is obviously great as a cleric etc.
My personal one: being able to pull out exactly one moist tissue from any pocket you put your hand into, limit once a day.
There should be a trophy for that. Definitely.
Hey, me too! It’s something about the pinching motion! And it’s much more confusing when both my hands get involved! Very rarely I’ll do it to my wife through her clothing if I’m feeling mischievous.
I'm good at giving speeches. I've always been outgoing and charismatic, so that definitely helps, but I'm also a very empathetic storyteller. Make me the best man at your wedding and I guarantee there won't be a dry eye in the room.
Have you got any tips you think work well for you for those of us who aren’t as good at speeches?
As a follow up, how do you know it’s going well? I sometimes assume everyone is bored or cross with me, to find out later it was well received, but it drove a lot of anxiety in the moment!
I'm not @BashCrandiboot, but I've also been told that I'm good at speeches, and one time I wrote down some specific instructions for giving Best Man speeches. They could be generalized.
On Speeches.
I am pretty damn good at flying small model helicopters. I doubt this will ever be useful, but specifically small scale collective pitch six channel helis.
Some people make a career with model aviation via crop surveillance or photography. All that stuff is easy to fly though, because they're gyroacopically stabilized and PID loops tuned tighter than a tympany keep the thing butter smooth all the time.
The helis I learned to fly with aren't like that. Just hovering in place is like trying to balance an inverted pendulum. It's much closer to how full scale helis control, but with collective pitch helis more size gives you more stability. I got really in to the smallest rc models (for price reasons really) and got used to how twitchy they are. Bigger models feel unresponsive.
I'd love to fly a real helicopter one day, but probably I'll not ever do anything with this skill.
Edit: I just reread the OP and realized that what I typed isn't really what was asked for. Sorry about that.
FPV drones are being used more in movies. Kinda similar to helicopters. That opening scene in Red Notice was filmed by one of the FPV racing world champions I think.
They are also starting to be used in Vietnam for planting crops and pesticide/fertilizer application (but like you said, mostly pre-programmed paths + gyro mode, so not as fun).
There's also Ukraine...
I had a neighbor who flew helis like that. I was a teenager and desperately wanted to try it. So he brought out his 'practice helicopter' basically a round board about 6" around with a vertical handle attached to the bottom. He put a heavy metal ball in the middle of the board and said, 'now just keep the ball in the middle of the board as you walk forward at a regular pace for 10 steps cause thats what flying a helicopter is like' I dont think I ever made it past 3 steps before the ball would go one way, then the other and Id overcompensate and it would shoot off the side.
Never did get to touch his radio controlled models nor did I ask after that.
That's a really clever way to train the skill! It's truly hard at first, but the learning curve is steep and it kinda all clicks at once. The real issue is thay when you crash, and you will, they're also insanely hard to repair. The saving grace of small helis is their lower momentum means most crashes don't result in damage as long as you kill power as soon as you realize you're out of control.
If you're still interested, there are affordable small options now that also have the option to go into a gyro stabilized mode. I forget exactly the model name, but it was made by wltoys. V970 or something.
I can drive stick shift cars. Not very unusual (although quite uncommon nowadays). I can drive stick shift cars in San Francisco. For those of you who haven’t been there, San Francisco has some extremely steep streets. Here is an image to help show how steep these streets are. That isn’t even the unusual part. Here is the unusual bit: I enjoy driving stick shift in San Francisco. I will even go out of my way to drive the steep streets. I know a handful of people who are stick shift aficionados. Not a single one I have ever met likes driving in San Francisco.
I can relate to liking the stick shift driving too. My first car was stick shift, and while automatick shifting is very nice and very convinient manual shifting gives you more feeling of the control over vehicle.
I'm very curious, as someone who's experienced with hills.. is using the hand break a must for you when starting from stop up a hill, or are you able to give it a good amount of gas to get going?
I live in a relatively flat area, so hand break starts is something I figured out more as a novelty than a hard need, and I've never had to put it to a test to find out if it's a must or not.
Honestly it depends on a way how you learned it. I practically never used hand breaks during stop/starts on the hills (if stop is quite short of course, no parking), but I have friends that use hand brakes most of the time.
Also a lot of it just comes down to personal preference and whatever feels best to you. I was taught by my grandfather (and then had to relearn it ten years later when I actually got a stick shift car) and it was a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly what felt comfortable to me personally. There aren't too many hills by where I live, so the few times I would have to go up/down one I experimented with different ways of starting and stopping to see which felt more natural to me.
I only use it if the person who stops behind me is really close. Or if I’m in the Denver metro.
If I was taught handbrake, I think I’d use it more often.
But I wasn’t taught that way. I was taught how to shift into 1st at the bottom of a steep driveway and “passed” when I could get us moving smoothly and park in the garage.
On the hills in San Francisco it’s pretty much required. Either a handbrake start, your car having hill hold, or something like heel toe shifting to keep some break while giving gas. Another fun part in SF is pretty much every single other driver doesn’t think about the possibility of rolling backwards on a hill start, so they stop right behind your back bumper and there is no margin for error. If you don’t have much experience, it makes the whole situation much more stressful.
Particularly steep vehicles are fun. You yank the hand brake on hard, you release the foot brake, and you start rolling back as the hill gradually overpowers the handbrake.
This is a unique experience in the US, but is not unique to the rest of the world. Wellington in New Zealand is famously hilly, and stick shifts/ manual cars are very common there.
As someone that comes from a country where automatic is only becoming common in very recent years due to financial incentives from the dealerships/government (more efficient use of engines and RPM across the entire driving population I've been told), it becomes second nature to guage when the clutch starts "grabbing" onto the gears.
That contact between the gears inside the engine/the gear plates (no idea what these pieces are called in English) keeps the wheels from turning when on a hill. Also guaging how much of a grab it has, you don't always want to start moving immediately when starting to release the brakes either.
On steep hills like this, as someone used to manual gears, I even find it incomfortable with hill hold functions in cars I am not used to, let alone automatic gears. With manual I can feel exactly when and how much of a hold I have through the clutch and gears. Meaning I have full understanding over when I'll start moving.
Hill holds or automatic gears will have different amounts of rolling before they grab on, or different amount of times before they release the hold, making it hard to manually adjust my input.
I remember driving a borrowed micro car once that even had me almost crashing into my garage in front of me. Was a downward incline towards my garage, and had parked in front of it. Needed to back up a bit before being able to turn around in the driveway. It took so long for the automatic gear to kick in that the car just started rolling forwards, almost crashed into the door in front of me before it "took" and the car started reversing. Braking just reset the entire process.
I just could not get a feel for the gas to brake ratio on that otherwise very nifty little thing.
Manual driving is fun because it's a challenge. Looks like San Fran is roughly the same steepness as the cul-de-sac for my childhood home in PA. Had a lot of fun doing that in snow and sleet, especially on the way down where there was a T intersection at the bottom ramping off with a 10ft drop if you didn't stop in time.
I do generally dislike heavy stop and go with a stick though. It's what taught me my cruising strategy, because I'd rather poke along forever at 5 mph than alternating between 30 and 0.
Nice! I only drove stick in the snow once. I had almost no snow driving experience then so I was taking it pretty easy. I wish I was able to get a stick on my last car purchase, but they were so hard to find and just getting harder now.
And stick doesn't really make sense for an EV or hybrid.
I feel like I want it to. Like there's a Chinese EV that has fake shifting (Ionic 6?) with paddle shifters and it does mostly sound like a gimmick.
But thinking about it the thing I like about manuals is being able to pre-select how much power I want X amount of throttle to have, how much engine braking, etc. I don't know if faking a manual is the way to do that in an EV but some more intuitive way to dynamically choose "sport/eco/hill-climb mode" or flip between regen braking modes or something would at least be an interesting thing to explore.
I am a huge fan of manual transmissions, and won't buy an automatic. When I bought a Tacoma for a work truck, I flew to Oregon to pick up a manual and drove it back to Los Angeles because they don't sell manual Tacoma's in California.
But with an EV, it basically is a manual. Because there is only one gear, the motor is connected directly to the wheels. You don't have the mushy feel of a torque converter or the random timing of a hydraulic actuated shifter.
The question of power/"engine" braking is all a matter of software.
The way it works on my EV(Kia EV6) is there are paddles behind the steering wheel, the left one makes it "feel" like you are in a lower gear and the right one, a higher gear. There are 4 levels. Basically it just makes the vehicle use regenerative braking more aggressively at each level. I.think it also makes acceleration more responsive but it's not that noticeable. In the max level it is a one pedal mode where you can come to a complete stop by just lifting off the acceleration pedal.
I drive in max level almost always unless I'm in cruise control. It's great, it basically feels like being at peak high rpm all the time, without using a clutch or shifting. And it's not hard on the engine or your gas milage!
You can take your foot off the pedal right before a 20mph curve and it will shift weight hard on to the front wheels, then be ready to deliver full power the instant you step on it. Then you can do the exact same thing on the next curve without shifting, even if it is a 50mph curve. The whole thing feels really smooth, responsive, and tight. It's honestly more fun to drive than any manual sports car I've driven.
You just reminded me of when my father taught me how to drive, and made me hill start, in winter, on a street so steep it later became a one-way street (you can only drive downwards). It was an old VW Caravelle that I actually accidentally managed to hill start in third gear (which is absurd).
My car is manual because it's old, and automatics didn't really become standard until around ten years ago where I live. You just made me realize if I ever have kids, I'm definitely going to be milking the uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow angle of learning how to drive.
Ive gotten very good at judging people's character, specifically in choosing renters for my units. After nearly 40 years Ive developed a good system for vetting - asking questions, interviewing, watching for clues, noting red flags and finally discerning who would be a low risk, highly dependable tenant and who would not. Its definitely a honed skill and the one thing that separates happy landlords with those who picked wrong and end up in a chaotic situation after which they vow to sell their rental and get out of the business. Vetting tenants well IS the key.
Any tips?
Ask me again in about six months. My book is almost done.
I wouldn't say I'm uniquely skilled at anything but I have a variety of little skills and interests that I don't use professionally and don't make me any money. Some examples:
The first one being about music and sounds had me primed for seeing that second one as “volume=loudness” and was wondering if it was like “perfect pitch but for loudness”... so like, perfect amplitude?
Amusingly, I do not actually have perfect pitch in the first place. You need to give me a key before I can sing or whistle.
Are you also quite good at picking out one instrument from a piece of music?
:) always been envious of folks with perfect pitch. Having your own ad free, battery indepent and DRM free music library sounds fantastic.
Got me into progressive rock because my brain plays music pretty much all day long, so I'll quickly get sick of anything I can memorize easily. Earworms are the worst.
To help me focus I either explicitly listen to a music of a deliberate genre (I like metal for programming!) or a noise machine.
I don't think I can pick out instruments from a piece of music very well but that may have something to do with a complete lack of knowledge about what instruments there are and what they sound like. If they sound extremely different, then sure, but I can't tell a violin from a viola.
A few things in no particular order:
Quite envious of all of those but especially this one. My brain doesn't seem to be able to store faces very well. If we use software to take an older photo of myself I've never seen before, move my face to someone else's body with different hair and clothing and context, I'm honestly not confident in being able to pick out my own face quickly from others with similar age/race/general description. I mean, I can recognise people after putting facts in place, it just takes me a while. Receiving new photographs of myself is always a mild shock. I have to heavily rely on clothing or other context clues (such as, I remember 8 of us were on that trip and here's friends 1-7, hence that one must be me), even for loved ones.
If you're ever witness to a small non violent crime you'd be really good at remembering and pointing out the bad guys! You could be that guy in a courtroom shouting "it was this man and this woman!" pointing at them!
It's probably also a great party trick when you remember names and faces of friends of friends of friends you only met one time years ago :D right?
As confident as I am in my memory, all available evidence shows that eyewitness lineups are simply not very accurate. Even if I thought I was correct, I'd never enter that into court as evidence out of fear from accusing an innocent individual. Just because I can remember a face very well does not mean that other people with similar faces do not exist, that the time between the crime and the testimony wouldn't degrade my memory, that the pressure of being in a court room and the anxiety of providing evidence towards an innocent individual would affect my ability to make use of my memory, that the stress of the crime itself didn't cause me to remember incorrectly, or that the circumstantial situations of the crime wouldn't reduce my ability to accurately see a person (bad lighting, large distance between perpetrator and myself, etc). In short, on principle I would likely refuse to participate as an eyewitness because I do not trust in it as reliable evidence.
Ooooh, what if it was to provide alibi for someone's innocence? You'd be subject to most of those but perhaps it could prevent someone innocent from going to jail?
I'm not sure I understand the hypothetical anymore. Picking someone out of a lineup to be like "they did it" doesn't seem compatible with providing an alibi for someone's innocence without simultaneously accusing someone else.
“Yes Officer, I’m sure, that’s the person I recognise from the night of the crime. And I was in Las Vegas that weekend, so there’s no way this person could have been the one to commit that crime in Brooklyn”
Ooh, I was fresh out of ideas on what rather unique skills I could present, but your comment about ambidextrousness reminded me of something. I am ambidextrous to a lesser degree (professional diagnosis back then was “likely self-taught to switch to the other hand”, so in essence I’m better with my weaker hand than is usual, but not truly ambidextrous).
Anyway, the skill is writing, pretty fluidly, in reverse (mirrored) handwriting. Both reading and writing. I just tested (on paper) to verify I can still do it fairly well too, haha.
Example (instead of a photo) because I’m not sure I explained it well:
,ƨiʜɈ ɘʞil ɘɈiɿwbnɒʜ nɒɔ I oƧ
and like this too, of course.
I don't know if it's unique, but I have exceptional proprioception, probably attributable to playing sports my whole adolescence and most of my adulthood. Even compared to friends of mine that played sports they often struggle with being repeatable or cross-applying their physical abilities to something they aren't familiar with. I'm not good at golf in particular, since I rarely know exactly where the ball will go (and can't hit woods at all) but if I hit a shot with an iron, I can hit the exact same shot and land the ball within 10yds if you asked me to. In darts I can hit the same spot if I get a feel for it. I was always a natural athlete and it took a lot of time to get that normally people are good at the one thing they do, and can struggle on other things. My friends who lift cannot hit a single shot at all decent in golf, my friends who play ultimate Frisbee can't kick a soccer ball well, and my friends who played music can't play ping pong. I can do all of those things to an above average competence. It's totally not really good for anything, I'm not and was never close to professional level at any one sport, but it's a bit of a neat trick to be better than most at a lot of different games, anytime I'm at a social event I can beat someone at darts and they'll say "play me at pong pong, or billiards, or air hockey" and still win :D
I tend to be good at most things, but excellent at very few things, but one thing I’m inarguably excellent at is situational awareness. I seem to always know what every object is around me, where every person near me is, how many, etc, even if they’re out of sight. When driving, I’m able to predict others and “see” incoming situations so that I can avoid collisions, avoid heavy braking, etc. One example is if someone is entering the freeway, I can tell where they’ll merge in advance and if they’re the kind of person that will properly speed up or slow down to merge or if I will have to adjust my own speed in advance to accommodate. Another example would be if I’m in a crowded place, I seem to be able to navigate very well without inhibiting myself or others.
It’s nice always being hyper aware of my surroundings and not being surprised, but at the same time, it’s exhausting and I can tell most people don’t go through this (like when riding with friends who are better than average drivers and seeing the gulf between their awareness and mine). Living in a world where we don’t have to worry about wolves eating us or something it’s at best a niche skill, but it has helped me some and I do generally get annoyed at being ignorant at things around me, so it’s nice to avoid that annoyance.
Do you get annoyed when you're trying to get somewhere and there are a bunch of people zigzagging all over the sidewalk not looking where they're going completely unaware of how they're getting in the way?
Yes, I get incredibly annoyed at people that do that sort of thing. If we’re the only two people around, whatever, they probably didn’t know I was there, but the people that do that at sports event or something drive me crazy! I wish I could live with that level of ignorance for just one day to experience it, lol
That's a minor superpower for sure.
You and I can do a Freaky Friday thing and both of us would have a great time, before transferring back with gratitude for our own abilities. :)
The opposite can be nice: no matter what mundane noises are going on outside your window or if you're in a completely unknown neighborhood or new bed, it doesn't matter much, you're gonna be able to sleep easily and soundly when you're tired.
If you need to focus on something in a crowded room, the ambient sounds become muffled and then cease to exist at all. Peripheral objects aren't important either, it's okay, do your thing. It's sort of like there's a delay in the way your brain processes sights and sounds unrelated to task: if it's important, it'll rewind a few seconds and actually process it. If not, it all gets tossed.
The down sides are probably obvious to you though. I wish I could freely switch into even "normal" situational awareness mode when I really need it.
You’re describing a very similar experience to what I call hyperfocus (although I’m not sure I’m using it 100% correctly)
It’s nice to have a moment of utterly distraction free focus on whatever I’m doing, but unfortunately I don’t get to turn it off, so it’s contributed more than once to missing my train stop on the way home after work...
The biggest thing that comes to mind is probably parking. Definitely not uniquely skilled but uniquely skilled at in within my family at least. Give me a car and a parking situation and I'll more often than not be able to park the car perfectly between the lines. I think I became skilled at parking because of my driving practice when I had my learner's permit. The only time my dad had to drive with me was after he came home from work. Since he'd be tired, he'd just make me drive to my highschool parking lot and park over and over for 30m to 1h since that required minimal intervention from him.
I honestly thought maybe you were mixing in some Spanish or something 😅
Good catch. I noticed and didn't care. Using a second language is hard
I have the probably not unique, but the experience in learning (to various proficiencies) 5 different instruments, mostly during high school.
To this day, playing instruments remains a hobby (although I've not played at all in recent months) but I do appreciate the experience it's given me and for expanding my horizon when I was still in school.
I'm not sure if this meets the prompt, but this is entirely non-professional.
I think I'm quite knowledgeable about the philosophy of religion, specifically philosophical arguments for God/for atheism, I'd think far more than many theists and atheists (god that sounds conceited, but this is nearly a full-time hobby for me.)
It started with falling into New Atheism and knowing the standard atheist responses to the common arguments which I imagine many if not most here can relate to. I figured the apologetic arguments were all trash, and I had the talking points to prove it. It turns out these arguments are far more complex than I gave them credit for. I'm not an expert on most of them, as it turns out you can likely spend a lifetime digging into any particular argument, but I have put in the effort with some arguments such as the fine-tuning argument and the argument from motion, though I have feelings about other arguments.
Fine-tuning and the hard problem of consciousness led me from atheism to agnosticism, though I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about the philosophy of mind. Mostly consciousness, and this sense that there seems to be meaning in the world pointed to by the existence of value, morals, purpose, and consciousness. I'm still working out what my worldview looks like, but I'm heavily influenced by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Philip Goff, and lately David Chalmers, though I'm still early on in the philosophy of mind stuff..
I feel like this is really stretching the boundaries of the question you asked, but I have excellent long-distance eyesight. Often I’ll be with friends out in the city, and someone will ask where we are, or the name of the place we’re heading to, and I’ll be able to read street signs and business names from quite a bit further away than anyone else in the group. Not quite double, but like, maybe 50% further?
I’d love to get my eyes tested at an optometrist and ask them to just keep going, because I’d love to have it confirmed and to get a number associated with it.
Oh man!! You're Legolas :D as someone who used to have 20/20 and now has slight nearsightedness that's a good one to have.
Yes if you haven't been to an optometrist in the last two years please do try to go. Likely already covered by your work insurance anyway. I'm sure they'll get a kick out of measuring you and keep going and going!
More importantly, it'll be a good baseline to measure against when you get older and start to experience age related vision degeneration.
I haven’t been to the optometrist in the last ever, because my eyesight (close and distance) has always been great, but you’re absolutely right that I should get a benchmark. Thanks for the encouragement!
I’m in Australia so on the one hand, medical stuff isn’t nearly as expensive as the US, and on the other hand my access to affordable medical anything is untethered to employment. So I think it probably won’t be free, but it definitely won’t break the bank either.
A friend/ex-coworker found out that I am very skilled at classic death metal "name that tune". At work when he wanted to test me I could usually name the song title, album, and band (of course) within just a second or two of hearing it.
Like the opening scene of Dr Strange!
Do you still listen to a lot of classic death metal? When does the genre start to stray away from classic and are there any current bands you would consider to be making faithful classic death metal?
That's a good question. I still listen to mostly "classic" stuff, which for me is from the beginning through the late 90s/early 00s.
I'd consider Vastum, Witch Vomit, and Necrot to be solid examples of faithful modern classic death metal.
I'm really good at changing the time on this old digital alarm clock that I've had since the 90s. If you hold the time button and the "forward" button it will really quickly speed through the minutes and hours while you hold it. As most clocks do. Well I'm really good at saying the time and letting go of the buttons at the exact time I want, like almost 100% accuracy. That's all I have to say about that.
I absolutely adore this
I have the minor superpower, "Find good X". After working in a kitchen, lab, law office, datacenter, engineering office, hospitals, retail, military base, etc., and traveling most of the U.S., I've developed a talent for locating good restaurants, bars, stores, galleries, gas stations, hair salons, grocery stores, online marketplaces, wholesale markets, computer outlet, doctor's office, or whatever.
It's a weird, eldritch consumer skill that combines being able to research well, listen to gossip, appropriately weight reviews, and having thoroughly curated life experiences.