What I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.
I am able to recite toy commercials and obscure TV theme songs from 90s kids shows with surprising accuracy, many decades past consuming them - Crossfire, Creepy Crawlers, James Bond Jr. Denver the Last Dinosaur… I’m your guy. I don’t watch these things deliberately to learn them and haven’t seen them since organically seeing during childhood, they just start playing in my head on the smallest triggers, music and lyrics, verbatim.
This is what the inside of my head is like, all the time
- marshmallow roasting (I can perfectly control the level of browning on the outside and melted-ness on the inside)
- paper snowflake making (I can make them very intricate and come out exactly how I visualize them)
pretty shit at everything else though. I fat-fingered my skill points allocation hard.
I can hear high frequencies that supposedly only kids and teens still can. The most recent time it was ‘useful’ was (spoilers) a magic show in Vegas a few years ago.
Otherwise my hearing is terrible.
Do you hear bats?
I don’t think I could hear bats as a kid. I also didn’t see bats often but when I did I didn’t hear them
I’m a really good driver. Like rules of the road and all that, sure, but I also have some training in rally cars, am decent on a race track, and am generally a top 5 finisher in whatever Sim race I enter.
Wish I could afford to enter an IRL series.
I have hyperphantasia, which means that I’m able to visualize things in my mind in a way that it looks exactly the same as it would in real life. If I see a puzzle that requires spatial reasoning, I can rotate it and manipulate it in 3D space in my mind.
I use this for CAD! It’s actually kind of frustrating because I often find my brain uses techniques that I can’t replicate using the controls on cad software.
I have that too but I use it daily.
I use it as a software developer and visualize code like it’s a factory.
it allows me to debug problems effectively and generally gets me an answer before anyone else can.
I’ve also used it to do any kind of diagnostic, be it mechanical or medical.
it’s an OP skill tbh.
I remember about 80% you tell me about you (if I’m listening) I won’t tell you what I know about you in order to not creep you out.
Do you remember their name too ?
Absolutely not. Only their faces
I have found a person like me
I can die in peace from now on
I’m very good at remembering people’s birthdays. I stopped “using” it cause I think it creeps people out a bit, but at least with people I like it’s always nice to remember to congratulate them without relying on social media.
I’m shit with names though.
Have you had a situation where you remembered someones birthday only to twists their neme?
walking into a room and forgetting why I entered
I use that skill every single day
Sling staff.
Lock picking.
Skydiving.
Laying ceramic tile.
How many of those can you do at once?
I can lay ten-inch hexagonal porcelain tile while freefalling, actually. But I need to use a premixed adhesive.
I think this has to be one of my favorite comments of all time.
Does the tile survive impact in one piece?
No, but this is a desired result of the technique.
Resolving IRQ conflicts on ISA devices
Lol : )
How many simultaneous ISA devices are we talking here?
Are you also adept in SCSI-fu?
Somewhat relatedly, I still have the MSDN Windows 2000 license key memorized.
Needless to say, I have not had to install Windows 2000 on anything for quite some time.
Cool, I had a Win98 one memorized for years but it’s gone now.
And of course there’s…
95 is easy, you can use all zeroes or all ones and it would pass the algorithm check and let you install. There was no online check requirement, unlike XP.
98 you could do 12345-12345-12345-12345-12345 or some similar variant as I recall, so I never bothered knowing an “actual” key for those.
XP and above could be trivially bypassed with software, so the whole thing was moot after that. Silly technology.
NT4.0 key here
deleted by creator
Still remember the sound blaster config?
220,5,1,5 or something similar. The overlap of me using DOS and having a soundblaster is quite narrow.
Nice! that sounds right.
I can vomit on command at most times without sticking a finger down my throat etc. I feel like that scientifically inaccurate dinosaur from the original Jurassic Park.
Mister Neon evolved!
He learned “Vomit”!
I’m a PC filler Pokemon that would rather be a Digimon. I don’t know what that means, but it’s the truth.
Technically if you put pokemon inside a PC it became digimon.
I can see magic eye pictures instantly. Like, at a glance.
I trained myself up to this one also. It’s great for Spot the difference pictures and games.
Can you post your favorites to [email protected]? I would love to see some more.
never in my life have those worked for me. My family used to infuriate me talking about what they saw and telling me to relax my eyes. WTF is relax your eyes!
If all they ever told you was to relax your eyes then it’s not surprising they don’t work for you, that’s not very helpful! Feel free to skip the rest of this if you don’t want advice on how to get them to work.
For me, the best way to get them to work is to cross my eyes and let my gaze drift out of focus. When I was a kid I read a tip in a book to press your nose up to the book, look at the picture, and keep them in that position as you pull away. That works well for me too if I’m having trouble doing it on my own.
I can do the out of focus thing on command, but even with the other tips you gave here i could never see it.
Crossing your eyes will show you the opposite effect though, something being concave instead of convex.
You still get the image, but that explains why they’ve always been concave for me 😂
So, I never had to try, it just always worked for me. But, a friend of mine once said that she got it to work by holding her finger up in front of her face, like a foot away, and then looking past the finger at something farther away. Then, back to the finger. Looking past her finger, she’d see two of the finger, but as soon as she was thinking about the finger, she’d focus again on it and start just seeing the one finger. The trick to the magic eye is basically getting to where you can deliberately focus past the finger and still look at it? I don’t know, I just look and see the image. Once, someone made a fake one that had no image to try to mess with me. There’s also a neat trick where you can immediately see the difference in side by side images by “magic eye-ing” them. The differences kinda flicker or glow, it’s hard to explain.
There was a video game back in the 1990s (Magic Carpet by Bullfrog) that was first person shoot that had a mode that would run the game in that “magic eye” 3D. I could only see it if the player was standing still, but you should see if you could see it 3D in real time. I’ve never met anyone that could.
Yup, totally could. Loved that game. Would get the Meteor power, then erase the map!
Because of how it was coded, it was really hard to emulate. Haven’t tried in years.
Magic Carpet also had red/blue 3d mode that worked pretty good!
I am reasonably acrobatic. I only get to use it when people are drunk and get the sudden urge to watch someone do a backflip.
Much lower level, but I’m over 50 and can do a great cartwheel. Was at a concert and these little kids were sitting in a line, one by one doing a cartwheel, I came and joined their line and when my turn came did the cartwheel they were just delighted, it was so cute.
Not otherwise acrobatic, a one trick pony. But it has very occasionally been a good trick.
Yeah, kids losing their mind (in a good way) is quite wholesome.
Sex.
I use it once every fifteen years.
I’m top notch at oral and love to do it, but I married a woman who doesn’t like it ten years ago. So much waste.
I can create massive research papers overnight.
