It can be a small skill.
The last thing I learned to do was whistle. Never could whistle my whole life, and tutorials and friends never could help me.
So, for the last month or two, I just sort of made the blow shape then spam-tried different “tongue configurations” so to speak – whenever I had free time. Monkey-at-a-typewriter type shit. It was more an absentminded thing than a practice investment.
Probably looked dumb as hell making blow noises. Felt dumb too (“what? you can’t whistle? just watch”), but I kept at it like a really really low-investment… dare I attract self-help gurus… habit.
Eventually I made a pitch, then I could shift the pitch up a little, then five pitches, then Liebestraum, then the range of a tenth or so. Skadoosh. Still doing it now lol.
(Make of this what you will: If I went the musician route my brain told me to, then I would’ve gotten bored after 1 minute of major scales. When I was stuck at only having five pitches, I had way more longevity whistle-blowing cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-running-around chromaticisms than failing the “fa” in “do re mi fa”.)
So, Lemmings: What was the last skill you learned? And further, what was the context/way in which you learned it?
Learning the proper way to squat for my long femurs/short torso body. It makes such a difference in how and where I feel the muscle work. Knees over toes be damned!
It’s places like that where “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
- How did you realize you were squatting wrong?
- How did you figure out the right way?
e.g. dumbbell row-like exercises all feel odd and disbalanced to me but idk what idk (is it form? body type? ask a doctor/trainer? check an authoritative blog that isnt SEO-spicy enough for search engines?)
Well, I kept trying to squat like most people do trying so hard not to lean forward and kept falling over on my ass lol. That and also I couldn’t feel the work in my glutes, only quads. Are you familiar with the way little children squat? I still can’t do it but getting better every day by practicing.
Turns out I have super tight hips and that prevented me of hinging correctly, plus the aformentioned femur/torso ratio.
I hired a personal trainer in january of this year to help me out with stuff and she helped me correct my form. Now I use a pair of those foam wedge things under my heels to prop me up in a better position and I can squat way better. It was a game changer.
Sideshow performer. Lately been working on putting mousetraps on my tongue. It’s one of my tamer skills, but I just never really had the chance to develop that skill. It’s also one of the more child friendly skills.
That sounds less like a skill and more like a very unfortunate freak accident.
The skill with a lot of these things is knowing how to present it with confidence. Plus pain tolerance, technical skills, and theater skills.
Oh yes, I was joking, that is definitely a talent outside of my wheelhouse.
:0
every sentence there makes me want more details
AMA I guess?
Done.
- How dangerous really is your job?
- What happens if you get injured? Insurance/etc.?
- What differences do you have when performing for adults vs. children? (since you mention child-friendly, I assume that means you don’t do things that might scare them)
- What are your least tame skills?
- How did you get into performing in the sideshow? Mentors, training, string of coincidences?
- Favorite memory?
- Any frightening memories?
Sorry for the wall x)
How dangerous really is your job?
Very. The name of the game is risk mitigation. Most acts put only the performer at risk, but fire puts the entire theater at risk, which is why I carry insurance and follow strict protocol. I perform at a historic landmark so they don’t allow just anyone to use fire there.
What happens if you get injured? Insurance/etc.?
I have a day job with insurance, but not everyone is so lucky and performers do get hurt sometimes. Injuries are bad because they mean taking time off to heal (a friend of mine is currently recovering from a broken rib and can’t perform). Minor cuts and burns are part of the job, you learn to manage them and move on, so we’re all covered in scars. Again, it’s all about risk mitigation.
What differences do you have when performing for adults vs. children? (since you mention child-friendly, I assume that means you don’t do things that might scare them)
Adult oriented shows often have more nudity/burlesque and more graphic acts, whereas kids get more traditional circus or campy horror. For example, children might see fire eating and mousetrap, while adults might get a bed of nails or human pincushion.
What are your least tame skills?
Tongue splits ALWAYS freak people out. So does anything involving a power drill.
How did you get into performing in the sideshow? Mentors, training, string of coincidences?
I started as a fire performer and got into it through fire eating. Eventually, one thing led to another, and I was invited to join America’s last permanently housed circus sideshow. Everything blew up from there.
Favorite memory?
We’re a close-knit group, almost like family, which is special since we’re a dying breed. My favorite memories are probably the things other performers have said about me while introducing me to the stage. We love to gush about each other.
Any frightening memories?
Earlier this year, one of my close friends tried to take her own life on one of my performance days. My phone blew up to the point where I couldn’t even see my GPS. My girlfriend stepped in to help thankfully. We got a group chat going, sent people to find her, got her to the hospital, and she spent a week in the psych ward.
After that, I hosted a fundraiser show that raised $1k to get her back on her feet. The event also brought a lot of people together.
If you read this far, here’s my IG
Recently learned how to bend some notes of an harmonica. It’s very complex to have the good mouth position, but it comes with practice i guess.
Do you actually bend the harmonica? Or is it just messing with the hole using your tongue?
I don’t think bending the instrument is a good idea, i just move my cheeks, tongue and throat in a way that the air flux bend the pins to change the tone. More info here
That makes sense. That’s why physically bending my harmonica never worked! I still don’t understand mechanistically how moving your tongue in your mouth changes the vibration of a reed, but I’ll work on that part.
Edit: found it!
Butterfly stroke. Technique’s still terrible but I cam clear, may be, 30 meters in one go. Because if the nerve problems in my leg, I decided to drop jogging and start swimming again.
To break a tire nut that’s really stuck on, hold the tire iron sideways to the left, support the iron with the right hand so it doesn’t pull on the nut wrong and damage it, step on the iron’s handle and lean on it until it loosens (usually with a loud snap)
If you get a + shaped tire iron, you can simultaneously pull up on one end and step down on the other, increasing your torque and keeping the nut properly engaged.
I recently learned to whistle as well! (in my late 30s). I’m bad at it, but finally can make a recognizable tune.
More recently though I’ve learned to cut my own hair :)
Love whistling. I learned it as a teen and drove my parents mad practicing.
While I am not inept in the kitchen, I only recently figured out how to get the classic French omelette consistently right. It’s harder than it looks to get it looking flawless like that with an ultra thin exterior layer and perfectly creamy inside, and not ruining the structure when rolling it on the edge of the pan. I followed the instructions of the legendary chef, Jacques Pepin, in this video, and supplemented by the wonderful videos of chef motokichi (link). They make it look super easy because they are extremely skilled.
I learned how to make a really simple PCB in KiCad a few minutes ago, by watching this video. The thing I wanted actually existed already and I could’ve bought it from Aliexpress, but I realized I could save about $40 re-drawing my own version and ordering from JLCPCB instead, so that’s what I did.
I got into photography during the pandemic as a way to go outside and stay active. I find it makes you pay attention to the environment around you a lot more closely. Things you normally wouldn’t notice become interesting.
In a similar way, I’d learnt an eeny bit about visual composition at one point, and it’s helped me understand how something pretty can be uninteresting and something ugly can be interesting. (Maybe it was more obvious to everyone else, especially with the whole image gen sitch (ー﹏一))
Oddly it’s made me respect internet-ugly MS Paint stuff more. Like this ancient shitpost.
And nature too of course. The way a red sky refracts in cirrus clouds. Ladybugs on leaves. Elk.
All stuff I normally wouldn’t have noticed :p
Yup, we tend to take our world for granted, but there’s so much to see even in things that normally seem mundane. Learning to stop and appreciate things has been a really eye opening experience for me as well.
I’m in the middle of it right now but I’ve got an old plug in oil heater that I decided to pop open the cover and have a look-see before condemning myself to buying another for probably $100ish.
I am so far from comfortable working on electronics or woodworking or traditional guy stuff, but this radiator is old in the sense of it’s built like a brick shit house and hooked up to a simple mechanical switch with 3 wires, one of which is the power cord that finally disintegrated from the heat.
It’s so simply built even I can feel confident swapping out for a new mechanical switch and some new wiring.
Last I learned about some local plants (like the stinging nettle) and which part is edible and most energy dense.
Learned to throw my little cast net! Had it for years, never used it. The trick was watching videos on how to throw small nets. Don’t have a fishing license, no idea what I’ll do with this skill.
trawl your boss
I got olama and WebUI working privately / locally and I’m able to insert documents into it with persistence and query them.
Nice, AI with half of the suspicion removed.
Does it save you a lot of time, what do you use it for? I have a somewhat old GPU but have been considering something like this to comb manuals. Does it have a file size constraint?
I have two projects for it right now. The first is shoving my labyrinth of HOA documents into it so I can answer quick questions about the HOA docs or at least find the right answer more effectively.
The second is for work, I shoved a couple months of slack, some Google docs, some PDFs all about our production product. Next I’m going to start shoving some of GitHub in there. It would be kind of nice to have something that I could ask where is the shorting algorithm and how does it work and it could give me back where the source code is in any documentation related to it.
The HOA docs I could feed into GPT, I’m still a little apprehensive to handover all of our production code to a public AI though.
I’ve got it running on a 2070 super and I’ve got another instance running on a fairly new ARC. It’s not fast, But it’s also not miserable. I’m running on the medium sized models I only have so much VRAM to deal with. It’s kind of like trying to read the output off a dot matrix printer.
The natural language aspect is better than trying to shove it into a conventional search engine, say I don’t know what a particular function is called or some aspect or what the subcompany my HOA uses to review architectural requests. Especially for the work stuff when there’s so many different types of documents lying around. I still need to try some different models though my current model is a little dumb about context. I’m also having a little trouble with technical documentation that doesn’t have a lot of English fluff. It’s like I need it to digest a dictionary to go along with the documents.
That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).
We’re a long way from trusting it to do something critical without intervention.
AI would be good at looking at an X-ray after a doctor and pointing out anomalies. But it would be bad to have it tell the doctor that everything looks fine.
HOA docs didn’t even cross my mind, that’s resourceful.
Has the AI been particularly accurate, and does it cite where it found your information? With more technical stuff it’s always confidently wrong
ty for the response btw
It tells me what document in the collection it used, But it doesn’t give me too much in the way of context or anything about the exact location in the document. It will usually give me some wording if I’m missing it and I can go to the document and search for that wording.
I’m just one person searching a handful of documents so the sample size is pretty small for repeatability, so far, if it says it’s in there, it’s in there. It definitely misses things though, I’m still early in the process. I need to try some different models and perhaps clean up the data a little bit for some of the stuff.
Using the documentation as source data It doesn’t seem to hallucinate or insist things are wrong, it’s more likely to say I don’t see any information about that when the data is clearly in the data set somewhere.
YW on the responses I’m having fun with it even if it’s taking forever to get it to dial in and be truly useful.
Reading the Cyrillic alphabet.
It’s not anywhere near as hard as it seems and there are so many times you encounter it.
What’d you learn it for (I personally don’t see it often so you likely live near a Cyrillic-heavier region) and how? Also
I kept seeing more and more things in Cyrillic especially because of the war in Ukraine, so gradually learned more and more of it online, now I know at least all the letters used in Russian. Now I can read Cyrillic, although only very slowly, basically I do it like an elementary school child.
I live in Austria for context, no neighboring countries with the Cyrillic alphabet.
Splice chain link fence. Learned from YouTube. 5 days ago.
Weaving up the wire thingies on chain link fences? What’d you need that for – did your property fence get a huge hole from a burglar or something?
An old storm damaged fence.
Oh.
yeah that’s more likely
