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?
Recently got good in making sourdough. But I could also add plastering walls. I’m semi-decent at it.
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.
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
Okay, so the most recent skill that I learned - or am still learning - would be making chainmail armour (or just “maille” for the pedantic). In theory, I now have the knowledge how to start from an iron ingot, turn that into a wire and that into the little rings for the armor. But because I want to be done in less than a year (will be part of my wedding outfit), I started with pre-made riveted rings, which I simply bend open, connect to solid rings and then bend closed and press in the rivet.
But since I never get to talk about it in other threads, I also learned how to make super primitive candles. Just yesterday I made candles from pork fat chunks that I ground up in my mortar and pestle. You don’t even need the little fabric to catch fire, you can just literally start lighting up the fat itself if you hold it long enough to a lighter
And before that, about one year ago now, I started learning to play the Herdy Gurdy, which is a lovely instrument, with a very lovely tone. And I even built one myself from a little do-it-yourself model kit, so to speak, which is called the Nerdy Gurdy. I started learning that because I was playing Sea of Thieves and I really enjoyed the sound of the instrument in-game. And then I also thought “hey, what if I not only learn to play it, but also learn to play it for my wedding in 2025?”
Edit because I feel this has been just a year of learning so much stuff for me: ASL. I started learning ASL about a month after I played VRChat for the first time and been practicing ever since. The chance of me getting good use out of ASL anywhere that is not online is pretty much zero, though, because I live in Germany lol
Wow, that’s definitely a few. Didn’t expect an entire set of chainmail to show up in these comments!
And I seem to notice something:
…the armor. But because I want to be done in less than a year (will be part of my wedding outfit)
“Hey, what if I not only learn to play the [Hurdy (Nerdy?) Gurdy, but also learn to play it for my wedding”
Someone’s wedding is going to be very interesting.
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.
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
Last two skills I’ve successfully learned:
-
Giving subcutaneous fluids to my cat. Followed vet instructions and watched several how-to videos online for different tempered cats.
-
Making macarons. Followed online recipes, tried some different techniques and troubleshooting through trial and error.
More recently, I have been trying to teach myself HTML whenever I have pockets of free time during the work day. I’m following the mozilla.org Intro to HTML as a guide.
Here’s a great guide: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/html-crash-course/
-
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.
Body work on my car.
I’m poor as fuck and had tree branches fuck me up. Decided I’m not willing to deal with the bullshit of finding a new one, especially with all the bullshit privacy invasion on top of buying the damn thing.
So, I borrowed tools, looked shit up, and while the car isn’t fully dent free or anything, it was good enough to replace windows and you have to get close to see the warping that’s left.
Took my crippled ass damn near two weeks because I could only work maybe a half hour, 45 minutes at a go once or twice a day. And I wasn’t working fast.
While it was much simpler than I thought it would be, those auto body pros deserve their damn pay. Shit is hard physically. Just replacing the side mirror had my back cramping and spasming for hours after, even with meds. And that was the easiest job involved.
Dunno that I learned enough to exactly say it’s a true skill, since it really only applies to my car, and the kind of damage done, but the parts of the frame that were bent are back in line, and the dents that needed shrinking are damn near invisible, which I’m proud as fuck of.
The painting sucks though lol. Couldn’t get a good sprayer on loan, and the one I could get was a bitch about not giving an even coat. The blending is not great. Visible from even a dozen feet away. A few drips too. But I ain’t worried about that with a car that’s damn near twenty years old.
Dunno what the hell I would have done without good neighbors and friends loaning me the gear. No way could I have afforded rental for the air compressor after the supplies cost, parts, and glass. Came out to a few hundred all told, but the estimate was damn near 1.2k
So assuming you saved $900, and you worked 45 to 90 minutes a day for two weeks, then your total work was between 10.5 and 21 hours, which maths out to between $42 and $85 an hour. Plus the convenience of dodging the modern disaster they call smart cars.
Amazing. I’d be content running into a car problem and fixing it for half the savings. Hopefully YouTube will serve me well when the time comes :P
What would you say was the hardest part (effort or instructional accuracy wise)?
Absolutely the hardest part was the shrinking. Most of the damage, I had access to both sides of the panel. Which means you can use a hammer and a block thing called a dolly. But you have to hold the dolly on one side and hammer on the other. Which is awkward as hell. It’s slow work, or was for me; I suppose a pro can go faster. And you have to be careful because if you overdo it, you can end up hardening the metal and end up with cracks.
All the videos and tutorials say to practice on some scrap sheet metal, but I didn’t have any, so it was trial by fire.
This was back in the summer, but my left shoulder is still being pissy about the positions I was in to reach the dolly to the middle of the roof and still see what I was hitting with the hammer.
Tbh though, it was much simpler than I thought. There’s plenty of good tutorials out there,and the concepts aren’t complicated at all, it’s the skill that’s fiddly and detailed.
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.
Probably proper knife skills. I’ve always been pretty good with a knife, but I’ve been taking my time to really refine the skill as I do a lot of cooking for large groups so speed is extremely useful. I honestly learnt a lot of it indirectly by just watching how chefs use them, but for the theory and all that I started with Lan Lam’s video on knife skills over at the America’s Test Kitchen yt channel.
I’m about to be going to an event where I’ll be cooking nearly a thousand meals a day for three days, so I’m going to be putting it to the test. The one nice thing is we’ll have a team of volunteers to help with ingredient prep, so it should be okay but daunting none the less.
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!
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
I learned how to make my own GIFs.
I also learned how to upscale video, but I’m not very good at it yet.
Nice. kdenlive or something else?
Also – upscale video? Don’t you run it through some real esrgan thing and wait for forever? I’m working on trying to upscale a video right now but my GPU is ancient
Gifski for the gifs and Topaz AI for the upscaling. I am on a Mac.
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.
