Daily discussion post: superpowers

[magnetic_pole]

Folks, what are your superpowers?

Before you protest that you don't have any, let me assure you that you do--you just haven't thought about them that way. My partner R, for example, can always spot an extra space between words in a page of text. On screen, on paper, doesn't matter. She's pretty amazing at catching typos, too. See? Superpowers.

I have the power of not-getting-lost. Drop me off in a completely new city, and I'll navigate with aplomb. An old housemate of mine has a favorite story about the time a long-distance bus dropped the two of us off at the side of the road in a remote part of Greece. The driver definitely knew where we were going, despite our embarrassing lack of language skills---I'd copied down the name of our destination and showed it to him, and he'd nodded and smiled and helped us put our luggage away. When he stopped the bus and gestured furiously for us to get off, I discovered a superpower I didn't even know I had: navigational skills for the win! We were going to a port city, so we just kept walking downhill until we finally met the water, and from there it was easy to see how to get into town.

I've also got the power to smell food that's bit off, but honestly, that's more a curse than a superpower, so best not to dwell on that one.

So, folks, what are *your* superpower? What can you do that your friends and family generally can't?

Comments

[naath]

I can often look at a thing, and a space, and see if/how it fits. (I can't, usually, do the actual moving of it). I'm not "visualising" it, I'm aphantasic, it's just... obvious somehow (often).

[green_knight]

<virtual high five> (see my comment below).

Right now, I have no problems calling it a superpower because it is super useful!

[therealsnape]

That is a really useful superpower, (sez she enviously, while rubbing sore back from measuring up an inconveniently-located space)

[liseuse]

This is a superpower I really wish I had. I have the opposite, unfortunately.

[green_knight]

My main superpower is 3D Tetris. I can fit things into the available space, and then restack them to fit more things into the same space, and keep doing that.

Right now, that IS a superpower when your freezer is mostly full and you're self-isolating and you have to leave the house so you shop, and since you're only shopping once a month you buy a LOT, and suddenly you have a lot of extra food to process.

It's all gone into the freezer, though we had to eat some icecream to make it happen.

[purpleink]

Same, same!

[purpleink]

magnetic_pole, what a fun question!!

My superpower is packing a suitcase. My partner travels frequently for work (well, he did up until now...) and he is hopeless at packing neatly into a suitcase. Our usual routine is that he gathers everything he needs for a trip (which always includes extra clothing for running, running shoes, his portable nebulizer, and various other things beyond just clothing for business meetings), and the suitcase he wishes to use and I pack it. He prefers a carry-on if possible and he has sometimes boggled at what I can fit into it. :) Like others who've replied here with similar superpowers, it's easy for me; I love puzzles and this has always seemed to me to be a 3-D puzzle.

Meanwhile, his superpower is the same as yours: he has intuitive navigational skills that have always blown me away. This is useful, because mine are completely hopeless. (His first initial is J, and I often quip that I don't need GPS if he is with me because I have JPS!)

[therealsnape]

Now that's a very useful skill, indeed. I'm a mediocre packer, who travelled quite a lot, and I envy you. I'm now slowly learning to pack capsule wardrobes.

[wpadmirer]

I'm good at navigation. Once in France, I found the Tour de France race route using a regular map and a drawn map from Sports Illustrated. I looked at both and told Pat I was sure it would go through this one town. (There were no towns listed on the Sports Illustrated map.) We found it. It was a mountain route and we saw EVERYONE. It was the coolest thing ever.

I also cook by smell. I can tell if something needs more of a particular spice by smell without tasting.

[therealsnape]

Isn't the whole spectacle of a passing Tour de France a glorious sight? Such fun to see that, and good for you and your superpowers to make it happen.

[jenett]

I have said for years my secret superpower is getting information out of Google (searches, mostly). I'm a librarian, so this is a tremendously useful superpower.

(I will do nearly the exact same search as someone else, and get the info in 20 seconds that takes them 20+ minutes, sometimes hours. Most recent notable success was a friend who half remembered a Methodist hymn she'd learned as a kid, gave me a broad sense of the way the tune went, and I sent her a link to sheet music under 30 seconds later.)

It also works with other search tools, but not quite as brilliantly.

[rebeccarobota]

My personal reference librarian win was the time a gentleman came into the library and asked for a book called "Chicago in Black and White."

I immediately asked him if possibly he was looking for "Devil in the White City." Ding ding, I was a winner.

[petrea_mitchell]

I am the champion of navigators! Give me a map full of barely labeled spaghetti, or one in a language I don't technically speak, and I will find you a route!

This comes from handling navigation duties on family trips as far back as when I was eight. Later on, I looked back on that and appreciated how my parents had given me room to learn a useful skill.

Much later, I finally realized the real reason was that my parents are both terrible with maps. I'm grateful that we live in a world where satellite navigation is a thing.

[therealsnape]

I love the story of how your understanding grew over the years - it must have been a fun moment to realise that your parents, actually, were pants at reading maps.

[rebeccarobota]

I work in a public-facing job (or at least I used to before COVID-19) and am very good at customer service and handling difficult customers. If someone is really angry or abusive I get flustered like anyone else, but I am very good at diffusing most people before they get to that point, and I have often enjoyed the challenge of creating a positive outcome out of a negative customer interaction (although after more than a decade in customer service roles, I'll admit I don't get the same joy out of it that I used to!)

I also know a lot of fiddly grammar and style rules, like how to use a comma correctly or the difference between "which" and "that." I am not actually a prescriptivist when it comes to grammar, but it's still handy knowledge.

[therealsnape]

I used to work on a helpdesk, so I know how difficult and negative customers can be - sometimes with reason, sometimes not - and I think it's amazing that you can turn that into a positive. Great skill.

[gender_euphoric]

Making perfect toast.

[therealsnape]

Can I come and eat it? With honey, perhaps? I'll bring the honey.

[twistedchick]

No matter where I am, or how recently I got there, I'm the person someone will ask about how to get to where they want to go. And 99% of the time so far it is somewhere I have been, and I can tell them how to get there. It has happened in DC, in New York, in Alaska, in Kansas and in Arizona. And it is weird but it works.

[therealsnape]

I don't know what I admire most, that incredible useful skill or how well-traveled you are. Alaska must be beautiful!

[glass_icarus]

Trivial superpowers that come to mind are reading and typing very fast? xD Outside of school the degree of usefulness varies, but still.

A less-trivial superpower I have is establishing and maintaining boundaries with other people (in the pursuit of a mostly drama-free life, haha). Verbally, through physical space, body language, and whatever else I'm unaware of, I've been successful with most roommates, friends, profs, coworkers, people I've dated, casual acquaintances, and strangers. I think my mom and I are fairly similar in this, though she's better at it; my dad and sister are notably worse at it because they're often bad at saying no to things.

[therealsnape]

Establishing boundaries is a skill that should be on the national curriculum. Such a useful thing to be able to do.

[cactus_rs]

My sense of smell is not usually sensitive BUT if there's anise or licorice in anything, even just a little, OH BOY CAN I SMELL IT.

Generally speaking I'm mega resistant to hangovers (though finally in my 30s that superpower is fading) and pretty good at waking up before my alarm.

[therealsnape]

Funny how age can afflict superpowers. Would that be why we don't see super(wo)man as an octogenarian? Still, it would be interesting to see what superpowers remain and what can be done with that.

Waking before the alarm is a great one, and one, I think, fairly uncommon in youngsters.

[ninetydegrees]

Also a detail-oriented person so I spot so I have the same superpower as your partner. I'm also the person who will notice when something isn't straight, or symmetrical, or things like that. I'll also notice if you have a new hair cut, new clothes, new shoes,... or if there is something new or unusual in general (using sight or sound, my other senses aren't that great :) providing it's a detail. Can't see the big picture most of the time.

I'm good at seeing how stuff can fit (or not!) or be best arranged in a room. Like evaluating available space and paths and stuff. Hm. I'd say also putting together outfits or matching colors.

[aome]

The next time I move house, I'm calling you to help arrange the furniture. :D

[lovetincture]

I can eat pretty much anything without getting sick. Dubious bread, meat that's gone off, questionable dairy? Totally fine. In general, my body's pretty fragile as compared to most people's, but my one and only superpower re: physicality seems to be a cast iron stomach. It seems to run in the family!

[therealsnape]

That's really unusual. It seems your body can handle things others can't - interesting. Would it be high resistance to certain things, or excellent digestion? But it's certainly useful.

[rhi]

I can smell smoke over overheating stuff at a terrifying distance, which is more of a curse than a superpower. I can also plot out (and help plot out) fics to greater or lesser complexity as desired, ditto for choreographing fight scenes. And I cook and bake by scent as much as recipe, which is fun!

[therealsnape]

Choreographing fight scenes! How brilliant. I wrote a real action scene in one of my fanfics once (but not twice, given the amount of work it was) and I found the choreography of it all quite challenging.

[aome]

This is actually some sort of weird physical mutation, so I don't know if it counts as a superpower or not but: I can wiggle the center of my upper lip without moving any other part of my mouth. I have never met anyone else who can do it. But it's great for entertaining babies and toddlers who are next to you in line, in the pew ahead of you in church, etc. I earned the name "little rabbit" from a friend in high school because of it, too.

As for as other talents, hmmm. I can do math in my head really quickly - calculating sale prices, the amount needed for tips, things like that. And I'm aces at proof-reading, as well. (Sometimes to the annoyance of others, when I spot mistakes in store signs, letters sent home by school, etc. My daughter just rolls her eye at me if I try to point it out.)

The person with the true superpower in our family is my teenage son, whom we have literally named, "The Super Finder" for years. He's not always great at finding his own stuff, but if you've misplaced something? He's fantastic at locating it.

[therealsnape]

Can I borrow your son?

And a trick like that, that calms babies and toddlers in situations where a screaming wee 'un in inconvenient - that's a really good thing.

[thatwasjustadream]

I can see a bad edit/flash frame in moving video, due to decades of linear and non-linear editing experience. I tend to get stuck on continuity errors for the same reason- like when the shot changes on a TV show and a character is standing in an entirely different position, or battle scars being substantially different degrees of bloody from one second to the next. Yeah, I'm a blast to go to the movies with, lol.

Also, I can parallel-park a car the first try every time- even though my sense of spatial relationships is *awful*. That one makes no sense. All I can figure is that the uncle who taught me to drive is a very good teacher.

[therealsnape]

Good parallel-parking is a great skill. I'm reasonably good at it, but not in your league.

It would be interesting to go to a movie with you - and an education, I'm sure!

[liseuse]

I'm great at spotting typos and awkward grammatical constructions. This is helpful in my work life but can make reading the local paper or signs in shops painful.

I am also great at remembering small details about people. I am very bad at remembering faces or being able to put a face to a name but if I get a name and an incidental detail I can usually remember the person. This is handy but I do have to rein it in because it comes off as a little creepy? And it's less useful at a remove because the intermediary person doesn't necessarily know which small detail my brain glomped on to about the person I met at her party.

[auroracloud]

I also have a bit of a navigation superpower, at least in urban settings. I can sometimes get lost in a forest if it's big enough that you don't come out at the other side very soon. But in cities, I love to just go exploring without a map and discover new places, and I'll usually have a pretty good idea in my head where I am and how to get back where I came from. I find it so much fun! It's one of my favourite things to do in a new place.

Language-learning is another superpower I have. I haven't used it as much in the past 5-10 years as I did earlier. But I learn languages and remember vocabulary really easily, and I'm good at grasping different kinds of grammar etc. It used to be that once I had learned certain basics of a language - enough grammar and vocabulary, let's say to an early intermediate level - I could then just sort of spend time with that language and... sort of absorb more. Like after a certain point, just by exposing myself to texts, songs, conversations etc. I'd be able to intuit what a lot of things mean, figure out word meanings from contexts, get a feel for what different constructions mean and so on. It's rather like how we learn our native languages as children. I've heard you're supposed to lose that ability after childhood, but seems my brain didn't get that memo. (My brain didn't get a lot of memos, but it seems like this was a useful one to miss!) Of course there are mistakes in the process, and sometimes I'd still need to check things out in a dictionary, but mostly it worked. I miss doing that properly... Just haven't had the energy for proper language studies for years now because of RL reasons.

[write_out]

What a fun question! I love R's!

I have the same superpower of navigation! I've always been good with direction and reading maps. Not to say I've never gotten lost, oh I have, but rarely.

[mithrial]

I think I'm good at styling. Clothes and interiors.
But that's a very subjective thing.

¸,¤°´'`°•.¸♥¸.•°´'`°¤,¸

Others may well look and disagree.

[erika]

I can always find a (free) parking spot. Including in San Francisco right next to a BART station.

[kat_lair]

Ooooh, good one! My superpower is an excellent sense of time. As in, most of the time I can tell the correct time to within to about 20min bracket (often much closer, like) without looking at the clock.