Ask Lemmy

Skateboarding. None of it computes for me. My brother has been a lifelong skater and still rips it up at almost 40, and I see him do shit on the board and I just can’t figure out what the fuck is happening. It breaks physics, it’s like bee flight, none of that crap should be possible.

I watched him go up a very steep incline and do the thing where it’s a kickflip and a pop shove it at the same time, which is enough on its own to break my brain, but he and the board went up and landed at the same angle of the incline like it was flat ground, he and the board went up and down perpendicular to the incline without any vertical drag on the drop and landing. Gravity doesn’t fucking work that way! And how the fuck do their feet and the board just get back together after the board is seizuring mid air and just fucking land and keep going like there are magnets on their feet or something? It’s gods damned wizard shit.

Programming fast.

When I program for my personal projects it takes hours to get very little done.

Socialization.

I'm gonna go meta on this one:

I don't understand how some people just know that they can do things from the get-go. Like from their early teens on.

It took me until age 50 to understand who is holding me back: me.

There's very little I don't think I can grasp now. Anything another human can do, so can I. I could have been a doctor or a musician or a chemical engineer or Michelin starred chef if had believed in myself like other people do.

How??? Why did they know they could do these things???

Dancing. And even something like swaying or tapping one's foot to a beat is hard for me unless the song makes it super obvious. Most people seem to just intuitively get all of this. Plus I don't have good coordination or spatial awareness, where I still routinely run into doorways in my home and such. And then add social anxiety on top of all that. A nightclub might as well be a torture chamber.

Math! I'm a software guy and generally find STEM topics highly intuitive. I do fine with the stuff through middle school - PEMDAS, algebra, that kind of stuff. But the higher levels concepts like logarithms and derivatives; no matter how many times they're explained to me they just don't quite click. I can plug numbers into formulas and get the answer I need, but I don't understand what's happening or why that particular formula is what's needed.

Complex boss fights in video games. Multiple stages with precisely timed keypresses, being able to track multiple things simultaneously while also dealing with random changes, being able to do quick gear changes, etc. I don't know how the hell people do it.

Functional programming.

Math and numbers in general. I have hyperfantasia so the voice in my head is completely self directed and language is otherwise only external, I read whole words I don’t read letters, when I learned to read it was all at once essentially, like flipping a switch. Numbers don’t have anything visual I can attach to them and don’t exist holistically, I have to look at each number not the whole set or problem or algorithm at once so it’s very foreign to how my mind works. Ideally I could just do everything in geometry because I do have something there to translate to my visuals only brain but as is I just really struggle with math and reading numbers.

Time signatures fuck with my head too. I'm not a pianist, but I decided to try and learn Gabriel Faure's Clair de Lune, which has always been one of my favorite pieces. My whole life I've heard it in my head as 4/4 , but to my surprise it's in 3/4 and the left hand are actually 16th notes with the first one missing in each beat.

AHA.

Meaning, of course, Ad Hoc Abbreviations.

Slippery/sliding/rolling things underfoot.

I wanted to learn how to skateboard when I was a kid. I tried for several weeks, with a friend trying to teach me. I got tired of hurting myself, and gave up.

I know people don't "grasp it easily", but most people eventually get the hang of it, and it doesn't seem to take them long.

Over the years I've tried roller skates, ice skates, and skiing. And, failed at all of them.

I'm autistic, a ton of things.

While I've become quite good at making friends, I am catastrophically bad at romance.

I've achieved one night stands here and there but whenever I get really into someone I end up acting like a nutcase due to anxiety/catastrophizing and I badly fumble. It feels like I can get someone hot that I don't relate too or a fem friend that I'm not attracted to and that's it and its agony.

I don't know if it's a modern skill, or a modern deficiency, I think it is a deficiency. But it's the apparent ability to take nothing seriously, to commit to nothing, to not be able to plan anything, to not be able to follow through on anything, to be completely unreliable... All of this and somehow still have a functioning life and social group.

Recognizing people.

How the actual fuck? (gestures vaguely)

Driving stick. I've tried on several cars at this point, and have only successfully gotten moving without stalling like twice. The worst part is I can shift pretty smoothly once the car is in motion, but I just can't seem to figure out how to get it in motion.