For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
How to make friends. It was so easy as kids, but now I can meet people that do things that I do and who want to do them in a group but they never become friends to me anymore. IDK where I’m going wrong, I don’t reek of desperation, I have other friends, but when people say “find your tribe” like, I might be the last of my kind.
Sometimes, a handful of friends is not just enough but the upper limit as well. And that’s okay, right? If you have a partner and everything is okay, you will start your own small community regardless. 😅
I can completely relate. Additionally my specific standards also make it very bad.
I found out that I’m an Autist so for me it at least explains things but is also totally not helping to know.
Nevertheless I do not know for sure if all of this isn’t totally normal, as in the regular human experience. The older you get the more difficult it is to find and hold friends.
Real friends are the ones that stick with you when shit hits the fan. When you’re an adult and you meet new people, you usually want to show yourself from your best side and for everything to go well. She we were kids, shit hitting the fan was somebody kicking a ball into a neighbors window or falling of a bike, minor things as an adult, but as kids that built character. The stakes are so much higher as an adult when things go wrong, so generally you avoid it even though this means that most of your relationships are superficial.
I’m not saying that something horrible must happen in order to get friends as an adult. But sometimes it’s better to simply work against the odds together to form a deeper connection.
To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics.
That could be part of the problem: time signatures aren’t a property of the notes, they’re a property of the song. The time signature is the rhythm and flow of the music. If you try to do a waltz in 4/4, it’s probably not going to sound like a waltz unless you do some really screwy things.
Plus, knowing the time signature helps you figure out why that guy is waving his stick like that while you’re playing.
I give you those “screwy things”. Somebody stripped the fifth beats from Brubeck’s magnum opus, and made the most waltz sounding 4 I’ve ever heard.
It’s funny how stripping out the fourth beat just sounds like a band who doesn’t quite know how Take 5 goes and they’re just winging it: https://youtu.be/t3u8GwMlJaw
Interesting how the 4 is kind of ghosted
Comment so I can find this later
Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters is a walz and you can’t convince me otherwise.
You could write in triplets in 4/4.
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.
Strapping a snowboard to my feet was pretty intuitive, just keep the downhill edge up. Hard agree, I even wore skater shoes but a basic Ollie was something my brain and limbs just…don’t do that
I cannot, and I mean cannot, flip a map in my mind. North has to be pointing north or my brain just keeps messing up.
There was a test in the back of Scientific American magazine a long time ago with pairs of 3d models (the stick and ball things people use to show molecular structures) and they turned them in different directions and asked “are these identical or mirror images” how many can you answer in 5 minutes.
I stared at it for an hour and couldn’t do even one. Like, I was crying by the end of the hour because I felt so stupid but my mind, it just couldn’t tell.
I’ve never had trouble reading but learned to read very young (barely 3 year old) like a language, sort of before even knowing the alphabet that well - it’s not a dyslexia situation. But I sure couldn’t see those differences in the quiz. At all.
I once dungeon-mastered a DnD campaign. For the map I just took a map of North America and rotated it 90°. Not one person noticed.
Could it be dyscalculia instead of dyslexia? From what I’ve heard poor sense of direction is a common symptom of the former.
I was not great at math in early school, rote memorization not my strong point but loved algebra, enjoyed calculus and actually work as an accountant. When in elementary school I could always rock word problems in math, better at understanding/applying than the literally calculating. So I don’t know, but not likely.
Pretty bad with right and left but honestly very good at moving around in real space - I orient myself (obviously) on north, south, east, west. I have a great sense of direction in the actual world.
Thats where patterns repeat. It’s just for convenience, an 8th note is an 8th note no matter the signature but its how you count the beats. If a piece is in 3/4 the phrases will feel different from 4/4. So, if youre sight reading, it makes it easier to predict when phrases begin and end, when to come in off rests, etc.
I hope that helps somehow lol.
Also helpful to know where it’s appropriate to take a breath on a wind instrument if it’s not marked.
Programming fast.
When I program for my personal projects it takes hours to get very little done.
hmm, I have the same thing. But I do test a LOT and make backups on backups, tbh. Most of my time probably goes into that.
Those accursed Smurfs.
Learning a second language. Having a processing disorder and a shit short term memory makes it hard for me to comprehend. I’m accepting advice if anyone succeeded with a stubborn learning disability.
First, screw grammar, I’ve learned 3 languages without ever learning their grammar, including English.
Find a topic that you are very knowledgeable at in your native language and start consuming knowledge on that topic in the language you try to learn. Go back to the basics of that topic, something you know by heart. There will be a reversal where instead of listening to the language and trying to understand what is happening, you will already know what is happening and just listen to the words. You will go from “What did he/she say?” to “Oh, that’s how you say it!”. Its way easier to append connections in you brain that create new ones, so the familiarity of the topic is a stepping stone to learn the language. Of course you will still have to pause and translate constantly but it will be less and less necessary with time.
That’s a pretty good idea! Something i can work with!
Check out ‘Angine de Poitrine’s Math Rhythms Explained’. They use a loop pedal in the context of math-rock with changing time signatures, so they must fit all changes in a track into a fixed length. For those good at time signatures (not me), they also have some misdirections between the loops of different instruments.
that’s fascinating and DIDN’T HELP AT ALL HOLY SHIT.
it’s like saying “oh you don’t understand basic physics? here watch Einstein explain his most complex concepts”
It’s just an example of guys who definitely must count stuff so that it always fits exactly into the loop while also being precisely timed between the guitar tracks and the drums
As for physics, iirc the book series by Feynman is recommended to really dig all the stuff from the basics to the fancy theories, and Feynman was no slouch himself.
Also, Einstein was teaching students in the US later in life.
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Love and affection. As someone who’s parents have a bunch of psychological problems, paired with growing up poor as an immigrant. I never in my life have experienced either love or any sort affection for either family nor strangers. For context my mother is a prefect example of a sociopath and I’m 80% sure my dad is autistic. Neither of those conditions exactly scream empathy. I never heard the words ‘I love you’ spoken with the eyes, or any sort of meaning behind them. Listening to daily (and I’m not exaggerating here) screaming matches for 30 years has given me the impression that those words don’t really mean anything to them anyway. Never having had a safe place to develop those feelings and given that I’m not exactly easy on the eyes means that I have somehow managed to become full grown, mentally stable adult with empathy, and a yearning for affection and acceptance without a single fibre of love in my body. Never have I had an interaction other than quid pro quos, “I want something from you, you want something from me.” never “I want you, you want me.” I literally can’t imagine what it’s like waking up next to somebody, feeling emotionally safe or having somebody genuinely wanting to spend time with you. I know that there are currently literally billions of people for whom this the most normal thing in the world but for me that is borderline incomprehensible. I would want to wish that kind of lonelines on my worst enemy.
I’m a dude BTW.
Dream. Or picture anything from memory.
I have an idea in my mind, but it’s not a picture or video like most people have. It’s just very difficult to “see” something.
More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Interesting that a few of the notable known people with it identified are authors. I’m not super familiar with them, but I wonder if it leads to writing more detailed descriptions which can help their written works be more memorable.
For most of my life I slept like a log for eight hours straight and basically never had dreams. Then recently-ish I botched my day routine beyond repair and discovered that I do dream when in light sleep, namely when falling asleep again after having woken up. Combined with drinking too much alcohol sometimes, this gives me shittiest completely absurd dreams of no value, just confusion and a very unpleasant feeling. Even when a dream is nice, I then wake up remembering I have my daily grind to look forward to. I’ll much rather go back to no dreams.
Interesting approach. I like dreams as they’re stupid little processed version of what I’ve been preoccupied with and what I’ve lived recently.
I can see the appeal of no dreams as you’ve put it. Same what I think of lucid dreaming. I just know I’ll start cramming work in there too.
I managed to fix the routine a bit in the past week or so, and had some great nights of sleep, uninterrupted and unmarred by dreams. Feels pretty nice.
I can do a bit of lucid dreaming, in that after waking up and falling asleep again, I’m often aware that I’m dreaming — but full control and consciousness eluded me so far, it’s more like the mind racing with random thoughts in half-sleep. So haven’t gained anything from it either (and don’t quite think I want to).
For me it is drawing. I think it is because I don’t really picture things. My mind is full of descriptions mostly, not visualization, but I don’t know.
I’ve put a ton of time over the years into trying to cultivate the skill, but 3 dimensions complete escapes me. I cannot picture a 3d object, then draw it. I can get away with some geometries with vanishing line references, but that’s it.
I’ve seen the books ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards and ‘The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are’ by Danny Gregory being recommended to those who have a hard time learning to draw. The commenter also provided examples of their own drawings before and after, and it was night and day.
However, I looked through the examples a bit, and am wary of reading the books myself, because the drawings there are very representative, while I’m aiming for a more wacky style. It could also be that the books are mainly about drawing from references, not sure yet.
If it makes you feel better, I don’t think being able to visualize helps as much as it would seem. Drawing is just hard. I say this as someone who has a very active mental imager and has been drawing (poorly) my whole life. The technical aspects of drawing/painting etc., is really just about understanding the theory, application, and practice.
Does it help? Sure, a little but nothing I’ve ever drawn has come out looking like the mental picture with any satisfaction and I could probably do just as well with a verbal or written description to go off of. And references, of course. Several famous modern artists have aphantasia.
As the saying goes, “Draw with your eyes, not your brain.” Drawing is just a loop of asking yourself whether it looks right or not. Nobody is timing you, if you have to check a reference a million times to draw a single line and then erase it angway then so be it, because the next line will maybe only take half as much, and then half of that…
Theres this wrongfull elitism that an artist has to be able to draw perfectly from memory. They don’t. Fuck it. Print out an image and trace it, that practices line commitment, line width control and scale. Then you can use the traced image to practice shading and coloring. You don’t put a kid on a bicycle without training wheels first, why would you do the same thing as an artist?Yeah this it it for me except I’m decent at drawing, I just can’t get how to make shadows or highlights. Drawing a 3D sphere for example with shadow is so hard for me. Granted I don’t practice, but still.
Choreography. Not just dance moves, but any physical activity where I watch someone do a thing and have to repeat it using my own body. Had a hell of a time learning to tie a necktie.
It’s a skill! If you’re interested maybe join a dance class, boxing/MMA class, pottery class, or do some improv!
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.
I’m curious if it’s the whole shebang or there are some aspects you do okay with. Immutability, higher-order functions, partial application, recursion, closures, pattern matching, tacitness, etc. I can also recommend not starting with Haskell. It’s a bit much.
I actually spent some time thinking about this. I guess it’s because I was a developer for 17 years before I ever heard about lambda calculus or functional programming, and it was really difficult for me to wrap my brain around it.
I like immutability, and discriminated unions, and I can handle monads, but a lot of the rest of it gets too far into the weeds for me. Writing a function that is just a single return statement that chains together a bunch of map and reduce calls just doesn’t click for me.
“If it compiles, it works.” Yeah, I’ve never found that to be true. And don’t get me started on how you can’t debug chained calls when something inevitably goes sideways.
Once I heard someone say “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” I was officially out. No thanks. Not for me.
