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?
Last two skills I’ve successfully learned:
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Giving subcutaneous fluids to my cat. Followed vet instructions and watched several how-to videos online for different tempered cats.
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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/
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Probably rudimentary plumbing repair? (More specifically, replacing a bathroom sink faucet.) Via Youtube.
I did this one a few months back with a kitchen faucet! Great learning experience. I even learned that German faucets, at least, don’t affix to the counter the same way as American brands.
Nice! How long did it take, and did you hit any roadblocks?
Must’ve saved a lot of money there.
Well, the whole saga is longer. We got a bathroom redone and the sink never worked right. It dripped. I took the faucet apart several times trying to fix the drip, but eventually concluded the faucet itself was just cheap crap and couldn’t be repaired.
So I bought a nicer one and replaced the faucet entirely. I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of replacing it ahead of time. Usually the drain and faucet “match”. (As in, the finish of them matches and if the finish on the drain is a different style/color/etc than the faucet, it’ll stand out.) And so they come as a set. But in this case, the drain that was part of the old/cheap faucet a) worked fine and b) was so similar in color/finish/style that you couldn’t tell it didn’t come with the new faucet. So I didn’t end up having to replace the drain, which made the whole process considerably easier.
Oh, I did need to slightly modify the drain closure plunger to fit the old faucet’s drain… lever… thing. Heh…
There was definitely a moment once I’d assembled the whole thing and was turning on the valves under the sink that I was a little worried it’d all explode and soak the whole bathroom. Lol. But everything’s been fine for months now!
As for how long it took, probably three sessions of a couple of hours each to finally convince myself the old faucet was too defective to try to salvage. And then another thirty minutes to find a new faucet on Amazon and another three or so hours to replace faucet. And about the only roadblocks were the time I spent trying to fix the old faucet and the time I spent procrastinating before undertaking the actual replacement. Heh.
Coming out the other side of that experience, I do feel like I understand the sentiment better now that “if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” And I think it largely applies even if you don’t have any particular amount of expertise. Someone who doesn’t have to live with the results may not really care about something like a dripping faucet. If they can check the “replaced the faucet” box, they can say “job’s done”, charge the customer, and be on their merry way. (And I’m not saying I blame them, really.)
(Of course, that only goes so far. I wouldn’t think you ought to DIY things that might be dangerous, for instance.)
Took a wood shredder apart and back together after something got stuck inside.
I can take a pen apart…
Did you have a lot of prior handy experience or did you follow a video? This is a bit vague on the how
( ’ ﹋ ’ ; )I’m kind of an electrical engineer by training. Experience taking electronics apart, but this was my first mechanical device. It was quite the journey and I only saw some general videos about people taking combustion engines apart. It’s a pretty simple device really, but still a new skill. :)
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.
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.
We sure hope it’ll be interesting, ya! We’re going for a fantasy/medieval vibe with a little tournament to win a wish from the queen. And it’s obvious what my wish will be, when I win that thing lol
Last I learned about some local plants (like the stinging nettle) and which part is edible and most energy dense.
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.
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.
I’ve been eating a lot of instant ramen lately and finally decided to get a pair of chopsticks and learn how to use them. I was using a fork before. The difference is incredible.
Yeah it just feels super different. Somehow it tastes different too.
It’s like drinking water out of a red plastic/solid cup vs. a nice clear glass. Or eating sushi using chopsticks instead of by spoon or fork or something.
I wouldn’t eat sushi without em :^)
I haven’t tried eating sushi yet. I bet it will be much easier with chopsticks too.
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 :)
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 how to use DAX expressions in Microsoft Power BI and how you can use them in measures so you can do all sorts of changes to datasheets so that when you make dashboards and data visualizations, it all looks super pro without complicated workarounds to make your data present nicely.
My employer didn’t read the description of the training and just signed me and a whole bunch of other people up. It was a certification course meant to train for the final exam but most of my coworkers who were there hadn’t even opened Power BI up before. I was just at the right experience level for this course though, as I’ve used PowerBI at an end user level for a couple years now.
Generating good reports is a surprisingly portable skill across most white-collar jobs.
Executives especially love pretty graphs that give them a good sense of how things are working/performing.
I find it so silly. Compared to Excel, Power BI is so easy. Yet, fancy graphs that move other graphs when you click a specific bar is all any senior manager wants to see. They don’t even understand what the data is. They don’t even care! Pretty bars go brrrrrr in their minds. Whatever. I get paid.
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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.
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.
