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Taught myself how to snake spit. But now it sometimes happens on its own so I really wish I hadn’t trained my mouth so well.
Making tofu from scratch. Also sourdough.
I love cooking in all forms, and there are a lot of things I happily do from scratch. I love baking bread, making my own oat milk, mixing up my own seitan from vital wheat gluten, and a whole bunch of other things.
But making tofu was something I tried a bunch of times and have ultimately given up on. It is extremely time consuming, very difficult to get right, and makes a worse product than what I can buy at the store. It isn't even cheaper to do, as the cost of the soybeans and the cost of the premade tofu are about the same. I may make it on occasion if I plan on serving it on its own as a dish with soy sauce, but that is about it.
With sourdough, I found it easy to get into, but my husband and I both prefer our baked goods to be not sour, and we both have pretty sensitive tastebuds in that regard. It is easier for me to just use instant yeast whenever I need it and make something we both prefer to eat.
Let me think -
Mostly software training at work for systems they immediately abandoned.
My interior design skills languish for lack of money.
Most of the other stuff I can do gets some use I think.
Functions and derivatives, from late high school to college. They were extremely tedious, and I had to learn tens of formulas I don't use very often.
English sheep counting, a base-20 number system. Often called Yan Tan Tethera. Lincolnshire is the best version.
Must. Resist. Rabbit-hole...
Ventriloquism. I dont use it at all anymore. Learned it because i thought it would be fun and one could make some jokes with it but nah
As an old time computer nerd I have uncountable examples of deprecated knowledge. There is no use in knowing how to use the reserved upper memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, nor how to use Napster or Kazaa.
But all these skills do shape your brain and way of thinking.
Assembly language taught me to be precise and think before typing. Flash taught me that nothing lasts forever, as big as it might seem.
Eventually, all this adds up and creates a profile that is very demanded in my career.
That said, my mom taught me to thread a needle without looking. And I can't sew, so that's that.
Wait, how do you thread a needle without looking?
It's pretty cool to see once mastered because it takes less than a second and not many catch what happened.
You take the thread and wrap it around the needle and pull tight. Grab the thread with two fingers and pinch it. Slide the needle out and shove the needle's eye into the pinched thread. When the thread goes through, grab it and pull it all the way.
The skill comes into play aiming the eye correctly and doing it fast.
It's probably easier to understand watching a tutorial video.
I had to learn himem.sys and loadhigh when I was about 10 years old and the family PC HDD crashed. I had a copy of DOS and a manual the size of a phone book. The only way out was to write my own boot disk.
But yes, these days it's a bit of a useless skill.
Yeah and to think we had to learn and find out stuff reading a book. A book!!
Touching nose with my upper lip
Touching peoples noses with your upper lip can't be that hard to learn.
Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.
I've been trying to figure out what to do in my life and this is tentatively on my bucket list. Problem is it's crazy expensive and I don't have use for it afterwards!
How did the process of getting the cert go for you?
If I had to do it again, I'd start with the end goal and work backwards. It was a long time ago, I was single with no extra expenses, had a decent job, and thought it might be fun to learn. If I had wanted to become a professional pilot, the calculation would have been very different.
Getting the cert mainly involved putting in the hours. Having a good instructor helps a lot. Also, not making any stupid mistakes. I almost stalled the plane hard on my first solo touch and go. The hardest part was getting used to the ATC lingo and not stuttering too much. I got an aircraft band radio with a headphone and joined all the weirdos who liked to sit at the end of airport runways.
At least you didn't go all the way through Instrument rating and Commercial license, only to realize ADHD was a thing and also not treatable while maintaining a medical.
I was already working in tech so the backup plan is chugging along fine; but goddamn the student loans....
What are the rules around flying a small plane with ADHD? I'm unclear if one needs to be off meds for an extended period to get a private license
I believe for even a third-class medical a pilot needs to be off ADHD medication for over 4 years, with additional screening/testing involved if they have been prescribed. My knowledge is limited since I have never been prescribed such meds and only realized I have some level of ADHD due to my son getting a diagnosis. He only took the meds for a year or two in elementary school before he opted to stop due to side effects and his brain overcoming that developmental hurdle.
It sounds terrible, but my advice would be that unless your ADHD is severe enough to demand medication you should never ever tell an Aviation Medical Examiner or standard doctor about ADHD suspicions if flying is something you want to do. I could technically still go fly if I found the time, and have never felt I was distracted given the degree that flying a plane engages all parts of your brain.
There is a dark side to this way of thinking though, as any sort of deviation from the norm with mental health or cognitive performance is often pushed under the rug instead of being treated due to fear of losing livelihood. A tragic example was Germanwings Flight 9525.
The cost of leaded gas alone is financially painful.
I got a bunch of software certs for when I was first job hunting and now they either no longer exist or have been so changed that the certs don't matter.
Customer Service Skills, aka the skill of eating shit.
Cursive I guess.
Probably morse code. It was required for my ham radio license back in the day to read it at 10 WPM. I put quite a few hours into learning it through the koch method.
At the end of the day I'm just not very interested in getting a lot of contacts. I just like building and tinkering with radios.
My limited experience listening to ham radio operators with my scanner (listening to voice, not Morse code) is that when hams do get in contact with each other, they mostly talk about ham radios. Which, I mean, I guess is understandable, since it's a common interest to all of them, but a lot of it is people who like building and tinkering with radios talking about building and tinkering with radios.
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Even if you don't end up using it, the process of learning something often shapes us into who we are. So it's tough to say something isn't worth the effort.
For example, I learned to read sheet music when I was younger and taking piano lessons. It took a while and I don't really use that skill today since I mostly play by ear or tab (fretted instruments). However, I appreciate understanding what the notes mean and think it made me more musical overall.
Cursive handwriting
Hard disagree.
There's some debate to have here about neuroplasticity and whether cursive handwriting (or the process of learning something involving both the cognitive resources and some rather fine hand, wrist, fingers, a bit of an arm movement), but one thing is certain: it's a faster way to write stuff down.
I have tried journaling and other writing both in printed and cursive, and the former makes me not write at all, because there's not enough time in this world for me to be my verbose self on paper when trying to write legible printed letters.
Cursive is just that fast. Faster if you learn to write shorter forms of the same words. Even faster if you learn some special systems, but that's a different rabbit hole.
But I will admit that learning to be concise with one's words without losing meaning and gravity is also beneficial, even if only for trying to push Alzheimer's and others further into the future.
I agree that cursive is faster for note taking and keeping up, but I retain the knowledge better when I print. I think slowing down is helpful in processing the information. Any writing is better for retention than typing though.
Cursive is faster (and more comfortable) than printing.
But that assumes that you're handwriting in the first place.
Typing is faster than cursive, and many people who work a lot with text can just type any substantial amounts of text that they want to write.
I do get what you're saying, but most people nowadays just type rather than write.
When I write, I mostly write in print, but I actually seem to have a bid of hybrid cursive going on in there.
In France, children learn only cursive. It's kind of strange to learn how to manually write like a typewriter…
I think it's a matter of how it's framed.
It was already going out of fashion in schools when I was growing up, and people did not like it when a teacher (usually older) made them practice it. The original argument of it being faster didn't apply once computers became common in schools/homes, and printed letters (writing like a typewriter) are better for clarity.
However, I think there is value to it when framed as an artistic skill. Calligraphy strengthens motor skills, and if you make the lesson less rigid then kids can have fun with it and figure out how to express themselves.
I don't understand it, to be honest. It may be cultural. To learn two ways to handwrite is a waste of time, agreed, but why choose the one which was not thought to be handwritten?
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Can't think of anything.
Life's a journey, not a destination.
Recently there was a thread where a lot of people were expressing their hatred of handwriting, so according to them that was a waste of my time (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ I do even write much neater in normal script compared to handwriting.
Other than that nothing stands out, so either I'm unskilled or super focused
Which is really weird to me because I love handwriting. It's my preferred way of taking notes because it's so much faster. I also love the flowing motion as I find that therapeutic. My Japanese writing sucks because of it though because I tend to get lazy and connect the strokes too much.
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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