I still can't do that damn 15-piece slider puzzle, and I love puzzles and do many of them a day at chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtath…

I taught myself programming and IT well enough to do it for a living for a long time, but I ultimately went back to writing - but writing about programming. 🙂

I did those tile puzzles when I was a kid. Haven't seen one in an age. Not sure I'd be interested anymore if I did. Same with the golf-tee thing that used to be out at some restaurant (anybody remember where?). Problem-solving has become a chore rather than an amusement.

My typing skills got pretty good with practice/experience. After 6 months' training I think I tested in the 30s; when I applied for the old printing job, I tested at 95.

Ah, typing is perhaps my skill - on a good mechanical keyboard (or Selectic typewriter) I can basically type as fast as I can think. (Most computer keyboards are really bad when it comes to fast typing.)

My spelling may be more than a bit homophonish - When I get roaring the words come out based on how they sound in my head - basically I'm dictating onto the paper,. In my contracts class in laws school - a full year course with the entire grade based on the final exam - I typed my exam. When I looked at it later after it had been graded I saw that for almost every instance I wanted the word "made" (as in "a contract was made") I had typed "maid".

(By-the-way, I aced that exam - I got the highest score ever in that class - matched only once by a student who went on to be a justice on the California Supreme Court. They put my exam - filled with "maid"s - into the library. I wonder if it is still there?

@Carsten Raddatz - I'm really bad at games; I have trouble paying attention.

Once some friends had a board game that I had not seen. Sort of Scrabblie-ish, but different, I don't remember much about it but after a few rounds I kinda understood how it worked. On the next round the most amazing thing happened - I looked at what I had been dealt and I instantly saw the path to winning. It was totally amazing, unlike anything that I've ever experienced. I told the other players to concede - even before a single piece/card had been played. They didn't. And the game played out exactly as I had foreseen. It was a moment of insight into what really good chess players must experience.

not really through 'life experience' but intentionally. My life focused on science and tech with no or very little interest in art until the sometime in the 1990's when I intentionally decided I was going to learn to draw. Practice, practice, practice....ended up focusing on pencil portraits....haven't done any in a few years but...here's the most recent one.

The Aviator

and a self-portrait (it's about time for a new one!)

Lordy it's Cold out here!

Culinary Arts in general, and especially baking. I had to learn a lot by myself as my mother was a horribly bland cook, and although she was an ok baker, she was all appearances on cakes rather than complex substance or flavors. She did mostly bland 'American' cooking, avoiding anything resembling ethnic foods except a small amount of Italian items (but stripped of most of their flavor as my father couldn't eat cheese and so everything was seasoned with basil, oregano and sometimes dried garlic or onion.. No wine in the cooking either, that wasn't allowed in our house.

Yeah I had to teach myself to get beyond burgers, hot dogs and meatloaf.

While I don't LIKE Malcolm Gladwell, and find his writings bland and shallow, his book Outliers does have one piece of [almost] truth in it; he says that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something you're an expert in it. This is false.

"Expert", for things like nuclear science and vaccine research isn't determined by such things.

But yeah, if you spend 10,000 hours busking with your harp on a streetcorner, you get better at it. Yup.

Not sure I'd say "expert". But I sure can demonstrate the improvement over time.

Not that I'm all that great at puzzles per se, but many of them, once reduced to transformations among permutations of symbols, are "easy" in the sense that you can build a model of how they work and get to the answer without any additional insight.

Not that that's usually any fun except to the lover of that kind of math.

I do like me a good NYT Thursday or Friday crossword. Not that those are like the ones I just mentioned. Back when I was doing lots of them that is where most of my cultural and sports knowledge came from. When I finally filled in a blank from the surrounding answers, that I was clueless on the actual clue, I could say "Oh, right, Brianna! ha ha silly me! Wait, who's Brianna!"

and a self-portrait (it’s about time for a new one!)

gee, you don't look anything like the guy in your profi—

wait, nvm 😏

/silly

the few male students in my High School typing class

I met a bf that way

i think i’ve gotten better at compassion and empathy as i’ve aged.

oddly, I've become more "sucks to be you" as I get older... although that is typically reserved for people who got themselves into whatever pickle they're in

Cue laugh of the damned.

Failing. I've gotten really, really, good at failing. Still, I keep looking for new things to try that don't run afoul of my moral code.

@Samuel Smith if the devalued (that's the wrong word but I can't think of the right one) format is the one I think it is, there is a repository of that stuff at the Internet Archive

there's probably a better way to get there, but I can't remember that either