What's your superpower?

[lirazel]

I am very good at name and voice recognition. If I see an actor in one project, I can tell you everything else I've ever seen them in. If I'm listening to Podcast A, I may think, "That voice sounds familiar," and I go look up the person and find that they were once on a single episode of Podcast B that I listened to last year. When I was watching Arcane, obviously I recognized Shohreh Aghdashloo's voice, but she has a VERY distinctive voice so that isn't a surprise. What is a surprise is that I recognized Even Lindley's voice from the handful of You Are Good episodes she's been on, even though her part in Arcane is definitely a bit part.

I'm so good with faces that if I see you at one event and didn't even get introduced or learn your name, I'm still probably going to recognize you when I see you at another event. I'm so good with faces that I don't understand the whole "these white guys all look alike!" memes that go around the internet often. I'm so good with faces that I was truly and deeply shocked the other day when I finally put it together that Vanozza from The Borgias is Sorsha from Willow. (In my defense, the two projects were made more than 20 years apart and I hadn't seen Joanne Whalley in anything in the interim, so I didn't know how she aged.)

elperian assures me that this is my superpower, and I think that is probably correct.

So what is your superpower? What's the thing you're really good at that most people aren't?

Comments

[genarti]

The one which is very rarely of any use, but which on at least the couple of occasions I've shown it off has gotten astonishment that I find wildly disproportionate (it's easy! you just do it! ...no?) is writing back-to-front. By which I don't mean mirroring the letters, but starting with the last letter, then the next to last, and so on, until you've written a normal readable word that doesn't show the fact that you started from the end.

(I started doing this when I was taking Arabic, you see. I'd take my normal notes on most of the page, and then on the right-hand edge if I wanted to note down a new word for later I'd write the Arabic, =, and then the English equivalent -- starting from the right, of course, since that was a more surefire way to make sure it all fit than to start from the left and guess how much space I was going to need. It just made sense to do it that way!)

...Yours is a lot more useful, lol. I suspect I have one that's at least slightly more practical in ordinary life, but I can't think what it might be.

[lirazel]

Hahaha, I love that! It's so random but delightful!

It just made sense to do it that way!

Absolutely! I need to start doing this with Hebrew!