Take him up on it. You’ll be surprised.
Good Lord! I hope you mean the MGM version!
Just to follow up on the whole “I can’t draw” thing – drawing (in artist-speak, rendering), is not really an artistic skill. It is more like knowing how to sew on a button, or build a fence, or drive a car. It is a skill I think anyone who really wants to can learn, it is a matter of comparing the marks you are making to the object or picture you are copying and learning how to correct yourself until you get the hang of it. It may never be ‘pretty’ but it will be accurate and recognizable.
Like a lot of skills, people get good at it at an early age because they enjoy the process (or the result) so much that they don’t mind being bad at it while they learn. Rendering is a thing which for modern people is entirely optional, no one cares and no one suffers if you can’t render, so if you don’t like that particular process of failing continually while learning to do better, you will give it up and declare that you have no art talent.
I can’t fix machines or build anything straight, for much the same reason. But I can drive a car, despite hating and fearing learning how to drive, because that’s something that it’s very awkward to not know how to do.
They used to say I was born with a crayon in my hand, i.e. I always knew how to draw. But what that really meant is that I was taught how to SEE. I remember being a toddler, and my mother, an artist, took me to the art museum. She held me up and described how artists painted certain things, like noses or fabrics or reflections.
My father was also an artist. So throughout my childhood I was exposed to both of my parents doing art. The activity itself, aside from the skills involved, was as natural to me as breathing.
I believe that most people can learn to do most things (within their physical limitations), if they can be taught properly. And that includes many (most?) of the things in this thread.
Can’t do rice. Can’t even do the Ready Rice right.
Can’t roll my tongue.
Can’t do statistics. My brain freezes if I see a percent sign. And I liked calculus (better had as I had year in high school, plus 3 semesters in college).
Actually, anything to do with money investing, etc. stresses me. A lot. Just getting the papers ready to give them to the accountants is a bit stressful, and that’s not looking at the forms themselves.
I sort of agree, with the caveat that what constitutes “taught properly” may vary from person to person. The ability to figure out the best way to teach individual people is a true gift. Also, I think the desire to learn has to be very strong.
There is a first grader in the school where I work who has yet to even learn all the letters. He has also been prone to outbursts when things don’t go his way. We have a very limited number of students in person right now, so his teacher and I have had more time than normal to work with him. I brought him some graphic novels, and discovered that his ability to tell what is happening is incredible. He will narrate what’s happening so well that someone who didn’t know better would think he’s actually reading. He also loves nonfiction books with lots of diagrams. He accurately interpreted the life cycle of a jellyfish by looking at a diagram; I was impressed that he knew exactly what the diagram was without being told. This kid has a burning desire to learn, and I think he’ll be ok. I had no burning desire to learn Algebra, although I didn’t want to fail the class. I had to see a tutor every day, which was a lot more effort than I wanted to put in. The difference between the effort required to simply pass the subject and the effort required to make an A in the others was so vast that it caused a lot of emotional distress.
I’m bumping this thread to announce that I have successfully crocheted. It’s very imperfect and there’s definitely a learning curve, but I’ve done it.
I know, I know… I’m an inspiration. Reach for the stars, you guys. You might just produce a messy and mostly useless “mug cozy” that is, nevertheless, an actual item that used to just be yarn.
I got 40 something percent, and my wife got 90 something, on the Cambridge Face Memory test.
I absolutely can’t play team sports. I’m reasonably fit but in a team sports environment it’s like the incompetence and incoordination gods arrive.
Count yourself lucky if they even get to the bit where they tell you what it’s about. It’s conscious dumbing down. Stupid people just want to be told what to think about a new thing. Any form of detail and their eyes glaze over. So significant sections of the media just don’t tell you any more. It’s also a form of “neutrality” since the media can claim to have said nothing themselves about the subject matter that could introduce bias (which is wrong of course).
Anyway my thing is drawing.
It’s a learned skill to some degree though. Lawyers (like me) who dictate documents and correspondence all day every day have to learn it as a skill and you do get better.
My mentor’s family used to tease him that after a few decades in practice, he spoke like he was dictating, all the time.
I can’t dance, I can’t talk; only thing about me is the way I walk.
I don’t have a problem going underwater and enjoy diving and snorkeling, but your comment about swimming otherwise applies to me, too. I can “swim” in the sense that I can stay afloat and propel myself a fair distance, but the only swimming stroke I’ve ever been able to manage is the famous dog-paddle (very appropriately – see avatar!). All these fancy swimming strokes have always been beyond me.
I can’t dance
I can’t sing
I’m just standing here selling everything
I’m sure I could learn the skill with enough practice. I just find it weird, here and elsewhere, where someone says “sorry for the grammatical errors; I’m using text to speech” as if it were a completely normal thing that people can do. And maybe it is; I mean, I can speak normally to a person, including on phones. Just not to a passive device (maybe relevant: on the phone or a conference call, I find myself occasionally asking if they’re still there, or if they have questions, just to get the mental sense that they’re still listening).
Maybe I need to imagine that I’m speaking to an actual person. I think part of the problem is that I am very careful to calibrate my words to the audience. But if there is no audience, that part of my brain doesn’t know what to do. I should just pretend I’m speaking to some representative person of average intelligence.
I’ve been doing it for 30 years and am not very good at it TBH. I tend to correct a great deal. Some of my partners can rattle off a short letter without a single correction or pause.
Not me.
But when I’m dictating on my phone to send a text to family or friends I guess I do think of it like I’m talking to them and do change my style as I would depending on the intended recipient
Even before my arthritis, I could not snap my fingers or make the shaka sign they make here in Hawaii.
On a bit of a related note, my wife and I play as a piano/bass combo at church, often with a singer and percussionist as well. When the pandemic hit and everything went to Zoom, we spent several months recording songs for the virtual church service. My wife hated it, and I found it tedious. No matter what we did, we never could feel relaxed and free-flowing and our music sounded mechanical.
When our church opened up, it was such a great relief to be performing live again. There is no comparison: playing music for a machine is awful; playing live is a breeze. It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s exactly how it is.
I’m sorta shocked that you could make this work at all. The problem is latency–the fact that it takes some time to capture a frame, encode it, send it over the internet, then decode and play it. It takes a few hundredths of a second minimum to do that. It’s not that noticeable for a normal voice call since there’s a natural gap when the speaker changes, but that’s not true of music. Multiplayer games have the problem since they’re very timing sensitive, but the games themselves have very sophisticated techniques for essentially lying to the gamer about when certain events happen.
Music can’t take advantage of that… I guess you could set things up so that the percussion drives the timing, and everyone plays from that, and you record separately and fix the timing later–but compared to everyone just playing in the same room, it does sound pretty miserable.
We didn’t do what you are thinking–for obvious latency reasons.
I would record a video of my wife playing a song. Then I’d make an mp3 of the sountrack to that video and email that to our vocalists / percussionist. They would individually listen to the mp3 with earbuds while recording their own contribution using a smart phone, and they would share their video files using Google Drive or something like that. At some point I would follow the same process to record my bass line.
Once everything was done, I’d put it all together in Final Cut Pro with the singers in the full frame and other musicians in “picture-in-picture” wherever they would fit. Add some lyrics to the bottom, tighten up the audio a bit in Audacity, and Bob’s your uncle.
One of the biggest issues with doing this is that she wants to play with expression, in a rubato way, with no solid rigid beat, so that means that everyone else has to really key in on her tempo. This happens organically in a live setting, but with remote recording it’s a challenge.
Sometimes I had her record a vanilla “melody + chords” version for everyone to perform to, then she would re-record her nice accompaniment while listening to the audio of the singers.
I simply can’t read a document properly and with any accuracy on a computer screen. I absolutely must be able to print it out and read the paper copy.