If you could have one small thing as a superpower. What would it be and why?
I mean small like I sneeze and a 20 dollar bill appears in my hand or something like that. Not classic answers like flying or super strength.
The ability to know exactly where anything I think of is located.
You could make some serious money with this power. You could find anyone's lost pet or keepsake.
[Breathing Intensifies]
- Captain Jack Sparrow
Hoffa?
I’m definitely thinking historic lost treasure hunter would be an amazing career!
Ability to force anyone to objectively confront their own cognitive dissonance by maintaining eye contact.
Possibly too powerful. Some heads may spontaneously combust from a lifetime of preferring their own reality.
Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.
That would force you to selectively use it since often times reality is somewhere between our personal view of it and other opposing views.
Chose the wrong situation and you'll both be crying in the corner with shatter worlds. Chose the ones where the people are truly disconnected from reality and perhaps you'll change their lives - hopefully for the better.
Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.
I was actually tempted to include that in the original, but I didn't want to belabor it. :)
I'm fine with this, and would prefer it that way.
Nah, I say that's part of the superpower. After using it a bunch, the weilder will have little or no more cognitive dissonance of their own. Every time they use it will further purify their own thought process. That's like a superpower where every time you use it it replaces a little bit of your body fat with muscle. After you use it a bunch, you end up ripped.
That's not a negative, I think. It might hurt a little at first, but you'll soon have removed most of your own errors and be a better person for it. What more could we wish for?
Sleep for 1 hour but with all of the benefits of 8 hours.
Just the ability to fall asleep instantly would be a godsend
For me I'd also like to add that I wouldn't wake up just because a loud car drove by. I can sleep fast, but staying asleep is difficult
the ability to know the right thing to say in every conversation
That's way too op
ok debuff maybe, it's the right thing according to the current time period moral standards and not based on what I want to say
I was thinking the inability to speak falsehoods would be useful for troubleshooting. "The problem is with the router." Nope. Not the router. "The problem is with the modem."...
Social engineering. I use it to get people to listen to be so they don't die.
You know when you have a discussion or confrontation, and six hours later you realize what you should have said? My superpower would be the wits to always think of the right thing immediately.
There's a French idiom for this: "Avoir l'Esprit d'Escalier" which means "The Wisdom of the Staircase". Basically, you often think of the best thing to say after you left and are walking down the staircase.
Remote restroom usage
Your wish is granted. Here is a box of extra absorbent adult diapers.
Didn't realize the monkey paw was granting these powers lol.
is that remote restroom usage, or is it a portable restroom?
Perfect for concerts
Cleaning up / scrubbing / etc. is as effortless as it appears on commercials.
The ability to fall asleep instantly, anywhere, and choose exactly how long to sleep... And get a full rest regardless of how long that is.
Skyrim IRL
If you get a full rest regardless of the sleep length, why sleep for more than a minute or two?
Airplane rides
Because I want to fall asleep and wake up with my wife. It'd be lonely staying up all night by myself.
I'd be too tempted to take a 10 year nap.
Gotta hope they check your pulse right or they might just bury you after a few years. Imagine trying to figure out where you could lay down for 10 years. Immediately got overwhelmed thinking about paying rent and all the work I'd miss. House over run by plant life and roof started leaking until the black mold set in and half of the house collapsed on you laying there.... yikes
There ability to fall asleep instantly, anywhere...
I used to have that back when I started work at 4am... Oh wait, you meant voluntarily.
Perfect control over memory.
So able to remember anything with high detail, but also able to forget the cringey stuff from middle school
Honestly, this is not a minor super power.
Maybe if there was a limit to how much you can remember. Like your brain runs out of storage kinda lol
But you have all the permissions in your brain. If you'd like you can delete English and learn Chinese when you're going on a trip. Maybe you can even forget how to breathe or forget what other food tastes like so I can go on a diet that has nasty food.
My biggest fear would be by the time I'm like 60 i would be attached to too many memories and wouldn't be able to learn new things
Ig it's not too different than regular older people lol. There are some people at work that I've taught them how to attach a file to an email like 5 times already and they just don't learn
To be able to hear the soundtrack. Like, if I walk into a building and hear the Psycho “reep reep!” I’ll get the hell out. But if I walk into that same building and hear “bow chicka bow wow”, I’m staying.
I have a disease which limits what I can eat, therefor the ability to digest any food or drink comfortably.
God I feel this. I'm probably not nearly as bad, but I'd like to not have to carefully analyze what I eat anymore
Yeah... It's crap
Makes you think that the things you take for granted on a daily basis can be a super power for someone else
Yup. Health is the most important thing you can have.
When in an argument I want the ability to know what my opponent has to say in advance so I can always interrupt and finish their sentences. Every single one of them.
For people who are interested in the same things I am to glow faintly, the more similar interest, the more they glow.
The abilty to change the color of anything.
Anything that would be improved by paint is on the table at a thought.
Likely way to powerful in a combat sense. You could tag enemy combatiants on a battlefield in dayglo orange or turn the whole landscape into that zebra ship paint they used in ww2. Hell, just turn everything bright white during the day and black at night. Would be a nightmare.
Still, really neat.
Even if you limit it by range, like only recolouring things within 1 meter of where you touch… It’d still be a great power! Imagine the money you’d make, flawlessly painting whole rooms in seconds.
Not quite mind control, but I'd like the ability to blast common sense into morons minds by looking at them. Like a psychic mind dart that says, "maybe this line has a purpose and I should get in queue instead of trying to force my way in from the outside" or "maybe I should listen to the sign that says 'don't put your kid on a railing above tiger enclosure.'"
I'd like to be able to give people arch cramps by making eye contact and saying "bipity bopity boo" quietly.
We’re all here think of good things; you’re plotting nefarious powers.
Damnit...I'm in. The ability to make someone believe they have to go to the bathroom really bad but when they get there, nothing was really there. Someone starts to annoy you while you're out somewhere, poof. They go a scuttling.
I'm a simple man with simple desires. I'm also probably chaotic natural.
Only needing an hour or two of sleep per night, but getting all the rejuvenating effects of a perfect night’s sleep. I hope I would be productive with that time.
Why not just get rid of the need for sleep all together but still have the ability to sleep when you want if you want to?
That’d be preferable but I wanted it to still be a very minor power
I would ABUSE this power
Google for polyphasic sleep. By fucking with your own sleep schedule you can reduce the number of hours you sleep while still getting the same restful effect. There's a few different schedules, some work better than others. The concept does work though, I've done it.
I’ve looked into those, I’ve even done biphasic sleep a small amount. It sounds like one has less leeway the more one breaks down their sleep into smaller blocks. Which ones did you try?
I was fantasizing about all the things I'd finally do. On second thought I'll probably just use the night to scroll too lol.
If I can get a combo deal of; less sleep, super motivation, super disciple. That would be amazing. An extra 6-8 hours a day would be miraculous! Maybe I’d become like Batman
I'd like to be able to double jump, platform video game-style. Mostly pointless in daily life, but imagine how good it would feel?
I'd like to relax people around me, make them happy and communicative. Imagine entering public transport during rush hour, and all of a sudden, everyone around you puts away the phone and people start to talk to eachother, with a smile on their face.
Put some MDMA in a spray bottle.
Instead of sleeping at night, let me just plug in to a charger. It would be much more convenient and reliable.
Knowing which of the last two pieces of fruit on my plate is sweeter.
Lol, so specific!
I would like to know every song's lyrics upon hearing the first 10 seconds, think of the karaoke nights 🎤
No tendency to procrastinate
Absolutely. Having three exams in the next ten days and realy have to study. Guess whos on lemmy writing about procastinating instead od studying.
My advice, close Lemmy now and start studying.
Promise yourself to study just for 20 minutes (20 real minutes not distracted minutes) and then see how you feel.
Set a timer for 30 minutes and study. Give yourself a 5 minute break / treat. But try not to overload yourself with more info from the Internet.
Came here to say this. If I could get past crippling procrastination, I wouldn't need any other superpowers.
Take a mental note that I could review later without worry of forgetting it, for times when jotting something down normally isn’t practical such as while driving.
Knowing everything about my body.
What is my current blood sugar? O2 level electrolyte status? How much shit do I have in my colon?
Kinda like a performance monitor for your body. I would like that too
I would love to have the ability to know for any journey, no matter how complex, what time I need to leave to arrive on time.
Be able to see 5 seconds in the future
Like, all the time or on demand? Coz if its a constant thing that would be torture. My ADHD ass can barely handle the present.
On demand but randomly sounds more fun
Like that Nic Cage movie?
That was 2 whole minutes into the future!
Is breathing underwater too exceptional? I’d settle for charging batteries by holding them, or the ability to revive/kill plants that I touch (my choice, not some random thing or King Midas curse)
Your purpose in life is now to supply power to the grid. At first it'll be great, you're celebrated as a neat way to keep the baseline juice coming as fossil fuels phase out. Then you're asked to stay back a few hours as there's a shortfall predicted, you oblige out of duty. Then one day you wake up in a drugged daze, strapped to a giant battery, your nutritional needs piped directly to your bloodstream as scientists ever so carefully cut you open to try and figure out how this works, because despite their best efforts to keep your wrecked body alive, one day you will die, and the utter reliance of the grid on your free energy will die with it, and with that kick off the downfall of humanity.
Get me out after a couple of decades of the torture and this is the tragic backstory I need to turn evil and plot the end of humanity. Make my savior a nerdy but hot chick (Gal Gadot will work - just put some horn rimmed glasses on her) and have her die while escaping. I think we can get two sequels out of it.
Have you published anything?
I’d pick charging batteries while holding them as well except only if it doesn’t affect the battery health of the battery. I’d never have to charge my phone again.
Phone, flashlight, gaming system, headphones, laptop, jump start cars, watch (though the Apple Watch wouldn’t be compatible with my super power…same as in real life with all normal chargers).
The real question is if it would transfer energy magically, or would I experience a calorie deficit. That could go both ways in my book.
The ability to turn most traffic lights green (not all of them just, like 90%), would basically be the reverse of my current super power of turning most traffic lights red
I think strobing lights set them off.
1 pound telekinesis in my line of sight. You won't be opening any safes or stealing anyone's gun, but you can do plenty of incredible stuff with even the weakest supernatural power.
I think I would be robbing casinos and thumbing the scale all over the place. It doesn't take much to make marginal opportunities into steady gains if you can cheat physics and break probability.
This power would be super useful. Imagine if using mirrors you could just lift all the dirt & grime off your skin, pick up all the dust on the floor, lift up a small camera and fly it through the air, or eat without utensils
I'd wave my hand and people arguing or hating in front of me or online, would suddenly be peaceful and conjointly coming up with solutions to their problems.
Whole political parties would cease to exist if that came true.
This would change my life more than any conventional super power.
Ability to have perfectly control how awake i am
Taking photos with my eyes. Would help a ton with getting pictures of cool bugs without having to fiddle with my phone and get defeated by autofocus
Being able to find the exact book page or moment in a Netflix series where I was when I fell asleep last night.
Or when my cat starts to make her first vomit sounds being able to beam her from the carpet to a floor with tiles in a split second.
Exactly once a month, I find a 20 on the ground. It can be anytime of the month and it can only be once a month. How great a feeling to find a 20 on the ground and no one is around?
The 20s are coming from scumbag people like jerks who don’t pick up their dogs poop or are mean to customer service people.
Why not once a day? You'd still not be making much out of it and I think there's enough assholes that you're not making much of a dent to the asshole flux.
oof.. i'm gonna go with slightly above average luck
If it's just enough to beat out the house advantage, it might be all you need.
Being able to manually adjust my focus on and interest in what I'm doing.
Not require sleep, ever, with no ill effects (fatigue, mental issues, shortened lifespan, etc).
So much time is wasted sleeping. I have too much shit to do! It's 2am because I was up getting some code working for another team at work, and we just moved, so I have tons of unpacking to do!
I feel like that'd be extremely boring, tbh. Constant uptime.
The ability to control the temperature (and perhaps humidity and/or composition too) of air within 1mm of my body. Like a personal air conditioner. Would make going outside right now so much more bearable, pretty sure it would help with sleep too... Sigh, one can dream...
Lie detection
Someone once mentioned slowing time for like 2 seconds as a terrible super power, but as a skateboarder, I think this would be amazing.
Control my apettite at will would be nice.
The ability to know exactly the right thing to say at any given time. Because I often do the opposite right now.
Zoom with my eyes! I love birding, having prismatic eyes would be neat.
I want an audibe achievment fanfare everytime something i do goes according to plan.
I may already have that power. It's hard to tell.
To be able to stockpile time up to 24 hours. For example, if I'm running late on a project, I can dip into a time stockpile for 8 hours to get it done. At a later time I can then lose 8 hours from my time
On the one hand it does sound kinda minor because you have to give back the borrowed time.
On the other you have the ability to stop the flow of time...
I'm sure it could be OP if used correctly
With the example given, I feel like my go-to super power would still be applicable here:
Whatever I draw, I can make real. The first thing I'd draw is a pill that allows me to draw better.
"Small thing" and you immediately go to infinite wishes haha
just a little omnipotence, I'm not asking for much
Superhuman patience.
Every morning when I wake up my clothes and dishes from yesterday are cleaned and put away
You need a magic coffee table
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Not have a panic attack when someone is mildly displeased with me
Breaking bones actually doesn't hurt much. If it does, it's probably the other parts of the injury that hurt. When I broke my foot I thought nothing of it until I tried to walk. It was not successful. It didn't hurt at all from my memory though.
Maxed out luck stat
I don't want to know something would go well, I want to be surprised when something goes well
That I could tell someone to stop doing something and they'd actually listen and stop.
"stop breathing"
Boom dead. Best assasinatoin superpower.
The ability to mute any sound I hear. Baby crying, annoying hum, someone snoring, obnoxious drunk? Muted.
To get my kids to fall asleep at their bed time.
You’re thinking too small. You’ve got to ask to have your kids do everything you ask them to do.
So you say bedtime, they go to sleep. You say sit still and quiet for this particular moment, they listen. You say look here and smile, bam, instant beautiful family picture.
I’d settle for them listening after the third time I asked them to do something. I’m not greedy.
For the sleep thing, melatonin is magical. 1/4 of a 1mg melatonin chewable is barely anything but it’ll knock them out because they think it’s supposed to. I could switch to gummy bears now and I bet it would still work on them.
The ability to not mind driving a car. Like whenever I need to drive somewhere, I just completely black out and my body drives perfectly while my mind is full out. Then my mind awakens as soon as I arrive hand have finished parking.
This superpower is called living in a country with a sane public transportation
Lemmy moment
My country is sane, but I'm the insane one who decided to live in the countryside where nearly no public transportation exists.
Overwrite my personality. It would help me so much to become normal dude.
Add +1 to the Credit Score of anyone I positively interact with.
The ability to know if a fruit is going to taste good just by holding it. Perhaps being able to experience the taste of it (when it ripens) by holding it. Perhaps also being able to tell peak ripeness. But that may be op. I’d settle for the first part.
Any species of insect of my choosing within 12 inches of my body instantly die and I can activate or deactivate this power at will.
Or the ability to be fresh out of the shower and perfectly dried off clean instantly whenever I choose.
I could hold my poop indefinitely until I got home.
The ability to instantly make anyone stub their toe.
i could see lies
Even better would be to make people's lies visible to everyone.
"Something's going on with this politician! It looks like he's sweating literal bullshit all over his face! Oh my God the smell! The smell is awful! Oh the humanity!"
I'd want a pen or pencil to come out of my fingertip. Retractable, of course. I'm always looking for something to write with and never can find anything that works decently.
I know this is not a thread where one says a superpower and the other a side effect. But how about: "the pencil which comes out of your finger break very often, and to sharpen it you have to spin your whole body 360 degrees a couple of time" , just like a normal pencil sharpener.
Kill every insect within 10 yards of me with a thought.
Apparently nobody here knows what a "small thing" is.
I want to be able to build an endless tower of blocks that will never fall over
The ability to know all of someone's usernames and passwords by only looking at a photo of their face.
The perfect ability in the modern age for a secret life as either vigilante or villain.
I want a power that if someone looks at my back I die but in return if someone looks at their back, they die and pass it on to the next user.
Not a fan of doggy style?
Weak earth-bending. Like just enough to like dig garden furrows or build sand castles. Even at the same speed that it would take with hand tools it would be pretty fun to mess around with.
The ability to sneeze and get the relief even if the feeling fades.
One of the biggest ones that still classifies as small?
I could save so much time if I could tell how much voltage is in a circuit just by touching it
Oh that's easy:
A little.
A lot.
TOO MUCH!
Isn't it unsafe to touch a circuit?
(Or is that the joke?)
Low wattage circuits (like I'm usually dealing with) aren't particularly dangerous, even if you had soapy or sweaty skin the most they could do is give you a tingle. It'd just be so nice to be able to trace down wiring issues without having to grab a multimeter and probe around to get info. Also it'd be bad ass to grab a battery and be able to tell the voltage.
I'd take perfect aim when throwing something. You always hit the garbage can, you're unstoppable playing darts. You never miss flinging a playing card at your friends.
You’re suddenly a superstar athlete making tens of millions of dollars. I think we have to disqualify you from the game on those grounds.
Being able to set a timer for when to sleep and wake up
To be able to dream, or at least be able to remember my dreams if I actually am having them. I used to be able to remember my dreams pretty vividly right after I woke up and I could tell when I was having them. Now, nothing.
I am having pretty big dreams. I know it because sometimes I don't get out of the effect after I wake up. But I forgot after 5 minutes or so. Today I woke up, and I remembered initially. It was some huge legendary tale or something, or it felt like it. But I woke up, and knew I would forgot. Maybe I should write it down so I won't forget it.
I do voice memos whenever I really enjoy the dream
And I used to dream like that too. I'd wake up remembering the dream initially and then gradually it would fade away if I didn't write it down. There would be times I would wake up right from my dreams, it was incredibly jarring. Now... it's just a blank slate, like I don't even have the inkling that I dreamt something or a vague impression, just nothingness.
Drawing sth in a way that explains a picture I have in my brain in a very short timeframe.
Being able to choose the best fruits/vegetables when shopping for groceries. No more moldy Avocados.
I know that there are indicators that I can already use to determine this, but I want to be able to just pick the best ones every time on first try without even thinking or touching them all.
the ability to just barely lose any match.
Not needing to sleep.
The Levant.
Wait, are we not roleplaying powerful countries?
An infinite money credit card would be pretty small, I think.
But I get it. I would honestly just pick an ability like being able to match other people's problems with the ideal solution if one already exists closeby. So, say, someone comes to me looking for a job, and I just magically happen to know exactly of a phone number for a company that needs them. Someone looking for love, and I just happen to know that if we walk down a certain street and make a certain joke, someone else will overhear and love it. I would eventually have a reputation.
mustard seed size faith 😄
You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.”(Matthew 17:20)
I already have a minor superpower. Sort of a weak form of telepathy. I can alter people’s thoughts and emotional state with my mind.
As for how my best guess is I got abducted by aliens and they altered me somehow. I do have a bunch of small identical scars scattered around my body.
As for why, I’m not sure. I suspect it might be a scientific study of human morality. Hopefully I’m giving them a good view of humanity with how I use it.
I only use it to help people. I can help people calm down when they’re panicking. I even did it with a dog once: it was a little dog in a shopping cart and it seemed terrified of everything so I just transmitted what it’s like to realize everything’s okay, and immediately the dog stopped shivering and looked around with wide eyes of wonder, then looked at me. There you go little guy.
I’m in sales, and I never use my powers to swing a sale. That’s unethical.
My favorite use of the powers is to enhance parties and concerts. Thought recently I’ve been toning that down too because it’s also kind of unethical. I do feel like operating on a crowd bothers me less than operating on a person.
I went to Ninja Sex Party in Boulder last fall and I helped drive the crowd wild. They said we were their best crowd ever and they’d never had a better concert.
If the DJ sucks I can just activate more of his brain and suddenly he’s on fire. If someone’s looking threatening toward me I can just instill a little irrational fear of me. Their mind fills in the details: “why am I suddenly afraid of that little guy? He must have powerful friends, or I’m being watched or something”
Overall, having a superpower is really weird because people don’t think it exists, and I can’t talk about it without being labeled crazy.
Invisibility, with ability to hide IR and sound and can make recording video cameras invisible too. I'd expose all the corrupt politicians, judges, and CEOs!
That's a fairly major power. The question was about a small thing as a power.
Like the ability to know what judges and politicians are corrupt... From reading the newspaper and their court filings, because they already tell everyone that they're corrupt, like all the time. It's not hidden, it's just next to impossible to get people to care about it. Or to get the right people to care about it.
Like, look at Clarence Thomas, the fucker is corrupt as all hell, and since the Republicans don't care, nothing can really be done. Because it's technically not illegal, and Republicans are blocking any form of Ethics reform.
ability to spawn $100,000,000,000 into my bank account at any time :)
A small power, they said. $100 billion, you said.
If I put on someone's shoes and walked one mile in them, I could magically perfectly understand everything they're going through.
If I put on someone's shoes and walk one mile in them, I can instantly perfectly understand what they're going through.
If I put on someone's shoes and walk one mile in them, I can instantly perfectly understand what they're going through.
To actually fall asleep within a few minutes of laying in bed, and stay asleep until I actually need/want to be awake.
I have this power, and it is in fact... super
A friend of mine does too.
I'm ready to form a supervillain league with the sole motivation of performing unethical research experiments on your kind. This power must be brought to the masses!
I have it too. It took me a few years to figure it out but now I average 12 minutes to fall asleep and can sometimes do it in less than 3.
I have this one too.
I used to have insomnia that came from anxiety about my future (I’m guessing.) When I started doing carpentry and started truly exhausting my body I gained the ability to sleep ANYWHERE ANY TIME FOR HOWEVER LONG I WANTED.
It’s seriously amazing. I’m 33 now and don’t have to work quite as hard, plus am used to the long shifts that are hard on your body. I can still sleep pretty much whenever, wherever.
I flew to England once (it was like a 14 hour flight) and seriously slept the entire time. I didn’t even have a window seat.
I did residential construction for a couple years, then 4 in the military, so no stranger to physical exhaustion... Insomnia hit even in those times.
The only way to predictably get a decent chunk of sleep is to kind of bank hours in the days leading up to it. Like if get 0 to maybe 3 hours per night through the work week, I'll sleep like a baby come Saturday.
Never been on meds for it. Was afraid to report it when I was active duty (fucking stupid) and now my rating isn't high enough to cover prescriptions and I don't have regular health insurance so... can't afford them. :-/
I wouldn't advise you to get depressed with this superpower. 🙂
"Wake me up when the world is worth living in."
I have the monkey paw version of this where I can fall asleep instantly but can’t stay asleep, I wake up several times throughout the night
Yeah, I get this too kinda. I find I get really vivid dreams when wake up but fall back asleep
It's called alcohol