Bodily Oddities
vester.si36 points by vesterde 3 hours ago
36 points by vesterde 3 hours ago
When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.
I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/
It includes a form to tell me about new things, if you think they belong on the page. Feedback welcome!
Do we have a theory yet why people hiccup? Wait, I just see you have a page on it :)
Not that I know of. But some people so far visiting the site have voted that they do no get hiccups, which is very odd.
They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.
Yes, a rare but real human affliction.
I remember choosing to not buy NVIDIA stock because Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Oops.
But just think of how many many things you could have bought with the same knowledge which would have been mediocre or failed entirely.
Very cool site! It's got some Claude-isms but they're not overwhelming which leads me to wonder: how did the author get the overall aesthetic to be so un-Claude-like?
Please point out the claudeisms, I want to clear them all.
V1 looked like complete Opus slop, but since I make many little sites all the time I can get it to undo a lot of them, one at a time. I just explicitly tell it the aesthetic to avoid per-element (like the famous left border), and eventually it looks okish.
Edit: Ah and for text, Standard Technical English is a good instruction to give it, but I also told it to be dry and technical, and no embelish or do storytelling. And some manual editing out of cringe stuff still after that.
People downvote me when I say we're back in the "Geocities era" / "indie web" of the 90's and 00's, but LLMs have enabled us to build cool side projects to completion and give them love.
This is 100% a good thing.
I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.
Thank you so much <3 I agree with your sentiment a lot, I love making things, and it's easier than ever.
When I see someone else jump or fall from a height, I sense the fall in the bottoms of my feet and my lower legs. I feel both the drop and the landing. It also happens if I approach a ledge or dropoff.
Lovely! I mean odd… I will look into it, thanks!
Is this not something everybody feels?
I keep being surprised at both which feelings are universal, as well as which aren't. I think I know the one your'e talking about but from being kicked in the balls... For jumping I might have experienced it playing video games and falling further than I expected.
So do you get the feeling before they land, or at the same time as they land, or some other moment?
How is supertasting considered "rare" if it is 25% of people? https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/kinds/rare-ability/
Only 30-40% of people encounter brain freeze?
Fabulous site.
So it seems, it just happens to include everyone I've ever talked to about it
I have to be so careful eating cold things, it's like freeze++, brain glaciation.
I wonder about these sites that appear to be vibe coded from a simple prompt. Has the author even looked at the data or just did a little sample and figured that looks about right and hit publish
To either my credit or against it, wikipedia provides a lot of the raw data. However that makes you feel.
I've been making this list for years as markdown files with a few sentences and links to wikipedia (or xkcd for his visual field comic), but the site is indeed made with the help of AI.
This should be taught in school.