Check out this blog that highlights a bunch of superpowers that would be totally useless. The drawings and descriptions are great. Here are a few of my favorites.
SUPERUSELESS SUPERPOWER: Healing Punch
Float like a butterfly and sting like the bedside manner of Mother Teresa. As a superhero, sometimes you have to resort to violence. Too bad your ferocious fists instantly heal the damage you inflict. Whereas most punches would deliver a crushing Ivan Drago-like knockout. Yours leave your opponent feeling amazingly refreshed and rejuvenated. At least until he counters with an uppercut to your esophagus.
SUPERUSELESS SUPERPOWER: ∞-ray vision.
Go from 20/20 to 20/plenty with this seemingly amazing gift of sight. But here’s the catch. Your see-throughiness is infinite and not at your discretion.
So, perhaps you are seeking out survivors in a collapsed mineshaft. Scanning through the wreckage with your ∞-ray eyes, you see through the rock pile. Then through the coal. The trapped miner’s clothes. His skin. His capillaries. His kidney. His bones. Back through his skin. Dirt. The upper mantle. Magma. The lower mantle. The outer core. The inner core. Again the outer core. The lower and upper mantles. Fossilized raptor dung. More dirt. A rice paddy in Miryang. A cumulus cloud. The Ozone layer. The Stratosphere. The Exosphere. Outer Space. A meteorite. The Orion Nebula. The Twin Quasar. Et cetera.
In short, by seeing through everything you will essentially never see anything.
(ht to marko)
