Coming from a place with no earthquakes to the place with the most, it’s interesting how much you can learn to perceive after a while, once you have a good sample size
You can distinguish “big but far away” vs “close but small” vs “huge but really far away” even if shaking has the same severity. The new year quake wasn’t very strong where I was, but you knew to turn on the news because it was bad somewhere
You can also distinguish shallow vs deep quakes, though, at least for me, less reliably
I’m sitting outdoors with earbuds in, on a bench, and it felt like someone had snuck up on me and gave the bench a quick shake to fuck with me. So, at first, I looked around see if someone was there, before realizing it was probably an earthquake 🙃