• FuglyDuck
    link
    English
    6
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Depends.

    There’s a reason I wouldn’t suggest monetizing your hobbies. It’s okay if you suck at a hobby.

    For me, 3d printing is a blast because it’s always growing, doing more things. I started in my teens; late 90’s. It wasn’t a thing in general discourse, my printer was literally a hacked-up Lexmark inkjet I bummed off my dad*, and a hot glue gun I bummed off my mom (I don’t think she even noticed…).

    I’ve gotten to see the hobby grow from a pipe dream where commercial machines cost more than a small house to accessible to most adults.

    Back in 2010ish, I realized my retirement 401k was sucking- I was actually loosing money (thanks 2008,). So I started a company in that space. ( no, it wasn’t another print farm, exactly, but the bread and butter service was actually leasing printers and maintaining them- like xerox machines.) it’s always been a side gig even if people think I’m crazy.

    In any case that has sucked a lot of the joy- and I constantly have to remind myself not to be that asshole ragging on the new guy cuz they got spaghetti prints; or shitting on entry-grade printers because they’re not industrial grade. (There was that one asshole in my life that caused me to shelve it for a long while.)

    But, also,’there is a lot of new things in the space, even in FDM printing and it’s just wild what’s being done.

    *in my defense, he gave the printer to me. It was a freebie from a pc bundle and he didn’t need it. But like a year or whatever, he needed to print color and got really confused as to why he couldn’t print out a single page. My mom still finds that exchange to be hysterical. I’m pretty sure she still hasn’t figured out where her hotnglue gun went…