So, there are some things that most people do, playing games, watching movies or television, playing music. So let’s get specific.
What are some of your favorite things to do with your time? The more hyper specific the better?
Painting expensive plastic with expensive paint.
What are your favorite miniature paints? Also, 40k?
AoS, mostly, but the Votan look interesting. Still, love my gitz. Regarding paints, I really like the Intense series from AK, great paints for a good price. But my racks also collect citadel (contrast is fun!), Army painter (so-so, imho), Valljeo (also OK) and, newest, Two Thin Coates (expensive stuff). But if I activley buying, it’s mostly AK.
Yeh, we have a set of Vallejo paints to paint our Kingdom Death: Monster minis someday. Seems like it should be at least good enough for an amateur paint job
Hey, you can always strip the paint. Check out slapchop, it is so much fun
I have finished assembling my plastic, but haven’t started painting yet. I’m new to the hobby.
Two things that really upgradet my painting:
- a diy wet pallete
- a decent brush (I like the Windsor & Newton Series 7, size 1
Otherwise, don’t sweat it, you can always strip the paint if you don’t like it. Plus, try other colors than citadel. They are good, but the pricing is crazy.
You can strip them? I thought plastic minis couldn’t be stripped.
Fairly easy. Drop them in isopropanol and let them sit for a few hours. Take the minis out, use a toothbrush to carefully scrub away the paint.
Is that the same thing as isopropyl alcohol?
Fantasy plastic, future plastic, or other?
Currently, fantasy. I just love the gloomspite gitz, such fun models. Leviathan looks pretty interesting, thought. But I will probably wait for a new subscription thingy from hachette, it takes time but the saving are awesome.
I got into contact juggling a decade or two ago. It is basically a form of juggling in which a clear or solid-colored ball stays in contact with your body to interesting effect. Think the Goblin King from the movie “Labyrinth”.
It is rare enough that you don’t meet many people that have seen it, and with enough of a learning curve that not many people that start ever really get anywhere with it.
-Edit- Random video of what I am talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5MqvtiHpOw
Ah, I’ve seen that before that’s cool! Didn’t know exactly what it was called. Looks real hard to do though.
Just takes a lot of boredom and lots of muscle memory. Not hard, per se, but unrewarding until you’ve put more time into than you’d think. A lot of skills within a week or so, you should have some sort of improvement to show for it. Not so much with contact juggling.
But once you’ve gotten ok at it, it kinda looks like magic.
I like sewing - I make a few pieces of clothing once in a while but usually I’m just mending things or adjusting the fit of store-bought clothes so that they look better on me.
I also love gardening - growing vegetables outside and mushrooms inside. I’m pretty new to both but the mushrooms in particular are really fun - many of them grow a lot faster than vegetables, so it’s exciting to have a faster feedback loop and try little experiments to find what works.
I really hope the sewing communities take off on here.
Sewing is one of the things I always wanted to get into, but I never found a good hook to pull me in. Any tips?
I think starting with alterations to clothes I bought at thrift stores or sales helped me a lot - I did a lot of that before I ever tried making something from a pattern. Even making a simple garment from scratch can feel like a big project, but if you’re just taking in the sides of a shirt (for example), it’s easier to get it done and feel good (even though picking out the seams first is so annoying)
Ohhhhh, I could tailor my t-shirt… Thank you :)
Yo I also do sewing and mushroom growing nice :D
Lately it’s been collecting Indie Perfumes. They are much more adventurous and complex than most mainstream scents. It’s really fun to pair scents with experiences or moods. I’ve roped my husband into it and it’s like a puzzle game to find scents for him as well.
Any favorite I could use as a present?
Not the op, but I really like Imaginary Authors scent lines. Specifically A City On Fire which smells like you were sitting next to a campfire for hours on end before you arrived wherever you are. Cape Heartache is also a really unique scent with strawberry and fir, so like a masculine sweet scent. And for something a lot less challenging, Fox in the Flower Field is also amazing. It leans more like a Chanel N°5 but cuts it with an ozone note that takes away the aldehydic note and replaced it with a darker undertone. I’d love to hear some other good scent houses people have used though too as I’m always looking for something new/exciting/different.
That’s a hard one! Do they use perfume already and have any scent preferences? I like foodie sweet scents, or vanilla scents.
This sounds really awesome. Got any online shops you could recommend?
My favorites right now are Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (fair warning their website is a bit daunting, but they have tons of great stuff), and Solstice Scents (they do complex atmospheric scents very well).
Thank you so much! Have a great day :)
I build and fight combat robots. Think Battlebots but smaller.
I’m getting my kids started with LEGO Mindstorms! Sumo bots is the first idea that came up.
… I think my 13yo wants to go bigger. Welding, anyone?
I’d go with 3d printing before welding. You can so quite a bit with a 3d printer and the CAD skill you gain are quite useful. I printed most of the parts for my 3lb robot and it heald up quite well.
Thank you! He is actually looking into 3d printing but has not bought anything yet. I’d hate for him to spend too little and have a crappy experience with a poor printer; much rather pay some extra to have a solid start.
They are actually learning CAD/3D drawing at school - how cool is that??! Back in my day we had Commodore 64 and had to remember to press Enter before the line ended, because there was no such thing as automatic word wrap. Times have moved on!!
Reading… I found this site that has quite a few novels of which authors post chapters weekly, bi-weekly or more…
https://royalroad.comMost of it is fiction/fantasy, quite a bit of it is litrpg
I can sink hours on this… Public transports, coffee break, lunch break, evening beer… I just can’t stop myself
I’m hoping that the r/fantasy and progressionfantasy groups move here. Currently rereading Cradle to catch up to Waybound
Good call. I jumped right into it and it I think I would have benefited from at least rereading the last book.
Yeh. Definitely taking my time to enjoy the series again since I get the feeling he’s wrapping it up for good. Just a hunch
Definitly! Not entierly sure if that’ll happen tho… maybe not soon at least
Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Royal Road before. I used to (and still do) read a lot of Cultivation novels, and I know that that subset of writers tends to have a lot of cross over with the Royal Road audience.
Yeah! there are great one on there too, quite a few very popular ones: The main ones I can think off the top of my head are
- Beware of chicken; takes itself less seriously, and is quite a fun slice-of-life cultivation thingy
- Forge of Destiny; more serious and closer to classical cultivation novels, slow-burn but honestly quite magical, I dropped it because I have a really hard time with Asian names and had trouble to difference characters, but honestly, very well written
- Path of Ascension; A different take on cultivation, outside of the Asian origin but keeps some of the mechanics while applying more modern ideas, on a grand scale, honestly love that one
There are plenty of others and people more qualified than me on cultivation novels could guide you better (I am quite impaired by my inability to parse Asian names unfortunately…)
What are your thoughts on DotF?
that one didn’t attract me too much. I think I tried it a while ago but wasn’t for me
Might try it again, I wasn’t much of a fan of apocalypse LitRPGs before I started reading The Primal Hunter, now I might enjoy it tbh
Urban exploring (for lack of a better term) with no purpose other than to discover. I live in a city and I’m constantly just wandering around going down streets I’ve never been down or into alleys I’ve never been in or checking out stores I’ve never been to. This is my approach when I travel to other cities and other countries too, I often don’t have a plan for my trip/vacation, I just arrive there and then start to wander and see what I find.
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Lately it includes growing gourmet mushrooms, re/learning languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, data organizing stuff (such as assigning each horror movie I’ve seen with fears from The Magnus Archives, been fixated on horror movies in general so I’ve also made a tierlist for all the ones I’ve seen), and sewing/making clothes. I’m looking to maybe have an isopod colony again (properly this time), make fursuits, continue studying wicca/witchcraft stuff, as well as finally get back to art once I’m over this burnout ^^;
Hardware modding. Consoles, handhelds, old computers, RC cars… whatever.
I’m interested in learning how to solder, but not really sure how. I’m not a DIYer when it comes to electronics, so I don’t know what to practice on. I just feel like it’s a skill I should at least be familiar with.
I always recommended finding an old Playstation to learn on. They are incredibly simple in layout and the points take solder very easily.
Be sure to use some flux and you shouldn’t have too much of an issue.
At my company we have soldering station for learning purposes and when someone has never soldered anything we will just find some old/broken electronic device and let the person desolder everything on the board (and maybe solder some stuff back on). It’s great way to get a feeling for it and also is a good opportunity to learn about different components on the board. It’s less interesting than making something “functioning” but helps to reduce the fear of soldering “wrong” or breaking something.
Do do you remember tamagotchi? The little electronic egg with a pet you should take care of? I collect those. They are more advanced now. They have color screens, they charge with USB, you can connect them and marry, have a whole families.
Oh hell yeah. I loved those little things, although me and my brother usually had either Digimon or Virtupets or whatever the cheap knock-off was called. I remember there was a game boy tamagotchi game that I got for my birthday though and I played that for ages and ages.
Quite a few, actually
- Artisan Keycap collecting, to a lesser degree mechanical keyboards (I usually use them as displays to showcase my artisans)
- Boardgame collecting and playing. I’m a big fan of modern area control games. Also trying to design some. Slowly.
- I curate a magic the gathering commander cube. Hopefully mtgcube gets a community somewhere around here
- Reading, lots of fantasy there.
- EDM shows and festivals, recently. Probably have been going to too many, but I always jump in with both feet
Ohhhh, the keyboard thing sounds neat. I know some of my friends really love mechnical keyboards, but I haven’t see a lot of cutstom keycaps.
Got any favorites you’d like to show off?
Yeh, give me a minute to upload some…
My Grail Board - Happy Hacker Keyboard 2 modded with Norbauer Heavy Grail VHS, with Brocaps Gamer set and Mitchcap modifier keys. The top row left are original clack factory multishot clack skulls, and on the top right are kbk/kwk (killed by keycaps) vandals and mummies.
OG Kyuu - OG Kyuu keyboard with GMK Bleached keycaps, brocaps gamer set, and various artisans on the top row
I do enjoy bouldering and also jump rope. I suppose those are niche…
What’s bouldering? Is it just a different name for rock climbing?
It’s rock climbing but more specifically the type with no ropes or harness. Just the body and your chalk. The height ain’t high of course and there’s safety mats. Fun to solve those short problems.
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My most niche hobby is writing ungodly bash scripts, and sourcing them to one of my bash profiles – mingw64 (windows), zshell (OSx), or normal (debian based).
I write in such a way that scripts are separated by concepts which overwhelmingly align with a certain technology or tool (e.g. git) and source whichever functionality I want into the proper profile.
The pain is separating corporate vs personal scripts, which I don’t have a great solution for outside of actually separating the scripts and sourcing in the proper order so that corporate functionality can override personal functionality (i.e. my git commands in corporate environment are still the same but with properly overridden config, etc)
For example, I bought a steam deck and mainly use it as a laptop instead of a gaming device. I created a new bash script
steamosand source to my (new) steamos profile. All my setup is repeatable through scripts to the point I could factory reset, clone my profile repo, run a couple commands, and everything is back where it should be. I am not quite to that state with other environments, but that is my goal.Imagine starting a new job, being handed a laptop you don’t get to choose (probably a Crapbook), and then simply clone and run config command to setup the OS for your personal prefs so you can hit the ground running on week one. This doesn’t mean you clue people in on the fact you are running not walking, however, ESPECIALLY at a new job.
inb4 have you heard of Ansible
Haha, I love that kind of thing too - even if there’s a “better” off the shelf alternative, it’s fun to figure it all out and design it exactly the way you want. it feels like doing a sudoku or writing a story or something to me. I feel like I wouldn’t be working in tech if I hadn’t initially gotten into making my setup just right with scripts - before that point I just didn’t have a lot of programming tasks that caught my interest, but I learned a lot that way and eventually branched into other stuff too.
I am a looooot more basic. But I see the fun in scripting. I make scripts when I need to do boring/monoton/repeating tasks like setting up a new win env after a new install, Set up test environments or getting info that my customers ask for that is something they will most likely not ask for again or if I need test data (especially files). I am a fullstack developer so that is why I am not doing anything fancy like the sys admins and I am too practical to create something for the sake of creating. But I do love creating things that is being used!
I create brickfilms, meaning I animate stop motion videos with Lego*. I’m from Germany, and we have a small community around this hobby here. Just last weekend we had our yearly festival where we meet up, watch a bunch of Brickfilms in an actual cinema, and award prizes (literal bricks) to the best ones. It’s soooo cool seeing something you’ve created all on your own on a big screen and experiencing a full theater’s worth of live reaction to it!
Getting started with it is also way easier now than it has ever been! There’s apps that you can download that allow you to just put your phone down on any kind of stand (build one from Lego if you want!) in front of some bricks and get shooting just like that.
*or differently branded bricks. Lego’s quality has been deteriorating recently, and there are really good competitors by now!
