• @[email protected]
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    23 days ago

    As someone who is lazy as fuck about learning art and doing other hobbies but still learning art the part about tracing hurt my soul

    • @MehBlah
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      17 days ago

      If the reason was so you would understand you never have to do it again then the answer is no. Just install slackware. Then you will really learn how things work. Compile that kernel leaving out all the bits you don’t need.

      • @BuckWylde
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        17 days ago

        Also for real fun daily drive Gentoo.

  • @greedytacothief
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    197 days ago

    I think some people are misunderstanding what this is trying to say. It’s not saying that you should always take the easy route with your hobbies. It is not saying that you shouldn’t learn the “right” way to do your hobby.

    It’s saying that it’s just a fucking hobby. It’s purpose is to be enjoyed not mastered. Do it the hard way when you’re feeling it. But don’t force yourself to struggle because someone on the Internet said that this way is how you learn the most efficiently or get the best results.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 days ago

      It’s saying that it’s just a fucking hobby. It’s purpose is to be enjoyed not mastered.

      Yeah, too many people preemptively gatekeep themselves: you’re not a real (hobbyist) unless you master (narrow part of the hobby), so you’re not allowed to take up that hobby until you’re ready to commit to that boring/tedious/difficult part.

      I play chess and I don’t know the names of openings (and still have a lot of trouble with following notation). Who gives a shit, I’m not going to win tournaments. But I still have fun with it, occasionally play strangers in the park, and have been having fun teaching my kids how to play.

      I half-ass my fitness and workout routine. Sometimes I go months in between gym sessions, and sometimes I go 6x a week for months, break some PRs, and then go on living my life. Sometimes I run 500 miles in a year, sometimes I run 10. Whatever. Life gets busy, and my own preferences shift between whether I want to do cardio, weights, sports, yoga, metcon/CrossFit style classes, or just sit on my ass and get weak and fat for a year. I’m in my 40’s, so I’ve been all over the place on all of these things.

      I can watch a TV show without needing to start from the pilot and watching every episode that came out. I can watch a movie without trying to understand every reference to everything else in the same cinematic universe. I enjoy watching basketball and football even when I can’t name all the players, much less their whole career histories.

      And after all that, a funny thing starts to happen. You find that you actually are pretty good at certain things compared to the public, even though you didn’t wholeheartedly devote all your effort to that thing.

      I like being a dilettante. It’s awesome and I’d recommend this lifestyle to anyone. The best way to enjoy a hobby is to be unburdened by expectations.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      I feel this so much. I got into stamp collecting, and I totally enjoy stamps and mail and all, but (old) people are so pretentious about it. The worst are the total hypocrites about it, too.

      "I got into stamps when I was young, but I stopped when I went to university/started working/had a family because I didn’t have time for it, and came back to it after I retired.

      "Philately is supposed to be academic and scholarly. You’re not a real philatelist if you’re not doing original research.

      "Young people just don’t have the patience for stamps!

      “The hobby is dying, why don’t young people want to collect stamps anymore??”

      Actually, a lot of people do and share lots of stuff online (where the old people are not seeing it and thus is not happening). We’re just not writing 16-page papers about them (which is the standard a expected thing to do in “philately”).

  • fmstrat
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    137 days ago

    The internet has made serial hobbying so much easier. “Back in the day”, it was much harder to expand your skills, so you learned a few things really well.

    Now there’s more opportunity to find something that fits your style, so half-assing is really just the trial period before you move on.

    As a “still a serial hobbiest”, It’s great.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      Growing up in the 90s, there were so many hobbies that were unobtainable.

      Like, I was a kid and didn’t have anybody to teach me about trees. So they recommend you go to a library and get some books on trees. But the books are either at a college level, or something extremely basic. And your support was only as helpful as the librarian. So they knew zilch about the topic, you’re fucked.

      Today, you wanna know about trees? Visit a wiki. Watch YouTube videos. Ask AI. Go to the library with actual resources to get the right books or audio books.

      Huge opportunity and a wealth of information.

    • @[email protected]
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      57 days ago

      I’m just like that. We should open !serialhobbiest to talk about and share the result of our last hobby.

  • @[email protected]
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    117 days ago

    It’s even more acceptable to half-ass your job.

    They’re paying you the minimum they can get away with, so pay them back in kind.

    • @hydrospanner
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      Hear hear!

      When you bust your ass all year for that great review and much needed raise…only to go in for your evaluation and be told, “Great job! Unfortunately due to budget cuts and corporate policy, we can only give you a 1.5% raise, but you’re welcome!”

      Don’t tell them, but remember that.

      Remember that regardless of the work you give them, they’re only paying you 1.5% more. And that’s not even factoring in information inflation.

      At the most generous, you should only give them 1.5% more productivity than it takes to not get fired. If you look at it based on value…the value of your time and experience and productivity against the purchasing power of your take home pay… you’re getting a pay cut vs inflation as their way of thanking you.

      As such, cut your productivity, attention to detail, reliability, and shits given by the same amount as the purchasing power you’re earning.

      They call it quiet quitting, but in reality it’s the market economy working both ways. If they’re buying less from you, give them less.

  • @[email protected]
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    97 days ago

    I love to draw but I have zero artist taste.
    I love to paint even though it is usually ugly.

    I did a few things a consider interesting but mostly pieces my friends think is made by school children until tell otherwise and I don’t even keep the ones I consider ugly.
    But I have fun at painting not I make a beautiful painting.
    And I have fun every time I paint even when I put my ugly looking result straight into the garbage bin.

  • @centipede_powder
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    87 days ago

    Wait, there is more than one type of braid? i thought i was hot shit for knowing how to braid a girls hair.

  • @Mango
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    77 days ago

    I struggle with this a lot. I go hard with literally everything.

  • @umbraroze
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    47 days ago

    I’m an enthusiast amateur photographer with nice DSLR and a few mirrorless cameras. And I shoot a lot on automatic. It’s fine. Semiauto and manual is usually only needed if you have specific ideas about exposure.

    Also you can fix soooo many mistakes in the post. When people tell me their cellphone photos look naff, I tell them to just try levels / curves / white balance tools, and those are in every photo editor. Will help a lot.

  • @GoofSchmoofer
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    47 days ago

    I feel this with reading.

    Personally I’ve never understood the flex around how many books someone has read in a year. I mean if you are a fast reader/comprehend-er then you be you. Yet I feel that most people are just reading book after book so they can get to some arbitrary number by the end of an arbitrary time frame.

    But, hey if setting a goal of reading x number of books in y amount of time makes you happy - fucking go for it.

  • MCHEVA
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    1128 days ago

    Perfect is the enemy of good.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 days ago

      Don’t force yourself to be perfect, allow yourself to be the best you can be and you’ll flourish

      Damn that’s a good quote I made

    • @4grams
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      228 days ago

      right. I feel like the world is desperate to pretend we aren’t standing on the shoulders of giants. who wants to reinvent everything, every time. use the paths already there and find shortcuts along the way, then mark them and leave them for the next traveller.

      • @[email protected]
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        98 days ago

        This is why I write down everything when I’m setting something up that’s new to me. Even if I go off someone else’s tutorial I put it in my own words. That way when I come back to it later I’ll understand it and if I run across someone else that’s trying to do the same thing I have at least one step by step guide to offer them.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 days ago

          This might actually be helpful for those stressful github tutorials that I come across when trying to setup some open source software because I can’t understand it because of the way they’ve written it

      • @[email protected]
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        07 days ago

        Recognizing that for a second would destroy the basis of private property. How can you say “this is mine” when it comes attached to the work of a million others?

        • @4grams
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          17 days ago

          Uhm, you know what a metaphor is, right? I’m not talking about actual paths here.

    • @[email protected]
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      218 days ago

      Related to what you said, but not necessarily this post: I was so damn frustrated with my neighborhood community the other day. We had a vote on whether or not to repurpose a huge grass field that takes up a ton of water and sees very little use. We’re wasting a ton of money (and water) watering this pristine empty field.

      The main argument for keeping the field was “we waste water in other areas of the community as well. The common-area sprinklers were on when it rained the other day. We need to address all waste before making a decision about this empty field.”

      There are a lot of people that don’t realize you can make incremental progress towards a goal.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 days ago

      I did macro photography for a while by flipping my tele lens and holding it up to the mount the wrong way.

    • IninewCrow
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      8 days ago

      The best part of learning astrophotography is not so much in taking awesome pictures … it’s the excuse to spend hours and hours sitting outside in the dark and staring up the night sky every night. To me the pictures are a bonus.

      • @[email protected]
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        138 days ago

        Absolutely! Just learning the positions of everything now and being able to describe them to people during the day has been pretty awesome. “Useless” knowledge, but I’ve always loved space lol

        • @[email protected]
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          37 days ago

          The knowledge of the position of the astres is anything but useless! It is one of the most pratical thing you can learn both for modern life application and very traditional use case.

        • IninewCrow
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          8 days ago

          It’s not ‘useless’ knowledge … if learning about the wider universe outside our small planet makes you realize what your place in this reality is, then I really don’t think it is useless, rather it is critically important because it makes our small insignificant existence in this vast universe far more special and humbling to the point where we look and see everything and everyone around us as so miraculous that we should do everything we can to enjoy this time that we have together in peace, love and harmony. It makes you realize its all we have and all we’ll ever be.

          Definitely not useless knowledge.

          Keeping looking at the stars, I’m watching the same sky as you.

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      178 days ago

      Hey, nobody would have questioned the worse quality cameras that astrophotographers were doing this with 20 years ago. Even though it’s your phone now, it counts!

    • @Mirshe
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      128 days ago

      Phones are arguably some of the most powerful consumer cameras ever built. That Nikon or Canon might have more funny buttons and settings, but your phone camera is pretty powerful on its own.

      • @[email protected]
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        128 days ago

        In some ways phone cameras are very impressive, since CCDs are now cheap and good enough that they’re no longer the bottleneck. All the computational photography stuff they do boosts their capabilities even more.

        The thing that really limits them is the size and optical quality of their lenses.

      • @[email protected]
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        128 days ago

        Hell my phone camera now is advanced enough that it has the ability to do “astrophotography” on its own without a telescope. The pixel series of phones after 4 has an astrophotography mode, the “ai” processing slightly corrects for star trailing. It’s been pretty crazy to just point my phone up and catch Andromeda or the Orion nebula!

  • @Warl0k3
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    828 days ago

    God this is so true. I teach compuster science, and I always make a point in one lecture to show the students how many tabs full of basic questions I have to open when grading their assignments. Nobody can memorize all of this, and it’s so important to shake off that feeling of not being good enough just because you have to look something up.

    • @LovableSidekick
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      8 days ago

      Career software developer - Years and years ago I stopped reading programming manuals and trying to remember the syntax of languages. I just google the same basic things over and over, and often paste & edit example code.

  • @glitchdx
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    588 days ago

    me: does a thing because I like it and I get kinda not shit at it.

    Everyone else: HaVe You cOnSIDErEd DoinG ThaT PRofEssIONaLLY? YOu cOULd mAKE so MUCH MOneY.!1!

    me: fuck off. I have a job. I do this for me.

    everyone else: Do What yOU LOve anD You’lL neVER worK A dAy IN Your life.!

    me: turn your hobby into your job and you don’t have a hobby anymore. There’s no faster way to hate your passion than to monetize it.

    • @Mango
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      77 days ago

      I feel so seen!

      I do not want my customer’s money deciding how I do my favorite things! That’s for ME.

      I’ve got extremely good dexterity and my favorite hobby is flow arts which is a visual spectacle. This results in lots of attention and I’m always hearing that I gotta make money with it.

      • @AsheHole
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        57 days ago

        Yep, I do have a business out of my hobbies, but I definitely have lost some fire for a couple of those hobbies I now depend on for income.

    • @[email protected]
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      57 days ago

      That’s why it’s funny that the bicycling community talks of “dentists” with all their gear. The people best equipped to really pursue that hobby wholeheartedly are the people who make a shitload of money doing something completely different.

    • @GoTeamBoobies
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      107 days ago

      I lost interest in photography for several years because of this. And because I’m a slow learner, I did the same thing with woodworking An extra few bucks doing a random thing or two is nice, but the side hustle gig mentality is toxic

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      There’s a word for that: jobby

      As you said, it’s not healthy to turn every hobby into a jobby. The best thing about hobbies is the lack of urgency and technical criteria. The whole point is to do it for fun.

  • @hardcoreufo
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    418 days ago

    I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years and I kinda suck. I’ve forgotten everything I know about music theory, I don’t know any songs and my fingers just don’t move that fast. But I enjoy coming home and making some noise for 15-20 minutes. I just move my hands around and make a lot of bad sounds until I start making a good sounding riff then I’m done.

    • @papalonian
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      127 days ago

      That’s how I used to play guitar, too. I got a cheapo sound pedal with a bunch of effects and premade back beats. Try to play some songs that I know. Sound bad. Keep doing it until I get bored or it sounds kinda cool once. That’s enough for the week.

      Am I ever gonna be anywhere close to decent? Nope. Do I care? Nope.