Personally, my favorite hobby is water bottle rocketry. You build rockets out of PET bottles, and launch them with pressurized air and water. At the time, I was somewhat of a space fan, and wanted to get into model rocketry, but never really had the money. Then, in the eighth grade, I had a teacher who really enjoyed building water rockets, so as a project he wanted us to build our own. Then, around a week later, we launched them all, and I was hooked.
So what's your hobby, and how did you discover it?
I want to be a fantasy author, so I write. I wouldn't say that my hobby is something as general as writing. I think what I would consider my hobby is short horror fiction. I just love everything about the horror genre, but I love writing little freaky pieces. I remember this started late one night while I was walking back to my house from a good friends barbecue. It was like maybe 1:30 in the morning, and I was slightly buzzed. I remember not having slept much for like the last week because of finals, so I was this weird combination of buzzed and exhausted. I was walking down this long road that has always been terribly lit at night (my good friend and I have lived in the same neighborhood since we were young). I swear that I heard my name being called from behind me, so I do a quick pat of my clothes making sure I didn't forget anything at his house. When I look back no one is there, and so I keep walking. At this point I'm power walking home, and I'm glancing over my shoulder constantly. To this day I swear I heard my name again, so I turned around to see a few of the street lights flickering. The farthest street light from where I was flickers, and finally goes out. For whatever reason this scared the shit out of me, so I literally sprinted home. When I got home I started writing down the experience with a bit of a fictional twist, and that was it. I've written a few really good horror pieces loosely based off stuff that I experience. I don't write them too often because the mood has gotta be right.
The mood always has to be right. I find that it's easiest for me to write in times of distress... exhausted, stressed, uncomfortable, etc. It's inspiring in a way, to feel that irregularity. It's like there's a fleeting bit of uniqueness nesting inside me that I need to capture, and words are the only medium I have.
I do bookbinding, so far limited to just blank notebooks. I started about a year ago to make a a birthday present for a friend who is an artist. I started making pocket notebooks for myself, and a couple for school. I also write, so it's cool for me to make the notebook, and then fill it with my own stuff.
Arduinos are really easy to set up and use, at least for simple projects - and you want to start simple. A good source for cheap arduino components is dx.com (deal extreme). Not always fast, but definitely cheap.
Yeah, but there are also a lot of kits out there to get started with. I am also more interested in the automation and software side of things. For one of my work projects I started playing around with openCV, which is basically a software suite that can be used to give your computer a visual cortex... like your webcam can capture images but openCV can see the images and be trained to understand what it is looking at. I never quite figured out how to do those 4 or so lines of code that would have automated the monotonous watching of trail cameras from my project, but it is technically possible. Anyway, if I had a little remote control car or quad copter with a few cameras on it attached to a raspberryPI I am pretty sure I could get it to find a poweroutlet to charge itself when it's battery gets low.
Ah, the software side interests me the least, at the moment. I have a decent amount of programming experience, but near zero in building physical hardware. While I'd like to get to the point of building robotic arms for manipulating objects, I think my current experience puts me right around the point of making a FM radio from pre-packaged receivers / amps / transitors...
I got into 3D printing a little over a year ago and have been enjoying the hell out of it. It's the ultimate geek hobby. There are different mechanical systems you need to understand inside and out. There are physical properties of different plastics you simply have to understand in order to see what's going on. "Why didn't it work?" becomes a complex question, and you have to understand the fundamentals of how 3D printing happens in order to begin to answer it. You can manufacture nearly any part you can imagine right in your home. Some applications are silly - desk toys, figurines, busts. Some are practical - tool holders, replacement parts for commercial products, etc. The best are practical and custom. Those are the things you design yourself to solve an incredibly specific problem. For example, I had a pair of kitchen tongs I really liked, but a plastic part disintegrated and they wouldn't lock anymore. A new pair of tongs is only $10, but it's a shame to have to toss the old ones because a small piece broke. 30 minutes of 3D modeling and 20 minutes of printing and the tongs are working as before. It's less about printing stupid little plastic things as it is about the freedom. 3D printing lets you create anything you need from scratch, instead of having to source a commercial product/part, or physically fabricate your part from wood or metal. You have unlimited freedom to create what you need without depending on anyone else. Even though some prints can take hours (and days), that's still faster than chasing down an international vendor to find an obscure part. All kinds of things can go wrong (especially with DIY printers), and it's the constant R&D part I love the most. Sure, your printer could be stable and crank out stuff reliably, but where's the fun in that? There's always a new horizon. You can try to increase your print area, or fiddle with your print speed to make it faster, or try new materials, like wood or flexible material. Do any old farts remember the PC kits in the 70s and 80s? When Radio Shack was relevant, they sold kits to build your own PC. It was a wild west - different parts weren't compatible. Lack of standards. Lack of codified "best practices" to describe how things ought to be done. It was a bunch of hackers figuring out what personal computers might be good for. Now we have multi-billion dollar industries, ISO standards, and university programs teaching "how computer stuff should be done". The hardware wild west is over. 3D printing today is where PCs were in the kit days. Nobody knows what the end game will look like because it's still changing so fast. It's exciting to be in on the chaotic action, and exciting to think what home manufacturing is going to look like in 20 years.
Needle felting! One day I was at a hackerspace and two people came in and started stabbing cute fluffy animals with tiny barbed needles to make them cuter. (They were building them to insert LEDs that would be controlled by arduino.) When I approached them, they explained the process and guided me through making a green turtle. Immediately after, I bought a starter kit and began to make gifts for people (my first good one was an airplane, and I'm currently felting a Totoro).
I keep pigeons and chickens. Initially I raised them for food, but now its just because I enjoy having them around.
I play the guitar. When I was younger, people just grabbing this instrument at a campfire and suddenly people would listen, they'd sing, there'd be a whole different mood... It seemed like magic. That, and the girls really seemed to like it, too. Eventually, it became less about extrinsic motivations like that. I nowadays mostly play as a weird kind of self-therapy. Sadly, I'm not quite making the kind of progress which I'd like, but I'm not too disciplined about it either. There also was photography, which I loved doing. I got quite decent at using Photoshop, too. At some point, I noticed that, apart from hanging a few prints on my walls, there really wasn't anything I could think of doing with my pictures. But I noticed that on some sites, millions of pictures were uploaded daily. I also noticed that the tools available in Photoshop had reached a lever where the actual act of taking a great picture was only really necessary if those 'shop skills weren't up to scratch. Pretty much messed up my motivation. Somehow, I never saw and still don't see that as a problem with music.
I love music. I've never had the gift to create it but i greatly enjoy browsing Spotify in my free time and making playlists. I've been interested in making video game montages with music I like for a while but haven't gotten around to buying a capture card and the software necessary. Once the Gears of War remaster comes out I'm gonna try to start making montages or videos in general with music I like. I discovered my interest in these things when i was a young kid and first got exposed t video games and music. I'd think of ways the combine the music in my head with other forms of media. I think I've always kind of had the aptitude for it but I havent focused my efforts on making it happen.
Haha. I have sunk so many hours into Spotify just clicking various things and listening to as many different things as possible. Sadly I only get these urges when I really should go to bed instead of sitting up another three hours listening away. What kind of music do you usually listen to? Lately I've been digging jazz, indie rock and drum and bass.
Haha same, most of my inspiration for playlists comes at like 3 in the morning. Right now, I'm really digging female vocalists. Melody's Echo Chamber, Wye Oak, Aluna George, Veela, Tove Lo, MO, Lorde, Alina Baraz, The Belle Game, Emancipator, Tei Shi, Broadcast, Mr Little Jeans... stuff like that. Here's a playlist I made showcasing my favorites:
https://open.spotify.com/user/cossack_/playlist/6cknKnz4fcdTAr3z75amXG In hip-hop, I'm digging, Earl Sweatshrt (his new album is amazing), Vince Staples, Casey Veggies, Yung Simmie, Deniro Farrar, A$AP Rocky, Joey Bada$$, Chance the Rapper, Kevin Pouya, Sir Michael Rocks. This is the hip-hop I'm listening to:
https://open.spotify.com/user/cossack_/playlist/1dQPOvFHCqOpZ7tlVh6rZy I like alternative and indie as well. bands i'm diggin right now are Portugal. The Man, Trails and Ways, PAPA, Flaming Lips, Tame Impala, Kid Mountain, Harlem, Fleet Foxes, Empire of the Sun, Mando Diao, Shout Out Louds, Dinosaur Feathers, Deerhunter, Other Lives, Phoenix, bass Drum of Death, Free Energy, Why?, Wavves, Motopony. Washed Out, Summer Heart, Mr Fijiwiji, Twin Rivers, and Toro y Moi are cool too. I guess they would be considered electronic chill music? Paracosm by Washed Out is a great album
No I don't, I usually find new music by listening to artists' playlists on spotify, browsing r/listentothis, and going to an artists page on spotify and listening to Related Artists (really good way to discover music). The discover tab can be useful but isn't always that great.
I was really, really good at Guitar Hero. Of course, you have those people who hate Guitar Hero and they would tell me "being good at Guitar Hero doesn't make you good at guitar". So I picked up an electric guitar and a few weeks later I was doing pretty well. I own a couple of guitars now an love it. And I'm still really good at Guitar Hero.
I actually had the opposite thing, learning to play guitar actually made me able to reliably hit that damn orange button and have it not mess me up on the next 10 notes!
I make games. Sometimes tabletop games, sometimes videogames. I've always wanted to be an entertainer of some sort. From the time I learned to write I wanted to be a novelist, and after getting an NES at six years old, I was designing levels to games (on paper) by age seven. I learned to play guitar in hopes of starting a band. I've been an extra in a couple of theater productions and a low budget film. Heck, I was a clown for two years in a circus for kids. Growing up, I was of course always told the next step after high school is college, and you get to pick your degree. Out of all of those options, I suppose I could have gone to acting school like my sister, but I discovered that videogame design was a new field that a few schools were offering, and I believed that of all of my preferred methods of entertainment, videogame development would give me the most chance of getting a successful career. Unlike all the other options, videogame design was an office job with steady hours, so I figured that would be the way to go. It would rely on hard work more than a lucky break (so I thought). So I got a B.S. in videogame design, and... now I do non-game-related stuff for money. So I work on games as a hobby. Though my degree was videogames, I got into some very fun tabletop games at college with roommates and friends, so that steered me into that direction, as well. I have a blog that's mostly about my game development which has recently been consumed by a card game called FissureVerse, though I've got a bunch of other projects scattered around.
Sewing. It is really easy to get to and surprisingly fun. I started when i needed to fix a pair of my favorite pants and they lost they zipper (not really lost, more like i wanted to make sure I didn't flash people by accident). I realized I enjoy the calming nature of it. I then bought a second hand machine and suddenly making things was easy. Then I had a lot of friends that did drag, which means that I could attempt to do odd stuff that doesn't need to be functional or in good taste.
I like playing tabletop RPGs. The interesting thing was that I only got introduced to it by pure chance. My friend (to whom I hadn't talked in a while) was hosting a DnD 4e session which I heard about when talking to his sister (who I hadn't seen in ages) about The Big Bang Theory and how it's taking the piss out of nerd culture.
Anyway, I started playing and never looked back. Since then (start of last year), I have played in 3 groups, and have started running 2 Pathfinder groups with friends. I highly recommend tabletop RPGs to anyone that's considering them. They're like video games where you can choose to do just about anything, rather than the scripted options.
I love the idea of tabletops. I just haven't been able to find any groups, so I just dick off by myself with some various tabletop PDFs and let my mind wander. Do you have any tips for finding a group?
I just tried to gauge interest in playing with friends. Enough said yes, so I organised stuff. You could probably try your local board game shop, or check out http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety to see if there's a local Pathfinder game near you.
I also play tabletop games with a group of friends, but we usually play GURPS or Shadowrun. We've been playing for about a year and a half, but the only problem is that our usual GM can't really keep to one campaign for too long.
Language learning - I've been interested in languages for my whole life but I was usually too lazy or pessimistic to get into it. About six months ago I started learning French and I wish I had started sooner. Reading - I was a voracious reader in elementary school but then depression happened and I couldn't focus on books at all. In early 2014 someone from the Random Acts of Amazon subreddit gifted me Heart of Darkness and I felt obligated to read it. So I forced myself through it (I also forced myself to understand it), and the feeling of victory I got when I finally finished it led me to start another book. Now I'm an avid reader again. It was kind of an odd approach though, and I wouldn't recommend Heart of Darkness as an introduction to books :P
I like to cut rocks. I mine them whenever I have the time for a trip into the wild. Polish up some book ends, cut and polish some cabachons for jewelry, I tried my hand at faceting - but didn't care for it much. I've been playing with rocks for 20+ years now. An old boss of mine took me to a rock shop in the town that I grew up in, and this little old lady that ran the store enticed me to join their "rock club", with annual fees of $12.00 to start. I just wanted to carve soap stone, but it turned out to be a much deeper rabbit hole than that. As soon as I cut a large quartz crystal into slabs, then polished them up, I was absolutely hooked.
I've kind of gotten into Astrophotography lately just by browsing the Internet. I remember my parents purchasing this super micro sized white telescope that was designed for viewing the moon. I had learned about space and other planets right after that. Astrophotography is an interesting field because you need a heafty telescope to see throughout our galaxy and enter into other ones. The main problem for me being unable to peruse this hobby even more is the cost. Telescopes are expensive :(
Still haven't found a hobby, technically. There's lots of things I want to try out, but aren't possible with the budget I have.
It's more of an interest than a hobby, but I love linguistics. Several years ago I read What Language Is by John McWhorter and realized that the questions I'd been asking about language were questions asked and (sometimes) answered by linguistics. I'm actually majoring in linguistics as well as Communication Sciences and Disorders. I don't think linguistics is a practical field for me at this time but I'm very lucky that I'm able to study it anyway, and go into a similar field (Speech Therapy in schools). I'm still holding out for the day that I can just get a PHD and become a professor..
Weightlifting. I first started working out with my dad at the local YMCA but we only used the machines and did a few dumbbell exercises and we were not very consistent. Then I went to college and my freshman year roommate got me to start working out regularly. Although I only went when he did and still stuck to mostly machines. A few months later into my freshman year I met a girl I really liked and she became my 1st girlfriend ever. Throughout the relationship I still worked out although not as regularly, we did go running a lot together though. Needless to say the relationship ended that summer (for various reasons probably including that I was a little obsessed and clingy) and she broke my heart. She was the 1st girl I had ever loved and it crushed me. I was pretty depressed for awhile and stopped working out completely. Finally after a month or 2 I snapped out of it and decided I needed something to focus on to get my mind of things (and also admittedly out of petty/silly revenge to make her jealous or trying to get her back) I started working out seriously. I started hitting the gym hard, eating right, and doing researching on health and fitness. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me in my life. I had never dedicated myself so much towards something, it really helped me on so many levels and I learned a lot about myself. That was 4 years ago and im still lifting weights to this day 4-5 times a week (although I did hit some bumps here and there where I stopped working out for extended periods the most being 2-3 months). And so yeah I guess thats my hobby.
I love bouldering, which I describe as rock climbing that exchanges the thrill of high ascents for short distance climbing that is technical and very difficult. It's fun to progress on the V Grade. My hand is broken currently though. : (
I've rock climbed once and while I loved the puzzle of getting up, I absolutely hated going down and didn't particularly enjoy the heights either. I was told I might enjoy bouldering more, so I'm going to check out a gym nearby that offers it. How easy do you think bouldering is to get into? Hope your hand heals soon!
Very easy to get into! Most bouldering gyms offer a variety of difficulty levels, so you can test things out and find where you're at. And I tell you, the desire to get better and climb more difficult problems is strong. It's an excellent sport. And rock climbers are so fit!
I like to play video games and watch anime, then discuss them online or with friends. I've always been into video games, and I have built my own PC for the main purpose of gaming. I started anime in 10th grade when a friend of mine told me to watch Code Geass, and now I am watching somewhere around 15 shows, mostly currently airing stuff.
I run a small fanbase for my favourite Korean band and translate information, as well as interviews when I have the time, for their English speaking audience. Aside from that studying has sorta become my hobby, and I love reading books a lot but it's difficult to make time for them now since there's a lot of distractions on my mind. I also write poetry, but that tends to be an occasional spur-of-the-moment thing rather than a sit-down-and-write thing.
Calligraphy, studying chess, train for sprinting, speedsolving (Rubik's Cube), memory sports, reading/learning about poetry, discussing any abstract subjects (if that counts, haha). I guess I could add video games with a focus on time trials or select RPGs. I suppose daily research on whatever I want to know is what holds it all together. I'm interested in these things because of the internet. There are many more things to add, but many of them are temporary and never come back to me once I stop the first time. My hobby is acquiring hobbies just to ditch them in the future.