I’ll start. I have recently gotten into 3D printing, and, while incredibly frustrating sometimes, there’s nothing more rewarding than getting a perfect print.
Lockpicking is nice. You won’t believe how many friends ask for help after they know your hobby. Most of the time it’s just “my keys are still inside, so it’s not locked”. It’s the easiest, but you don’t need to pick the lock to open those.
I like buying LEGO minifigures and then designing/building biomes for them to inhabit. I use BrickLink Studio to design the builds and then upload my parts list to BrickLink to get used bricks to build them. I also post them on Rebrickable for free, but I’ve fallen behind and need to post more on there.
Here are a few that I’ve built.
Hey that’s pretty sweet man. Has some diorama feel to it.
Role-playing games. It might hit close to mainstream now - those tv series and movies where they appear directly or indirectly, certainly made the hobby more famous - but as an actual hobby, it’s still a niche thing.
I think they should be part of educational program, globally.
Like DnD? Or what role-playing games?
Tabletop role-playing games in general. D&D and Pathfinder are now the most widely recognized and played ones, but there’s whole library of alternatives. Thousands of games out there, catering to different needs, offering different experience, set in different worlds and offering different choices.
For example, there’s BLUE PLANET in production - a SF/cyberpunk/environmentalist game in production, taking place on a distant planet covered mostly by water. In terms of the setting, it’s antithesis to DUNE, or very old, but stil amazing DARKSUN but the undertones are similar - people fighting against greed that ruins their world.
Whatever idea you have, zombie apocalypse, kids saving the world, people investigating Lovecraftian horror, spaceships, weird west world, clash of fantasy kingdoms - there’s a game for that.
I second with Vampire: The Masquerade, The Dark Eye, Shadowrun and StarWars RPG in my family. Teach your kids to play and they will never have time or money to waste on drugs. ;)
A man after my own heart!
By the way, do you know “Star Wars: REUP” edition?
No, sorry. We are playing Age of Rebellion rules during the Old Republic, because the children wanted to be Jedi.
I’ve never really enjoyed playing online games. (I don’t like being harassed by strangers. I have enough problems with my self-esteem, thank you.) But now I’ve gotten into several niche games I’d prefer to play with people and I have no skills or energy to make that happen. The most niche one is the Armada 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire. I love that game and I’d love to play with my friends, but my friends have very little trek fandom/rts enthusiast crossover.
Blacksmithing. Something so primal and simple about it. And you get to play with fire. But what I find most satisfying is the ability, once you have a few simple tools, to make any other tools you need. It’s like the og 3d printing.
I shop Goodwill like it’s a job.
DVDs are always welcome. We have like 900 discs right now. $1.50-$3 a piece over several years.
Then it’s all kitchen gadgets. All kinds of single purpose appliances for <$10. If they work out, keep them or upgrade them to a higher quality brand. If they don’t, donate them back.
It’s a lot of fun, and a real shopping experience that forces you to consider different options because if limitations where Amazon might funnel you into a single solution.
Is it only Goodwill specifically or any thrift store? Are Goodwills generally better than others?
We only really shop Goodwill and are familiar with the layout and trends. It has gotten worse lately, but we did get a working, clean minifridge for $50 ($250 new), and we got our stand mixer from the auction site mentioned by someone else. $90 for the mixer and a ton of attachments. Just needed a $10 gear replaced.
Mosaic crocheting. You can create blankets that basically look like quilts, or photographs (although I don’t like the look of the latter).
I play mandolin, which I think is niche? This summer I’ve been learning ableton live with the goal of combining edm influences and small, odd instruments.
I’m a fellow mandolin player! Couldn’t believe what I just read haha. There isn’t typically too many of us making ourselves known in places like this
Me three! I wish there was a mandolin community here
No kidding! Maybe I will look into starting one…
Please do!
Okay I did it! I honestly don’t know the right way to link to communities so I hope this works. Let’s get it going: !mandolin@lemmy.ca
@cottard@lemmy.world and @ritswd@lemmy.world you’re invited too!
Awesome, thanks! Just joined.
Me too!
When my wife offered it to me for my birthday, I hadn’t seen a real one in my life. I already had been playing the guitar and the ukulele (on top of other non-string instruments) for a while, and I said: “I hope it’s not yet another tuning to learn chords from scratch on, a friend tried to teach me the cello’s tuning once and I found it so needlessly confusing”.
Oops… 😂
But it’s all good, I got over it. 🙂
Home server take an old pc setup with a load of old harddrives noodle about with all the self hosting apps.
I have a fascination with VFDs/VVVFs/frequency inverters. They are the controllers that gives of a specific hum/whine from electric trains/cars and from other 3 phase electric motors.
I’m making my own sudo-vvvf at home. I just think they sound awesome and are Hella cool
https://youtu.be/-SDYdHzT7Qw (sound starts at 0:13)
That’s really dope!! I’ve heard about this a few times. So you have a good video or site you could recommend that explains for layman why they do that?
I can suggest simply looking around YouTube. That way you can get a sense of how they work and what kind you’d like to know more about. I happen to have practical experience with the, because I used to work on trains that had some giant versions
I got into 3d printing ages ago by way of wanting to build whacky r/c aircraft (and I had read a thing about it in a magazine. This was late 90’s though and it was completely different then.)
3d printing got me into horology- and designing printed versions of different mechanical clock mechanisms.
I especially like pendulum clocks.
That’s awesome…
There’s a mod (build?) that I saw that combines a pendulum clock with a Sentro brand auto-knitting machine to knit as the clock ticks.
this was the first clock I printed. The instructions are easy, even it does take more hardware. It also has remarkable accuracy as far as time keeping is concerned
Online simracing league with virtual reality. The league is run by a really nice bunch of people, who all have really good race etiquette.
Gliding. There’s something remarkable about being able to fly hundreds of kilometres without an engine, just relying on the forces of nature.
Gunpla. It’s literally assembling Gundam (Japanese transformers) models. Modern gunpla kits are very cool with what they can do. This can be a pricey hobby if you get really into it (painting, air spraying, even 3d printing) but it can also be a $20 a month hobby. It all depends on how far you want to take it and what aspects you enjoy.
I got into this recently. Seeing that there were Evangelion kits helped too. Blows my mind how intricate it is. It’s so relaxing.
I do pyrography and make amplifiers, guitar pedals. I sometimes fix them, too :) It makes me happy to fix sound systems and crave for more!
