I’ve been getting into primitive technology lately. It all started when I looked at my back yard and thought hey, if we call it red clay, then I should be able to make it into pottery. I take dirt from my yard, levigate it, add grog and wedge, hand-build pots, and fire them in my fire pit. Been making sharpening stones from river rocks. Crafting replicas of Roman machines. That sort of thing.
That is an epic niche. Primitive skills are awesome. Have you ever read The Toaster Project? It’s a story about the attempt to build a ‘simple’ modern appliance starting with raw materials and only using primitive methods. Very insightful look into how complex our built environment really is.
Okay, this sounds cool as hell. Please post photos of this.
Brickfilming! I make films with Lego using stop motion animation. Takes a lot of patience and my perfectionism is my worst enemy, but it’s super rewarding, and there’s a really cool community online around it. And yes, my profile picture is from my most recent Brickfilm!
I have a very dangerous and lame hobby.
I forage for food. It’s a lot of fun trying new things. But it’s also really dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing.
If you want to do this hobby safely start small. Identify plants in your own yard/park exct. I use an app called plant net, Wikipedia, duckduckgo, Google Earth, foraging sites, to find out where to go. Knowledge of when they grow and what condions they like helps.
Being 100% sure on what you are going to eat is a life and death choice. When in doubt, throw it out.
Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions.
I guess blacksmithing would be considered niche? Not doing it very regular. But once every view months.
The most niche thing I probably do (badly) is making chocolate. Not like, just tempering chocolate, but putting nibs and milk powder and sugar and cocoa butter in my countertop melanger and letting it work for like 24 hours until it’s nice and smooth. I haven’t really perfected it at all and my chocolate recipe is currently mediocre, and i need to experiment with better nibs and roasting them myself, but it’s an interesting process that I enjoy.
Otherwise uh, IDK I do everything. I love cooking/baking, and most types of art, I’m huge into fabric arts like nuno felting and needle felting, embroidery is one of my absolute favorite things, I’m pretty decent at sewing, I also like to draw and I am really itching to get into sculpey jewelry crafting and maybe miniatures, I’ve dabbled in wire jewelry (meh at it), I built (with help) a coffee table where the top comes up so you can turn the base on its side to become a dining table, I’m sure there a bunch of stuff I’m forgetting… oh I guess I’m really good at laundry? I can get stains out of almost anything at this point.
What kind of cooking do you do?
I wrote out a huge response to this and connect crashed that day and lost it, I meant to reply again but forgot until now. TLDR: everything I can in a home kitchen
I love most kinds of foods, my favorite food has been steamed artichokes dipped in hollandaise sauce pretty much my entire life. My more recent favorite food is jjajangmyeon, I mostly use Maangchi’s recipe but I tried another early on that added mirin and cabbage so I add those now too because they’re just so good in it.
My favorite recipes though are cheap, easy, quick, and delicious. Instant pot stuff has been great as I had a baby in January and it lets me make pretty decent stuff with very little work. The air fryer is also fantastic and we use it regularly for all kinds of things.
I finally got my 12" cast iron to a great state of seasoning so I’ve been making omelets and now more recently toast omelet things (basically dip bread in the eggs and flip over, then flip the whole thing once eggs are set, put filings in and close up and cook the bread to a nice golden brown on each side). I also love making beef jerky and oh boy is it way better than store-bought. Grilling is also fun, i smoke our turkey every year in my weber (got a rotisserie thing for it last year!), and I like to bake - pineapple upside-down cake is my favorite, but I’m also partial to sour cream pound cake (served as strawberry shortcake), and St. Louis gooey butter cake.
I’m always looking for new things to try, and my meal planner has more recipes than I’ve ever made saved in it haha (I should really clean it up).
I’m really into calligraphy and snowboarding. Luckily there’s a snowboarding presence here on lemmy, but I have not the time to start a calligraphy one.
I really love this thread. It’s great to see people sharing things they enjoy!
Making custom home automations with Home Assistant. Sure, a lot of it is unnecessary but it sure is a lot of fun.
I’m a semi-secretive LARPer. I pack my stuff at night, don’t talk to my coworkers about it, and just go about my life as if I don’t.
I’ve found people are pretty judgy about it, so I just don’t mention that I enjoy getting into a neat costume, playing some little mini-games, having a drink or six, camping, and (most importantly) seeing my friends once a month in a structured activity.
It’s fun stuff if you find the right group. That last part is hard.
Honestly, I don’t know why people rip on other people’s hobbies just because it’s something they wouldn’t do. As if their opinion has any bearing on other people’s happiness. I’m glad you’ve found something that makes you happy and gets you out of the house.
Seriously, you’d think people could just be happy for someone’s happiness, instead of being miserable. I’m over those feelings. You don’t have to like the same stuff to get along.
Primary motto: Do your best not to hurt anyone, but otherwise do what you want. Enjoy life while you have it.
Secondary motto: Enjoy seeing other people’s happiness. Sometimes giving up something (small) you want for someone else to have something they really want (or even need) feels even better.
Have fun, and do good. Thanks for your kind words 😊
Is that a Role Play game in real life, or what?
Yep, pretty much that. Some of the bigger groups with lore spanning decades by now, written by in game historians and smaller meetings besides the big cons to act out little side stories. It is awesome and tbh did a lot for my ability to go up to and interact openly with people I don’t know.
But how does it work. I mean, you sometimes are an NPC and sometimes you are a player?
Yep. People that don’t want to or can’t commit as much time or as regularly often choose to play NPCs. There’s a DM or a DM committee on site that observes the game directly or through their NPCs and uses the NPCs to steer the story (which can be hard, because proverbially, every plan is excellent until it meets the players).
Sometimes they’ll stage little or big events for players, e.g. if a player has let them know that he wants to kill a char, that is always a great opportunity for a neat send-off. Maybe the char is murdered during a banquet to make the other players aware of a treason subplot or he gets to save another character during a road robbery at the expense of his own life or something like that, that goes into the in game history books.
Big ol’ post below:
Every LARP has a different system, which in our game is light-touch(1) and kinda light-hearted. We use latex weapons like those from Forgotten Dreams and Mytholon (two manufacturers I know of off hand), and there’s a hit point system, and vocally called damage and skills with different effects.
Example: Hitting an opponent and calling “Strength 5” indicates to the opponent that they need to take 5 steps away from the attacker in the direction the attacker chooses. They also take basic weapon damage of 1 HP in this transaction.
While every LARP has its own system, there is a lot of overlap because of the limitations presented by a physical (ie. in-person) system. You can do a way larger swath of things in a tabletop.
Look for LARPs in your area online, and I’m sure you’ll find a few.
(1)Different games handle it differently, but we have players stemming from single digits to upper double digits, and we try to be accommodating to the needs of a diverse age group with varying degrees of disability.
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I’ve always wanted to do this mut know nothing about electriconis. Do you have any good resources to get into it?
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I build various random number generators, and then use them in elaborate practical jokes.
Solid-state particle detectors, zener avalanche noise, etc. Many failed designs (or failed… So far).
Sometimes I put them in sinister looking cases. Sometimes behind an API. Sometimes I design a coffee maker that brews coffee in a quantum superposition of caffeination states.
I’m working on one that is a Lemmy bot. It won’t be done particularly soon though.
My niche hobby is self-hosting and running my own home computer lab. It’s tons of fun. The only thing I miss about reddit is the community of self-hosters and home labbers.
I read a post that mentioned the community migrated to Lemmy.
It’ll pop back up here. Data Hoarder needs a new spot
I build guitar pedals! I don’t design them, but I order the PCBs and solder the components myself. It’s significantly cheaper than buying them premade, and how many people can say they made their own pedalboard?
I’m also an amateur Fossil Hunter. The area I live in is filled with fossils from the Ordovincian.
Right, you’ve already convinced me. How and where do I start? Can you recommend some links/resources please?
PedalPCB is where I order my boards from. They have clones of pretty much any pedal you’d want.
I usuallyorder my components from DigiKey, but depending where you livethere may be others you can use.
Can’t believe I got all the way to the end and no one has posted about flight simming.
It’s an amazing hobby, with tonnes of gear, software, community and a wealth of knowledge. I’m nowhere in as deep as some, but find an immense pleasure in nerding out about it.
I was never worried about flying for real (as a passenger) but during turbulence I’d sometimes get a bit clammy-handed. Flight simming has completely cured it. There are SO many layers of safety and the more you understand - and in fact the more accident reports you read and see what the follow-up improvements were - the less I get bothered about even heavy turbulence or unsteady landings. Pilots know their stuff.
As someone with fear of flying, I really need to look into this.
The Mentour Pilot channel makes documentaries about aviation accidents using the official reports, and it has helped many nervous flyers, because he explains it fully and also goes over the recommendations of the reports. I recommend checking it out.
I’ve been on a hiatus due to some medical stuff making it hard for me to concentrate, but I’m a lock nerd. I collect cool locks (“cool” being very subjective here 😅) and pick / manipulate them.
edit: here’s a tiny part of my collection. I’d upload more but I’m having a hard time with the mobile site and image uploads
