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.
I haven’t done much with it in a while, but I’m also not giving up on it, so I suppose it’s still valid lol.
I collect LaserDiscs
I got started with the format around 2010, and it was super neat to delve into this old, but strangely good, format. I found that most players and films were super cheap, and as a poor family with really no ability to move to HD yet, the SD format picture was clearly worse than DVD, but not so much so that it was unwatchable or anything.
I spent a lot of time collecting new films, looking at players, etc. etc., but I took a break while in college. Turns out that in that time everything went wild, and now the format is expensive to collect for. So much so that I’ve basically stopped at the moment. It’s still a super neat format though, and I’m not about to offload all my kit just yet.
For anyone looking for info about the format, I’d recommend Techmoan on YouTube. Matt does a lot of interesting tech videos, and the handful he’s done on LaserDisc are quite good.
you’d be shocked at how easy it is to grow most edible mushrooms. all you need to grow oysters is a syringe full of spores and some uncle bens pre-cooked vacuum sealed rice. If you want to do lion’s mane or other more complex growing cycles like that, just add a rubbermade tub half full of vermiculite and coconut coir. You can be in this hobby for like $100 up front and then like $30/batch. And yes you can grow those mushrooms, where legal of course. I haven’t tried it but it seems to be no more difficult than the ones I’ve successfully grown, and the rice trick actually comes from that community (google “uncle ben tek” for more info)
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.
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!
Ham radio! It’s relaxing. My favorite activity is to take my portable gear to parks and operate Parks on the Air.
Just getting into Ham radio and SDR myself as of late, so cool and so fun to tweak around with. Got any recommendations for guides or articles to read and learn from? I’m brand new just got a SDR-RTL dongle 📡
You should check out Ham Radio Crash Cpurse on YouTube. Lots of great info there.
What do you think about the baofeng radios with ham? Pretty good to start out with?
They are fine for starting out with, but you’ll probably want to upgrade soon. There are better radios for around $75 if you can afford it.
What would you recommend? Is there a good mega thread here?
Most activity, I’ve seen here: [email protected] but there’s a lemmy bug that’s not showing a bunch of posts. That should be resolved soon.
These are good cheaper radios (The price has gone up a bit)
There’s also [email protected] which is reasonably active.
I play rhythm games. Like a lot. Maybe to many?
Guitar hero back in the scorehero.com days was peak gaming.
Looking for and archiving recordings of old and modern announcements in commercial and industrial settings. Like mind the gap on trains or there has been a broadcast tower failure in your area or Pan Am boarding call welcome and instructions. these can be on reel to reel or 8 track tape.
I’m pretty into conlanging, which is basically making up languages. There are tons of different approaches and ways people can go about it, but like probably most (or at least a plurality of) other conlangers, I generally go for something as naturalistic as possible. I’m also into linguistics so it serves as kind of an interesting way to explore different features and grasp them better, as well as just an excuse to do more research to find out more about something.
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.
I build custom mechanical keyboards. Got into it because of the Pandemic and now I have built 6 of them. /r/mk and /r/emk used to be some of my most visited subs on the other site. I’m now known as the goto for keyboard questions in my circles of friends.
I started getting into fidgeting more lately and took a liking to magnetic sliders and now have a few that I pretty much always have with me.
And that extended into me learning about begleri beads somehow so now I am attempting to learn that. I can do slips and 2 finger wraps and occasiaonal one finger or thumb wraps but not much else yet. I accidentally learned a stall because I messed up. I need to really learn transfers since that is one of the main things you do a lot of.
I think I am also amongst the hyperfixator group in this thread. I was previously into speedsolving Rubik’s cubes and roasting coffee so I feel a lot of these answers lol.
Some more niche than others but basically…making stuff. Cross stitch, yarn crafts, sewing, needle felting, dicemaking, 3d printing, very occasional cosplay, I’m about to try my first macrame kit and a friend is planning for us to learn punch needle together.
There’s something just so satisfying about making real stuff you can use, or wear, or wash yourself with or whatever (I also briefly got into soapmaking).
If you want to chat about basically any craft (or just lurk and look at pretty projects, that’s ok too), I’ve been keeping a megalist of relevant communities and magazines here https://lemm.ee/post/224890. And if anyone reading this runs a related one that should be on the list please DM me to be added!
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 collect plushies/stuffed animals (to the point where I’m running out of room for more) and I’ve played Tabletop RPG games like Pathfinder, Shadowrun and GURPS for a good few years.
If I may ask, how does GURPS compare to pathfinder and other RPGs? I played a bit of pf1e, Im currently in some pf2e campaigns that have been going on a few years now, and I never played GURPS but I did read some GURPS reviews and GURPS material. It seems interesting but Im not sure how to go about pitching it to my goons
GURPS I find is hard to pitch to people because it’s very, very reading-heavy and has characters that take a while to build if you’re still learning the ins-n’-outs of the game. Building a character in GURPS can take multiple days for me personally, but I am a slow character generator overall regardless of the system.
GURPS also lacks character classes or jobs like PF unless you kinda “build” them yourself, by picking and choosing what you want from generic rules the game provides and describes to you. It might be offputting if your group has the kind of players who would just like to stick to their class’ core abilities/playstyle or follow a more linear pre-built progression path.
I’d say the thing I like most about GURPS as a system is probably also it’s biggest downside, which is the sheer amount of content you could choose from to apply to your game or your character. It’s easy to get option paralysis with it all.
There’s a book for practically every setting, species, trope, ect you could think of. There’s not a single character idea I’ve had that I couldn’t build mechanically, but that also comes at the caveat of reading game material for multiple hours at a time to find every fitting trait or rule I could for these concepts to work. That process often involved hopping from rulebook to rulebook.
I’m sure if you searched around on some TTRPG forums you could find people discussing their pros and cons of the system too, probably much better articulated than in my reply here lol. I hope my answer still helps a bit.
I love mapping on openstreetmap.org
