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Buying more expensive and better gear will not make you better at it. I not even going to tell you what the hobby is because this applies to so many of them. If you can do your hobby with the gear you have and you think “oh man I wish I had that, I could do awesome things” - it’s only worth it if you spend a whole lot of time on your hobby. If you’re like me and you only spend a couple hours a week or month on your hobby, it’s usually not worth it. Unless it’s something that let’s you do stuff faster. Because then you can do more in the few hours you have. I’m sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but in general, before you buy some shit, think to yourself “Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?”
This does NOT go for watercolor painting! While you certainly dont need a lot of colors and brushes. The quality of both is paramount for progress and a decent outcome! Paper is even worse. You need a lot and of the expensive stuff. Acrylic paintig is not as bad but still…
Not sure what hobby this is, but honestly it goes for almost every one of my hobbies. Especially photography. I could probably just get good with my Canon EOS 40D for digital and my Canon EOS 300 for analog photography. But collecting new gear is so satisfying. There’s always something new to improve. “If only I had X, then I could really do Y well”. Though I at least feel like I’ve somewhat contained myself. I haven’t bought any new camera or lens that was more than like 500 bucks, and honestly with what I have now I don’t really feel the need to upgrade.
“Meh, I’ll upgrade the server RAM when I need it, zswap is working fine” <- clueless idiot from last year
Definitely applies to climbing. Technically more expensive shoes may help with certain climbs, it certainly won’t help a beginner.
Is your hobby guitar lol i’m curious
It is not, but it’s music related. But I also have outdoors hobbies. And electronics hobbies.
IIT: lots of wisdom
3d printing, specifically FDM with PLA since I’m not down to mess with the chemicals for a resin printer. Keep printing until you’re out of an opened filament roll, otherwise your filament will absorb water and degrade. I often learn filament goes bad when a tiny piece breaks off in the feeder right above the heating element, requiring some annoying disassembly to diagnose and correct the problem. If you’re not sure what to build with the last bit of filament, a small square trash can/pencil holder is always useful.
Stick to a maintenance schedule. Putting off a lubrication or dusting can lead to debris getting stuck somewhere and ruining a print when you least expect it. Also learn about every component in your printer and how to get a replacement when it inevitably breaks. That way you can purchase a few of the more commonly broken parts to lower printer downtime.
Start off with a brand name printer that does auto leveling. That cheap CR10 you bought for a hundred dollars sounds like a bargain until you realize it can’t print a solid first layer, causing all sorts of other minor annoyances with your print quality. Trying and failing to fix the issues might eventually turn you off on pursuing the hobby.
I was already well versed in Solidworks, but learn how to use a CAD program. You can get a lot of use from the many publicly available models out there but you might eventually have an idea or require something that requires a custom design. Being able to physically manifest your own design ideas quickly was a big drawing point for me to get into the hobby.
I would go so far as to say, if you aren’t interested in learning CAD or some other 3D modeling software, forget a 3D printer. Because if you rely on Thingiverse and Printables, your 3D printer is a trinket machine. You’re going to print a few toys, a benchy or two, a paper towel holder that doesn’t work, a shop vac adapter that’s the wrong size, a phone stand the $200 Creality you bought just cannot get through, and then it’ll sit gathering dust.
PLA does not absorb moisture. You can submerge a roll in water overnight, dry it and print just fine after. It does become brittle eventually just being exposed to the elements though. Either vacuum seal your filament in bags with a desiccant and store in a dark place or use it within 3-6 months of opening a roll as a general rule of thumb. Shorter timespan if you keep it in the light and if your ambient room temperature fluctuates considerably.
PETG on the other hand will absorb moisture and will crackle like a bag of popcorn when it tries to print with wet filament as it gets superheated at the nozzle level.
Also cheap printers are absolutely asinine for proper workloads, but if you’re a tinkerer that learns “on the job” so to speak while troubleshooting the nonsense you’ll see your prints perform, then it’s usually a great starting point, otherwise yeah, quality and reliability costs extra.
Rock climbing:
- Do regular full body workouts/yoga/antagonist work. A lack of core strength and scapular stability will end up wrecking you if all you do is climb.
- To get better at climbing, training helps a lot. But 90% of the training you need to do is just climbing more. Your problem isnt that you arent strong enough, it’s that you havent developed the necessary techniques to climb harder because you havent experienced enough rock. 90% of the change you need to improve your climbing is simply to start consistently logging what you do in your climbing sessions.
- Work your way up to climbing 20 pitches per day, 4 days per week, lowering the grade as much as needed to get the pitches in. You’ll find your biggest problem here is simply time management and finding a willing partner. This is a great time to get used to leading, since almost all your pitches will be quite easy.
- Once you can consistently get 20 pitches in per climbing day, start increasing the number of pitches at your onsight grade. Your sweet spot for progression is a climb that you may or may not be able to get on the onsight attempt, but which you will probably get second go. Aim to put 10 burns on onsight-level climbs per day.
- Once you stop easily progressing through the grades week by week, your climbing logbook comes into its own. If you find that a certain grade feels like it would take more that 2 or so attempts to put down, start tracking sends in the grade below it. You are only allowed to be disappointed in your inability to send the new harder grade in when you have put down 100 sends on the grade below it.
- When progress starts stagnating purely from increasing volume, start bouldering one or two days per week instead of rope climbing. It can be satisfying to send boulder problems, but spend at least some of your time on boulders that are so hard that you can only do one or two moves at a time - practicing doing just one or two extremely hard moves at a time is where you will really learn how to use your body. It is helpful to boulder in a big group, so you are forced to rest between burns.
- The easiest way to improve at climbing is to climb a lot with people who are better than you. If you can do this, disregard all previous instructions and just go climbing with these people.
ok first of all what is a grade
wow
I can keep going, lol. This is the tip of the iceberg
The predatory FOMO nature of Games Workshop is real and harmful to the hobby as a whole. The editions of the games could last for years yet we’re on a 3 year cycle to adjust stats and change rules that don’t need changing. It creates a cycle of I liked this edition but everybody moved on so I’m forced to move up or give up on the game.
Luckily there’s a million other games but they’re micro in comparison. You’re stuck either creating a community on your own or hoping there’s a group within a reasonable distance that you can help with. If not… Sorry about your wasted investment.
If you do get sucked into it and you end up investing into every GW game system with multiple armies across every system, you’re gonna run out of space. Unless you live in a multi story house or have a shed with nothing in it, these things take up space.
Yes, tabletop gaming is so much bigger and more varied than GW’s games. I love 40k and Warhammer fantasy, but just as one part of the hobby.
The high pricing and FOMO churning is pretty perfected by GW. It is easy to fall into just thinking and buying GW products at MSRP. There are many ways to avoid it and play for much cheaper, but it means breaking out of the GW exclusive ecosystem. (I have many specific suggestions how to do this btw.)
I can’t stand the modern tournament culture which has this sort of e-sports stink on it.
As a mild piece of good news OnePageRules seems to have decent traction and isn’t too difficult to find groups who play in stores. It has its shortcomings, but at least the rules aren’t subject to the constant market driven churning updates.
Oh I know there’s so much more than GW. I got my start with Warmachine. I had a group of 6 that met bi weekly for years until the game imploded. Then we scattered. Infinity was the next big thing. That got two of us and another from the store I frequented that wasn’t apart of the Warmachine group. Then that dwindled and all that’s left is GW.
We tried converting some of the 40k players to Infinity. They all like the look, like the idea, see the elaborate tables we cook up, and show enthusiasm for the game. None of them pull the trigger. There’s never a right time. It’s like trying to pull Artax out of the mud.
I understand both sides because I had a friend try to get me into Otherside and iirc that game doesn’t even exist anymore.
OPR skirmish is the easiest to talk people into since it uses GW minis they probably already own. All it needs is people reading the free rules and making a list. It feels like a proper skirmish game instead of the strange hero battle game modern Kill Team is. This is doable if a store has a Discord or something to do barebones meetup planning even with strangers.
A little more difficult, but doable if you’ve eased people into alternate ideas is getting people to agree to an older 40k edition. It requires buying or, uh, finding the rules and codexes, but it sidesteps the problem of constant rules changes. My preference is 3e (I have very little personal interest in Primaris marines) which is much less bloated than modern armies of the same points value.
I got into retro computing during lockdown. Kind of a nostalgia thing. Refurbed My Atari ST and ZX Spectrum. Got an Amiga, and Amstrad CPC464 and an old Atari 2600. Spent a lot of money and did loads of mods. Now they just sit there and I have no idea what to do with them. The games and demos were a fun novelty, but I’m not really a gamer. I don’t want to sell them, but they don’t really bring me any joy either. I’m pretty happy, mostly and have a good family life. Certainly not depressed. But yeah, this kit is just sitting in my den, rarely used. Probably should have anticipated that before I got so deep into it.
Get your kids into it. Don’t let them know modern games exist.
For digital photography, the only thing I wish I really knew was how to clean the sensor sooner. I made a decent choice with the tech stack for the camera.
I have too many hobbies. Can never find enough time for everything. Gaming has probably been my longest and most expensive one though. Between all the hardware and software purchases I wish I had simply been more patient earlier in my engagement. Could have saved so much money. These days I cruise the steam sales for indies and I’m having a great time.
I didn’t need to buy a base amount of Legos to create my own designs.
What the consumables are. As a noob, you don’t look at a metal bike cassette and think “that’s going to wear out”. Or at a metal 3d printer nozzle. Or at paint brushes (I keep ruining expensive ones! 😭).
- It’s always more expensive than I thought
- It’s always more physically demanding than I thought
- There’s never a local hobby/support group for it
… Sums up pretty much every hobby I have tried/am trying
There’s never a local hobby/support group for it
This is the hardest part…
That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.
Find a good physical therapist. There are some good ones out there, I promise. But you might need to travel and/or pay out of pocket. And the best source for good PT recs is friends in the same sport - so make friends with some ultra runners and ask them.
Hit the gym and do yoga. A big part of a lot of knee pain is instability in the low back and hips.
Read up on psychosomatic pain, and integrate exercises into PT and gym time.
Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.
OR
DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.
People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.
Nope.
Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.
They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.
LOL I learned so much from this, thank you.
And also: Fume and dust extraction is no joke!!
I just tell everyone where all the mistakes were.
My foray into woodworking began and ended with figuring “sheesh, custom picture frames are so expensive, how hard could it be?!”…
By the end of that experience, nothing felt real anymore. Every foolishly pure mathematical concept, every platonic ideal - shameful indulgences of the young and weak. Our grand edifices of knowledge, little more than piles of tattered rags with which we clothe our nakedness, arrogant and hubristic in our vulgar conceits.
Don’t do it y’all. That abyss gazes back.
You need to conjure the ancient dark magics of woodworkers long past.
Underappreciated comment of the thread.
After having worked with wood and son of a cabinet maker, I crave the strength and certainly of steel. I got into welding in a big way.some aluminium, but mostly steel. It’s such a wonderful material. Cut it, weld it, grind it, bam, new and bigger steel. You can’t make a piece of wood bigger.
… but you’ll know
Don’t forget the thousands of dollars in tools you’ll be compelled to buy and never being able to throw out even the small piece of wood because “you might need it someday”.
Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.
I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.
We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.
“It’s made outta offcuts.”
quietly pushes entire bespoke server rack under bed
That’s my dream, except I want to complicate it by building guitars. So it actually has to work, not just look like it might.
I can’t build a guitar. I can build a guitar-shaped object. But I cannot build a guitar.
My partner complimented my new shelf recently. Then she looked closer and realised it was a few boards stacked up on the cheapest engineering bricks I could find but rotated so the holes are not visible.
Only got a folding hand saw which I suspect isn’t the best for making straight cuts, I had considered cutting up a railway sleeper for blocks instead of the bricks. Bricks worked out cheaper. Wooden blocks could look nice though.
Just cut pieces of wood big enough to cover the front of the bricks, and glue them on. Wood on the front, and brick on the side, will look like a cool design choice.
shia_labeouf_slowclap.gif
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
Especially if you want to make “good” food. I’m not saying there isn’t good food that is healthy for you. But if you want to make things taste like they do in a high end restaurant, it’s probably going to require a shitload of butter/ghee and salt. And then probably cream. And also highly fatty meats.
It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
And also highly fatty meats. It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
Anthropology: The study of mankind’s quest for readily available fat.
