Mine is mapping. I am a big OpenStreetMap contributor and I have mapped many towns near me that were previously completely unmapped.
Trying to learn languages, Linux, gaming, and music.
Gotten real good st troubleshooting fuel injection systems on vintage Italian cars (not the expensive kind)
I’ve had several multi-year long ones:
- As a child: Stargate SG1
- Adolescent: paraphilias
- Young adult: the care of high violence risk and cluster b psychiatric inpatients
- As I’m entering middle-adulthood: western esoteric spiritual tradition and philosophy
You might appreciate this story from my bro-in-law who is a former psych-tech. There was one really wily guy in his institution who liked to go where he wasn’t supposed to be. One time he slipped through a door that was left unattended for a few seconds, and led the techs on a merry chase through the building, finally ending up in his room, where he gleefully jumped on his bed, turned around with a big grin and shouted, “SAFETY ZONE!!!”
That’s hilarious. So they had to let him chill right?
my hobby is collecting hobbies
if I could have a special interest for more than a week at a time I bet I’d be good at it …
I’m not sure about that, I have a lot of hobbies which I have for years like brewing beer, drying meat, making sausages, playing bass in a band, programming, and I’m not really good at any of them.
I think what defines a special interest over a hobby is that you’re good at it.
Been really looking at playing bass again …
Does raising and training ducks count? I’m really good at it. I have care down to a science and I’ve done quite a bit medically because there aren’t any vets that treat ducks around me. I’ve rehabilitated crazy injuries, performed minor surgery, treated severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.
I have trained all of my birds to listen to basic commands and they know their names and respond to them.
What got you into that? How long have you been doing it? What kind of ducks?
I got into chickens when my sister started 4H, and when our chickens died suddenly, my grandma got us 3 ducklings as a gift without consulting anyone. They imprinted on me immediately and I was like, “I guess this is my new obsession because I’m a mother now.”
That was 8 years ago. I started off with a Muscovy male, a muscovy female, and a mallard female. We rescued a second Muscovy female a couple years in. I moved to my own place in 2022 and brought the remaining birds with me, which were the Muscovy male and mallard female.
I ordered some more ducklings and rescued a couple birds over the course of 2022 and 2023. Right now I have:
2 female muscovies: Mama Duck and Lady. Mama Duck fights me over eggs, so I have to pull a Skyrim move and put a bucket on her head so I can take her eggs without her attacking me. Lady is very sweet and shows me her eggs and acts all happy when I compliment her best and thank her for the eggs.
A tiny male mallard and his mate who is a female mallard that looks like a male but has laid eggs. Little guy is Sonic (because he runs SO FAST) and his mate is Amy. Amy went through duck menopause about 6 months after I got her, so that’s why she looks like a male in terms of feathers. Without her ovaries producing female hormones, her feathers defaulted back to mostly male. She and Sonic were rescued from a local family who couldn’t care for them anymore.
A male Pekin that doesn’t have male traits but I’ve seen his dick a few times. His name is Salt. He is a lil chonky.
A male khaki Campbell named Pepper. He was purchased with Salt as a baby. They were on sale for 25% off and were 100000% an impulse buy. They’re besties and don’t leave each other’s sides.
A female khaki Campbell named Capri-Sun who yells a lot
A female Pekin named Judy. She’s named after judge Judy because she’s always squinting at me in a judgmental way and interrupts me with sassy quacks any time I talk to her. She’s done this since she was literally only a day old. She has a distinct quack that has a squeak to it.
A female golden layer named Cayenne who is hella chill.
A female Cayuga named Fashionista who is slowly turning from black to white with each molt of her feathers (that’s normal)
Wow! That is so awesome and I’m super jealous! I discovered a park semi-close to me last spring that has a bit of a Mallard population, and apparently seasonal Gadwalls. As you might imagine, they’re not super interested in most humans, but still super fun to watch.
Where can we sign up for duck tales?
I would name a mallard “M’Lord” just to mess with it.
Next mallard I get will be named that. Even if it’s a girl. Gotta do it for the meme
Mine is Free software. If I can avoid it, then I avoid nonfree software. This brings me a lot of problems but also a lot of joy.
so true bestie
Love me some watercolour.
I know more about the Doom engine than I do interpersonal relations. Did you know you can completely destroy collision physics via writing over memory addresses if you shoot a bullet weapon at a stack of corpses?
What does this even mean
Great deep lore of ancient games
I edited my comment with a poor explanation from memory, alongside a great video explaining that I can’t watch to double check my comment as I’m at work currently.
It’s clearly some sort of combination of words but I can’t quite make out what they’re attempting to communicate…
Nevertheless, I am fascinated. And open to more!
I love reading about people’s passions, and I think it adds to it the less I know about the subject, as just sitting back and enjoying how excited and interested someone is in their thing, really is so nice.
Yeah I’m not the best word smith on the best of days, let alone immediately after waking up with 3 hours of sleep lol
Meaning then you just pass through objects rather than collide? Or is it unable to properly calculate the incident & resulting collision vectors, meaning the resulting trajectories are nonsensical?
Everything from projectiles to monsters pass through walls, can do no damage to one another, and can’t interact with stuff like switches. I edited my comment with a poor explanation from memory, alongside a great video explaining that I can’t watch to double check my comment as I’m at work currently.
Game preservation. I got into it last fall when I learned about OpenGOAL for the Jak and Daxter games. I grew up with those games and were some of my favorites from that generation.
I then learned how easy it was to rip PS1 through 3 games and how simple it is to set up each of the emulators for each console. I have a sizable collection of games from each of those generations, so I started ripping.I also remember watching LTT’s video about how to jailbreak your Switch. I bought a used Switch from a friend pre-pandemic, but never played the games because I never cared for playing on the Switch itself. So I checked if mine was old enough to jailbreak (Nintendo patched the exploit out of the Switch about a year after production) and, lo and behold, it was.
It wasn’t easy jailbreaking it. It took several hours over 3 days to do it; I would hit a roadblock that I couldn’t figure out, so I’d stop and come back the next day, get a little further, hit another roadblock, and repeat. Once I managed that, I ripped my (small) collection of Switch games and played them on Ryujinx. Now that I could finally play them on my laptop whenever I wanted, I actually had a desire to play them and finally got through BotW in January.Then I figured out how to jailbreak my Wii (which is pretty easy, I recommend everyone do it to theirs), so I could rip those games. It can also rip GC games, so I didn’t need to jailbreak one of those to do it.
When I learned of shadPS4 this summer and the progress it was making toward playing Bloodborne, I spent $400 on ebay to get a gold PS4 running firmware 9.0 so I could jailbreak it and start dumping PS4 games.
At that point I saw how much space all of the games I ripped took up on my laptop, so I bought a NAS from a friend who was upgrading theirs and set it up with two 8TB hard drives in RAID 0 and stored all my games on there. It’s currently about 60%+ full.
Over Halloween I went to a used game store and saw they were selling a Wii U for $160. I bought it and jailbroke that as well and started ripping those games.
I bought an OG Xbox to jailbreak, but I need to open it up to replace the clock capacitor first. Otherwise it could leak and my effort would be for nothing. I just haven’t got around to it yet.
I realized this was a passion of mine when I accidentally borked my PS4 and it would only boot into safe mode. I was willing to completely wipe it and start the jailbreak from scratch so I could keep doing it.
All told, I’ve ripped about 400+ games in the past 15 months, spent dozens of hours ripping them, and have zero intention of stopping. I only think about how I can keep expanding my collection.
Do you have any kind of backups in place? I ask becuase raid 0 means if either of your disks fail you lose everything. Just wanted to make sure you’re aware!
Woops, I meant RAID 1. I’ll go fix that in my post. But I do have an external 4TB SSD with all my games except for the PS4 games since they’re so large. It has about 750 GB of space remaining on it.
I also backed up my games on a friend’s NAS in a separate location.
I also purchased a small rack server that can hold 4 hard drives. I want to buy a few 8 TB drives and set up Gamevault on it to better manage my few hundred games in my collection.Excellent setup! You’re doing God’s work
I wish my switch’s screws weren’t stripped to hell so I could do this too
Well thank you very much Emerald for the mapping and the great question.
For me, it’s something much more modest:- Amiga, or retro-computing in general. Not just for gaming. There’s something deeply inspiring about browsing the web or creating spreadsheets with entirely different hardware and software. Hoping to get an Alpha CPU and/ or an Atari soon.
- Dreaming of a better world.
- Amiga, or retro-computing in general. Not just for gaming. There’s something deeply inspiring about browsing the web or creating spreadsheets with entirely different hardware and software. Hoping to get an Alpha CPU and/ or an Atari soon.
Kind of similar but obscure operating systems in general are things I’m a big fan of like TempleOS, HaikuOS, AROS, and MorphOS. OSs that are more than odd Linux distros.
Something about the ARM architecture also seems really neat to me.
Do you have any neat videos or YouTubers that cover Amiga content?
I have at least a couple.
3D printing. But I mostly design my own models and mostly for utilitarian purposes rather than artistic. For instance, my mother’s into quilting and wanted a very specialized die for a Sizzix die cutter to use to cut quilt pieces, so I applied my amateur 3D printing, CAD, and mechanical engineering skills to the problem and designed/printed a die. The process also included making a custom tool for precisely bending the die blade.
Second, studying U.S. intellectual property law. I just dig it. And it’s relevant to me because I frequently publish software and models for 3D printing under permissive licenses. And I like having at least some amount of understanding of what the licenses really mean and what people will be able and not able to do legally with the works I’m publishing.
I also sometimes release software and 3d models. What’s your favorite permissive license? TBH, I didn’t know enough about them.
(IANAL, not your lawyer, this isn’t legal advice. Heh.)
I personally am a huge fan of copyleft licenses. “Copyleft” means that the licence is permissive in that it allows, for instance, redistribution (sharing) and derivative works (remixes, mashups, etc) but only on the condition that if they share the work or any derivative works, they must do so under the same license terms under which they got the work. That ensures that a) no one can (legally) make a derivative work of your work and put it under a more restrictive license and b) if they publish improved derivative works, you can take those improvements and incorporate them into your work (and the derivative work publisher can’t object – or at least doesn’t have a case if they do.)
In terms of Creative Commons licenses, “share alike” means “copyleft.” (The other popular family of copyleft licenses is the GNU GPL family of licenses, but those are really more designed for software/code than non-code works. Even OpenSCAD models, I tend to release under a Creative Commons license rather than a GPL license. Though for other, non-3D-printing works of source code, I always use the GNU Affero GPL.)
Aside from that, I tend to go as permissive as possible.
So, in concrete terms, for 3D printed models, my go-to license is the latest version of the Creative-Commons-Attribution-Sharealike license. This ensures I get some credit down the line and ensures nobody can make a more legally-restricted derivative of my work. But it also explicitly allows the creation of derivative works and even sale of drivative works under the condition that a) I, the creator, get credit and b) the buyer gets the same rights to the work.
IP law sounds so dry to me, but I love it when people are enthusiastic about niche topics like this!
Criminal law. Now that’s boring. It’s a wonder so many TV shows are based on criminal law.
I want to say selfhosting but that seems not so special on Lemmy. If I can host it myself and it’s FOSS I do it.
Special to you even if not to others.
i upload photos i take of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fungi, and bugs. The observations (photos + location + annotation) are uploaded to a public database accessible to researchers and universities.
I’ve been involved in multiple species range expansions, and i’ve documented both endangered and invasive species. Pretty fun!
The Android app is very good. The iOS app is good for uploads, but lacks a lot of browsing features like search filters and phylogenetic trees. If you are on iOS i suggest using it in a browser except for observation uploads
You can also upload audio recordings for bird and bug sounds. It’s amazing what you can learn about your local ecosystem!
Nice! I hadn’t heard of iNaturalist. Over where I live most people use observation.org
iNaturalist
Thx a lot, I did not know about tis website.
I love iNaturalist. I lived out in the woods for several years and would see so many different bugs that I didn’t recognize. So when I discovered it about 2 years ago, I started taking pictures of every bug I saw and uploading them to the app to learn what they were. And then in August last year there was an unusual explosion of mushroom varieties in our yard. That’s the one area where iNaturalist is a little weak as it really struggled to give me good ID’s for a lot of them. But it should only get better with time.
I’ll see if I can find some mushroom photos to share here.Edit: one of my favorite mushroom pics I got during the mycological explosion:
With mushrooms i often rely on other citizen scientists rather than the ID robot. There are some very friendly and active mycologists who can be a big help figuring out an ID or telling you what to photograph next time to get better data
Animatronics. I like old school Chuck E Cheese and Rockafire Explosion. Also, urban exploration. Train videos.
Planes and to a lesser extent Cars and Trains. I just love travel, points hacking, and flying!
What is ‘points hacking’? Are you moving rails and sending trains off in the wrong direction?!
As someone who no longer commutes, this sort of chaos is deeply amusing. I hope it’s this.
I’m not so devious, it’s mainly just tricks to maximize the amount of points/miles you can get via credit cards and travel, which you can then redeem for travel. Usually in business class!
