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.
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.
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 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.
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.
… but you’ll know
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.
It’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.
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”.
“It’s made outta offcuts.”
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.
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.
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About me when it comes to all of my hobbies: I like to collect things.
Typewriters - mostly just buying/using them, haven’t delved too much into the actual restoration/cleaning part just yet:
- There’s a Discord that has a lot of information and a nice, welcoming community.
- Typewriter Database is a very handy tool to help you identify your typewriter model and year based on the serial number.
- The case can get messed up depending what you clean with, so do your research well so that you don’t accidentally strip the paint.
- Estate/garage sales are great for finding typewriters.
- When buying a typewriter, bring a piece of paper with you and test it out: type with every key, use the shift and caps lock, try the red and black inks, backspace, tab, set a few tabs and then tab through each one, reach the end of the line and see if the bell rings, etc. Don’t let social anxiety get in the way of you testing a product before buying, especially if it’s costing a pretty penny.
- Speaking of price, I’m not sure how it is everywhere, but where I am you can get a good typewriter for under $100, even under $50, fairly consistently. I just went on OfferUp and I was able to find a few at around $50 that I would purchase myself tonight if I wasn’t already strapped for cash.
- The few typewriters I would spend over $100 on if I had the money (all in working condition, even better if it has a case): Royal Model 10 with the glass side, Olivetti Lettera 33, and the Hermes Baby.
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
I want to know why I have to be naked all the time. I didn’t sign up for this.
We tried it clothed, but the baby oil kept getting absorbed and it’s impossible to find the right place to clamp.
They let you guys use oil? I need a better hobby group.
The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.
This is true for reptiles and snakes as well.
Same for cameras, axes and chainsaws…
Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.
And bikes, and computers
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Civil engineering as a hobby, eh?
Tactical urbanism ftw!
Cats
For coding, I wish I had known that I will need to basically relearn the entire thing every 2-4 years due to frameworks and language design changes.
Tell me you’re a front end programmer, without telling me you’re a front end programmer.
I had to do FE for a freelance work, I learned Angular built the thing and delivered, a few year later I wanted to do some other stuff went to check Angular documentation and it had changed completely, plus no one else was using it because everyone had migrated to React.
This is why I only use languages and libraries that are “finished.” C, Pascal, Euphoria to name a few.
Absolutely isn’t true though, unless you only learned JavaScript for some reason and god help you if that is what you call programming
Yep. Redesign the entire library every few weeks because you discovered a better architecture.
