[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

Falconry. It's really more of a lifestyle than a hobby now though. I've been doing it for a little over 10 years now and am currently flying a cast (group of birds flown together) of 3 Harris's Hawks.

Quick faqs:

• I use the glove and everything
• It's a hunting sport, we catch rabbits 3-5 times a week
• We all go out together, I flush they catch
• No, they do not bring what they catch back to me, I go to them
• They don't eat the whole rabbit, I trade them a small reward
• They are completely free flighted when doing this
• I've trained them just enough to get them back and work with me, they know how to do bird things naturally
• They don't really go for your eyes, and getting bit hurts 50x less than getting footed
• They are not rescues and are perfectly healthy
• Mine are captive bred, but some are wild trapped
• Wild trapping has 0 effect on native populations, 50-90% of raptors don't make it through their first year
• Even though mine are captive bred they are still wild animals, they are just tamed.
• This is the most regulated sport in the US

Birbs:

• Packing: backpacks, bags, organizers, compression sacks, all kinds of things like this. People loathe packing while I just love to play Tetris with my perfectly organized stuff. I have too many bags.
• Role-playing games: it is weird because I mostly collect them since there's no time to play (nor to learn new rules).
• Automation: why spend 2 minutes manually something when I can spend 2 hours failing to automate it?

vacuums, why would I spend 100€ on a shopvac when I could do it myself for 200€ or even more?

My latest obsession is sashiko, a Japanese form of embroidery with beautiful repeating geometric patterns. It’s a folk art that evolved to strengthen cloth, extend its lifespan, and repair torn clothes. Rather uniquely it’s also intended to be stitched with the fabric in your hands rather than in a hoop.

One thing I really love about it from a technical sewing standpoint is that traditionally you don’t use knots at all, but it’s still a strong stitch. Quilters do something similar with what’s called a waste knot that gets snipped away, but this skips the knot step entirely.

There are specific paths you follow while stitching these patterns so that you don’t waste thread. They vary in complexity from simple lines, triangles, and curves, all the way up to tiny repeating patterns that practically replace the cloth with thread.

I don’t have nearly enough patience to do the complex ones like that, but the more simple stitches are so relaxing.

My hobbies mostly sit at the intersection of plants and electronics/programming esp. microcontrollers and managing fleets of them.

Im obsessed with making things grow and relatively simple types of automation can make a huge difference to a plant. A trickle of water applied at the right frequency can turn an unforgiving sun-scorched balcony into a garden.

Im currently working on prototypes of a device destined for mass production. It’s a power unit for a temporary immersion bioreactor used in plant tissue culture. The benefit of my approach is that the power unit can work with almost any growing container and the unit doesn’t need any power hookups.

The unit is powered by the plant grow lights and my Mark I prototype proved it can harvest enough energy to perform any published temporary immersion protocol I have seen.

I think this qualifies as ‘weird’ because it usually requires explanation to justify the ‘why’ of this project. Plant tissue culture is not a common interest.

But if you want to plant a trillion trees and ‘save the planet’, we will need to develop some new propagation methods. This is my little attempt to address some of that need.

Grafting. I like grafting different varieties of fruit trees together to make trees that bear multiple varieties of fruit. So far I've grafted a golden delicious apple onto my crabapple, and a golden orb plum onto my purple plum. It's pretty hit or miss, but cool when the grafts take. I'm going to try grafting some different varieties of stone fruit onto a wild peach tree that I have to see what will happen.

I also like growing fruit trees from seed. I have an avocado tree, an egg fruit tree, a mango, a few red plums, and a firepit peach tree. I also grew some pineapple plants from pineapples that I got from the store, and I got a pineapple from one last year!

• Audio engineering. How to take a bunch of tracks that sound like hot shit and make them into beautiful music. How to record an awesome performance, probably in a shit space with shit acoustics and shit gear. How to work my "magic" on a track to somehow do the impossible. More recently, how to analyze and design analog outboard gear and digital plugins that emulate them in real time. I would do it for free if I had the time. I used to mix people's tracks on Reddit (different username) before I went back to school.

• Music, particularly writing and playing ~~shitty bedroom black metal~~ guitar. So I guess not that weird other than the music choice...

• Automation, particularly AI and Control Theory. I approach AI from a dynamic viewpoint, i.e. using machine learning to analyze and control systems that "move". I'm still working on unpacking the mathematical fundamentals of AI, especially because the dynamic applications I'm interested in require much more careful understanding of the assumptions that typical machine learning paradigms make about the input and output signals.

• Math. Calculus, linear algebra, dynamical systems, and high- or infinite-dimensional problems. Both theory and applications. I read textbooks and watch open course lectures. I use this math to back up my intuition in all the above subjects. Even people who say they like math find my interest in the subject obsessive.

Hit me with your top flashlight fact.

Have you seen the Flashlight community on lemmy.world yet?

Leather working. I inherited my grandfather's old hatchet and knife from when he was a boy scout, these 80+ year old relics had their original leather sheathes that were totally disintegrating and stiff. After looking fruitlessly for replacement sheathes I decided it couldn't be that hard to make my own, and now I'm hooked. I have leather cases for all of my devices, leather bags for different traveling needs, and leather wallets and trinkets make the absolute best gifts. People are always blown away by hand made leather products.

I love radio control trucks, but not for competition or to go fast. I like taking them for a walk like one might walk a dog ... it's just fun and a bit silly.

I've been out of it for a while now, but I spent a number of years Nerfsmithing. Which is to say, I modified Nerf blasters. I upgraded the internals to get longer range and higher rates of fire. My real fun, though, was modifying the exteriors to see just how silly I could get. I made a lot of different designs, but below is my masterpiece.

I attached a real red dot sight, after carefully painting it to look like a Nerf accessory. I attached a real laser sight and tactical light, after mounting them inside the case of what had been an official Nerf light. The 10-round straight magazine was replaced with a 35-round drum magazine. A rifle strap (in bright yellow) and a Nerf bipod finished off the main unit (a Nerf Stampede).

Then I attached a Nerf Magnus pistol, still fully functional, as a front grip. And I attached a Nerf Zombie Strike Machete under that as a bayonet.

It looks overbuilt and ridiculous, which is what I was trying for, but it was also an absolute terror in the office Nerf wars. I had a lot of fun building it.

bought myself a magnet for magnet fishing, hopefully that's fun

Increasingly, mini painting has been eating my life. I tried to fight off 40k obsession but it's been slowly pulling me in for a while now. But probably the weirder part is, I haven't actually played the game yet. Still trying to get everything tabletop ready.

Flashlights are an interesting one. I somehow ended up in !flashlight@lemmy.world and it's definitely a unique hobby. I'm not sure if I'm willing to really join all of you yet, but reading the posts can be pretty cool.

For me, it's probably CRTs, other display technologies and old hardware in general. It's fun to tinker around with stuff. And playing games, be it new or old, on CRTs is what I live for.

Probably "menial task automation", I use Sonarr(series), Prowlarr(movies) and Taiga(animes) + Jellyfin(media server) all conected to my qbittorrent so I don't have to individually download an episode or movie, I can just set that I want to watch it and the programs download it automatically, just set it and forget it and use the jellyfin phone app to cast it to my tv.

Also retrogaming emulation in general, I love watching videos about the newest cheap portable that runs up to PS1 and searching for the perfect shaders to use on retroarch, which I find it to be the mega bezels pack with slight reflections to the side.

It's very taxing on the hardware though, you do need a gaming rig just to emulate old games if you use these.

My weird hobby is reading textbooks on forensic medicine and other forensic sciences. Like how to perform an autopsy, how to identify the cause of death, how to take and interpret fingerprints from different surfaces and such. I am a trained toxicologist but unfortunately only had basic training in forensic toxicology as part of my curriculum (and not working in that field now). 🙂

I, like many of you I'm sure, am an avid collector of hobbies. Recently I've been into Analog Photography. Partly because I like the old machines involved and also because of the creativity and expression of making pictures.

One might ask: 'why not use a digital camera? It's so much easier, potentially cheaper and technically "better".'

To me it's like painting instead of drawing, maybe similar but also very different. One is not better than the other and you will get different results.

I post here on !analog@lemmy.world but mostly on pixelfed.

Shaving.

Not in the sense that you might be used to, but "traditional" wetshaving. There are so many aspects to this hobby, it's overwhelming.

Shave soap - all sorts of great scents, different soap bases offering various types of lather.

Razors - Double Edge, Single Edge, Open Blade (straight, shavette, etc), Safety Bar, Open Comb, mild, aggressive, stainless steel, aluminum, titanium... and on and on.

Brush - Synthetic, Badger, Boar, soft, gelly, backbone, handle size, handle shape, knot diameter, knot loft,...

Blades - Lots of options, and they are very very inexpensive (especially DE blades). Different blades often work well in certain razors but not others, and certain people prefer different blades. Blades are highly subjective and it's fun finding some that work really well for you.

Aftershave - alcohol based, toner, balm, skin food, all sorts of great scents, etc.

I got permission to copy most of the reddit wiki on the subject to de-reddit all the info, and we host it at https://wiki.wetshaving.social. I also help run the lemmy instance dedicated to the hobby where people share what they shaved with, new things they bought, and anything else related to shaving.

You know, you got me wondering… why do fleshlights have no lights? They should do rgb or something.

• Laser holography and optics. After I took an photonics course I became obsessed. I am attempting to build a laser holography setup to capture "true" 3D reflections on a piece of film. Even getting cheap diode lasers to lase coherently at high currents is a challenge. It's a black hole for money so I need to limit myself but it is just so fucking interesting.
• Cameras. I am not a good photographer but I love cameras. I can ramble on and on about every single function detail and the history too. I even built a scientific camera for my job from scratch. And beyond that I even started getting into the math behind distortion correction, stereo, panorama etc.
• 3D printing is a major rabbit hole. Especially if you've built your own printer.

Lately I’ve really been into making and integrating home automation devices.

Mostly I’m just trying to ensure my privacy in an increasingly non-private world, but it’s a fun medley of skills to deploy - 3d printing, soldering, electrical engineering, a bit of programming, and even some carpentry work.

Let’s see, I got adhd and up until well… next month when I get my first post-college paycheck… been pretty limited on funding. With that in mind

• home automation
• home server w automated media acquisition, and a random assortment of other services
• Fixing things, started out of need to save money… but now I just enjoy doing it. From phones to cars, and soon clothes (just got a sewing machine)
• Scripting/automating random tasks, like clipping all the digital coupons for my grocery store. Or auto booking vaccines back when they weren’t so easy to get.
• I like a good sounding audio system / headphones… but idk if my small collection really constitutes a hobby.
• wife’s got me birding a bit, she’s way more excited about it than I, but I always at least enjoy the walks, and occasionally see something neat.
• oh yeah, photography, mostly to capture moments and places for myself… but I’m venturing into trying to get a bit more artsy to try and convey whatever it was that intrigued me to take the photo to others who weren’t there.
• board games, but I like the social aspect, and I have a hard time finding people who aren’t like… idk what to call them, but people that seem to be autistic and have board games as a special interest. At least that’s who mostly goes to boardgame meetups around here.
• I guess I like collecting useful tools, for the above fixing
• VR intrigues me, and I’m starting a job soon where I’ll get to spend more time working in and developing for VR/AR/XR, and with the money from said job I’ll probably invest in some better home vr gear
• in college, I really liked being a tech consultant for our student org, learned about and implemented everything from event live-streaming to documentation management systems to web hosting hackathon judging platforms.

So yeah, idk… a little bit of everything

operating systems

I have an odd obsession with tornado sirens and other civil defense things. The odd harmonies that different kinds of sirens can make together. Cold War vibes, and the feeling of "well, we're fucked then" when the emergency alert system goes off, only to find that it's just another ho-hum thunderstorm on the other side of the city. I don't know a whole lot about the stuff but I've spent many hours of many days soaking up videos about it on YouTube.

I miss when all school kids had to worry about was fire, tornado, earthquake, and nuclear annihilation.

My actual is philosophy of psychiatry/psychology/science in autism.

The more I read and learn in this field the more I think people should begin with it before diving in the autism topic itself. Researchers did and still do atrocious research in autism without acknowledging conflict of interest, taking ethics in account, breaking basic human rights, "finding the question when having the answer", etc. A lot of what could be read on autism is just bad.

My best friend was an usher at Dollywood, and freaking loves flashlights. Collects them and has a shit ton.

I like crafting. Anything with fabric or yarn or thread.

I love lights and lighting in general.

Restoring and collecting mechanical calculating machines and slide rules. I was abysmal in math at school, but I love those implements.

I can ramble about a few things:

• AI - very new, unconventional, scary, interesting and fascinating in a lot of different ways, mostly in ways most ppl don't really think about
• US Law - I'm european and I'm not a lawyer in any shape or form but Depp v Heard sucked me in and now I have so much knowledge about the US law that it's flowing out of my brain every once in a while
• Computer Science - with varying degrees of proficiency, obv things like software dev, game Dev, stuff like 3d composition, music production, but also some more specific ones like pentesting, some cryptography or scripting.