Ask Lemmy

Painting expensive plastic with expensive paint.

I got into contact juggling a decade or two ago. It is basically a form of juggling in which a clear or solid-colored ball stays in contact with your body to interesting effect. Think the Goblin King from the movie "Labyrinth".

It is rare enough that you don't meet many people that have seen it, and with enough of a learning curve that not many people that start ever really get anywhere with it.

-Edit- Random video of what I am talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5MqvtiHpOw

I like sewing - I make a few pieces of clothing once in a while but usually I'm just mending things or adjusting the fit of store-bought clothes so that they look better on me.

I also love gardening - growing vegetables outside and mushrooms inside. I'm pretty new to both but the mushrooms in particular are really fun - many of them grow a lot faster than vegetables, so it's exciting to have a faster feedback loop and try little experiments to find what works.

Lately it's been collecting Indie Perfumes. They are much more adventurous and complex than most mainstream scents. It's really fun to pair scents with experiences or moods. I've roped my husband into it and it's like a puzzle game to find scents for him as well.

I build and fight combat robots. Think Battlebots but smaller.

Reading... I found this site that has quite a few novels of which authors post chapters weekly, bi-weekly or more..
https://royalroad.com

Most of it is fiction/fantasy, quite a bit of it is litrpg

I can sink hours on this... Public transports, coffee break, lunch break, evening beer... I just can't stop myself

Lately it includes growing gourmet mushrooms, re/learning languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, data organizing stuff (such as assigning each horror movie I've seen with fears from The Magnus Archives, been fixated on horror movies in general so I've also made a tierlist for all the ones I've seen), and sewing/making clothes. I'm looking to maybe have an isopod colony again (properly this time), make fursuits, continue studying wicca/witchcraft stuff, as well as finally get back to art once I'm over this burnout ^^;

Urban exploring (for lack of a better term) with no purpose other than to discover. I live in a city and I'm constantly just wandering around going down streets I've never been down or into alleys I've never been in or checking out stores I've never been to. This is my approach when I travel to other cities and other countries too, I often don't have a plan for my trip/vacation, I just arrive there and then start to wander and see what I find.

I do enjoy bouldering and also jump rope. I suppose those are niche…

Hardware modding. Consoles, handhelds, old computers, RC cars... whatever.

Do do you remember tamagotchi? The little electronic egg with a pet you should take care of? I collect those. They are more advanced now. They have color screens, they charge with USB, you can connect them and marry, have a whole families.

Quite a few, actually

• Artisan Keycap collecting, to a lesser degree mechanical keyboards (I usually use them as displays to showcase my artisans)
• Boardgame collecting and playing. I'm a big fan of modern area control games. Also trying to design some. Slowly.
• I curate a magic the gathering commander cube. Hopefully mtgcube gets a community somewhere around here
• Reading, lots of fantasy there.
• EDM shows and festivals, recently. Probably have been going to too many, but I always jump in with both feet

My most niche hobby is writing ungodly bash scripts, and sourcing them to one of my bash profiles -- mingw64 (windows), zshell (OSx), or normal (debian based).

I write in such a way that scripts are separated by concepts which overwhelmingly align with a certain technology or tool (e.g. git) and source whichever functionality I want into the proper profile.

The pain is separating corporate vs personal scripts, which I don't have a great solution for outside of actually separating the scripts and sourcing in the proper order so that corporate functionality can override personal functionality (i.e. my git commands in corporate environment are still the same but with properly overridden config, etc)

For example, I bought a steam deck and mainly use it as a laptop instead of a gaming device. I created a new bash script steamos and source to my (new) steamos profile. All my setup is repeatable through scripts to the point I could factory reset, clone my profile repo, run a couple commands, and everything is back where it should be. I am not quite to that state with other environments, but that is my goal.

Imagine starting a new job, being handed a laptop you don't get to choose (probably a Crapbook), and then simply clone and run config command to setup the OS for your personal prefs so you can hit the ground running on week one. This doesn't mean you clue people in on the fact you are running not walking, however, ESPECIALLY at a new job.

inb4 have you heard of Ansible

My favorites (right now) are learning to play star wars legion better, getting back into gunpla, finding mobile games that aren't utter garbage, trying and failing to find decent friends, and sorrowfully watching hasbro destroy magic the gathering.

I create brickfilms, meaning I animate stop motion videos with Lego*. I'm from Germany, and we have a small community around this hobby here. Just last weekend we had our yearly festival where we meet up, watch a bunch of Brickfilms in an actual cinema, and award prizes (literal bricks) to the best ones. It's soooo cool seeing something you've created all on your own on a big screen and experiencing a full theater's worth of live reaction to it!

Getting started with it is also way easier now than it has ever been! There's apps that you can download that allow you to just put your phone down on any kind of stand (build one from Lego if you want!) in front of some bricks and get shooting just like that.

*or differently branded bricks. Lego's quality has been deteriorating recently, and there are really good competitors by now!

I stuck with the card game Yu-Gi-Oh! For the last 20 years. Got quite the collection now with over 100’000 cards sitting around here (and counting)

I’m also quite the Apple nerd, especially some of the older devices like the G4 Cube that’s sitting next to me here, but in general I’m just a tech geek.

My hobby (mountain biking) itself isn't that niche but I'm guessing the way I do it is. When you put me next to a typical mountain biker the difference is immediately obvious. Most other people approach the hobby from the sport-side but for me it's more about being in nature, exploring places and I guess you could say there's some military larping aswell considering that I choose my gear based on what blends well with the environment and can withstand tough use. Not many people ride wearing combat boots with a fully loaded backpack on them.