Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.
Bodybuilding style Lifting. Wish I knew that science based influencers are just using science as a gimmick to make new videos and bold claims for short form content.
Lifting is hard when done right but its not super complex. The basics are the same they were decades ago:
- be consistant and stick to a routine at least 6 months.
- Learn the proper lift techniques
- learn how to train to failure (failure is not mandatory every set but you need to know where it is in order to train close to it for adaptations to occur)
- Keep progressing weights when you can without sacrificing technique. (Progressive overload is both the driver and the result of muscle growth, as long as your work sets are close to failure the growth stimilus is there)
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?”
“Meh, I’ll upgrade the server RAM when I need it, zswap is working fine” <- clueless idiot from last year
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.
Definitely applies to climbing. Technically more expensive shoes may help with certain climbs, it certainly won’t help a beginner.
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.
You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.
When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn’t really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.
A box of comics isn’t going to take up too much space.
Boxes of comics have taken over an entire room.
Hydroponics, how heavy a 10 gallon tote is filled with water. With about 8 gallons of water in it, it’s about 67 lbs. Thankfully I don’t need to move my basic deep water culture setup and it’s stable. It’s been a great learning experience, but moving forward if I expand I’m going with the nutrient film technique.
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.
I’ve only ever modified files I’ve found online, never designed anything myself in Cad and I find plenty of real uses for my 3d printer. It probably paid for itself just printing organization bins and other things for the house. Just last week I bought some cheap shelves from IKEA clearance without any hardware, printed out some feet and now I have a new monitor stand. I regularly print accessories that I would otherwise have to pay extra for (like tripod mounting plates)
Plus there are some pretty amazing projects out there that get a lot cheaper if you have access to a printer. Personally I’ve printed a pair of astronomy binoculars https://www.analogsky.co/ and a custom mechanical keyboard fitted to my hand. https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/beta
Let’s say I learn CAD.
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What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer.
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Why should I get a printer.
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Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3d print shops?
I’m going to take these out of order.
Why should I get a printer?
If you have a continuous and frequent need or strong desire for small plastic objects. If you have a hobby like cosplaying, cosplayers find 3D printers quite useful for making costume parts or props, tabletop players like printing minifigures or playsets, if you’re an electronics hobbyist it can be useful to print cases and enclosures for projects, if you’re a woodworker you’ll never stop needing jigs, brackets, vacuum hose adapters.
Or, if you’re interested in 3D printing itself. There are folks doing like, 4-axis non-planar stuff that’s industry leading, for the fun of it. Hell and gone smarter than I am.
Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3D print shops?
If you have one project in mind, or “might occasionally find a use for it,” hire it done rather than buying a machine.
There’s kind of a trap for newbies to 3D printing: Inexpensive printers tend to be projects unto themselves. Which can be a good thing if you’re interested in the hobby of 3D printing itself. If you want to buy a machine, plug it in and it just works, expect to spend $1000. Because you’re either going to buy a Prusa, which start at about $1000 for an assembled MK4S, or a Bambu Labs machine for about $500 and then they’ll getcha somehow. Bambu Labs sketches the fuck out of me, they’re trying to be the HP of FDM.
Even then, if you have one of the “just works” machines, you still have things to learn. What plastic to choose for this model that needs to be outdoors? Do you use a textured or smooth sheet for PETG? Can you print ASA without a heated enclosure? Should you use glue stick for TPU? Can you print PC-CF with a brass nozzle? What do the eight pages of print settings in the slicer do? If you can envision the printer sitting turned off for months at a time, does all that seem worth learning?
What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer?
Mainly, have something you need to 3D print for.
I have found that Thingiverse and Printables are both full of idiots. They let literally anyone on there, and I’ve found the dumbest shit.
“It’s 7% shorter in the X axis because my printer prints 7% long in that direction so I squish all my parts to compensate. And then I upload them like that because my mom let me eat paint chips as a baby” has to be my favorite, right after “This design relies heavily on trapping hex nuts in hexagonal recesses, and I looked up the “diameter” of M3 nuts and modeled that as the across flats dimension because my mom is my dad’s mom!”
If you want to print anything other than flexible dragons and Bender Bhuddas, and then actually use them, you’re going to need to know how to alter things other people ruined through incompetence, or design things from scratch. The ability to design the thing YOU need is what really unlocks the power of a 3D printer.
- What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer.
CAD is just a tool. You can use it to make more trinkets yourself or create a special bed basket, custom camera bracket, etc. If you see something at work or home that could benefit from a product that doesn’t exist yet, you might be able to design and print a fixture for it.
- Why should I get a printer.
Unless you’re constantly coming up with things to print then you don’t. Plenty of libraries offer free 3d printing services but keep in mind you get what you pay for. If you’re lucky, some universities or hacker spaces might let you use their printers and are of generally higher quality.
- Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3d print shops?
It gets expensive very quickly. Most commercial places I’ve dealt with for work will rip you off because they’re targeting industries that have more money than common sense. I once needed to print a few simple boxes with ESD safe filament and they wanted over 400 dollars for just one. A lower end prusa costs the same as 3 of those prints so it made more sense for us to purchase our own printer and filament and make it ourselves. The cost of making additional fixtures plummeted too once we considered avoiding some traditionally machined parts in favor of printed ones.
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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.
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!!
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.
Underappreciated comment of the thread.
You need to conjure the ancient dark magics of woodworkers long past.
I shudder to imagine such might. Utter your shriveled curses to the unwary, fiend, not to me!
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.
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
I just tell everyone where all the mistakes were.
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.
… but you’ll know
shia_labeouf_slowclap.gif
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.
that there are no women
The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.
Dice. Definitely dice.
There are moments when it can be n+2…
Same for cameras, axes and chainsaws…
axes and chainsaws…
Thnx mate! I owe you! Gonna Take this to my wife now !!
Always happy to help a brother out.
And bikes, and computers
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Civil engineering as a hobby, eh?
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Tactical urbanism ftw!
Cats
Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.
This is true for reptiles and snakes as well.
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.
And salt. Watch Gordon Ramsey season every single step.
- 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…
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.
I had them playing Golden Axe, Pang, IK+ and Stuntcar Racer, when they were about 6 and 8. They did love it, but it can’t hold their attention the way Fortnite, FIFA, Minecraft and Harry Potter games on the playstation do, sadly.
Know the feeling! Although I do a fair bit of gaming, it’s more the overwhelming choice of every single game every released and being paralysed by so much choice!
How about some retro software? Music, 3D modelling, pixel art, programming etc. Plenty of those on the Amiga.
There’s a lot I don’t know about the Amiga. I was always an ST kid, and viewed Amigas with a jealous resentment! There’s definitely a lot to learn and do with it, but I don’t feel the same connection as I do to my ST, despite it’s shortcomings. That said, the dilemma still remains. I’m just not that excited by them. It’s definitely a ‘me problem!’
Ah shame. Well, maybe the retro computing spark will come back for you eventually.
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! 😭).
Hey! Long time artist here who paints all kinds of things, from metal lawn art to actual paintings. Rule number one- wash your bushes out in cool water, not hot or warm, as hot water can loosen the glue that holds the bristles in. Second get a small tub of brush restorer. A little goes a long way. Once the brush is dry, add a little brush restorer and reshape the tip and bristles. You can use sharp sizzors to clip and stray brush hairs that won’t stay in place. And keep paining!
I just do miniature painting, so it’s the really tiny detail brushes, keep ruining the tips trying to get into little corners.
Might have a look at the brush restorer.
For fine tip miniature work I have also put cheap hair gel on the brush tip to hold the piont. Milage may vary based on bushtype and technique.
