Ask Lemmy

I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)

I really like killing invasive plants. I think that's probably my most niche passion. Like when I have some free time I'll just go into the woods behind my house and cut down wisteria, ivy, Chinese holly.... I just find it extremely satisfying idk. I love the idea that I'm clearing out space for native plants (and in turn native animals) to grow.

I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.

I know there are others out there, but I sometimes feel like I am the only person under 50 who loves opera. I have 2 streaming services that I mostly use for watching opera.

I honestly feel like many people would like opera if they gave it a chance. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cross between Lord of the Rings and The Avengers, but without the 30-min CGI fights (no disrespect to those who like fight scenes, but i get bored). My son and I love Mozart's The Magic Flute; my wife's favourite is Bizet's Carmen.

Making almost all of my food from whole ingredients.

The most processed ingredient that I would use is corn flour and such, or maybe cheese. I'm not gonna find wheat or whole dried corn and fire up a grindstone lol. But yeah everything is made from the whole ingredients to the greatest degree reasonable. An example I think everyone can relate to is ketchup ... If I want it I start with fresh tomatoes and a cutting board.

But yeah it's fun as hell for me - a wonderful blend of nerdy science & chemistry, plus that beautiful artistic side which allows me to be a rule-breaking creator.

Most people think its cuckoo that I ferment my own peppers for hot sauce, make tortillas from scratch, braise my meats for hours, cut and desiccate potatoes for fries, pickle various vegetable concoctions, make mustards, fry my own chips for nachos...

I love the hell out of the craft but many think I'm a little overboard. Fair enough. No family, kids, girlfriend, mostly a loner... I got time plus it's super fucking nerdy and process-driven (in many ways) if you lean into it that way!

I also developed some great "systems" so I can batch cook, and its become so routine after 5 years that I've slip-streamed it all into my daily puttering so its like hours of time overall, but minutes of actual work.

I do calligraphy. Sometimes i meet someone who knows someone who does calligraphy. But I've never met another person IRL that does calligraphy. And the particular style I like makes it even more rare.

Dune was my go to scifi...now it's popular and I feel like a hipster.

My dad got me into hard scifi, d&d, Tolkien...if I feel like a hipster, can't imagine what he feels like.

I'm sure there's probably someone out there, but I'm really interested in cool border crossings and how they represent nations on each side. As much as I am no nationalist, I find those projections of strength, friendship, security, etc. all super interesting.

Oh, and fake/fantasy transit maps. Those are always fun to draw up in my spare time.

Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called "That Time I Found a Box" and got hooked on it. It's a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.

The full version just came out on Steam - I'd recommend taking a look. It's a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.

I like retro programming, in particular Windows 2000.

Now I'm making a little 3D toy now that works with OpenGL on Windows with WGL and on X11 with GLX (also on Cygwin). No third party abstractions!

I want to keep adding backends, like DX 7, 9, Vulkan, WebGL, bare Linux KMS, and then stuff like screen space reflections, shadows, materials, ray tracing where possible, maybe get it running on a console or two too.

I'm not into gaming. I think I'm the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn't. I don't really know why. I think it's a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

At a glance, Tlatoani: Aztec Cities looks like a Pharoah game type city builder. I'm into this, thanks for mentioning this game OP.

Currently I'm in a similarly small population of people who play Motorstorm 1 (Monument Valley), and Motorstorm Pacific Rift online.

They work with real PS3 consoles with just a DNS change or on RPCS3 emulator.

Motorstorm Arctic Edge on PSP or PPSSPP as well but it's played less often.

Apocalypse also kinda works but it's pretty broken in very annoying ways, and reverse engineering needs more work.

Motorstorm RC is also supported, but I don't play that one.

Can find the Motorstorm communities on Discord and they're mostly using PSRewired.

Here's an invite link for Motorstorm Online World: https://discord.gg/4sJPGDxhx

Every few years I get a yearning to play through Daikatana.

The entire thing.

I’ve been doing this from before the community patch.

I dunno.

Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.

Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.

Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.

Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are "into it".

I work in a technology field and I'm interested in "not AI" stuff. It's a wild ride.

Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).

I’m into combining these in interesting ways.

While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.

It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.

I like to analyse stickers stuck on traffic lights and road signs.

I plan on making an app someday where people can contribute to a database of stickers and compare the sticker culture of different regions.

I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.

• Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It's just such an iconic building design. There's a documentary out now on them, but I've been fascinated for almost a decade now.

• Meshtastic

• John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.

At school, I seem to be one of the very few people who use Linux so there's that

I like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s

I really love Japanese jazz fusion. None of my friends understand my excitement about the EWI solos, they just say it sounds like Mario Kart music lol. I'm also into Buddhism, but dont have anyone else with this interest.

I code Csound. It's still sort-of being maintained, but otherwise the community is super dead. It's a shame because it's very versatile and fun, but realistically there are quite a few more modern alternatives for coding sound synthesis these days.

I'm really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name, but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.

That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.

I'm still on Second Life, which is a virtual world social platform. It has ~45,000 given active people on it, which is a piss squirt compared to other online platforms like MMOs and MMORPGs. But, nobody I know are into it save for about 5 people at least.

And I still somehow am bothering with Gaia Online which has even less users, from 1,500 ~ 4,400 on a good day and only know 2 friends on there.

Well.. I'm using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)

I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy's and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.

And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I'm apparently one out of ten :)

I still love Garry’s Mod animations. Basically using stop-motion-style tools to make low-effort animations with familiar characters on Source engine maps.

They don’t fit the YouTube algorithm now though; creators can’t just put up a new animation every few weeks. It was at its best when the whole community was just posting stuff in leapfrog formation, rather than competing for their audience every day.

I strap GoPros on to hand built FPV Freestyle quadcopters and make videos out of it. When I lived in Orlando there were a few of us doing it. Lately I know of 0 in my area.

Whenever I'm going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.

It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don't see that often. And at the same time, I'm increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there's more to the EU than just Finland :)

I would guess it's unlikely that all that many other people do the same.

I like to rescue dogs. I just rescued one last week that I'm taking to get groomed. He's sleeping in his crate right now. It's not ideal, as I live in a small house with two cats, three people, and two dogs. But holy shit is it rewarding. Most of the time they just scamper away, although blessedly it's usually to their home. Every once in a while you get a friend for a while, and someone else gets a friend for life. Dogs are lovely animals, and they exist as they do because of humans. It is our duty to take care of them.

This little guy needs to be housetrained and neutered but then he's off to live a life on the open road as my trucker friend's road companion. Or at least that's the plan!

Idk how to attach pictures on this app so you'll have to imagine a very sweet Yorkshire terrier who only has a few dreads left to snip! When I found him he had a dread that was legit like two feet long. Poor baby.

I try to curate zines from around the world into local exhibitions, do hand translating alongside if need be, imitate the original paper best I can.

It's kinda fun lol. That and kinda similarly, but I love♡ spending time on online software radio sites, just listening into different channels like I was there myself.