Asklemmy

Jacking off. I'm really good at it and have a lot to share, but every time I've tried the police get called.

I like making things. I'm mainly into making costume props and decorations. Basically I'm into making interesting things exactly once, learning a bunch of lessons on what to not do, but never do it again. I'm not a skilled wood worker or metal worker. But! I bound a book myself, coffee stained it, and made the cover out of sewn together leather scraps. It's a Necronomicon. I made a lightsaber almost entirely out of junk from ReStore (mostly plumbing parts). I made an EL wire tree with a dried tree branch about 6ft tall, a spool of decent gauge metal wire, and 50 10ft EL strands. Sanded and painted toy guns. Made a James Webb looking wall decoration out of black foam board, gold hexagons, and an NFC tag. Semi related, I modified an IKEA table to be a vaulted board game table where the tops mount on the wall via French cleat and it has cup holders to keep drinks out and away from spilling on the inside of the table. I have 3D printed some minor costume bits. Made a bunch of wizards wands out of paint, hot glue, and chopsticks. Made a float lamp (tie a bunch of annoying knots around a sphere). Currently trying to modify toy Poke Balls to have a functioning LED button but I really hate soldering.

I'm a programmer by trade so I also tinker with Home Assistant far too much. I have a jellyfish lamp with an RGB bulb that tells me the weather when I wake up. Just made an LCARS (Star Trek UI) dashboard for decoration.

I've got a shit ton of hobbies thanks to my ADHD, but I think my most obscure one is Reef-keeping. Also the most expensive.......

i used to be really really into fingerboarding / fingerskating. made my own wooden decks and stuff

In addition to general learning which might be my favourite, I have multiple.

Maybe the most niche is a historical reenactment and historical costuming. Latter usually based on extant garments or garment finds. I try to get as close to the original in techniques, tools and materials using the best evidence I can find.

I also plan things that will never happen. I decorate houses and apartments on paper. I make extensive plans for travel that I can never afford unless I win in Lottory. Which I even never play.

I spend absolutely too much time playing with spreadsheets.

I have quite a few obscure hobbies due to ADHD...

I'm super into collecting vintage analog music equipment. Old analog synthesizers and reel-to-reel tape machines to be exact. I also make music on them, but to be honest that's kind of a secondary thing haha.

I play a little bit of everything. Drums, guitar, keyboard, bass, etc. I'm probably best at drums though and have been playing for the better part of 25 years. Currently in a punk band and a desert rock band.

I'm into programming (web dev is my career) and embedded systems. I make a ton of various things with arduinos/raspberry pis. Often I'll try to combine the two and make midi/cv controllers for my synths.

I got into 3d printing a couple years back and have since been going down the rabbit hole of CAD with fusion 360/blender/etc.

I also got really into making video games for a bit in Unity. Started work on a VR game and have been meaning to get back to it.

Speaking of VR, I'm not a huge gamer but definitely love playing Beat Saber and Pistol Whip (both VR). I'm in the top 1000 or so in beat saber, but I was #1 globally in pistol whip for quite a while. I imagine I'm probably still top 10 at least.

And probably my most obscure hobby: Poi

Most people have no idea what it even is, and once they find out, just assume I'm a rave kiddie. I mean, I kind of am, but I legit love the art of poi.

Knot Tying. Sure, there's an International Guild of Knot Tyers, but it's a rather small group.

I collect lewd anime figures. They sadly have tonspend their existense in a closet.

playing in a symphonic orchestra. sure, it sounds cool, but most people don't know much about the topic and feel intimidated by it, so the conversation is just me attempting to convince them that it's not just for rich nerds and you can be casual about classical music.

Handspinning. I do a lot of fiber crafts.

I play Mahjong. If I try talking to most Americans about it, they'll think I'm talking about Shanghai, or Mahjong Solitaire.

I actually play 3 forms of it:

Riichi: Standard Japanese rules. This is what you typically see in anime and mahjong games from Japan.

CSM: Competition rules for Chinese Mahjong. This what you'll typically see played in tournaments outside of Japan

American Mah-jongg: A ruleset with a lot of unique features. An AMJ set contains jokers that can act as any tile in the set. The game is played without being able to call "chow"(taking a sequence of 3 pieces), You "Charleston" for the pieces you need before the round begins (pass pieces to the right, left, and across from you), and the standard hands you can make change on a yearly basis. This is the version you often see played by the American Jewish community.

I love playing all three, but it's hard to play them in person, because you need to find at least 4 people who can play by the same rule set.

Riichi is easy enough in Japan, but it's seen as kinda a sketchy game here, and most places you can play it are at expensive and seedy mahjong parlors. Luckily there are a flood of video games based around it that make it more accessible.

Chinese Mahjong is very regional, and each area can have its own variation on the rules, scoring, accepted hands etc. When playing with Chinese friends, I just kinda roll with whatever variation they're playing.

For American Mah-jongg, because the standard hands change year to year, you have to buy a new card from the National Mah Jongg League yearly in order to keep up with it, so it's the only mahjong game with a subscription cost built in. Also as mentioned, the game is very community specific, but also the majority of players are often senior aged women, usually making me the youngest at the table by far.

I love playing all three, but it's hard enough finding someone else who also likes Mahjong, let alone find someone who doesn't confuse it for the solitaire game. I'm not saying Mahjong solitaire ruined my life, but if I could Thanos snap a game out of existence...

Open-source virtual reality, usually just any VR works too lmao but especially FOSS VR

Seems like every hobby is too obscure for most to care at the level I do. Sim racing, rtlsdr, self hosting, ANY kind of motorsports, home automation, blogging, DND, video games... At the surface these are not too obscure but I find very few people in my day to day life that care about them in detailed way

I don't think it's super obscure, but I home brew beer and it's a hobby where you can really go deep into the technicalities of tweaking recipes, building equipment, and just the overall process in a way that would probably bore the average non-brewer to death.

Lockpicking tends to be my most misunderstood hobby/interest.

I love plushies. I have an ever growing collection and love just browsing plushies of all sorts when I'm online. I just really like cute things. But as a 28 year old man with a beard, it's safe to say I'm not exactly the spiting image of a plushie collector, and most people are definitely not interested in talking at length about it with me.

I race RC cars.

Seems simple enough but there’s always follow up questions that inevitably take the conversation from interesting to ‘in the weeds’.

Video Games... And i mean all of it. If you try to talk with me about videogames in a casual way, I need to do my best to not hit you with a history lesson. Did you know that Miyamoto used to Smoke in the Star Fox office and startet talking about trees? Well now you know...

I'll say me writting my homebrew DnD world. It goes in pair with me using ObsidianMD, I love the tool i'm using and i'm having fun specifically in the making of polical cities more than in the making of combat senarios. My mom knows about it and sometimes asks, Dad finds it stupid, and I don't talk about it with anyone I used to atlk about what I write to two friends, but they are coming to my session in september so now I have no one esle to bring it up

Sim racing.

It’s difficult to talk about it without people dismissing it as just a video game with a steering wheel.

I love troubleshooting, even though I complain a lot about it, I still do it.

That doesn't mean that I use systems that require high maintenance like Arch Linux, but openSUSE doesn't have the same support as other known Linux distributions, so I sometimes have to adapt to the options I have, like using containers or compiling for my system.

I also like to provide support for people and help family/friends with whatever they need, tech-related or not.

It may sound silly, but a lot of family (whom I try to avoid) always tell me to charge for the things I do, but I like to help and even donate a lot of things when I can. I also have been trying to give back to the FOSS community. To me it's like a hobby, and money isn't everything.

Playing terminal.