What is your special interest?

Initially thought I didn't have one, because I was thinking it had to be, like, things you do or whatever. Like wood carving or building something. Then I realized I absolutely do. Lol

Philosophy and religious studies. Non dualism especially, but honestly, I just love learning about different philosophical ideas. I love Anthropology in general, and the differences and similarities between disparate cultures is downright fucking fascinating. People tend to think that the differences in, say, Hinduism and Christianity are pretty great, and they absolutely can be, but if you dive into the deep thinkers of either tradition you tend to find that oftentimes they're trying to say the same things.

I like making homemade bongs and water pipes specifically from reclaimed materials. I'm not strident about things, but it's fair to say in a general sense that I need them to have $0.00 of material costs. I make "the best" in terms of performance, and people freak out when they use or see them. They are always a huge conversation piece, always creative, and I just give them away. People ask me all the time to make custom ones but I won't. It's free or nuthin'

I know people that still use water pipes I made for them 15 years ago! Sometimes they look a bit "trashy" but they're crafted! And that's the way I like em!

Remember when Homer Simpson made that misbegotten lump of shit called VunderBaat or something? I feel him man

Cryptography. If something exists, its very existence conveys something or is about to.

Hedge laying. It's a technique where you almost cut through the stems of the plants in a hedgerow in order to bend them down. This promotes the growth of new shoots and results in a very dense hedge, which historically was done to make sure animals didn't escape or enter pastures and fields.

How did you start with that? I've contributed some via Street Complete, but I've never figured out how to contribute directly to OSM.

iNaturalist

i upload photos i take of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fungi, and bugs. The observations (photos + location + annotation) are uploaded to a public database accessible to researchers and universities.

I've been involved in multiple species range expansions, and i've documented both endangered and invasive species. Pretty fun!

The Android app is very good. The iOS app is good for uploads, but lacks a lot of browsing features like search filters and phylogenetic trees. If you are on iOS i suggest using it in a browser except for observation uploads

You can also upload audio recordings for bird and bug sounds. It's amazing what you can learn about your local ecosystem!

Planes and to a lesser extent Cars and Trains. I just love travel, points hacking, and flying!

Mine is Free software. If I can avoid it, then I avoid nonfree software. This brings me a lot of problems but also a lot of joy.

Game preservation. I got into it last fall when I learned about OpenGOAL for the Jak and Daxter games. I grew up with those games and were some of my favorites from that generation.
I then learned how easy it was to rip PS1 through 3 games and how simple it is to set up each of the emulators for each console. I have a sizable collection of games from each of those generations, so I started ripping.

I also remember watching LTT's video about how to jailbreak your Switch. I bought a used Switch from a friend pre-pandemic, but never played the games because I never cared for playing on the Switch itself. So I checked if mine was old enough to jailbreak (Nintendo patched the exploit out of the Switch about a year after production) and, lo and behold, it was.
It wasn't easy jailbreaking it. It took several hours over 3 days to do it; I would hit a roadblock that I couldn't figure out, so I'd stop and come back the next day, get a little further, hit another roadblock, and repeat. Once I managed that, I ripped my (small) collection of Switch games and played them on Ryujinx. Now that I could finally play them on my laptop whenever I wanted, I actually had a desire to play them and finally got through BotW in January.

Then I figured out how to jailbreak my Wii (which is pretty easy, I recommend everyone do it to theirs), so I could rip those games. It can also rip GC games, so I didn't need to jailbreak one of those to do it.

When I learned of shadPS4 this summer and the progress it was making toward playing Bloodborne, I spent $400 on ebay to get a gold PS4 running firmware 9.0 so I could jailbreak it and start dumping PS4 games.

At that point I saw how much space all of the games I ripped took up on my laptop, so I bought a NAS from a friend who was upgrading theirs and set it up with two 8TB hard drives in RAID 0 and stored all my games on there. It's currently about 60%+ full.

Over Halloween I went to a used game store and saw they were selling a Wii U for $160. I bought it and jailbroke that as well and started ripping those games.

I bought an OG Xbox to jailbreak, but I need to open it up to replace the clock capacitor first. Otherwise it could leak and my effort would be for nothing. I just haven't got around to it yet.

I realized this was a passion of mine when I accidentally borked my PS4 and it would only boot into safe mode. I was willing to completely wipe it and start the jailbreak from scratch so I could keep doing it.

All told, I've ripped about 400+ games in the past 15 months, spent dozens of hours ripping them, and have zero intention of stopping. I only think about how I can keep expanding my collection.

I have at least a couple.

3D printing. But I mostly design my own models and mostly for utilitarian purposes rather than artistic. For instance, my mother's into quilting and wanted a very specialized die for a Sizzix die cutter to use to cut quilt pieces, so I applied my amateur 3D printing, CAD, and mechanical engineering skills to the problem and designed/printed a die. The process also included making a custom tool for precisely bending the die blade.

Second, studying U.S. intellectual property law. I just dig it. And it's relevant to me because I frequently publish software and models for 3D printing under permissive licenses. And I like having at least some amount of understanding of what the licenses really mean and what people will be able and not able to do legally with the works I'm publishing.

Primary: Disc Golf ❤️

Secondary: As many useful docker containers as I can pack onto my home server

!watercolor@lemmy.ml

Love me some watercolour.

my hobby is collecting hobbies

if I could have a special interest for more than a week at a time I bet I'd be good at it ...

I really had to think just to come up with nothing lol

I get REALLY into something for 2 weeks then I drop it and never look back. I was into minerals/mineralogy for a few years I guess, but I'm not all that knowledgeable. I just really like copper bearing minerals like dioptase and azurite.

I know more about the Doom engine than I do interpersonal relations. Did you know you can completely destroy collision physics via writing over memory addresses if you shoot a bullet weapon at a stack of corpses?

I want to say selfhosting but that seems not so special on Lemmy. If I can host it myself and it’s FOSS I do it.

Animatronics. I like old school Chuck E Cheese and Rockafire Explosion. Also, urban exploration. Train videos.

Fighting games and Riichi Mahjong.

Believe it or not, this venn diagram has enough overlap that we've got a running joke about how Riichi is becoming the new FGC Retirement Home. We've even got a few people bringing tiles to every major tournament to unwind before/after brackets. I've booked my trip to Frosty Faustings next month, signed up for six different brackets and I'll try in squeeze in as much 'jong as I can too.

How do you even do that?