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your fav hobbies that stave off the existential dread

Started by dannyfc, July 06, 2022, 08:36:36 PM

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Twit 2

Quote from: kittens on July 06, 2022, 09:13:56 PMchrist im turning into bgmnts. OK my girlfriend and i regularly walk around our neighbourhood looking at and stroking the local cats. todays results were saw:10/stroked:4. can this be a hobby

Bollocks, you were fucking them into wheelie bins like that mad old bint.

Ray Travez

Quote from: bgmnts on July 06, 2022, 10:06:27 PMHas anyone had an existential wank? Thinking about Simone de Beauvoir or something?

I tried, but it was a bit of a non-sartre

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse


flotemysost

Quote from: shoulders on July 06, 2022, 10:53:55 PMHow does anyone get anything done? Where does the time go?

Hard relate. Honestly staggers me how many CaBbers (and civilians) have heard so much music/seen so many films/read so many books/are generally really knowledgeable about masses of stuff, as well as having actual lives and jobs and that.

Managing to cook a healthy meal per day, render myself just about presentable for polite society each morning and keep my room tidy is a massive achievement here, even as a semi-wfh cunt these days. ADULTING FAIL, AM I RIGHT?? *crying laughing emoji*

But then, I'm probably out more evenings than not (doing the shite listed in my previous post, or more likely just getting pissed with mates). Maybe I'd be a bit more inclined towards less sociable, more "indoor" hobbies if I wasn't living in a flatshare - not that I'm at all unhappy here or anything, but yeah it's not like I can just Bogart the kitchen every evening embarking on elaborate recipes, or decide I'm gonna take over the living room making papier-mâché models of Tracey Island or whatever.

Zero Gravitas

When I did they were mostly programming related, I'd love anything that had a visual output: ray, path and sdf tracers a plenty, various forms of strange attractor, memory scanners to fuck with special regions of video files and gitch them.

If I saw something that made pretty or weird I'd reimplement it.

thenoise

Quote from: Elderly Sumo Prophecy on July 06, 2022, 09:59:39 PMWanking

I'm 38 years old and I can barely manage 3 times a week nowadays. At this rate I won't manage it at all once I reach 50. NEED REPLACEMENT HOBBY FAST

Crenners

Photography
Cooking
Travel
Hike
Films, games, music & writing about them
Community-type activities, like planting flowers round our village or supporting mates at a farmer's market
Going to church, though I'm not religious
Beers
Bullet hell
Running and riding a bike
Used to do fly-fishing but can't justify it now
Going for massage or some pampering
Gardening, flower arranging


Blue Jam

Quote from: kittens on July 06, 2022, 09:13:56 PMmy girlfriend and i regularly walk around our neighbourhood looking at and stroking the local cats. todays results were saw:10/stroked:4. can this be a hobby

I also do this- well, I stroke two of them. The rest aren't very friendly.

I prefer dogs but if you want to stroke dogs you generally have to go to pubs. Doggo-induced alcoholism it is then.

When I go for a run I use a run tracker app and always add the number of sausage dogs spotted to the stats. Just as a bit of motivation to keep at it- "alright, you hate exercise, but just look at how many sausage dogs you get to see".

KennyMonster

Running (hate doing it but love havng done it).

Gardening (Veg mostly).

Reading a book, even a only a few pages, before going to sleep.

#RockNRoll!

Kankurette

My hobbies are very boring. Cooking, learning languages, swimming or going the gym, attending the odd football match (not as much as I would like due to money and disability), playing Pokemon Go (I use it as a walking app), going to gigs and playing various instruments to different degrees of badness. Which reminds me, I need to get valve oil because one of the valves on my tuba is stuck and it's a fucking nightmare trying to play it because I have to keep stopping to yank the valve back up. I'm not really into doing group activities, I used to be in my synagogue choir but quit for various reasons.

I read a lot - Kurt Vonnegut to Dostoyevsky to Elinor M Brent-Dyer to Zadie Smith - but don't watch too many films because my attention span is shot.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I took up kayaking several years ago. Everything feels very far away when you're floating on the water. It is perhaps rather context dependent, however - we're moving from the outskirts to the middle of the city soon, so I shall find out whether it's as peaceful with car noise and that going on.

Quote from: shoulders on July 06, 2022, 10:53:55 PMLearning Czech (I feel a fraud saying it though as I have slacked off this year)
Would you say you've Czeched out?

jobotic


Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth


Stigdu

Learning Polish
Painting miniature figures
Playstation
Visiting National parks/English Heritage sites

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: flotemysost on July 06, 2022, 10:37:44 PMWell impressed with anyone who codes for fun, I couldn't even do it for work.

The real difficulty with it (and one that can make the whole endeavour immediately dispiriting) is finding some problem you have that needs solving that hasn't already been solved better than you could have done it, that you inevitably stumble across a few google searches in.

The easiest way to do this is to invent a very bespoke problem, for instance I decided I wanted to join Letterboxd, but couldn't remember all the films I'd watched and kind of wanted a watch history, I've been posting on another forum with a film thread for 17 years, so wrote a script that extracted all my posts in that thread, then trained a natural language tool on 100 or so of my posts containing film names, to extract the rest, using an api to a film database as a filter to get rid of any false positives. Given it was a rushed job I was surprised how well it fared - I'd been meaning to do it for some time, but work have a thing where everyone has to give a presentation on a work thing or a hobby thing once a month and I didn't have anything else to talk about and didn't want to talk shop I used it as an excuse to give me the kick up the arse to do it. It's not finished, mind, I want to use the same tool to gauge 'sentiment' (positive/negative) and use that as a crude way of scoring the films out of 10.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Zero Gravitas on July 07, 2022, 01:29:14 AMWhen I did they were mostly programming related, I'd love anything that had a visual output: ray, path and sdf tracers a plenty, various forms of strange attractor, memory scanners to fuck with special regions of video files and gitch them.

If I saw something that made pretty or weird I'd reimplement it.

I wanted to have a play around with trying to make art by training ML algorithms on stuff and then generating images. To get me started I used a point and click service to do the training and generation as my laptop didn't have the right sort of GPU or grunt to train quickly, I wrote a script to pull as many images from the brutalist subreddit as I could and ran them through it, I liked the results but then ran out of free credits and it got pricey so didn't do much else.


About 6 months later an IDM artist on warp or something did more-or-less the same thing.

Endicott

Photography. Often combined with hiking, camping, and wanking.

RC models. I have some quad copters I've got bored with, I'm going to build a low end discus launched glider next.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Endicott on July 07, 2022, 11:28:13 AMRC models. I have some quad copters I've got bored with, I'm going to build a low end discus launched glider next.

A couple of lads where I used to work had some of these, they used to challenge each other to get over the Clye, round Finnieston Cran and back without crashing. They were pretty good at flying them and had cameras with a video monitor or goggles to get a view from the drones (although the goggles just gave everyone motion sickness) but they were forever breaking landing gear.

Dex Sawash


I like fucking about with machines but that's my job. Frees me up to do absolutely nothing the rest of the time. I have some machines in garage in desperate need of fucking with, occasionally arrange tools and materials near them or browse online for sources of materials and for methods.

Not much time passes that I am not thinking about racing sailboats, inconvenient where I live so do it like 2 days/month. DGAF about sailing around for no reason so almost never just go sail when it isn't a race day.

The Ombudsman

Wish I had a hobby I could loose myself in. Tried quite a few things but never found anything I want to do. Always feels like a chore, which isn't the mark of a hobby.

Twit 2

Walking around outside. Sitting down in fields, smoking spicy rollies and looking at the sky. Cooking. Sometimes I read a book.

Stoneage Dinosaurs

Hiking

Music (writing/playing/recording/producing)

Wandering aimlessly around large cities or towns

Don't really do video games much but I've got back into Minecraft in a big way cause I like just building and designing stuff

Knitting (haven't done it in a while though)

Endicott

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on July 07, 2022, 11:32:47 AMA couple of lads where I used to work had some of these, they used to challenge each other to get over the Clye, round Finnieston Cran and back without crashing. They were pretty good at flying them and had cameras with a video monitor or goggles to get a view from the drones (although the goggles just gave everyone motion sickness) but they were forever breaking landing gear.

The goggles are great but they leave you open to attacks from dogs off the leash. It's hard to find a field locally that dog walkers haven't taken to using and I got sick of being suddenly slobbered over. So I stick a small screen on the RC TX instead now, which allows you to look around and see them coming.

None of them have any landing gear to break, but I did manage to crack one apart when I tried to do stunts while flying with a battery that was way too heavy for that.

Sherringford Hovis

Quote from: Blue Jam on July 07, 2022, 10:21:40 AMDoggo-induced alcoholism it is then.

When I go for a run...

I'm sure there's an under-walked high-energy pooch local to you that'd be overjoyed to run with you:
https://www.borrowmydoggy.com/how-it-works

The Mollusk

#54
My life is absolutely fucking consumed by music. Reading about it, writing about it, listening to it, spending money I can't really afford to spend on CDs. That's basically all I do with my free time. Every single day I wonder about listening to something new and then I do and I'm happy. Music is the best thing in the world except shagging and laughing and it helps me stave off the existential dread because I often think, well, as long as there's this. And there is, fucking loads of it, more than I'll ever be able to hear. That thought brings a great wave of joy into my heart.

Blue Jam

Quote from: Sherringford Hovis on July 07, 2022, 01:42:10 PMI'm sure there's an under-walked high-energy pooch local to you that'd be overjoyed to run with you:
https://www.borrowmydoggy.com/how-it-works

Ha! I'm actually signed up to borrowmydoggy but not as a paying member, I just get their emails with pics of cute doggos. Saw a friend's doggo featured a few weeks back, would offer to walk that dog because he's lovely but he's also gigantic and mental.

And when I say "run" I'm really more of a jogger, and most doggos would get frustrated at my current Long Covid pace. I don't actually enjoy running, it'll never be more than a cheap way of exercising and a necessary evil to me.

Would love to walk a few doggos though, can't dogsit as I'm renting.

bgmnts

Would recommend borrowmydoggy as I have used it.

TrenterPercenter

Playing football/piano, cooking/baking things, making cocktails, house stuff, used to hit the gym 2/3 times a week but been a real slacker since lockdown.

Zero Gravitas

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on July 07, 2022, 11:26:44 AMI wanted to have a play around with trying to make art by training ML algorithms on stuff and then generating images. To get me started I used a point and click service to do the training and generation as my laptop didn't have the right sort of GPU or grunt to train quickly, I wrote a script to pull as many images from the brutalist subreddit as I could and ran them through it, I liked the results but then ran out of free credits and it got pricey so didn't do much else.


That's really nice, inspired choice of subject, it's a GAN I take it?
How did you walk around the latent space, just randomly twiddling values or some kind of planned scheme?

Memorex MP3

I'd make things with crafts, go to a ton of films, garden, knock out some proof of concept technical projects before losing interest in them (but learning a fuckton about various things along the way)...

Seems like all I do this side of the pandemic is work and take on baggage from friends and family to distract myself and that's all gotten pretty toxic as a result. Gotten to the point I don't really know how to talk to someone anymore if they're looking for anything other than support, had an old friend I actually get along with visit for a few days last week and had zero idea how to have a fun chat anymore.