Currently, fantasy. I just love the gloomspite gitz, such fun models. Leviathan looks pretty interesting, thought. But I will probably wait for a new subscription thingy from hachette, it takes time but the saving are awesome.
AoS, mostly, but the Votan look interesting. Still, love my gitz.
Regarding paints, I really like the Intense series from AK, great paints for a good price. But my racks also collect citadel (contrast is fun!), Army painter (so-so, imho), Valljeo (also OK) and, newest, Two Thin Coates (expensive stuff). But if I activley buying, it's mostly AK.
a decent brush (I like the Windsor & Newton Series 7, size 1
Otherwise, don't sweat it, you can always strip the paint if you don't like it. Plus, try other colors than citadel. They are good, but the pricing is crazy.
I got into contact juggling a decade or two ago. It is basically a form of juggling in which a clear or solid-colored ball stays in contact with your body to interesting effect. Think the Goblin King from the movie "Labyrinth".
It is rare enough that you don't meet many people that have seen it, and with enough of a learning curve that not many people that start ever really get anywhere with it.
Just takes a lot of boredom and lots of muscle memory. Not hard, per se, but unrewarding until you've put more time into than you'd think. A lot of skills within a week or so, you should have some sort of improvement to show for it. Not so much with contact juggling.
But once you've gotten ok at it, it kinda looks like magic.
I like sewing - I make a few pieces of clothing once in a while but usually I'm just mending things or adjusting the fit of store-bought clothes so that they look better on me.
I also love gardening - growing vegetables outside and mushrooms inside. I'm pretty new to both but the mushrooms in particular are really fun - many of them grow a lot faster than vegetables, so it's exciting to have a faster feedback loop and try little experiments to find what works.
I think starting with alterations to clothes I bought at thrift stores or sales helped me a lot - I did a lot of that before I ever tried making something from a pattern. Even making a simple garment from scratch can feel like a big project, but if you're just taking in the sides of a shirt (for example), it's easier to get it done and feel good (even though picking out the seams first is so annoying)
Lately it's been collecting Indie Perfumes. They are much more adventurous and complex than most mainstream scents. It's really fun to pair scents with experiences or moods. I've roped my husband into it and it's like a puzzle game to find scents for him as well.
Not the op, but I really like Imaginary Authors scent lines. Specifically A City On Fire which smells like you were sitting next to a campfire for hours on end before you arrived wherever you are. Cape Heartache is also a really unique scent with strawberry and fir, so like a masculine sweet scent. And for something a lot less challenging, Fox in the Flower Field is also amazing. It leans more like a Chanel N°5 but cuts it with an ozone note that takes away the aldehydic note and replaced it with a darker undertone. I'd love to hear some other good scent houses people have used though too as I'm always looking for something new/exciting/different.
My favorites right now are Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (fair warning their website is a bit daunting, but they have tons of great stuff), and Solstice Scents (they do complex atmospheric scents very well).
I'd go with 3d printing before welding. You can so quite a bit with a 3d printer and the CAD skill you gain are quite useful. I printed most of the parts for my 3lb robot and it heald up quite well.
Oh yeah, I've heard of Royal Road before. I used to (and still do) read a lot of Cultivation novels, and I know that that subset of writers tends to have a lot of cross over with the Royal Road audience.
Yeah! there are great one on there too, quite a few very popular ones:
The main ones I can think off the top of my head are
Beware of chicken; takes itself less seriously, and is quite a fun slice-of-life cultivation thingy
Forge of Destiny; more serious and closer to classical cultivation novels, slow-burn but honestly quite magical, I dropped it because I have a really hard time with Asian names and had trouble to difference characters, but honestly, very well written
Path of Ascension; A different take on cultivation, outside of the Asian origin but keeps some of the mechanics while applying more modern ideas, on a grand scale, honestly love that one
There are plenty of others and people more qualified than me on cultivation novels could guide you better (I am quite impaired by my inability to parse Asian names unfortunately...)
Lately it includes growing gourmet mushrooms, re/learning languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, data organizing stuff (such as assigning each horror movie I've seen with fears from The Magnus Archives, been fixated on horror movies in general so I've also made a tierlist for all the ones I've seen), and sewing/making clothes. I'm looking to maybe have an isopod colony again (properly this time), make fursuits, continue studying wicca/witchcraft stuff, as well as finally get back to art once I'm over this burnout ^^;
Urban exploring (for lack of a better term) with no purpose other than to discover. I live in a city and I'm constantly just wandering around going down streets I've never been down or into alleys I've never been in or checking out stores I've never been to. This is my approach when I travel to other cities and other countries too, I often don't have a plan for my trip/vacation, I just arrive there and then start to wander and see what I find.
It’s rock climbing but more specifically the type with no ropes or harness. Just the body and your chalk. The height ain’t high of course and there’s safety mats. Fun to solve those short problems.
My Grail Board - Happy Hacker Keyboard 2 modded with Norbauer Heavy Grail VHS, with Brocaps Gamer set and Mitchcap modifier keys. The top row left are original clack factory multishot clack skulls, and on the top right are kbk/kwk (killed by keycaps) vandals and mummies.
OG Kyuu - OG Kyuu keyboard with GMK Bleached keycaps, brocaps gamer set, and various artisans on the top row
I'm interested in learning how to solder, but not really sure how. I'm not a DIYer when it comes to electronics, so I don't know what to practice on. I just feel like it's a skill I should at least be familiar with.
Do do you remember tamagotchi? The little electronic egg with a pet you should take care of? I collect those. They are more advanced now. They have color screens, they charge with USB, you can connect them and marry, have a whole families.
Oh hell yeah. I loved those little things, although me and my brother usually had either Digimon or Virtupets or whatever the cheap knock-off was called. I remember there was a game boy tamagotchi game that I got for my birthday though and I played that for ages and ages.
My most niche hobby is writing ungodly bash scripts, and sourcing them to one of my bash profiles -- mingw64 (windows), zshell (OSx), or normal (debian based).
I write in such a way that scripts are separated by concepts which overwhelmingly align with a certain technology or tool (e.g. git) and source whichever functionality I want into the proper profile.
The pain is separating corporate vs personal scripts, which I don't have a great solution for outside of actually separating the scripts and sourcing in the proper order so that corporate functionality can override personal functionality (i.e. my git commands in corporate environment are still the same but with properly overridden config, etc)
For example, I bought a steam deck and mainly use it as a laptop instead of a gaming device. I created a new bash script steamos and source to my (new) steamos profile. All my setup is repeatable through scripts to the point I could factory reset, clone my profile repo, run a couple commands, and everything is back where it should be. I am not quite to that state with other environments, but that is my goal.
Imagine starting a new job, being handed a laptop you don't get to choose (probably a Crapbook), and then simply clone and run config command to setup the OS for your personal prefs so you can hit the ground running on week one. This doesn't mean you clue people in on the fact you are running not walking, however, ESPECIALLY at a new job.
Haha, I love that kind of thing too - even if there's a "better" off the shelf alternative, it's fun to figure it all out and design it exactly the way you want. it feels like doing a sudoku or writing a story or something to me. I feel like I wouldn't be working in tech if I hadn't initially gotten into making my setup just right with scripts - before that point I just didn't have a lot of programming tasks that caught my interest, but I learned a lot that way and eventually branched into other stuff too.
I am a looooot more basic. But I see the fun in scripting. I make scripts when I need to do boring/monoton/repeating tasks like setting up a new win env after a new install, Set up test environments or getting info that my customers ask for that is something they will most likely not ask for again or if I need test data (especially files). I am a fullstack developer so that is why I am not doing anything fancy like the sys admins and I am too practical to create something for the sake of creating. But I do love creating things that is being used!
I create brickfilms, meaning I animate stop motion videos with Lego*. I'm from Germany, and we have a small community around this hobby here. Just last weekend we had our yearly festival where we meet up, watch a bunch of Brickfilms in an actual cinema, and award prizes (literal bricks) to the best ones. It's soooo cool seeing something you've created all on your own on a big screen and experiencing a full theater's worth of live reaction to it!
Getting started with it is also way easier now than it has ever been! There's apps that you can download that allow you to just put your phone down on any kind of stand (build one from Lego if you want!) in front of some bricks and get shooting just like that.
*or differently branded bricks. Lego's quality has been deteriorating recently, and there are really good competitors by now!
My favorites (right now) are learning to play star wars legion better, getting back into gunpla, finding mobile games that aren't utter garbage, trying and failing to find decent friends, and sorrowfully watching hasbro destroy magic the gathering.
Yeah I stopped playing about 2 years ago just because of product fatigue. And the new LOTR stuff costing twice as much as a regular set? No thank you. They have also leaned heavily into turning MTG into a weird "investment vehicle" with all these ultra-collectible and exclusive cards, the most egregious of which is the "one of one ring." It's pretty gross. It's much less about the actual game now, which I'm sure would (does?) disappoint Dr. Garfield as he only wanted to make a game. He expected people to play magic at the kitchen table and wrap a rubber band around their deck when done.
My hobby (mountain biking) itself isn't that niche but I'm guessing the way I do it is. When you put me next to a typical mountain biker the difference is immediately obvious. Most other people approach the hobby from the sport-side but for me it's more about being in nature, exploring places and I guess you could say there's some military larping aswell considering that I choose my gear based on what blends well with the environment and can withstand tough use. Not many people ride wearing combat boots with a fully loaded backpack on them.
I stuck with the card game Yu-Gi-Oh! For the last 20 years. Got quite the collection now with over 100’000 cards sitting around here (and counting)
I’m also quite the Apple nerd, especially some of the older devices like the G4 Cube that’s sitting next to me here, but in general I’m just a tech geek.