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Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#51

Post by lagrange77 »

mdf wrote: post #22

Currently, birding. Got really into it in 2021 since it pretty much runs in the family. I feel that observing the lives of our fellow creatures helps me really destress and put my mind off work. Interestingly, I find that birding while walking in the nature works better in this regard than just walking in the nature. Get a good pair of binoculars, a bird sound recognition app for your mobile[1], and a bird field guid…

Nice, i'm an amateur birder, meaning i'm just standing in front of the office building and ..watch the birds. But lately i have been thinking more and more about professionalizing it. It's so calm and fascinating.

My favorites are Corvids.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#52

Post by meheleventyone »

Skiing, I skied since I was a kid going on holidays to the Alps with my family once a year. We were also lucky to have Avon dry-ski slope nearby so I could ski after a fashion in the south of the UK. I snowboarded through my teenage years and then fell out of it when I was a student and couldn’t afford it!

In my mid-twenties I met a crazy New Zealander at work, got into ski touring after shaking some of the rust off, skied all over Scotland including a bunch of gullies people normally climb and generally got much, much better. Then I moved to Iceland which when the conditions are good is a ski touring paradise. Skied all over here, various bits of the world (Japan is unreal!) took part in the first freeride comp in Scotland and have generally had a lot of fun.

I’ve calmed down a lot with two kids, it’s a bit unfair to everyone to disappear on day+ long trips all the time. I’m really enjoying teaching them to ski and pootling about on the piste as a family.

It’s a sport like climbing or swimming which I also love where you can feel when you’re doing it right and everything flows effortlessly.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#53

Post by epiccoleman »

My biggest one right now is music. I recently started taking some guitar lessons again (my first lessons since high school). It's been a great motivation to bust through some plateaus.

It's been a big encouragement too to pick up some other skills - I've been getting into recording and DAWs and even have done some (very noobish) video production.

I was really inspired recently by Ben Levin's music channel, so I cribbed a format he used for a few videos, and recorded myself playing a solo and then did some after-the-fact analysis on it. I really like how the video came out, although there a million things to improve upon, especially in terms of audio quality. (That video is here if that sounds interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2FkjeOXchc)

I have always had a (bad...?) habit of picking up and dropping various hobbies - I love learning new stuff, and I really love how quickly you can get the first 70-80% of a new skill. Over the past few years some of those have been cooking, fishing, weightlifting, and writing. I'm not super active in any of those right now (though I really need to get back on the wagon with lifting and exercise).

Oh, also - pinball. So much fun, I could bang quarters into those machines all day long. One of these days I'll have a table in my house...

I also have three kids, one of whom is a baby, so my time for multiple hobbies is basically nil. I'd love to find more time for all of them!

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#55

Post by aidos »

lostlogin wrote: post #44
aidos wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me too. Though it’s more DIY in general (plumbing, electrics, decorating etc too). Built myself a shed from scratch earlier in the summer as a warm up for building a garden office. Currently have the roof off the porch (somewhat regrettably given the state the summer in the uk) because the ivy got to it before we purchased the house and it was rotting away. Having to learn a new set of skills around tiling hip ra…

A bit that makes it attractive to me, if I pay someone and the job is done in a way I don’t like, I end up fixing it anyway and am out of pocket. Do it myself and any issues are easier to live with as they are my fault.

Totally. I’ve reworked a lot of the plumbing and electrics I paid pros for because I wasn’t happy with the results.

I make a lot of mistakes, but as you say, you can make your peace with them.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#56

Post by aidos »

lostlogin wrote: post #49

Beekeeping. It’s fairly inexpensive and most people love honey (you end up with masses). You can find swarms pretty easily and it’s very satisfying to save them. A bedraggled clump of sad bees in the rain can be transformed into a productive monster given the right home. You can learn it from a friendly beekeeper, a local club, or a good book. There is no substitute for seeing a skilled person work with them though.…

Interesting! I’ve always wanted to get into beekeeping. How big of a space do you need for a hive though?

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#57

Post by epiccoleman »

schemescape wrote: post #46
H1Supreme wrote: post #31

Making music. At the ripe old age of 16, I bought DJ Shadow's "Entroducing" album, and wanted to make music just like that. Started out making "music" with the Wave Editor that shipped with Windows 95, and the rest is history. In the last 26 years or so (man that sounds like a long time), I've learned a number of different DAW's, put a modular system together, learned to play instruments (piano, guitar, drums), and w…

Any interest in sharing some of the resources/communities that helped you? Or any examples of your work?

It's pretty dependent on what exactly you want to do, but I have found the Signals Music Studio channel to be a great resource for learning some music theory and composition stuff.

Music theory is not a necessary entry point per se, but it can help to get some basic concepts into your head to play around with. But really, the best thing you can possibly do is just pick something that seems adjacent to music you like and just start screwing around (if you're a metalhead, maybe guitar, if you like EDM, pick any DAW, if you like jazz, get a decent midi keyboard, etc). Music really isn't an intellectual exercise, just start doing something, see what you like, and what you don't like.

I wrote this comment a while back on learning music theory, which has some more thoughts and also some links and pointers to various tools and resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078383. Might be of interest.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#58

Post by dimal »

Modular synths. Yeah, it's more tech, but it's so different from making electronic than on a laptop. I used to make music with a laptop, but after spending eight hours on a computer at work, the last thing I wanted to do was sit at a computer for "fun", so I gave it up.

About a decade ago, a friend of mine got into modular synths and got really good. (He ended up founding New York Modular Synth Society, btw. [0]) I'd see what he was doing and got jealous. So a few years ago I gave it a shot and put together a "small" system for a few thousand dollars. Now somehow I grew that to a $20,000 system. I'm still not "good", but fuck it. It's so much fun. I'm not very social, but there are a lot of modular communities out there, and they're all pretty welcoming and helpful.

[0] https://nyms.love/

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#59

Post by _fs »

neom wrote: post #33
_fs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 hour course? Did you actually get through the entire thing? Was it worth it?

I learned ableton through trial and error, but I have watched the whole video and got a lot from it. I wish I'd had that resource when I was starting out, would have saved me a lot of time. So I'd say: yes, it's worth it if you're picking up ableton.

Thanks, I will give it a try. I picked up ableton a few months ago and have been poking around. A deeper course like this might open up tricks that I am not aware of.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favourite hobby and how did it start?

#60

Post by etrautmann »

epiccoleman wrote: post #53

My biggest one right now is music. I recently started taking some guitar lessons again (my first lessons since high school). It's been a great motivation to bust through some plateaus. It's been a big encouragement too to pick up some other skills - I've been getting into recording and DAWs and even have done some (very noobish) video production. I was really inspired recently by Ben Levin's music channel, so I cribb…

I'm not sure that's a bad habit - exploring lots of different interests is totally okay (especially for children but also adults). Each of those things you try teaches you something you may apply elsewhere. There's a quote I can only partially paraphrase where if you only stay motivated for some period of time for different activities, then "maybe you found what you were looking for" in one that you put down or rotated away from.

For myself, I'm sporadically very motivated to take photography seriously, but don't beat myself up if I'm not motivated for a few months.

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