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

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91–100 of 111 posts

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

#91
Paragliding. Someone else mentioned skydiving, and if you want the adrenaline, you can find it in paragliding with acro flying, or just in rougher weather.

But otherwise you can hang serenely above a sand dune, or below cloudbase, or pull into thermals.

Sailing gives something similar, playing with the wind as it were.

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

#93
post #8

Learning Ableton opened me up to a whole world of meeting new people and picking up new skills. https://www.ableton.com/en/live/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iuRsiKtObw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxY0x1i3XhY https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9oiyAGA6zOTSPR5-ttojODT4... Getting some teenage engineering pocket operators is also something I'd strongly recommend. They're affordable and fun! Check out this 8 ye…

Recently I got a Circuit Tracks and it's been a hoot. I like using it standalone more than with Ableton (because I haven't gotten around to trying to make entire actual songs). I mostly make grooves and ideas to play with. I got a MicroFreak to go with it but have yet to unlock its features.

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

#94
post #11

Not the healthiest of hobbies but I stumbled into DOTA (the league of legends precursor) 20 years ago and have never fallen out of love. It's been a dangerous addiction at several points of my life, but in many ways has revealed to me more insight about myself than any other activity. There is so much variation and nuance, there's always something to learn. For a naturally curious and slightly competitive person, it'…

That's hardcore. I play StarCraft 2 (Protoss) arcade style--quick ladder matches.

Before that my obsession was Go, the board game. Still enjoy it but don't ever feel I have 40min - hour to spare for a game and don't enjoy smaller/faster formats. I'll sometimes do problems on a phone app.

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

#95
Magic the Gathering. Got a box of Starter 1999 at my local game store (LGS) as I was growing out of playing Pokémon.

I’ve been paying off and on ever since; usually ON when I have money (summer I worked in college and once again when I graduated and started making Engineer money)

I often joke that it’s like Golfing for Tech. I’ve met so many lifelong friends through the hobby. I’ve taught people how to play on first dates (and yes, they continued to date me haha). It’s been a hobby that has helped me establish new friends when I’ve moved cities. I’ve even played semi-competitively in Modern and Legacy, which is just a fun conversation starter.

Nowadays I play Cube and Commander weekly and I buy the yearly Commander decks and play them with my friends that like to play occasionally but leave the Hobby to me.

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

#96
post #28

Magic: the Gathering. Started playing very casually before stepping into a more competitive scene. It's both strategic (intersection between poker and chess) as well as creatively expressive (deckbuilding/theorycrafting). Downsides: $$$

Why people don't just play with fake cheap cards?

They can. My friend got his whole deck proxied online for about $50

Problem is that it’s worthless to anyone but him.

The cards are expensive but they also hold some relative value (can be resold) and only real cards are legal in tournaments.

That said, for casual games, proxies are growing in popularity and I always say they’re a moral imperative. Only problem is some people use proxies that use non-standard art or borders, which can really hamper the game (or in one case, be incredibly cringe and awful to play against).

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

#97

I like running (now). I never played sports growing up, and would not consider myself particularly athletic. I joined my country's military as an officer, and always found myself running at someone else's pace, which was also awful. When I finished my undergraduate degree, I found I had a huge vacuum of time. So, I started running. I signed up for a marathon with some friends and the training was fun, because I was r…

Very cool. I'm guessing one of the two US athletes!

It was a great race - love watching Hassan race too. Also enjoyed the mens 5km and was very happy (as a Brit) to see Josh Kerr beat Ingebrigtsen in the 1500m :)

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

#98
Self-reliance as a hobby, it may not be recognised as such but I consider it to be mine. It more or less grew out of my desire to come as close as I could to my interpretation of the concept of 'homo universalis' [1]. This really just comes down to ditching the idea that 'I can not do this' or 'I will never learn this' and doing the thing instead - badly first but usually better later on. Most of this does not square with the drive for hyper-specialisation but... I don't care. This is my life of which I only have one so I'll just keep on exploring.

Build a house, fix a car, pick up an instrument, make a mural, raise children, read books and start writing, paddle a river from source to sea, climb a mountain, build a synthesizer from scratch, start a band, never stop... Don't be discouraged by naysayers, just try until you succeed or decide to move on.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Renaissance-man

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's changed a lot over the years. There were forums I belonged to early on, but most are gone these days. Typically, if I have a question about something particular these days, I Google it, and usually run into a YouTube video, or a random link (a lot of those end up being Reddit). I don't release music (although I do consider from time to time). I mostly just enjoy the process, and listening back to older work.

> I don't release music (although I do consider from time to time).

I think you should!

Not that my opinion counts for anything, I need to take my own advice. But my guitar teacher said something recently that really hit me - "You don't need to wait 20 years until you're the perfect player before you put music out into the world."

This was a big part of what made me feel confident enough to publish the solo video I linked in my other comment, and I've got some other stuff in the works too. I am trying (to some very small success so far) to be a little less fearful of looking stupid or putting something half baked out into the world.

Music is for everyone! Share it. (Or ignore this advice, that's ok too, don't let me tell you what to do ;)

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

#100
post #8

Learning Ableton opened me up to a whole world of meeting new people and picking up new skills. https://www.ableton.com/en/live/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iuRsiKtObw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxY0x1i3XhY https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9oiyAGA6zOTSPR5-ttojODT4... Getting some teenage engineering pocket operators is also something I'd strongly recommend. They're affordable and fun! Check out this 8 ye…

Can you explain how picking up this hobby lead you to meet new people?

Btw thanks for the links, they look super helpful.

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