My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
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Reading
Thanks to e-books and the Libby app you don’t even have to physically go anywhere or pay anything to find a good book these days.
Playing older video games via emulation. The barrier to entry gets easier and easier as time marches on. And as long as you have disc space to download the games, you’ll likely find a repository somewhere on the Internet.
Oh yeah some even let you play in browser now. Crazy how it takes seconds, and most peoples phones can even play most everything game cube and earlier.
That is a particularly handy feature for older computer games from DOS and C64.
Some even let you play in your browser now…
Makes me sad thinking about all the fun Flash based games we had access to maybe a decade ago.
Chinese handhelds (sbcgamings) are an interesting rabbit hole.
Miyoo Mini Plus!!!
My childhood dream.
And if you don’t flash drives/micro SD cards are dirt cheap and stupid fast these days. May as well be external storage in an easy to loose stick or microSD card.
I’ve never had a problem playing my collection of old games I used to own externally.
Anbernic handheld consoles are awesome and inexpensive.
I recommend the RG35XXSP. It’s shaped like a Gameboy Advance SP and plays lots of Dreamcast & N64 games plus everything below that.
$60 + Shipping Directly from Anbernic
or
$90 with free 1 or 2 day shipping from Amazon
But you see, I wanna git gud immediately
- Print one
, or something like 
- Get a scale/ruler, a pencil and an eraser
- Use the above to draw, first a
and then a 
- Then imagine and draw stuff like
The last one is not true isometric, but has a perspective. But you can make similar good looking stuff in isometric too.
To do perspective, you can’t use the Printed isometric line/dot paper.
Instead, it has an additional step of choosing the infinity points and making your own lines for it.
I tried to find a good instructions page, but unfortunately, search engines just prefer YouTube videos (which I don’t like to recommend).
Either way, this is one method that lets you
git gudpretty fast, albeit in a different drawing form.
Another thing: The last example picture I showed, has circles and semi circles. Avoid those in your drawing at this stage. That requires you to learn an extra method.
/restofthefuckingowl
Nah, these instructions are pretty clear. It’s just the same lines on a grid, but more and better arranged.
Take 175 lbs of chemicals and turn it into a human being!
Add some sugar and spice and everything nice. Leave out the chemical x
Essentially how that works.
At least in this case, you are using the same basics over and over again.
What to put where, is your imagination. The first 2 steps just explain how to put the stuff there. And since I recommended an eraser, I would expect you to know to use it when it comes to the point.
Since you desire togit gudat drawing, I would expect you to be good at imagining, which is the prerequisite.So yeah. I this case, the rest of the owl is the same as the first circle and ellipse.
Oh and ignore the shadows. That comes in a completely different territory. You will need to learn shading, first. I’d never bother with that and just use a CAD software.
Highlighted dimension is not provided.
Drawing implosion imminent.
Ah right, I should have said that too: don’t care about the dimensions. Just make a shape similar to that, which can be done using the vertices/dots in the provided paper (otherwise the print will be useless for the purpose of making the learning process easier).
You are just trying to learn how to draw nicely, right? You don’t really need to care about properly matching some random example I casually picked off google images. You can change the dimensions at will as long as you understand what you are doing.
That intermediate step is amongus sitting down.
- Print one
This was awhile ago, but playing dungeons and dragons! I showed up one night at the local gaming store, asked the group playing that night if they had space, and bam! I’m playing a terrifying monk in World’s Largest Dungeon!
Cooking. A lot of really delicious foods have extremely simple recipes and as an amateur you have time on your side. You don’t have to rush anything for most recipes. A lot of times I measure and cut everything before I even turn on the stove and this makes cooking super easy. Sure it takes a while to cook when you are just starting out but you can just go at your own pace. I really feel like anyone can cook almost anything. You don’t even need fancy tools. I got started with a $12 wok and a wooden spatula. These days there’s a huge amount of resources to teach you how to make just about everything. It’s also really rewarding since you get to eat what you make and you get to make things you want to eat. Needless to say it’s also a very important skill.
Cooking is much easier than it looks. Recipes are just suggestions and after looking at enough of them the commonalities to play around with it
Gathering, cutting, measuring all the ingredients before cooking is actually a very well regarded French method called mis en place so you’re basically already classically trained 😜
Blender. Not great at it, but there’s so many fantastic tutorials on YouTube. I can use it good enough to design and 3d print simple things. Of course, there’s may aspects / layers to it. It’s both broad and deep. So it’s good to kind of focus on one thing at the time, and then break that down even further.
What are your favorite tutorials about Blender specifically for 3D printing? Any channel recommendations?
I do resin printing. All models get sliced into 2d layers by the slicer program. Therefore, the geometry of the mesh isn’t nearly as important as it would be for something you wanted to animate or use in a game. (Pro 3d modelers take great pains to keep their meshes very clean and smooth, made up of all triangles, etc. But if you’re just going to convert the thing to a bunch of 2d slices, you don’t need that level of discipline.)
You can basically overlap and tweak a bunch of primitive shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc) to build a complex shape for the thing you want. Then you can export that as an STL file and load it into your slicer. Once inside the slicer you can add any needed supports and then slice it.
In order to get to this pretty basic level of competence, I just watched several tutorial videos on the basics. Like how to add shapes, scale them, modify them, mirror them for perfect symmetry, etc. I have watched some videos on texturing, lighting, etc. out of curiosity but you don’t need any of that for resin printing.
And once you export it as an STL it looks like one solid thing, so it’s easy to rotate it around and so on in the slicer program.
“Blender Guru” is a really well done Blender tutorial channel, but he also covers a lot of things I don’t really need. Early on, I learned a lot from the “tutor4u” channel.
Thank you :)
Man, I tried to get into this. Spent months running through the tutorials. I just couldn’t grasp how they design flow of creating a complex shape from scratch. It just didn’t “make sense”.
I’ve found parametric modeling programs like Solidworks far, far more intuitive to use - it’s easier for me to grasp “okay, this thing is a combination of added shapes, extrusions, negative spaces, revolved outlines, etc” than what Blender wants you to do. Unfortunately, most parametric programs really don’t offer good skinning/texturing and only mediocre rendering options.
I totally get that. It’s like finding a programming language or personal information manager app that you like. Have to try a bunch out to find something that works for you.
A long time ago I dabbled in script-generated ray tracing. That was fun, but I never got great at it.
I also learned PostScript for a while, because I wanted to create some very intricate printable forms. Using WYSIWG tools was just not cutting it. I ended up with some large 300dpi forms that I liked, whuch were perfect for the assignment.
Sometimes a different model or approach can make a huge difference to your work flow.
I’ve been wanting to learn blender for the same reason. Complicated models are an absolutely bitch to work with in parasolid modeling engines.
However, for simple designs, parasolid modeling is spectacular for designing models for printing. Fusion360 has a free tier for hobbyists (they hide it and you have to go hunting to find it, but it exists), and I’ve done most of my designs there.
I’ve also used tinkercad for really simple edits. I’ve heard great things about solidworks, but it’s expensive af, even for a hobbyist account.
Not sure exactly what you consider ‘expensive’, but there are ways to get a student edition Solidworks account for $100/year. I consider that a pretty reasonable price.
Personally, I find it infinitely more usable than Blender, but that may just be my personal biases in play. Your mileage may vary.
That’s absolutely reasonable, but I’m not a student. Is that required by the license agreement?
Easily fixable. What you do is go to the Titans of CNC Academy and sign up. Congratulations; you are now technically a student! When purchasing the Student Edition from Dassault, you’ll be asked what your educational institution is; “Titans of CNC Academy” is an accepted answer.
Then you can head over to Titans’ sales page and pick up an annual student license. (Make sure you’re getting the Student version and not the cruddy “3DExperience for Makers”. That’s Solidworks’ cloud-based software, and is a hot mess.)
The major downside to this is that files created in the student edition are watermarked as such, and will open with a warning if you try on a professional-licensed version of SW. You should be able to still 3D print for personal hobby purposes, but it is against the license to make money off of it.
Game Mastering for TTRPGs. Set up can take some work, but it’s a great creative outlet and, once you find the right group, soooo much fun. I personally started off with Paranoia XP and moved from there to a couple different systems before landing on D&D 5e. There are some great rules-light systems like Kids on Bikes/ Kids on Brooms or Paranoia Perfect Edition if the behemoth of D&D (with its multiple text-book sized rule books) seems daunting.
ETA: there’s also entire libraries of advice on GMing out there for assistance if you need it.
I played D&D for 10 years before I seriously tried DMing. I’m now a year and a half into a 5e game with 4 other players and it’s been great. It helped that YouTube kept sending me Matt Colville videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8
Nice! I’m a big fan of Ginny Di, she’s got some great tips for DMs and players.
houseplants and especially ferns: It all started with a gift: a bird’s-nest fern and a blue-star fern. i was already into cultivating offshoots, but the bird’s-nest fern does not generate those, and the internet said you can not divide a single plant into multiples. but how do they propagate then? the use spores and the internet said it is not easy to get new plants this way, but i gave it a try. and it was not that difficult…
currently i have about 12 nest-ferns of all sizes and fear the winter when i have to bring all plants into the small flat.
funny enough: the blue-star fern is easy to propagate via offshoots, but its even easier with spores: as soon as you have a medium moist pot near such a fern you get fresh ferns for free. they grow quite slow, but still look beautiful.
if your interested and German based, write me a PM and i can send you a letter with some spores to bootstrap your new hobby!
Kayaking was easy. Get one you can afford on FB Marketplace and go. Cheap paddles are just fine to start as are $3 thrift life vests, grab a whistle while you’re shopping. Next thing you know, you’re scanning Google Maps for water and new adventures.
Painting miniatures. Anyone can do it and make their board games look way nicer.
All you have to do is avoid paying New-In-Box GW prices, and avoid/minimize GW paints and the cost of the hobby drops through the floor.
Tons of skirmish games in all settings are around, many of them with free rules. Battletech is cheap because it basically needs skirmish game amounts of minis. Even playing 40k is cheap(er) embracing third party and scratchbuilding.
Can you recommend good paints to get? I’m interested in getting into model making but all the options are kind of overwhelming and reviews are all over the place.
90% of my paints are Vallejo Model Color. Good value for the price, never had any quality control issues.
Vallejo Game Color is their newer line where they’ve focused on brighter and more saturated colors for the 40k audience. Same company and quality.
I supplement my Vallejo Model Colors with some Duncan Two Thin Coats paints when I want super saturated colors. This line also has pretty decent metallics which I now use, since I can’t find Vallejo Mecha Color anymore.
I do still use Citadel Nuln Oil and Agrax. I have the old formula bottles, and I don’t use wash that often or much, so it will be a while until I buy new ones.
A few random products from Tamiya, MIG, and AK. All are speciality things like rust effect washes. Not really needed for starting out.
I also have a collection of cheap Applebarrel paint from WalMart. These are great for painting bases, doing low importance areas of vehicles, painting terrain, and being drybrush paints for vehicles. Much more cost effective than using hobby paints for this purpose.
I managed to sidestep Games Workshop pretty neatly. I’m huge on Battletech and pretty much exclusively use Army Painter paints. I also have a lot of board games like Scythe or Betrayal that have plain gray minis that I’m working on.
Cycling
I started biking to work after we moved closer and next thing I know I’m into mountain biking and have built 2 bikes
The bizarre culture (pun intended) around sourdough is maddening. The obsession over the “ear,” bannetons, lames, daily feeding: all bro club bullshit. This is the bread humans have been making for millennia; the only tools you need are one hot rock and one not-hot rock.
There are some serious differences between a badly made loaf and a well done one though. You never stop learning. But yeah, it’s easy to get something passable.
None of the differences have anything to do with the Bro Method.
Uh, I must admit I don’t know about that bro method.
Fly fishing
Got yelled at as a kid for playing with your pole too much? Then it’s the hobby for you. Can practice in your backyard and it’s fun just to whip shit around
The cost barrier of entry is decently high though. Fly fishing is a huge rabbit hole for sure. I’ve never been but one of my coworkers goes almost weekly.
You can buy like $50 kits or go on Craigslist and look for someone selling their impulse bought gear.
Add in a license fee and even then it’s not too bad for time killing hobby.
I think when I first got into it I was put off thinking I’d need like the finest $3k in orvis gear and I’d need to buy $10 flies at my local shops.
Like there’s a weird bougie-classist feeling I think a lot of people have which turns them off of trying to get into the sport.
Woodworking! Yes, you can obviously spend lots of money on equipment, but you’d be surprised by how nice furniture you can build with just a track saw and a trim router.
Wine. Not making it, but just enjoying it. Trips to wineries, wine clubs, tasting rooms. All it requires is money.
I don’t even like red wine, but the hobby aspect of it all is very simple.
