Throw the gates wide open

Related to what you said, but not necessarily this post: I was so damn frustrated with my neighborhood community the other day. We had a vote on whether or not to repurpose a huge grass field that takes up a ton of water and sees very little use. We're wasting a ton of money (and water) watering this pristine empty field.

The main argument for keeping the field was "we waste water in other areas of the community as well. The common-area sprinklers were on when it rained the other day. We need to address all waste before making a decision about this empty field."

There are a lot of people that don't realize you can make incremental progress towards a goal.

right. I feel like the world is desperate to pretend we aren't standing on the shoulders of giants. who wants to reinvent everything, every time. use the paths already there and find shortcuts along the way, then mark them and leave them for the next traveller.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly

The cost of perfection is infinite.

Don't force yourself to be perfect, allow yourself to be the best you can be and you'll flourish

Damn that's a good quote I made

Strap your phone to a telescope?

So it's a tele-phone?

Wait a min....

I did macro photography for a while by flipping my tele lens and holding it up to the mount the wrong way.

The best part of learning astrophotography is not so much in taking awesome pictures ... it's the excuse to spend hours and hours sitting outside in the dark and staring up the night sky every night. To me the pictures are a bonus.

Hey, nobody would have questioned the worse quality cameras that astrophotographers were doing this with 20 years ago. Even though it's your phone now, it counts!

Phones are arguably some of the most powerful consumer cameras ever built. That Nikon or Canon might have more funny buttons and settings, but your phone camera is pretty powerful on its own.

Career software developer - Years and years ago I stopped reading programming manuals and trying to remember the syntax of languages. I just google the same basic things over and over, and often paste & edit example code.

I lost interest in photography for several years because of this. And because I'm a slow learner, I did the same thing with woodworking An extra few bucks doing a random thing or two is nice, but the side hustle gig mentality is toxic

There’s a word for that: jobby

As you said, it’s not healthy to turn every hobby into a jobby. The best thing about hobbies is the lack of urgency and technical criteria. The whole point is to do it for fun.

I feel so seen!

I do not want my customer's money deciding how I do my favorite things! That's for ME.

I've got extremely good dexterity and my favorite hobby is flow arts which is a visual spectacle. This results in lots of attention and I'm always hearing that I gotta make money with it.

That's why it's funny that the bicycling community talks of "dentists" with all their gear. The people best equipped to really pursue that hobby wholeheartedly are the people who make a shitload of money doing something completely different.

That's how I used to play guitar, too. I got a cheapo sound pedal with a bunch of effects and premade back beats. Try to play some songs that I know. Sound bad. Keep doing it until I get bored or it sounds kinda cool once. That's enough for the week.

Am I ever gonna be anywhere close to decent? Nope. Do I care? Nope.

People struggle to put themselves out there as amateurs because of this feeling, but it's totally fine. Most hobbies wouldn't exist without a range of enthusiasts and skills.

Like, I've been pretty into chess for the past couple of years, but I'm still barely "intermediate" at best. Browsing forums and stuff, it seems like everyone is a top 1% player, but that's mathematically impossible.

Amateur’s etymology is “amator” meaning lover. It’s ok to be an amateur. It shows you’re enjoying yourself and interested. You don’t need to be the best, just do what is fun to you. Life’s too short to be a jack of all trades professional.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about hobby based trade shows, it’s that the highly experienced, obsessed, informed people in obscure hobbies tend to want to spread their knowledge.

Don’t obsess over not knowing… put yourself out there and talk to people and get them to tell you what they find exciting. They will unload knowledge on you and be excited to do so.

It took me about 7 years to be good at my trade. I was really bad. It did not come easily. It was a nightmare, and seeing guys with less experience than me pick it up way faster than me was demolishing for my self esteem. But I kept at it, decided I was in too deep to quit and I liked it, picked up way more hours and held my head above water. Now I’m the best carpenter I know and own my own contracting company.

It sucks being a slow learner, but if you want it bad enough you can have it man.

I learned carpentry, plumbing, electrical, mechanics, welding, metal working, landscaping, operating machinery, small engine mechanics, boat building / repairing, hunting, trapping, camping, survival

What a skill set! I'm impressed.

Sometimes we might not do a great job because we didn’t know what we were doing and other times we were geniuses because we had messed up so many times before that we finally figured out how to do it right.

As I grow older, I find this is how you become an 'expert'. You start not knowing how to do it, then you figure out all the wrong ways to do it by doing it wrong. Eventually, when you have messed it up in more ways than anyone else you know which paths not to take and you are then the expert.

This is exactly how I got good at maintaining/using computers! I had this old Dell Optiplex gxb with just a Pentium 2 or 3 and 4gb of memory. We lived out in the country and this computer was my only real connection to the rest of the world, so I had to make damn sure not to break it! In fact, I had to fix it several times! I can't tell you how nervous I got putting the mobo in the oven, but it worked! HDD in the freezer? Welp, it worked! I wondered if I might have to put the mouse in a toaster at that point.

Anywho, I think it's the mentality that gets us more than the reality of the conditions. When you gotta be careful, you're gonna be.

I can't even imagine how you manged to learn all that while being poor

Yeah well you’re also part of what we fight the patriarchy for. It’s sad that people don’t thing someone like you might enjoy sewing

Also a dude, sewing is fucking great! Thinking back, I'm pretty sure I learned to sew long before I learned any other forms of making, childhood me made lots of felt toys and crafts for friends and family because materials were cheap, accessable, and pretty easy to work with. I love being able to take a pile of fabric and make it into something functional, or at the very least mend my clothes to get more life out of them.

As someone who never did photography professionally but as a hobby, I learned the manual settings when automatic failed to take a good photo.

the automatic setting might give you 1/30 of a second when photographing fast moving animals or 1/500 with aperture 2.8 when photographing landscapes, neither of which will give you good photos :/

Aperture, shutter speed and ISO aren't very hard to understand and applying them correctly will give you a lot better photos.

It said do a hobby for the fun of it, not create pain and suffering

If the reason was so you would understand you never have to do it again then the answer is no. Just install slackware. Then you will really learn how things work. Compile that kernel leaving out all the bits you don't need.

It's saying that it's just a fucking hobby. It's purpose is to be enjoyed not mastered.

Yeah, too many people preemptively gatekeep themselves: you're not a real (hobbyist) unless you master (narrow part of the hobby), so you're not allowed to take up that hobby until you're ready to commit to that boring/tedious/difficult part.

I play chess and I don't know the names of openings (and still have a lot of trouble with following notation). Who gives a shit, I'm not going to win tournaments. But I still have fun with it, occasionally play strangers in the park, and have been having fun teaching my kids how to play.

I half-ass my fitness and workout routine. Sometimes I go months in between gym sessions, and sometimes I go 6x a week for months, break some PRs, and then go on living my life. Sometimes I run 500 miles in a year, sometimes I run 10. Whatever. Life gets busy, and my own preferences shift between whether I want to do cardio, weights, sports, yoga, metcon/CrossFit style classes, or just sit on my ass and get weak and fat for a year. I'm in my 40's, so I've been all over the place on all of these things.

I can watch a TV show without needing to start from the pilot and watching every episode that came out. I can watch a movie without trying to understand every reference to everything else in the same cinematic universe. I enjoy watching basketball and football even when I can't name all the players, much less their whole career histories.

And after all that, a funny thing starts to happen. You find that you actually are pretty good at certain things compared to the public, even though you didn't wholeheartedly devote all your effort to that thing.

I like being a dilettante. It's awesome and I'd recommend this lifestyle to anyone. The best way to enjoy a hobby is to be unburdened by expectations.

I feel this so much. I got into stamp collecting, and I totally enjoy stamps and mail and all, but (old) people are so pretentious about it. The worst are the total hypocrites about it, too.

"I got into stamps when I was young, but I stopped when I went to university/started working/had a family because I didn't have time for it, and came back to it after I retired.

"Philately is supposed to be academic and scholarly. You're not a real philatelist if you're not doing original research.

"Young people just don't have the patience for stamps!

"The hobby is dying, why don't young people want to collect stamps anymore??"

Actually, a lot of people do and share lots of stuff online (where the old people are not seeing it and thus is not happening). We're just not writing 16-page papers about them (which is the standard a expected thing to do in "philately").

At least your parents are supportive.

Every time id share some creation of mine in my late teens and early 20s with my mom, I’d just hear a random smattering of reports on shit her “friends” (vague acquaintances) had done with no acknowledgement of what I had created.

At least the skills I picked up over the years landed me a job where the things I make are objectively crap and everyone who I don’t really care about sings my praises.

That's also a nice compliment though, I.e. it's so good they think people would pay for it!

Growing up in the 90s, there were so many hobbies that were unobtainable.

Like, I was a kid and didn't have anybody to teach me about trees. So they recommend you go to a library and get some books on trees. But the books are either at a college level, or something extremely basic. And your support was only as helpful as the librarian. So they knew zilch about the topic, you're fucked.

Today, you wanna know about trees? Visit a wiki. Watch YouTube videos. Ask AI. Go to the library with actual resources to get the right books or audio books.

Huge opportunity and a wealth of information.

I'm just like that. We should open !serialhobbiest to talk about and share the result of our last hobby.

I use manual when I'm shooting RAW and want to get better control for shutter speed. I like to run under exposed settings between one or two steps since I can just up the exposure just fine in post but I can get much more consistent focus in less than ideal lighting.

I can't speak for newer cameras, though. As the last camera that I used is released on 2012. The auto settings on that camera (Pentax K5-II) is atrocious.

Hear hear!

When you bust your ass all year for that great review and much needed raise...only to go in for your evaluation and be told, "Great job! Unfortunately due to budget cuts and corporate policy, we can only give you a 1.5% raise, but you're welcome!"

Don't tell them, but remember that.

Remember that regardless of the work you give them, they're only paying you 1.5% more. And that's not even factoring in information inflation.

At the most generous, you should only give them 1.5% more productivity than it takes to not get fired. If you look at it based on value...the value of your time and experience and productivity against the purchasing power of your take home pay... you're getting a pay cut vs inflation as their way of thanking you.

As such, cut your productivity, attention to detail, reliability, and shits given by the same amount as the purchasing power you're earning.

They call it quiet quitting, but in reality it's the market economy working both ways. If they're buying less from you, give them less.

Stopping half assing at hobbies is just a form of half assing. Those us that are serious about half passing go way beyond hobbies.

please define duct tape homelab

pedantic side rant: Adhesive tape with a plastic covered cloth backing was never and will never be duct tape. It was originally called duck tape because the plastic coating made water run off it like it runs off a ducks back. If you use this product as duct tape your going to have a bad time, it will develop cracking in the plastic portion of the tape and drying of the adhesive, both of these lead to ducts leaking and higher utility bills. Proper duct tape is a metal foil with an adhesive developed for the application. This leads to joints that stay tight long term and lower utility bills. IT'S NOT DUCT TAPE IT'S DUCK TAPE even if the packaging says it is duct tape. It should always be called duck tape (not always Duck™ tape) no matter what brand. It was named duck tape because water runs off it like it runs off of a ducks back, and that predates the Duck™ brand. As for the worry about confusing duck tape with Duck™ tape, nobody is confused when you ask for a kleenex or a bandaid no matter what brand it is. I spent to much time on this, I'm done ranting.

tldr: read the bold text and be less lazy

@blazeknave I promise I'm not trying to be a smartass in response to your comment.

Another way of looking at it is do things even if you don't have talent in the area. Im one of those folks that are not a very good doer but while this means I generally just can't make that fantastic meal that impressives everyone or draw something that approaches reality or really do anything which does not utilize known measurements and timings ; I can do them well enough that it will do. So I can make a decent tasting meal or draw something interesting or write a poem with meaningfulness to me.

Yeah, I agree. It’s not like I disagree with any of the specific points made in the post, but when you put it together it seems very, idk, complacent? Sure, not everything needs to be a challenge, but I also think it’s important to challenge yourself in some things.

Like you alluded to, it means that you’ll fail from time to time, but to me that’s better than never succeeding. Failure is more of an achievement than not trying at all.

I don’t disagree but we’re talking in terms of a hobby, I have things I want to improve (chess, game dev) and things I don’t care about (baking, guitar, doodling ) the latter are honestly just time fills when my brain needs something that isn’t stressful or challenging.

What if your hobby is reading tarot cards?

Fact based knowledge sounds good but could mean anything.

Knowing how stuff is done 100% right and deliberately deciding when something has to be done that way are two different things.

Learn stuff, know stuff, but don't get bogged down by it.

Best example is graphic design: I used to do everything in vector graphics in Inkscape, all parametric in 1:1 ratio to how it's going to be printed/presented. Now I go apeshit in pixel graphics in GIMP and it's so much more useful for a lot of applications, where the goal isn't as clear cut as let's say technical drawings; free flowing artsy graphic stuff so to speak.

I know how I'd do it 100% right, but chose not to as the effort increases exponentially for nobody to notice it if that line is completely straight in the corner of a deep fried A4 print of some artwork.

It crumbles as soon as you ask "facts according to whom?"

It's OK and straight forward for simple stuff like classical physics. But as soon as you introduce human subjectivity like goals, meaning, taste, art, fun, enjoyment, etc, it becomes useless. What's the fact based way of sculpting wood with chainsaws and gas torches? And what is payoff? Payoff for whom? In which way? Money, power, influence, efficiency, fame?

Get off the treadmill, not everything needs to be optimal. Most things cannot, by their own nature, ever be optimal. Just sit back and enjoy life for once.

Extra tip: don't start comments in social media with "no", or variations. It's really rude, hostile, and unnecessarily halts constructive discussion. It invites confrontation and it is a fact based way to make you sound like an ass.

Not always when the payoff is having fun. Though I personnaly love to learn the theorical basis.