What are your niche hobbies you’d like to share with other people?

I've been getting into primitive technology lately. It all started when I looked at my back yard and thought hey, if we call it red clay, then I should be able to make it into pottery. I take dirt from my yard, levigate it, add grog and wedge, hand-build pots, and fire them in my fire pit. Been making sharpening stones from river rocks. Crafting replicas of Roman machines. That sort of thing.

That is an epic niche. Primitive skills are awesome. Have you ever read The Toaster Project? It’s a story about the attempt to build a ‘simple’ modern appliance starting with raw materials and only using primitive methods. Very insightful look into how complex our built environment really is.

Brickfilming! I make films with Lego using stop motion animation. Takes a lot of patience and my perfectionism is my worst enemy, but it's super rewarding, and there's a really cool community online around it. And yes, my profile picture is from my most recent Brickfilm!

I have a very dangerous and lame hobby.

I forage for food. It's a lot of fun trying new things. But it's also really dangerous if you don't know what you are doing.

If you want to do this hobby safely start small. Identify plants in your own yard/park exct. I use an app called plant net, Wikipedia, duckduckgo, Google Earth, foraging sites, to find out where to go. Knowledge of when they grow and what condions they like helps.

Being 100% sure on what you are going to eat is a life and death choice. When in doubt, throw it out.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions.

I guess blacksmithing would be considered niche? Not doing it very regular. But once every view months.

I'm a semi-secretive LARPer. I pack my stuff at night, don't talk to my coworkers about it, and just go about my life as if I don't.

I've found people are pretty judgy about it, so I just don't mention that I enjoy getting into a neat costume, playing some little mini-games, having a drink or six, camping, and (most importantly) seeing my friends once a month in a structured activity.

It's fun stuff if you find the right group. That last part is hard.

Honestly, I don't know why people rip on other people's hobbies just because it's something they wouldn't do. As if their opinion has any bearing on other people's happiness. I'm glad you've found something that makes you happy and gets you out of the house.
- Seriously, you'd think people could just be happy for someone's happiness, instead of being miserable. I'm over those feelings. You don't have to like the same stuff to get along.
  Primary motto: Do your best not to hurt anyone, but otherwise do what you want. Enjoy life while you have it.
  Secondary motto: Enjoy seeing other people's happiness. Sometimes giving up something (small) you want for someone else to have something they really want (or even need) feels even better.
  Have fun, and do good. Thanks for your kind words 😊
Is that a Role Play game in real life, or what?
- Big ol' post below:
  Every LARP has a different system, which in our game is light-touch(1) and kinda light-hearted. We use latex weapons like those from Forgotten Dreams and Mytholon (two manufacturers I know of off hand), and there's a hit point system, and vocally called damage and skills with different effects.
  Example: Hitting an opponent and calling "Strength 5" indicates to the opponent that they need to take 5 steps away from the attacker in the direction the attacker chooses. They also take basic weapon damage of 1 HP in this transaction.
  While every LARP has its own system, there is a lot of overlap because of the limitations presented by a physical (ie. in-person) system. You can do a way larger swath of things in a tabletop.
  Look for LARPs in your area online, and I'm sure you'll find a few.
  (1)Different games handle it differently, but we have players stemming from single digits to upper double digits, and we try to be accommodating to the needs of a diverse age group with varying degrees of disability.

Making custom home automations with Home Assistant. Sure, a lot of it is unnecessary but it sure is a lot of fun.

I'm really into calligraphy and snowboarding. Luckily there's a snowboarding presence here on lemmy, but I have not the time to start a calligraphy one.

I really love this thread. It's great to see people sharing things they enjoy!

I've always wanted to do this mut know nothing about electriconis. Do you have any good resources to get into it?

The most niche thing I probably do (badly) is making chocolate. Not like, just tempering chocolate, but putting nibs and milk powder and sugar and cocoa butter in my countertop melanger and letting it work for like 24 hours until it's nice and smooth. I haven't really perfected it at all and my chocolate recipe is currently mediocre, and i need to experiment with better nibs and roasting them myself, but it's an interesting process that I enjoy.

Otherwise uh, IDK I do everything. I love cooking/baking, and most types of art, I'm huge into fabric arts like nuno felting and needle felting, embroidery is one of my absolute favorite things, I'm pretty decent at sewing, I also like to draw and I am really itching to get into sculpey jewelry crafting and maybe miniatures, I've dabbled in wire jewelry (meh at it), I built (with help) a coffee table where the top comes up so you can turn the base on its side to become a dining table, I'm sure there a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting... oh I guess I'm really good at laundry? I can get stains out of almost anything at this point.

What kind of cooking do you do?
- I wrote out a huge response to this and connect crashed that day and lost it, I meant to reply again but forgot until now. TLDR: everything I can in a home kitchen
  I love most kinds of foods, my favorite food has been steamed artichokes dipped in hollandaise sauce pretty much my entire life. My more recent favorite food is jjajangmyeon, I mostly use Maangchi's recipe but I tried another early on that added mirin and cabbage so I add those now too because they're just so good in it.
  My favorite recipes though are cheap, easy, quick, and delicious. Instant pot stuff has been great as I had a baby in January and it lets me make pretty decent stuff with very little work. The air fryer is also fantastic and we use it regularly for all kinds of things.
  I finally got my 12" cast iron to a great state of seasoning so I've been making omelets and now more recently toast omelet things (basically dip bread in the eggs and flip over, then flip the whole thing once eggs are set, put filings in and close up and cook the bread to a nice golden brown on each side). I also love making beef jerky and oh boy is it way better than store-bought. Grilling is also fun, i smoke our turkey every year in my weber (got a rotisserie thing for it last year!), and I like to bake - pineapple upside-down cake is my favorite, but I'm also partial to sour cream pound cake (served as strawberry shortcake), and St. Louis gooey butter cake.
  I'm always looking for new things to try, and my meal planner has more recipes than I've ever made saved in it haha (I should really clean it up).

I build guitar pedals! I don't design them, but I order the PCBs and solder the components myself. It's significantly cheaper than buying them premade, and how many people can say they made their own pedalboard?

I'm also an amateur Fossil Hunter. The area I live in is filled with fossils from the Ordovincian.

Right, you've already convinced me. How and where do I start? Can you recommend some links/resources please?
- PedalPCB is where I order my boards from. They have clones of pretty much any pedal you'd want.
  I usuallyorder my components from DigiKey, but depending where you livethere may be others you can use.

I build various random number generators, and then use them in elaborate practical jokes.

Solid-state particle detectors, zener avalanche noise, etc. Many failed designs (or failed... So far).

Sometimes I put them in sinister looking cases. Sometimes behind an API. Sometimes I design a coffee maker that brews coffee in a quantum superposition of caffeination states.

I'm working on one that is a Lemmy bot. It won't be done particularly soon though.

Analogue photography but the films are expensive af.

Last year I was on a road trip and we stopped by a convenience store in the middle of nowhere. Bought so many Fujifilm 200 rolls since they were like $2 each. No clue why they were so cheap, they were even 36-negative rolls.

My niche hobby is self-hosting and running my own home computer lab. It's tons of fun. The only thing I miss about reddit is the community of self-hosters and home labbers.

I read a post that mentioned the community migrated to Lemmy.
https://lemmy.wiuf.net/post/529
It'll pop back up here. Data Hoarder needs a new spot

Can’t believe I got all the way to the end and no one has posted about flight simming.

It’s an amazing hobby, with tonnes of gear, software, community and a wealth of knowledge. I’m nowhere in as deep as some, but find an immense pleasure in nerding out about it.

I was never worried about flying for real (as a passenger) but during turbulence I’d sometimes get a bit clammy-handed. Flight simming has completely cured it. There are SO many layers of safety and the more you understand - and in fact the more accident reports you read and see what the follow-up improvements were - the less I get bothered about even heavy turbulence or unsteady landings. Pilots know their stuff.

As someone with fear of flying, I really need to look into this.
- The Mentour Pilot channel makes documentaries about aviation accidents using the official reports, and it has helped many nervous flyers, because he explains it fully and also goes over the recommendations of the reports. I recommend checking it out.

you'd be shocked at how easy it is to grow most edible mushrooms. all you need to grow oysters is a syringe full of spores and some uncle bens pre-cooked vacuum sealed rice. If you want to do lion's mane or other more complex growing cycles like that, just add a rubbermade tub half full of vermiculite and coconut coir. You can be in this hobby for like $100 up front and then like $30/batch. And yes you can grow those mushrooms, where legal of course. I haven't tried it but it seems to be no more difficult than the ones I've successfully grown, and the rice trick actually comes from that community (google "uncle ben tek" for more info)

Actually seen someone grow (regular, culinary) mushrooms off of these yellow blocks. They were definitely oyster types, but don't ask me which, or which color. The memory's gone.
What wasn't gone from my memory tho, was the size and time it took to grow. Like, I saw them prepare those blocks one night. Next day.... Nothing. The day after, still nothing visible.
Then I actually slept there, and the morning after.... Like, man... I was actually scared when I first saw it. The sprouts or whatever... They were bigger than my hands. And I have pretty big, pianist hands. A single night and the whole thing just... Just... jutting out off the side, as if a hole had been there all along. And then they grew more and more over the next three days. The full thing ended two times the size the yellow block, and at least larger than its original volume.
- wild, isn't it? it happens that way because what we call the "mushroom" is only a small part of the organism. All those days when nothing seemed to be happening, what was really happening is an underground network of living threads called mycelia were establishing themselves in the soil and beginning to extract nutrients much like plant roots. What you saw are the fruiting bodies, which generate spores and release them to create new mycelia. With a well-established mycelium network the fruiting bodies can go from pinning (just barely visible above the surface) to massive in a day or two.
The magical ones are nice too (⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

Mag fishing. Tonnes of fun for little entry cost.

I haven't done much with it in a while, but I'm also not giving up on it, so I suppose it's still valid lol.

I collect LaserDiscs

I got started with the format around 2010, and it was super neat to delve into this old, but strangely good, format. I found that most players and films were super cheap, and as a poor family with really no ability to move to HD yet, the SD format picture was clearly worse than DVD, but not so much so that it was unwatchable or anything.

I spent a lot of time collecting new films, looking at players, etc. etc., but I took a break while in college. Turns out that in that time everything went wild, and now the format is expensive to collect for. So much so that I've basically stopped at the moment. It's still a super neat format though, and I'm not about to offload all my kit just yet.

For anyone looking for info about the format, I'd recommend Techmoan on YouTube. Matt does a lot of interesting tech videos, and the handful he's done on LaserDisc are quite good.

I've been on a hiatus due to some medical stuff making it hard for me to concentrate, but I'm a lock nerd. I collect cool locks ("cool" being very subjective here 😅) and pick / manipulate them.

edit: here's a tiny part of my collection. I'd upload more but I'm having a hard time with the mobile site and image uploads

I fly paramotors. Imagine a fan you strap on your back, a paraglider that goes overhead, and you run run run until you're airborne! Never fails to put a smile on my face when times are tough. And maintaining the engine and planning that next flight keeps me occupied when the weather doesn't cooperate.

I like finding obscure media and curating playlists out of them. Weird old commercials, music videos, tv spots, instructional/training videos, short films and animation, old tv shows.

I build custom mechanical keyboards. Got into it because of the Pandemic and now I have built 6 of them. /r/mk and /r/emk used to be some of my most visited subs on the other site. I'm now known as the goto for keyboard questions in my circles of friends.

I started getting into fidgeting more lately and took a liking to magnetic sliders and now have a few that I pretty much always have with me.

And that extended into me learning about begleri beads somehow so now I am attempting to learn that. I can do slips and 2 finger wraps and occasiaonal one finger or thumb wraps but not much else yet. I accidentally learned a stall because I messed up. I need to really learn transfers since that is one of the main things you do a lot of.

I think I am also amongst the hyperfixator group in this thread. I was previously into speedsolving Rubik's cubes and roasting coffee so I feel a lot of these answers lol.

Always though begleri beads looked fun but I never picked them up because I didn't think I'd be able to do it at my desk. It'd look to much like I wasn't working.
- I have the luxury of working from home so fidgeting isn't an issue. I tend to not play with them when working as much since I end up spending most of my time picking them up off the floor. Also when you are on a phone call and hit your knuckles and blurt out an "ouch" it makes it a bit awkward lol.
Found any good lemmy communities similar to the old /r's? Used to love g what people came up with, especially with the trackball integrations and all that jazz
- Obosob is one of the main mods from the ergo mech sub and they are running https://lemmy.ml/c/ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world. (I don't know crosslike communities on here yet) but that sub is picking up. There is also https://lemmy.ml/c/mechanicalkeyboards. Both are gonna be slower than what reddit was like of course but I kind of like that. I haven't seen much trackball stuff yet but right now there is a Fingerpunch board on the first page with one. I saw a Cirque build the other day too. and a hand full of sub-40% boards including one of mine!
How do you build a custom keyboard? Do they sell every single part in different shapes? (I mean the "chassis", not the key caps). How custom can they be?
- Beware brave traveler, you are asking questions that may result in a journey you did not wish to embark.

stealth camping. basically camping where your not supposed to / normally wouldn't want to, and have your presence remain unknown. it's great fun and breathed new life into "the outdoors" for me

Like in a van or do you mean camping out in cities or something?
- either or! I don't do vehicle stealths myself but it's an equally acceptable part of the hobby. I personally like to camp under bridges, on abandoned structures and in the bushes on motorway interchanges. good fun

This could be niche, but I'm a fountain pen nerd. I love stationary, different types of papers inks and nibs and how they all influence the writing experience.

I like traditional slavic folk music and leatherworking (which is misleading what I do is more like crafting rather basic things out of leather, I don't tan or work the leather myself)

Roasting and brewing the best coffee I possibly can.

Installing open source operating systems or firmware on every device I can.

I'm pretty into conlanging, which is basically making up languages. There are tons of different approaches and ways people can go about it, but like probably most (or at least a plurality of) other conlangers, I generally go for something as naturalistic as possible. I'm also into linguistics so it serves as kind of an interesting way to explore different features and grasp them better, as well as just an excuse to do more research to find out more about something.

I play rhythm games. Like a lot. Maybe to many?

Guitar hero back in the scorehero.com days was peak gaming.

Looking for and archiving recordings of old and modern announcements in commercial and industrial settings. Like mind the gap on trains or there has been a broadcast tower failure in your area or Pan Am boarding call welcome and instructions. these can be on reel to reel or 8 track tape.

I love mapping on openstreetmap.org

Raising ducks. I love it. They're disgusting creatures, but great.

How are they disgusting? When I see them they look quite cute.
- I had a friend as a kid who had ducks as and I can answer this. They poop. Everywhere. A lot. Also they're loud as hell sometimes.
- Drive by the duck farms in North Jersey and get back to me.

Some more niche than others but basically...making stuff. Cross stitch, yarn crafts, sewing, needle felting, dicemaking, 3d printing, very occasional cosplay, I'm about to try my first macrame kit and a friend is planning for us to learn punch needle together.

There's something just so satisfying about making real stuff you can use, or wear, or wash yourself with or whatever (I also briefly got into soapmaking).

If you want to chat about basically any craft (or just lurk and look at pretty projects, that's ok too), I've been keeping a megalist of relevant communities and magazines here https://lemm.ee/post/224890. And if anyone reading this runs a related one that should be on the list please DM me to be added!

Not sure if it's niche anymore but mechanical keyboard is a fun rabbit hole to dive into. There's so much variety and diversity in term of customization. You can really build a keyboard that fit your preference in term of looks, feels and sounds. The hobby has been booming after covid so now you can get some really nice starter stuff at affordable price.

Some of mine maybe aren't that niche anymore, but:

Retro computing: no one needs more than 640k. Maybe no one needs more than 64k. Those old systems were the last time a single programmer could have control over the entire machine at a low level.
Ham radio: Oftentimes called a dying hobby, but a great foray into electronics in general, and also a pretty nice community (save for a few curmudgeons).
Analog audio: often thought of as a boutique thing, but really isn't. Lots of old equipment ready to be restored that can give you really unique auditory experiences.
Plastic modeling: especially if you start from a kit but add things to it, or if you build from scratch, or hell, even if you just build a kit as intended, there is a huge amount of personal expression and creativity.

I love loomknitting, but I dont know if its niche enough 😅

Coffee brewing! It's not super niche (a lot of people enjoy coffee), but I'd love to get to the point where I could host free coffee for friends and be able to make just about anything one could ask for and make it well. It'd be nice to share it back just out of the love of doing it.

What’s your brewing equipment?
- Right now I’ve mastered the pour over and the cold brew, but I’ve been recently figuring out how to dive into the espresso machines. That’s been the main set back to opening up the free friends coffee shop out of my apartment lol, don’t know the right one to get and all of that.

Ham radio! It's relaxing. My favorite activity is to take my portable gear to parks and operate Parks on the Air.

Just getting into Ham radio and SDR myself as of late, so cool and so fun to tweak around with. Got any recommendations for guides or articles to read and learn from? I'm brand new just got a SDR-RTL dongle 📡
- You should check out Ham Radio Crash Cpurse on YouTube. Lots of great info there.
What do you think about the baofeng radios with ham? Pretty good to start out with?
- They are fine for starting out with, but you'll probably want to upgrade soon. There are better radios for around $75 if you can afford it.

Remote control tanks. Nothing brings me more joy than seeing the suspension on the tracks of an RC tank actually react to bumps

This sounds awesome, how did you get into it?
- I think I originally stumbled across them on eBay when I was looking for scale models. Then I finally found one I liked and ordered it.
  Most people start with a Heng Long pro edition tank because they're relatively cheap and have metal tracks

Is 3D printing still niche? If so, 3D printing, otherwise nothing.

It's not super niche, but I've never met anyone outside of the hobby that even knows it exists.

Anyway, I enjoy car audio competitions a lot. One version is SPL (sound pressure level) where the goal is to build a system that can get as loud as possible. Then there's SQ (sound quality) that's more about making the best sounding system you can, which is also fairly artsy (make it look pretty).

There's a lot of people who are assholes about it, they're the kid down the street blaring his music at 10 o clock at night. Every who does it for a hobby are very respectful of other people and recognize that the vast majority of people don't wanna hear your music.

I enjoy it for a few reasons. Firstly, I just love music. Music is a while body experience. It's not just your ears, but your skin reacts to the vibrations as well, and you just aren't gonna get that experience with cheap speakers. The car is a great place to feel music because it's enclosed and you can generally go somewhere to not bother people.

The other part, is that its very hands on and problem solving. You're doing woodworking, electrical design, maybe fiberglass. Lots of different engineering.

I collect plushies/stuffed animals (to the point where I'm running out of room for more) and I've played Tabletop RPG games like Pathfinder, Shadowrun and GURPS for a good few years.

If I may ask, how does GURPS compare to pathfinder and other RPGs? I played a bit of pf1e, Im currently in some pf2e campaigns that have been going on a few years now, and I never played GURPS but I did read some GURPS reviews and GURPS material. It seems interesting but Im not sure how to go about pitching it to my goons
- GURPS I find is hard to pitch to people because it's very, very reading-heavy and has characters that take a while to build if you're still learning the ins-n'-outs of the game. Building a character in GURPS can take multiple days for me personally, but I am a slow character generator overall regardless of the system.
  GURPS also lacks character classes or jobs like PF unless you kinda "build" them yourself, by picking and choosing what you want from generic rules the game provides and describes to you. It might be offputting if your group has the kind of players who would just like to stick to their class' core abilities/playstyle or follow a more linear pre-built progression path.
  I'd say the thing I like most about GURPS as a system is probably also it's biggest downside, which is the sheer amount of content you could choose from to apply to your game or your character. It's easy to get option paralysis with it all.
  There's a book for practically every setting, species, trope, ect you could think of. There's not a single character idea I've had that I couldn't build mechanically, but that also comes at the caveat of reading game material for multiple hours at a time to find every fitting trait or rule I could for these concepts to work. That process often involved hopping from rulebook to rulebook.
  I'm sure if you searched around on some TTRPG forums you could find people discussing their pros and cons of the system too, probably much better articulated than in my reply here lol. I hope my answer still helps a bit.

Yarn dyeing started as a hobby and turned into my job quite quickly :)

It's fun and satisfying to see the colours evolve on yarn and how the colours act differently depending on the fibre blend you're dyeing.

I like to make mistakes (yes, on cassette). It's a time to be with my music, think about it, maybe have a beer. I make the cover artwork and then later I can listen to something I made.

Mixtapes?

I was about to share some of mine but then comparing to everyone in the comments I realize mine are basic as hell

Nothing wrong with mundane hobbies. Seems like a lot of people don't even have mundane ones. Or if they do, they don't talk about it much. Seems lonely doesn't it? It feels that way for me. This thing you spend so much of your free time and enthusiasm on, but not many ways to share this enthusiasm with others.

I freeline skate and have recently gotten into surfskating as well. They're good fun and nice leg workouts. Don't ask me to do any tricks though, I say "I prefer to cruise around", but really I'm just too pleb for that stuff.

Haha freeline skates are quite amusing. Never have witnessed them in real life yet though.
Surfskating looks like tons of fun, I'd love to give it a shot. Would you have any recommendations on gear & research for anyone looking to get into it?
- I've only been surfskating for about a month and had been skateboarding for about another month before that, so maybe take my advice with a dash of soy sauce.
  Personally, I currently only have one surfskate. My set up consists of the Waterborne Surf Adapter with their Fin system, with the Fin set to "Super Carver" mode. This was the most expensive part of my set up and cost me ~£90. I'm using a blank, 8.5" popsicle-stick deck I got from Venom for ~£27 and the rest of my set up I got from aliexpress, i.e., the longboard trucks, wheels and hardware as a ~£35 package, and an off-brand Rail adapter (the counterpart to the Surf adapter) for ~£12. The grip tape I already had, as I had been freeline skating prior and go through grip quite quickly because of it (I bought a 60' roll of Jessup Ultragrip for ~£85).
  Regarding research, I mostly watched YT videos to see them in action:
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=c0cc-jtnl5E
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Rw8l_rGRoQ
  There's also an app you can to help you choose a surfskate, but I personally haven't tried it.
  Obviously I can't attest to other setups, but regarding mine, I'd say the biggest issues I have with it are:
  It's really heavy to lug around. It weighs ~5kg, mostly from the adapters and trucks, so if you're also hoping to learn tricks with it, it's likely going to be more difficult.
  It's a bit tall. I've gotten used to it by now, but don't expect it to feel the same as riding a skateboard. On the other hand, the extra height does aid with making tighter carves.
  Aside from the Waterborne, the other surfskate that caught my eye was the Curfboard. I like that its design seems to use something akin to an Ackermann steering system, which apparently is more stable than "turntable" systems used by most other surfskates. Here's an interesting blog post on it I read which talks about the geometry/physics behind it.
  Ultimately, I went for the Waterborne, as I liked that I could use it with whatever trucks I want and because its Fin system provides some adjustability to the truck angle, which allows me to experiment and decide which setting I liked best.

growing chillies in beer cans

Left is a ghost pepper, right is a 7 Pot Congo

So the chillies part is obvious enough, but why in beer cans?

I revisited an old hobby, emulating niche systems. I got an Acorn emulator with Risc OS 5 and some development tools, and I wrote a snake game in BBC BASIC and a calculator in pure ARM assembly, both of which are new to me. It was a blast.

This is really cool. I'm trying to teach myself 6809 assembly.
- What kind of system are you doing it on?

I’m unsure if this counts as a “hobby”, but I absolutely love the Mass Effect series so much that I enjoy just watching it as much as replaying. I love it so much that I’ve been recording my gameplay and editing it into a sort of Mass Effect “show”.

I could just watch the handful of streamers out there who play it, but few people play as FemShep and I’ve never seen anyone play a Shepard looking anything like mine let alone take the “right” choices and actions, so this Mass Effect “show” gives me a way to watch my Shepard’s story as often as I’d like.

The whole project has evolved into learning how to polish things in Premiere Pro and Photoshop, so I’m self-teaching as I go.

Out of curiosity, how do you select what scenes to keep and what to cut? Are you freecamming things like combat?
Now you raise this, I kinda wanna try it with the Dragon Age trilogy
- For Mass Effect, I’ve played the game enough times that I have my “ideal” story in mind each time I play. I’ve had to re-record playthroughs multiple times so that I can maximize the dialogue options and include everything that I’d like. For example, when it comes to the ME1 Virmire survivor, I decided that I liked a mix of the Paragon and Renegade responses when choosing to leave them, so I recorded with the Paragon response and then replayed that mission so I could do the Renegade response. Then, I edited the two so that it looks like a single cohesive scene.
  When it comes to the combat, I’ve had to re-re-re-record some missions to ensure that I 1) didn’t die and 2) didn’t seem to be getting my butt kicked too much that it became distracting. For example, in ME2, I’ve had to record Jack’s mission a nauseating six times because I either got killed or there were just too many instances where I nearly died, even on Casual. I’ve also had to re-record missions because my first attempt had the “camera work” a little too janky and too hard to follow when just watching. I’ve since learned to play with a cinematic eye so that the combat is a lot smoother.
  In the combat, I’ve also tried to minimize the “game” aspects wherever possible which meant editing around bringing up the different menus like changing weapons or directing powers/attacks. I’ve also spent a lot of time adding in some crossfades to speed up movement where applicable. For example, in ME1, running across the Citadel once can give a nice view for the first time, but there’s no reason to just watch my Shepard running back and forth across missions, so I’ll fade leaving Chora’s Den and running back to C-Sec or other places.
  Overall, it’s been a pretty fun project. I’ve had to teach myself how to play with an eye for cinematography and how I’ll eventually edit things. It’s also been interesting to notice super niche things about how the games are put together because I’m observing scenes down to single frames when I’m editing.
  I’ve been doing my recording off the original Mass Effect games since I’ll likely play Legendary Edition far more often than I’ll revisit the originals, so I’ll have my “show” for some added nostalgia as well. Right now, I’m in the middle of editing a full “re-record” of ME2’s combat to reduce some of the jankiness while also going through a first run of ME3. I’ll need multiple runs off what I loaded from ME2 to get all the right armor and weapons and play/record with reduced pop-ups for leveling up, etc.
  If I can make a recommendation, I’d definitely recommend doing everything on PC if possible. I’ve done mine off Xbox which kept the files limited to 1 hour at a time, which has helped keep things easier to find, but it’s been heart breaking to get through a mission and then realize the recording stopped 10 minutes before I’d finished.

Collecting signatures in 20 states protecting us from intoxicant psych chemical cruelty https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_initiative

-Making sprite art and turning it into perler/ the plastic bead things.

-Chiptune and synthesizers

-Tabletop RPGs

-Card games

Hey, another chiptuner! What's your setup? I use 2 DMGs with LSDj, looking to muck around with a C64 too.
- Right now, i'm messing around with furnacetracker. It's got almost everything in one package! The chip I usually focus on is the YM2608 chip because it's close to a genesis chip. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it though, the third FM channel when split up is still a mystery to me lol

I ride electric scooters for fun and plan to learn lockpicking. I'm a sucker for cryptographic puzzles but not really good at it.

Same, I love the idea of cryptography and breaking it but I'm not that good and don't really have the time, so I dabble a bit and mostly enjoy from afar. I've made a few pen and paper ciphers but don't know how to have anyone test them.
- There's got to be Internet people that will!
I made a replacement cipher for my friend. I sent him a very short story and he was able to decipher it! Made me happy!
Lockpicking is a blast, you've inspired me to bring my kit back out