There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
the fediverse.
weirdo
Yea, I wouldn’t want to be seen there either.
Yes. That could get embarrassing.
A truly sick and disturbed individual.
That’s a lot of hitmarkers
Needs more jpeg
Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called “That Time I Found a Box” and got hooked on it. It’s a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.
The full version just came out on Steam - I’d recommend taking a look. It’s a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.
Sticky Mustache, is that you?
This was funny because I went back to see if the review I just read was Sticky Mustache, and it was actually pruwyben!
Uh, I don’t think so…
Okay, there just was a review that had pretty much the same content you wrote :)
That reminds me, I need to write a review for the full version, thanks!
Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.
Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.
Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are “into it”.
Now that’s a proper special interest 🤌
What’s your favorite refrigerant
I touch r134a the most in my day to day life, cuz i fix a lot of people’s car AC… But I have a soft spot for propane (R290) or propane/butane blends. Yes it’s flammable to a degree but it’s naturally provided, cheap as hell, zero ozone depletion and very low GWP. It has usable pressure/temperature curves that are easy for compressors to handle and can produce temperatures as low as -30C.
I’ve refilled old farm trucks with propane from a BBQ can and gotten good AC out of them. It’s kind of cool.
It’s kind of cool.
I’d argue it’s objectively cool
I bet you also enjoy Technology Connections.
:)
Ohh yeah! Though I do wonder: Why limit themselves to the guy who is evangelizing (and rightly so!) when he could also hang out with crazy swamp guy HyperspacePirate who not only thinks of the crazy cycles but actually builds some as well?
Gee, what gave it away?
I popped an edible and watched his entire catalytic converter video last night. Shit’s great.
I really loved the decal he put on his lift to make it seem like the brand name of his one armed car lift was “TIPPI.”
The video or the edible?
Both in their respective departments :)
You’d get along great with my dad. All he’s talked about for the last year is heat pumps.
If you haven’t before, you should play Stationeers. It sounds like you’d love it.
Oh god I already play both Space Engineers and Factorio, don’t give me another 500 hour logistics game time sink…
But this one simulates the refrigeration cycle! It has proper phase changes and everything.
Empire fucking booked it to steam and has been playing it for the past 10 hours, for sure.
I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)
Lemmy is like internet jail. We got sent here for breaking the rules on Reddit, but now we’re institutionalised and it feels safe, even if there are some very odd people here with us - they’re mostly nice and just serving their time…
Not all of us…
nobody knows what Lemmy is as far as I’m concerned you people aren’t even real
Ha, I actually know quite a lot of people who use Lemmy (and OSM) IRL, but I met all of those people on Lemmy.
I’ve tried telling a few friends about Lemmy but they give no fucks. Sad face yo
I recently switched to CoMaps, performs so much better than OSMAnd on cheap hardware
I can only recommend Organic maps for OSM
I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.
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Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It’s just such an iconic building design. There’s a documentary out now on them, but I’ve been fascinated for almost a decade now.
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Meshtastic
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John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.
Meshtastic
If someone could find an extra 8 hours a week, I would so make this one of my hobbies.
What do you need 8 extra hours for? Affording the 8 other nodes you buy after your first one?
My experience with DIY home networking and self-hosting has been “This is going to eat up your weekend if you want it to work as intended”.
Ah, well the good thing is its pretty easy to set up. Most nodes are already flashed with recent enough firmware, so you just attach antennas, connect to your phone, do some quick setup for your region and go for a walk.
Then you realize you want a node that stays at home.
Then you want one on your car.
And reachable from work.
Then you see that hill in the distance and think “that’d be a good spot”.
Then you see the mountain on the horizon and wonder if you could hit a node up there.
Then all of a sudden you realize you’ve single handedly set up the infrastructure for your part of the state and are out more cash money than you told your partner and need a side hustle to afford to finish the second mesh you’re building out.
Oh god I feel seen.
(Meshcore rather than meshtastic but tomato tamato)
We started a meetup group in my local area. Someone put a node on the mountain now the entire city gets longfast. Its so cool.
[email protected] in case anyone else is interested!
I was going to ask if you were in my area, because we recently got some nodes on mountains, but I figure at this point if there’s a mountain, it’s got a node on it at this point.
Now that I live in a dense urban city, the number of nodes is wild.
I’ve been thinking of setting up a node at my local ski area, both for others to use, but also to make custom timing equipment that can send start and finish messages to the timing computer and keep us from having to haul wires up icy race courses all winter.
I’ve never actually set one up or used one yet though, so it’s probably a few years off.
It doesn’t take too long to set one up but hooking into the python can sometimes be a pain. Sounds like an excellent use case!
The amount of Pizza Hut buildings I’ve seen turned into Lions Den adult stores is too damn high. In second place, is the local wing place Jerk N Go.
Jerk ‘n Go sounds like the adult store. Just sayin’.
In my area every single one is a Mexican restaurant and I’m not mad about it.
Finding former Pizza Huts in North America.
Wait, I have a meme for this! (Forgive the lack of crop lol)
I’ve seen a bunch of old Pizza huts turned into Chinese food restaurants and I saw two that became small used car offices. They are always so easy to pick out. I legit loved old Pizza Huts with the sit down pacman machines being a common fixture when I was a kid.
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I really like killing invasive plants. I think that’s probably my most niche passion. Like when I have some free time I’ll just go into the woods behind my house and cut down wisteria, ivy, Chinese holly… I just find it extremely satisfying idk. I love the idea that I’m clearing out space for native plants (and in turn native animals) to grow.
As a native plant lover and invasive plant hater, I support this and please don’t stop.
at one point do the invasive species exist for so long that they become an integral part of the ecosystem and can be considered native
invasive species = non-native. But, non-native doesn’t always mean it’s an invasive species.
Invasive Species: Any species that has been introduced to an environment where it is not native, and that has since become a nuisance through rapid spread and increase in numbers, often to the detriment of native species.
I don’t think having a non-native title is necessarily bad, just that it didn’t originate/evolve in that area.
edit: taking this opportunity to promote https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/, found his videos a while back and have enjoyed the content.
Are you anywhere near Connecticut? I have a 50-60 foot tree in my yard that’s been completely incased by a kudzu vine.
I’m really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.
That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.
That’s cool! Can you recommend any resources on this? I’ve thought a lot about this sort of thing. I’m guessing semiconductor fabrication requires a lot of complex upstream tasks and isn’t the sort of thing that’s feasible at home. Would love to be wrong!
“The Book”, is a book that uses illustrations to explain how to recreate civilization. Dunno if it is good. That said, you can also try “How Things Work”, which explains the workings of many inventions, with many wooly mammoths interspersed throughout.
Ha! Is that the one that explained buoyancy by saying the elephant/water was afraid of the water/elephant, so they had to build walls on the side of the raft so it/the water couldn’t see each other?
Depends where you’re starting. If it’s sticks and stones, yeah, you’re going to spend a lot of time building up. Even getting to the prerequisites for the Gingery-esque machine shop will be a trick, and you definitely need machining first.
Sam Zeloof is the guy that actually did the semiconductors bit. He makes a transistor in the linked video series starting with a commercial wafer, some basic chemicals, a spinning piece of tape and an electric furnace. I read papers and just Wikipedia to get ideas for the parts he doesn’t cover. The standard ways of doing things are heavily constrained by scalability, which as an artisan you don’t care about, but will breeze past other things you really do, like ability to work in a small space. And, if you’re starting from scratch, using only common, locally available elements.
Wait, I work in cleanrooms professionally. Fabricating my own semiconductors at home always seemed like a cool idea, but really out of reach. I kind of always wanted to keep old machines from the labs I worked at, but with such expensive things they never threw anything away (of course)!
Isn’t it prohibitively expensive and/or noisy? What type of projects do you do?
Have you seen the Sam Zeloof videos? He’s the main person I’ve seen actually build a chip in a garage.
He buys his wafers, which is critical. Given a hot furnace you could refine your own metallurgical silicon in a crucible, but cleaning it will be a whole thing. The machine needed would probably be based on spinning band distillation, which you could make in a pre-existing machine shop. To avoid toxic gases and explosion hazards - which are the two things chemists have told me not to mess with - you’d want to use SiCl4, which is a bit different from the standard approach which uses hydrogenated species. The Siemens process back to silicon and monocrystalline casting is all that’s left, and I wonder if they could be combined in a step if scalability isn’t a concern.
What type of projects do you do?
If only I had space for a workshop, so it’s all theoretical ATM.
Which machines are noisy? Polishers?
Ah, not to worry, even professionally it’s very common to buy your wafers. I am on mobile data right now so I’ll check out those videos later!
Basically, every single machine that needs a vacuum chamber - so almost all non-wet processes, like physical/chemical vapor deposition, reactive ion etching, scanning electron microscopy (although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).
Honestly maybe I’m just too used to the lab setting and am underestimating how much you can actually do without vacuum processing. I’ll take a look later: this all looked so out of the reach of an ordinary person that I never even considered following content creators who do this. Thank you!
High vacuums are tricky. The first high vacuums were achieved with mercury-based Sprengel pumps, but mercury isn’t available everywhere. Maybe you could make a small, slow turbomolecular pump work if it was mandatory (it’s all about the bearing) but it seems anything that needs sealing is going to struggle without either that or a massive petrochemical industry to supply the needed high-quality synthetic oils. If you’re doing technology all over again, I’d skip the vacuum tubes stage because of this.
If you can get away with a low vacuum, a piston-type pump with castor oil as the sealant will do. It seems like a low vacuum would work for at least some kinds of VD. Maybe you can help clear it up a bit.
(although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).
1 micron features is as ambitious as I’ve bothered to think about. For basic computing, like to run a CNC machine, that should do.
I should mention I met someone IRL who makes their own vacuum tubes. You can own your own pump, although I don’t know how it would stack up against what you’re used to.
This sounds like the entire premise behind the manga/anime Dr. Stone.
All humans on earth get turned to stone, and a young scientific supergenius teaches survivors how to essentially restart civilization from scratch.
It’s an absolute joy to watch. Maybe you’d dig it? :D
I try to curate zines from around the world into local exhibitions, do hand translating alongside if need be, imitate the original paper best I can.
It’s kinda fun lol. That and kinda similarly, but I love♡ spending time on online software radio sites, just listening into different channels like I was there myself.
Well… I’m using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)
I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy’s and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.
And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I’m apparently one out of ten :)
Glad you found a happy cozy home. Appreciative that I can reply to you from heart of the old beast!
Relative to all the well known commercial social media platforms though aren’t we all into something here hardly anyone else knows about, whether 10 users or a few thousand?
You’re one in a million to me
i.e., there are approximately 1,400 people in China just like you.
Whenever I’m going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.
It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don’t see that often. And at the same time, I’m increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there’s more to the EU than just Finland :)
I would guess it’s unlikely that all that many other people do the same.
I’m still on Second Life, which is a virtual world social platform. It has ~45,000 given active people on it, which is a piss squirt compared to other online platforms like MMOs and MMORPGs. But, nobody I know are into it save for about 5 people at least.
And I still somehow am bothering with Gaia Online which has even less users, from 1,500 ~ 4,400 on a good day and only know 2 friends on there.
Gaia Online still exists??
Every so often I go through a phase:
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“Second Life was fun. Why did I stop using it?”
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Recreate account, log in.
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Watch FPS drop to a fraction with a lot of zeroes at the start of it as all the adverts struggle to load.
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“Oh, yeah. That was why.”
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Oh man, Second Life! I remember being absolutely wowed by it even though I never made an account. Its heyday was very much before I’d be able or brave enough to use real money in a virtual social game like that. (That wasn’t WoW lol)
I always fondly remember the lovable antics of the legendary troll: Esteban Winsmore!
Gaia Online reminds me a lot of Ragnarok, visually. That’s cool it’s still around! I remember hopping around F2P MMOs like crazy just trying to find something me and my long distance partner could interact together and vibe with. There were a lot of oddball ones that are shockingly still around!
I was just thinking about second life the other day when someone brought up meta and its push for the ‘metaverse.’ I still remember the old pranks of making it rain dildos in someone’s area, or enclosing their head in a box.
I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.
There are people who play solo TTRPGs and share logs, I think? Seems kind of similar
I’ve done it (just one session, nothing I want to share).
You mean you are actually role playing in a role playing game?
My my, you are strange.
I’ve tried to do this several times and usually get bored. Journaling RPGs on the other hand are loads of fun!
I’m not into gaming. I think I’m the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn’t. I don’t really know why. I think it’s a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.
Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.
But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.
That does bug me. When i was a kid I was teased for using the Internet and playing computer games because “get a life omg”.
Now, you know.
My fiance is not into gaming whatsoever. He only played a handful of games as a kid. He’s 30
Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).
I’m into combining these in interesting ways.
While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.
It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.
hmmm… I’m having some issues with VPN tunneling in my docker config. I wonder if you might have some advice?
That sounds a bit ambiguous, though I should have prefaced my previous comment with the fact that I am still very much learning about this stuff myself.
More recently, I am trying to wrap my head around containerized VPN connections through WireGuard using gluetun. The idea sounds great, in theory. Figuring out how to make it work will probably be less so.
If you mean just accessing a service through VPN from the outside world, then I might be able to help.
I’ve done it successfully a few times. Most of the issues I have ever had were usually with misconfigured firewall rules around NAT.
Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.
I’ve really wanted to try getting into this sometime! I just love nifty ways of hitting distant things with other things.
I’ve heard of people fashioning them outta paracord and using tennis balls to start with and thought that sounded cool.
Plus, something that looks like a weird belt could potentially hurl any old rock at dangerous velocities, and that’s gotta be worth something in this dangerous world.
How’d you first get into it?
So, I’ve always lowkey wondered if that meteor hammer guy’s techniques would translate to slinging at all
