Ask Lemmy

the fediverse.

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.

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".

I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.

• 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.

• Meshtastic

• John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.

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 :)

I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)

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 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.

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.

There’s a lot of Robotech/Macross stuff out there, but I rarely see anyone post online about it, and I’ve never met anyone in person who even knows what it is.

Death metal. I’m pretty clean cut and tat free so people are really taken aback when I tell them one of my favorite acts is called Cattle Decapitation.

I am the only person I know IRL who reccomends browsers to people in-person

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.

I'm addicted to buying crappy antique and vintage shotguns and restoring them. Have so many now I can hardly justify another. I know, I'm ruining the antique value by stripping the metal and wood, but they're ~$150 items, not exactly rare.

Look at this $119 ($160 by the time I get it home) piece of crap!

https://www.guns.com/used-guns/p/companhia-brasileira-de-cartuchos-151?i=571883

Never even heard of that brand, let alone the model. Bet I could make it dance and sing for a week's worth of evenings. It's a single-shot, can't be too fucked up. Probably.

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.

Guix, there are dozens of us! Dozens!

FoundryVTT, baby! Somewhere north of 70,000 downloads for a very feature rich virtual tabletop that you'd think more D&D / Computer Nerds would be into.

If you want to get even more bespoke, I'm the proud owner of a version 2 box of "Kingdom Death", a $400 boardgame designed in the spirit of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls. You play a primitive band of survivalists, hunting horrifying monsters for their body parts, in order to slowly claw your civilization's way out of a Lovecraftian dark age.

I work in a technology field and I'm interested in "not AI" stuff. It's a wild ride.

I like to analyse stickers stuck on traffic lights and road signs.

I plan on making an app someday where people can contribute to a database of stickers and compare the sticker culture of different regions.

I like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s

I like retro programming, in particular Windows 2000.

Now I'm making a little 3D toy now that works with OpenGL on Windows with WGL and on X11 with GLX (also on Cygwin). No third party abstractions!

I want to keep adding backends, like DX 7, 9, Vulkan, WebGL, bare Linux KMS, and then stuff like screen space reflections, shadows, materials, ray tracing where possible, maybe get it running on a console or two too.

I do calligraphy. Sometimes i meet someone who knows someone who does calligraphy. But I've never met another person IRL that does calligraphy. And the particular style I like makes it even more rare.

I like to rescue dogs. I just rescued one last week that I'm taking to get groomed. He's sleeping in his crate right now. It's not ideal, as I live in a small house with two cats, three people, and two dogs. But holy shit is it rewarding. Most of the time they just scamper away, although blessedly it's usually to their home. Every once in a while you get a friend for a while, and someone else gets a friend for life. Dogs are lovely animals, and they exist as they do because of humans. It is our duty to take care of them.

This little guy needs to be housetrained and neutered but then he's off to live a life on the open road as my trucker friend's road companion. Or at least that's the plan!

Idk how to attach pictures on this app so you'll have to imagine a very sweet Yorkshire terrier who only has a few dreads left to snip! When I found him he had a dread that was legit like two feet long. Poor baby.

Dune was my go to scifi...now it's popular and I feel like a hipster.

My dad got me into hard scifi, d&d, Tolkien...if I feel like a hipster, can't imagine what he feels like.

My favorite thing in the whole world is dropping LSD, and listening to obscure music or watching weird shit...

Dude I can't find ANYONE to hang out with me... I wave that flag in every social situation I find myself in. I really thought there would be more people into it.

Well, that or I'm completely unbearable to hang out with. If that's the case I just wish people would tell me.

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.

At school, I seem to be one of the very few people who use Linux so there's that

I curate about 90 cartoons and almost as many indie animation channels to create a weekly block of Saturday morning cartoon programming for my wife and kid.

I edit it together in kdenlive from files on my media server, and we stream it to my mini projector each weekend. Been going over a year now, only missing weeks when we're traveling. I would love to be able to share it with a wider audience, but I'm still not sure how, given it's all pirated.

One year on Spotify I was in the top I think 1% of lou reed listeners.

I'm sure there's probably someone out there, but I'm really interested in cool border crossings and how they represent nations on each side. As much as I am no nationalist, I find those projections of strength, friendship, security, etc. all super interesting.

Oh, and fake/fantasy transit maps. Those are always fun to draw up in my spare time.

"space music" -- I played Mass Effect 1 long ago and got hooked on the idea of musicians trying (and often failing) to make music for futuristic settings. This is like Star Trek episodes that reference classical music but some person has to predict what classical music will sound like in 2300. So they go with with future retro stuff and it just tickles me. So I seek out these sorts of experimental musical pre-trend predictions cause they're often hilarious.

I’m an avid reader, and I like reading in original language. That has brought me in a variety of rabbit holes, including trying to learn Russian, then Japanese. Unfortunately, I forgot most of it. I also forgot most of my ancient Greek, but my Latin is still vaguely useful. My German and Spanish never reached the “I can read anything” level, that is a shame because I really want to read the Don Quixote and Goethe... But I’m proud to easily read in 3 languages, struggling in 2-3 others (depending how much dictionary use is allowed).

I haven’t been able to find a community of people that like this. Most like a specific culture and go deep into a single language.

I really love Japanese jazz fusion. None of my friends understand my excitement about the EWI solos, they just say it sounds like Mario Kart music lol. I'm also into Buddhism, but dont have anyone else with this interest.

Pure math, finite automata, math rock, analog synthesis, knitting (in my demographic), video games from before we knew modern UI and game design... to be fair, none of these communities are non-existent, but they're pretty niche even among my weirdo friends.