the fediverse.

Probably not rare in general but rare where I’m from. Racing, asphalt circle track stuff. Like NASCAR but much smaller, cheaper, and local tracks.

Making almost all of my food from whole ingredients.

The most processed ingredient that I would use is corn flour and such, or maybe cheese. I’m not gonna find wheat or whole dried corn and fire up a grindstone lol. But yeah everything is made from the whole ingredients to the greatest degree reasonable. An example I think everyone can relate to is ketchup … If I want it I start with fresh tomatoes and a cutting board.

But yeah it’s fun as hell for me - a wonderful blend of nerdy science & chemistry, plus that beautiful artistic side which allows me to be a rule-breaking creator.

Most people think its cuckoo that I ferment my own peppers for hot sauce, make tortillas from scratch, braise my meats for hours, cut and desiccate potatoes for fries, pickle various vegetable concoctions, make mustards, fry my own chips for nachos…

I love the hell out of the craft but many think I’m a little overboard. Fair enough. No family, kids, girlfriend, mostly a loner… I got time plus it’s super fucking nerdy and process-driven (in many ways) if you lean into it that way!

I also developed some great “systems” so I can batch cook, and its become so routine after 5 years that I’ve slip-streamed it all into my daily puttering so its like hours of time overall, but minutes of actual work.

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 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 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 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.

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 :)

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.

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

When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?

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.

How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science

Edit since a few people asked: I don’t have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:

• According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
  • Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
• Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
  • Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord’s Game (the precursor to monopoly)
  • This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
• Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn’t due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
  • Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
  • Tak is another example that’s a lot easier to learn (because it doesn’t require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
• TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don’t think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players’ life experience, and via the setting/world.
• Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
  • No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
  • Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.

There are probably plenty more links. I’ve been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I’m just starting out looking in to game design…

edit 2: also, a plug for [email protected]

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 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.