I had been wanting to learn how to play the guitar for years, but laziness, i guess, kept me from it. I picked it up with moderate seriousness and am very greatful i did. I wish i would’ve started sooner.
Disc golf, free to play on courses. Discs are much cheaper than golf clubs. The skill floor is low enough for most people to start having fun pretty quickly and the ceiling is high enough to have an entertaining to watch pro scene.
I also got into disc golf over the pandemic. I hope the sport sees a lot of growth. I like that courses don’t require much upkeep or forest clearing
how about combining it with skeet shooting?
I started playing the piano. I have just learned from books and the occasional you tube video. I still practice everyday. I can’t tell if I’m actually getting any better, but I do enjoy it.
Enjoying it is the point! But I’ll bet that you are better than you were when you started.
I actually stopped my hobby of golfing because the courses were getting overcrowded as golf was one of the few sports you were still allowed to do at the height of covid. Haven’t picked it back up because it’s so time consuming.
I started taking biking more seriously around the time Covid started. I built my fitness up over the course of the last few years to the point where I can ride almost anywhere in my city if I have the time and the weather cooperates. Last week I did my favorite 40 mile ride for the 5th or 6th time in recent history and I now average around 80-100 miles a week. My mood is better and I physically feel much stronger.
The best part: all this fitness stuff is a side benefit because I originally started riding for the purposes of sunshine and exploring and just happened to stumble into better health!
Same! It eventually led to racing, which has opened up a fun new world I didn’t know existed.
Before covid I remember thinking averaging 20mph on my 10 mile commute was impossible, i was struggling to hit 19. A couple weeks ago I averaged over 21mph for 100 miles.
I live near the mountains and have made it my goal to ride up a proper mountain. I am still early in that goal; still calibrating to where I think I am and where my limits are. I usually ride alone and get lost in the experience on a nice long path or trail. After the ride, stats, though imperfect, help me see a sense of progress and I don’t often feel a desire to compete with others, though I did go on a group ride with some roadies once through one of our most iconic regional landmarks and they pushed me so hard I haven’t ridden that much high intensity cardio and leg melting endurance in any ride since then. I absolutely want to do it again.
20mph sounds crazy fast for an average speed. I’m crawling up hills at 6-7 mph and the fastest I’ve ever gone on the downhill was 46mph, yikes! I think I average 12-15. You’re killing it! What’s the most enjoyable race course you’ve been on?
Yea I’m less into the competitive aspect more into the community. People who race just really love riding their bikes. I like office park crits more than anything just because it has a grassroots feel, and you’re always racing the same people so it’s really just an excuse to get together. I’ll average 14-16 on commutes nowdays because I’m not on an aggressive bike and don’t have my aero kit on and stuff, so don’t feel like you’re doing bad. I don’t like going over like 35, it’s scary… 45 is pretty insane
I got into doing yoga. I did it daily for about 9 months straight in 2020, and have never felt better. I go through phases now where I can keep it up, but I can also go a while without doing it. I wish I could get back into doing it daily because I feel so much better with the consistency.
I think we all go through those phases with our hobbies. What makes it great is that we found them in the first place. As long as we can pick them back up after some time away and still get the same enjoyment, then we’ve found something special.
Kind of like old friends you can hang out with like you never spent a day apart.
Parenting, since our first child was born in September of 2020. Still giving it a go. We just had a 2nd child this July, so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.
Ah, yes, another quaranteenie.
Unfortunately you can’t just drop the hobby if it gets too frustrating.
I took an electronics class in high school and always thought about getting into the hobby. It took 20 years and a pandemic, but I finally did. Though with the availability of cheap micro-controller dev boards I haven’t gotten as deep into it as I always imagined. Most of what I do is just wiring components to GPIO pins with the occasional pull-up/down resister.
I bought my guitar about twenty years ago and probably learned how to play half a dozen chords before the pandemic. So i did nearly the same thing.
I wish I had been able to enjoy the lockdown with everyone else. I’m an essential worker, so aside from wearing a mask all the time, life didn’t really change for me. I would’ve loved a 2 year break from work and people.
Started bouldering, still at it. It did wonders for my health (was basically a couch potato before that).
Started getting into coffee with all the snobbish attachments of it.
Still enjoy it. But bought a nespresso machine in the meantime. I just wanna have coffee to wake up, not do the whole ritual.I started making scented candles. I mostly started because I was trying to recreate a particular scent that we don’t seem to be able to find anymore. I’ve gotten sort of close but not, like, super close. I liked experimenting with lots of different types of scents, though, and it’s nice to always have something around to help get rid of cooking odors in the kitchen, freshen up a bathroom, etc.
I haven’t made any in a while – not for any particular reason, though, although it is harder to want to do something that involves being over a stove a lot during the summer. I really should get back to it soon.
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Drinking
I picked up baking soughdough loaves - like a lot of people…
I’ve managed to keep the habit! I’ve made a loaf once a week (pretty much) for almost 3.5 years. Which is a crazy number now that I’ve calculated it.
Feeding/kneading/shaping/baking just became part of my routine and it is now super easy to maintain, especially with the 1 a week low commitment. It makes the best sandwiches!
What is your process/recipe?
I’m no expert, please take the below with a pinch of salt (pun intended).
I keep my starter in the fridge and feed when I use it.
Make a levain: 60g starter (week old) 60g water 60g flour
Cover and leave that for 8 hours (remember to feed the starter and add back to the fridge).
Make the dough by mixing with the levain. Ratio is 1:2:3 (levain:water:flour): 10g salt 360g water (Lukewarm) 540g flour
I usually add the water, stir, add the salt, stir, add flour and mix by hand.
Cover and leave that 45min to an hour.
I then do a bit of a knead, then every 20mins do some coil folds. How many depends on how bothered I can be - between 1 and 5.
I give at least 2 hours from the last fold to proof, essentially at least 4 hours from making the dough. At this point dough should have doubled in size so you can also use that as a visual guide. How warm your kitchen is plays a bit part in how quick the proofing takes, hotter=quicker and colder=slower. So in winter I will wait a little longer.
Get the dough on your work surface and give it a quick shape. Let it bench rest for 5mins. During this time I get my proofing basket ready and make some space in the fridge.
Using flour, shape the dough and place in basket and then the basket in the fridge.
Leave this overnight.
Preheat oven to as high as it goes with Dutch oven inside.
Wait 30mins to heat up.
Get dough out the fridge and give it a brush to get some excess flour off.
Take the Dutch oven out and place the dough in the Dutch oven, score the dough, spray some water in the Dutch oven and place back in the actual oven.
Wait 30mins.
Turn oven down to 180 and take lid off the Dutch oven.
I then play it by eye on when to remove the loaf from the oven, usually 15-20mins. Depends how dark you like your crust.
Leave it to rest at least an hour before cutting into it. I’ve started leaving it another day and then cutting it all up and placing the slices in the freezer. Much easier cutting after a 1 day and this let’s me use the slices over the whole week.
It’s been a long time since I have looked at how to make soughdough loaves, so I probably have a few things wrong. However the above works for me. Let me know if you have any follow up questions and I’ll do my best to answer.
10g of salt? Jesus…
Nightly drinking. At this point, I don’t know what life was like before I started, and as much as I know I’m shortening my life, I actually really enjoy the daily stress relief - I’m weirdly happier overall these days as a result, although I do keep my intake low.
I don’t smoke, vape, trip, weed is a no go, as it triggers psychotic thought patterns, and I don’t take anything else (unless caffeine counts, in which case, I’d rather fucking kill myself than give up coffee.) I enjoy having something to lean on. We’re all dying, some of us slightly faster than others by choice. I don’t think a couple whiskeys a night is all that bad, all things considered. The world is moving in a direction I’m not compatible with on a deeply personal level anyway, so fuck living until 80.
I’m on a similar wavelength, however I’ve noticed my “couple nightly drinks” over time has turned (at times) into half a bottle.
Please do a better job managing your intake than I have, it was a hard look in the mirror that night.
please try to stop, man.
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You could try taking edibles with lower amounts of tch. Taking 1MG might take the edge off for your coping needs but shouldn’t be enough to give you high anxiety or psychotic thoughts.
As someone who drank like you for years, it slowly became a much larger problem in my life. Sober for a little over 2 years now and use THC regularly to help when needed.
Sounds like you’re happy where you are at now but if you do want to look into it, there are stopdrinking communities here and Reddit (more active there) to learn more.
I now swing between the two, if I feel I’m having too much of one I’ll slide over to the other for a couple weeks to break the cycle.
I have been thinking about giving cannabis a go again lately, but I’m honestly pretty frightened of the stuff nowadays. I was fine with it for years, but it slowly started manifesting thoughts of existentialism, consciousness, the nature of reality, and solipsism, among other deeply-unanswerable questions. It got to the point where almost immediately after the effects came on, I’d become paralyzed with fear over the fact that anything exists at all, but I kept using it because it helped my insomnia better than anything else.
I’ve only recently come out of that existential crisis after really having to work on myself to get back to where I was before that, which for the most part, I am. The only lingering change is that my firm atheism was shattered and I now find myself seeing the universe, consciousness and death very differently (largely in a good way.)
I want to get along with weed, but it’s just too much for me. I have ADHD, and all it does is make me think even more than I already do, as one errant thought will always send me down a cascading sequence of increasingly more terrifying philosophical possibilities about the universe and nature of infinity. Alcohol manifests itself as pure bliss and anti anxiety. It allows me to actually switch off for a few hours and then sleep.
Trust me, I wish I could love cannabis, but I just don’t think it’s worth the risk for me personally. I’ve never had a drug fuck me up so hard mentally (and I’ve previously experimented with psychedelics and dissociatives as a younger guy.) There’s something about THC specifically that fucks me up.
“I’d become paralyzed with fear over the fact that anything exists at all”…“I now find myself seeing the universe, consciousness and death very differently (largely in a good way.)”
It really does help your mind come up with some awesome ideas.
I don’t know if it was weed specifically or my education and life experiences, but I’m comfortable with the idea that we can’t know anything with absolute certainty. And since none of the questions about our existence can be answered (yet?) we get to be creative.
I can understand how it can be scary, though.
There are countless ways we can find to cope. As long as it makes us happy and we can understand and accept its full effect on our lives, then i believe it’s great to have.
I started smoking weed again during the pandemic, and was probably just old enough to do that responsibly. I definitely wasn’t when i was younger and couldn’t handle my substances well.
Guitar playing and weed is the best.
As long as it makes us happy and we can understand and accept its full effect on our lives, then i believe it’s great to have.
bro lmao
“i do heroin everyday which is great as I understand its effects and it makes me happy”
tried yoga, meditation, running to fix my suspected adhd, but couldn’t stick to it
i am still trying stuff like surya namaskar and make it a part of my daily routine, but still struggling
Maybe trying new hobbies is your hobby. That might be the best one so far. You’ll eventually find a great one if you keep it up.
