What is a new thing, a new something that you have recently gotten into, or that you have been a long time participant in, that you find very entertaining and fun and time consuming and distracting?
What things would we need to purchase to get into that thing?
How did you get into that thing?
Play The Long Drive. Lookup nothing. Play in the dark with loud sound.
If you draw or dabble in the arts try out Water Mixable Oil Paint! No turpentine or odors, it’s real oilpaint but it can be cleaned with water!
Nothing beats oil paint, it’s crazy, amazing and humbling, you can probably spend a lifetime and still have new things to learn. After the initial cost (say 200€ max if you keep thing normal) it can be a low cost hobby too if you don’t go crazy.
Watching movies. There’s so many movies, both good and bad. Sometimes bad movies are fun too, especially horror.
Others have mentioned video games. I’ve gotten into emulation using Batocera. Can be installed on old hard drives/raspberry pis.
Depending on your space/climate, gardening and/or growing mushrooms.
I’ve been looking more into home improvement and homesteading.
I also just tend to get fixated on random things that interest me and go down rabbit holes.
Minecraft. Build a cool base in the side of a mountain or in a tree with a ton of secret passages. I play it with my kids and enjoy it just as much as they do.
Skipping/jump rope. Great exercise, crazy fun and an endless amount of tricks and combos to learn.
I decided to get into drone piloting this week. Turns out you don’t need a crazy expensive drone to start. It’s a $70 controller, some batteries and a simulator application.
In a few months it’ll be a lot more expensive. For now, it’s not too bad.
If you want something calm, you could try houseplants. There’s all sorts of options from easy to difficult to keep, and it’s easy to end up filling your home with them, which is actually pretty beneficial unlike some other clutter
If you live in an area that gets a lot of snowfall, buy a zamboni. Keep it in a garage. Then, when a big ice storm hits, your time will arrive! Take your zamboni to the city streets! While the city ice crews are trying to melt the ice, you’ll be out there thickening and polishing it to a glimmering shine! You’ll be the ying to their yang. The negative to their positive. You will be the balancing element in nature! Buy your zamboni, and take to the streets!
That would be the most fantastic thing if I lived in such an area, but alas, I do not.
A little groove box. Like the Roland T-8 or Novation Circuit.
Few hundred bucks will get you a used one. Super fun to sit around and make your own simple beats and songs. No musical knowledge required!
I’m a big proponent of modern affordable musical electronics. If you like it, it’s a fun little thing to do. If you love it, there is endless depth to pursue in many directions. No natural rhythm or understanding of melody needed. It’s fun to just sit and tweak knobs and notes until you like what comes out.
I also recently discovered this website called “Strudel REPL” that let’s you code electronic music in your browser for free. Another fun way to check out the hobby without spending anything.
Planting native plants and checking out the cool bugs that show up.
3D printing.
Get a used printer or build a new one (building it teaches you a lot about how it works).
Start downloading models… toys, gifts, tools.
Start seeing what little things you can fix and improve around your home.
Encounter something you need to print, but can’t find anywhere to download… Get into CAD and start making your own models.
Also there’s a nice side effect if you get into 3D printing: it’s suddenly really easy for your family/friends to buy gifts for you. There’s never enough filaments you could have.
I haven’t the courage to fix my 3D printer sitting in the garage (classic core-xy), should I buy a cheap laser one instead? One with that liquid that solidifies under uv light.
No no, don’t do that. If FDM (classic filament printer, as you say) is a hassle for you, then SLA (a UV resin printer) is not for you at all. It’s way more involved, requires protective gear as the resin is toxic while uncured, and requires a ventilated work space. Also, generally SLA is waaaay slower than FDM, due to significantly increased resolution.
They’re just intended for different use cases and different requirements. In most cases they’re not an equivalent substitution for each other.
Thanks! I had forgotten about the toxicity, that’s why I never tried ABS…
The hassle isn’t the printing itself, it’s just that I don’t have the pc with the marlin code and all that any more, I built my printer so everything had to be adjusted and tweaked… And as I built it myself there were shortcomings, very fun and instructive but maybe I should just buy an old working one… Compatible with that expensive E3D full metal hotend :-)
VR. Spend all day in another world.
Video games ^^/$
Go learn to SCUBA dive. Being 100 feet under water is amazing.
My wife passed away February 28th 2019 and I was lost in life. I wandered into a shop and was certified to dive on June 16th after a few classes. By January 16th 2020 I was Advanced Open Water certified and on June 28th I was Rescue certified. I actually want to become certified to instruct and use my underwater videos to pay for teens and young adults who have survived sexual abuse to become certified to dive and hopefully be able to provide them a set of gear.
I personality am a survivor of mental, physical, and sexual abuse. Diving has been the best thing in my life and in less than 100 dives I have seen things that people with thousands of dives haven’t. It has also helped my mental health more than anything else I’ve ever tried. Now I just want to be in the water every chance I get.
I think yours is a wonderful story. SCUBA is amazing, and you can get deeper and deeper (no pun intended) into it and the gear.
As far as its therapeutic value, what are your thoughts on having people who have suffered a trauma engage in a sport that has serious safety risks? You need to keep your wits about you under the water and mistakes can be harmful. I’m glad this seems to have worked well for you but I wonder if it might be risky for a broad population.
I’ve found that the trauma actually causes hyper awareness and it’s not uncommon. https://www.simplypsychology.org/hypervigilance.html
Also while it has its risks similar risk is associated with many activities, but diving is generally a group activity and stresses the buddy system to reduce those risks. A properly trained diver who has certified to depth over multiple dives is probably safer diving that getting on the highway in a vehicle with hundreds of random people of dubious skill and training.
My plan is also to overtrain. There are operations out there who pump out divers who do not have good training and later on need retraining. My class sizes will be no more than two, always. Because I’m not doing the training for profit I can spend as much time as needed to go over all of the little details and train them with the knowledge a rescue certified diver would have in their arsenal with them only being open water certified.
I’m also planning to mainly deal with people who have been referred to me by counseling services or other therapy programs. Funding for non-profits is difficult to begin with so training and equipping a random person who makes claims of abuse isn’t likely to happen.
Cool, I see you’ve thought it through. Perhaps abuse survivors appreciate risks that they can control. Anyway it’s certainly a physically active and very stimulating sensory experience that gets people outdoors so I can’t imagine that’s a bad place to start in terms of mental health and healing. Wish you the best of luck with it.
What you need to get started is training. Dive certification will run around 500. You can find some shops that charge a bit less and some that charge more. The biggest thing in the agency alphabet soup is to find a shop that truly teaches and then plan to do advanced certification as well. If you can travel to do the Advanced Open Water certification do it, a week somewhere warm with some diving is worth it.
Things you should really buy: mask, fins, and snorkel. Buy it before you start the class. You can go on Amazon and buy any cheap mask and snorkel set where the mask has a tempered glass lens/lenses. Skip the dry top snorkel, they don’t really do much other than cause issues (I have a design for one that would be amazing but need to prototype it first and don’t have the ability/funding right now.)
For fins you need a scuba fin, I prefer ones made for dive boots rather than barefoot ones. Then you can walk around in the dive boots and have more grip and a little protection vs being barefoot. The fins I use are Cressi Pro Light but if I was to buy a set today I would look at the SEAC Propulsion S. And buy yellow or orange fins, trust me.
After that a dive computer is a really smart buy. You have a couple choices there and they can get expensive. A good basic computer is the Cressi Leonardo series or the Mares Puck Pro + Series. I started started with the Mares Puck Pro and just updated to the Mares Quad CI but will use the Puck Pro as a backup. You can use the app that comes with the dive computer but if you use Android and want to keep all your logs in one place even if you change computers (and you probably will if you get started) DiveMate is worth it. It works with tons of dive computers and you can still have signatures in your logs. I haven’t used paper logs since my first certification. If money is no object the Garmin Descent Mk3i is one I (and many others) have drooled over.
Next is BCD and Regulator set. I’m looking at the Scubapro Hydros Pro with Air2 for my next BCD. Regulator I would suggest is the Scubapro MK25 with the G260. I use the MK20 with the G250, it’s a tank and works great. Grab a console with depth gauge and pressure gauge as well, if you can get one with a compass as well all the better.
if you don’t have one a steamdeck.
