I kinda wish I considered my social anxiety and picked a better solitairy instrument than drums. They’re super fun to play, but I was only ever in one band and I’m too anxious to play with strangers right now. I just jam by myself, but I suspect I’d have an easier time actually writing music if I had more experience with melody. I tried picking up guitar and violin later, but so far I haven’t had the energy to really devote the time needed to learn another instrument.
Have you thought about an “MPC” type instrument like a Native Instruments Maschine? I feel like that might be a nice evolution for you as it would allow you to transition a love for percussion into a songwriting tool that is a blast to jam out with and make patterns with.
I mean, I really like nice finger drumming pads, but you could also just use a more traditional midi drum kit to record loops the point is that you can have a blast with an MPC type tool all by yourself with headphones on and you can then choose to share that or not, it is perfect as a solo instrument.
Bonus points you could record loops of yourself playing your actual drums and slice up the audio samples in an MPC, that would be super cool.
I also think as a drummer having an MPC might be really nice to throw loops of certain sections of songs into that you wanted to practice so that you could easily switch between them and keeping looping that section to practice as long as needed.
I had not thought about an mpc type instrument, but I’m going to look into it right now because that sounds cool lol
If you have a computer you can get a used/older NI Maschine for fairly cheap just make sure you get a software key. The pads feel really nice on those, but it is all down to preference.
A lot of people like the Ableton Push series of controllers but for me the pure playing feel of the Maschine is hard to beat and the ability to build loops into songs without looking at your computer screen while still having access to all the benefits of being connected to a computer (easy file access of samples for example) is really nice.
Go to Guitar Center or something and try out one, they are a blast I promise! They are inherently percussive instruments and I think having experience as a drummer is a great platform to enter into learning MPC type instruments from.
drummer here as well! I’m very glad to play the drums and not guitar or anything else. Okay, you’re the loudest one, but you also have your own safe space. I really see my drums as a wall between me and the rest of the stage/the band. It’s a comfort zone, a protection. Let the drums do the talking and hide behind your kit (figure of speech, not literally as that would be hard to play)
Unless you’re Dave Grohl. Than you can jump right through that wall
Guitar is difficult to learn, especially if you don’t know anything about music theory.
You might want to start with a basic digital piano, and learn basic keyboard skills, and music theory at the same time. As a drummer, you have good hand independence, and will probably pick up piano pretty quickly.
Music theory is a supremely elegant system, and you may find it soothing for your anxiety.
This is really intensely packed information, but EVERYTHING you need to know about music theory is on there, especially the basic stuff. You’ll find lots of great explanations on YouTube. It’s a lot like mathematics, one small thing leads to another, and it all develops into an elegant complex system built on logic at every step. Most of it becomes pretty intuitive once you figure out the basics.
When you get a keyboard, make sure to get one with weighted keys, so it feels like a real piano. I got a really nice Donner on sale, and it’s lasted for years.
And of course practice every day. Try to get 20-30 minutes a day, either when you first get up, or before you go to bed, or preferably both. Make it a habit, and you’ll get better quickly. Keep it up and you’ll get fluid at reading music, and then it gets fun. You can be there in a year. You can take up the guitar next year.
And don’t worry about playing with someone else, just learn to play keyboard and you can start making your own recordings on your computer, and you only have to play with yourself. That’s what I do, along with guitar and bass. I wish I played drums, I have to use pads and program drum grooves.
It’s a lifetime journey, have fun!
Can confirm, switch from drums to piano after trying the guitar.
I couldn’t stick with the guitar but the keyboard, aw man, that’s awesome.❤️
Yeah, the guitar is really hard, you have to really want to play. There’s a long learning curve (endless, really), and it’s not very intuitive, ESPECIALLY when it comes to theory. That’s why guitarists have a much different approach to theory than other musicians.
Piano on the other hand, makes theory seem ridiculously easy, once you’ve mastered the notes on the staff.
I’m a guitarist, primarily, but I learned music theory getting a degree in music history about a million years ago, so I got the educational grounding BEFORE I really got into the guitar. It made it a LOT easier. I can’t imagine learning proper theory on guitar. I run through chord progressions on the guitar just fine, but so much of early theory is harmonic note leading, and that can only be taught, and learned, properly on a keyboard.
Once you’re decent on the keyboard, not a master or anything, but you know basic theory and can play some easy stuff, you can try to learn guitar, and transfer your knowledge over there. It should shorten the learning curve a bit, or at least make it less frustrating.
You’re fingertips are still going to scream either way.
This resource is awesome, thanks for sharing!!
A box of comics isn’t going to take up too much space.
Boxes of comics have taken over an entire room.
Buying more expensive and better gear will not make you better at it. I not even going to tell you what the hobby is because this applies to so many of them. If you can do your hobby with the gear you have and you think “oh man I wish I had that, I could do awesome things” - it’s only worth it if you spend a whole lot of time on your hobby. If you’re like me and you only spend a couple hours a week or month on your hobby, it’s usually not worth it. Unless it’s something that let’s you do stuff faster. Because then you can do more in the few hours you have. I’m sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but in general, before you buy some shit, think to yourself “Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?”
Definitely applies to climbing. Technically more expensive shoes may help with certain climbs, it certainly won’t help a beginner.
“Meh, I’ll upgrade the server RAM when I need it, zswap is working fine” <- clueless idiot from last year
Is your hobby guitar lol i’m curious
It is not, but it’s music related. But I also have outdoors hobbies. And electronics hobbies.
Not sure what hobby this is, but honestly it goes for almost every one of my hobbies. Especially photography. I could probably just get good with my Canon EOS 40D for digital and my Canon EOS 300 for analog photography. But collecting new gear is so satisfying. There’s always something new to improve. “If only I had X, then I could really do Y well”. Though I at least feel like I’ve somewhat contained myself. I haven’t bought any new camera or lens that was more than like 500 bucks, and honestly with what I have now I don’t really feel the need to upgrade.
This does NOT go for watercolor painting! While you certainly dont need a lot of colors and brushes. The quality of both is paramount for progress and a decent outcome! Paper is even worse. You need a lot and of the expensive stuff. Acrylic paintig is not as bad but still…
Emacs makes a better row counter than basically anything else.
Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.
Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.
Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.
The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.
Oh, absolutely! My primary laptop is a t430 that I got for $50, got the charger for $7, a replacement CPU and RAM for $50 each. Runs better than my partner’s budget PC from a couple years ago. Still needs a new battery, but those aren’t too expensive either. It’s at 20-25% of the manufacturer capacity now.
I’m pretty sure my server was one of those, though. 1tb HDD, 16GB ram, no idea the other specs, but it was $100. Said it was new, but I 100% do not believe that because the RAM/HDD alone would cost $100 new
Second hand ThinkPads are absolutely brilliant value.
Emacs makes a better row counter than basically anything else.
You mean like
wc -l?Not sure if they meant column counter since you can easily get that too with
Ctrl+x =if your cursor is over a character.Line counts appear at the bottom of the emacs window by default but has a limit where it stops incrementing somewhere in the 10,000s. Also would be slower to return a value since it needs to open the file to get the count, unlike
wc -lwhich is virtually instantaneous.On, no, I meant for knitting! Gave the full example here
No, for knitting xD At this point I do an org-mode list of every row in the pattern with checkboxes, then tick them off as I do them. Way nicer, especially for patterns you have to reference multiple parts at the same time for
Wait, you’re serious? You use emacs for knitting patterns? Fascinating.
I have no real interesting in knitting, but I would be interested in seeing this workflow.
The screenshot is in orgzly, but this is the actual file that I use. The source looks basically identical:1. [X] CO160 (tail on right) 2. [X] b5vE, WT 3. [X] b3vE, WT 4. [X] b3vE, WT 5. [X] b4vE, WT 6. [X] 2, FW 7. [X] Field 1 [31/31] 1. [X] 40, WT 2. [X] 21, WT 3. [X] 2, WT 4. [X] 4, WT 5. [X] 6, WT 6. [X] 8, WT 7. [X] 10, WT 8. [X] 12, WT 9. [X] 14, WT 10. [X] 16, WT 11. [X] 18, WT 12. [X] 20, WT 13. [X] 22, WT 14. [X] 23, WT 15. [X] 24, WT 16. [X] 26, WT 17. [X] 28, WT 18. [X] 30, WT 19. [X] 32, WT 20. [X] 34, WT 21. [X] 36, WT 22. [X] 34, WT 23. [X] 32, WT 24. [X] 29, WT 25. [X] 26, WT 26. [X] 23, WT 27. [X] 20, WT 28. [X] 17, WT 29. [X] 15, WT 30. [X] 13, WT 31. [X] 26, WTJust hit C-c C-c <down> when the row’s done to mark it. It took me about 30 minutes to get the file set up, mostly because there are 45 sections like the “Field 1”, most patterns would just go straight through to whatever the final row is. Plus the pattern’s split into 3 columns, and a PDF, which is notoriously painful to convert to anything.
But yeah, no fancy configs, just basic org-mode functionality. I don’t code much at all, I just use org-mode because it’s been the best PKM tool I’ve found for myself.
If anyone’s curious about the pattern, it’s the Phoenix Wing Shawl by Nadine Schwingler on Ravelry
That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.
Find a good physical therapist. There are some good ones out there, I promise. But you might need to travel and/or pay out of pocket. And the best source for good PT recs is friends in the same sport - so make friends with some ultra runners and ask them.
Hit the gym and do yoga. A big part of a lot of knee pain is instability in the low back and hips.
Read up on psychosomatic pain, and integrate exercises into PT and gym time.
The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.
This is true for reptiles and snakes as well.
There are moments when it can be n+2…
Dice. Definitely dice.
Same for cameras, axes and chainsaws…
axes and chainsaws…
Thnx mate! I owe you! Gonna Take this to my wife now !!
Always happy to help a brother out.
Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.
And bikes, and computers
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Civil engineering as a hobby, eh?
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Tactical urbanism ftw!
Cats
Losing Joann’s has made it really difficult to find fabric locally. Michael’s needs to step their game up.
Yeah, there really hasn’t been a good alternative for fabric. Lots of people were quick to jump on the “lol join the 21st century and just buy it online” side of the argument, but buying fabric is an extremely tactile experience. You need to feel it to know that it will have the correct texture, weight, see it will hang, which direction(s) it will stretch, how much it will stretch, how easy is is to stretch, etc for what you’re trying to make, because all of those qualities will heavily impact the end product. Those things are difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to judge purely from photos on an online listing. Two fabrics that look identical online can have vastly different weights, stretch, textures, etc…
Move to Chicago, we have good local stores for fabric.
It’s miserable. It was such a good store, Michael’s doesn’t compare for fabric yet. Hoping they get as much fabric as they’ve been sending me emails, might get a lot then lol
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
Especially if you want to make “good” food. I’m not saying there isn’t good food that is healthy for you. But if you want to make things taste like they do in a high end restaurant, it’s probably going to require a shitload of butter/ghee and salt. And then probably cream. And also highly fatty meats.
It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
And also highly fatty meats. It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
Anthropology: The study of mankind’s quest for readily available fat.
And salt. Watch Gordon Ramsey season every single step.
The predatory FOMO nature of Games Workshop is real and harmful to the hobby as a whole. The editions of the games could last for years yet we’re on a 3 year cycle to adjust stats and change rules that don’t need changing. It creates a cycle of I liked this edition but everybody moved on so I’m forced to move up or give up on the game.
Luckily there’s a million other games but they’re micro in comparison. You’re stuck either creating a community on your own or hoping there’s a group within a reasonable distance that you can help with. If not… Sorry about your wasted investment.
If you do get sucked into it and you end up investing into every GW game system with multiple armies across every system, you’re gonna run out of space. Unless you live in a multi story house or have a shed with nothing in it, these things take up space.
Yes, tabletop gaming is so much bigger and more varied than GW’s games. I love 40k and Warhammer fantasy, but just as one part of the hobby.
The high pricing and FOMO churning is pretty perfected by GW. It is easy to fall into just thinking and buying GW products at MSRP. There are many ways to avoid it and play for much cheaper, but it means breaking out of the GW exclusive ecosystem. (I have many specific suggestions how to do this btw.)
I can’t stand the modern tournament culture which has this sort of e-sports stink on it.
As a mild piece of good news OnePageRules seems to have decent traction and isn’t too difficult to find groups who play in stores. It has its shortcomings, but at least the rules aren’t subject to the constant market driven churning updates.
Oh I know there’s so much more than GW. I got my start with Warmachine. I had a group of 6 that met bi weekly for years until the game imploded. Then we scattered. Infinity was the next big thing. That got two of us and another from the store I frequented that wasn’t apart of the Warmachine group. Then that dwindled and all that’s left is GW.
We tried converting some of the 40k players to Infinity. They all like the look, like the idea, see the elaborate tables we cook up, and show enthusiasm for the game. None of them pull the trigger. There’s never a right time. It’s like trying to pull Artax out of the mud.
I understand both sides because I had a friend try to get me into Otherside and iirc that game doesn’t even exist anymore.
OPR skirmish is the easiest to talk people into since it uses GW minis they probably already own. All it needs is people reading the free rules and making a list. It feels like a proper skirmish game instead of the strange hero battle game modern Kill Team is. This is doable if a store has a Discord or something to do barebones meetup planning even with strangers.
A little more difficult, but doable if you’ve eased people into alternate ideas is getting people to agree to an older 40k edition. It requires buying or, uh, finding the rules and codexes, but it sidesteps the problem of constant rules changes. My preference is 3e (I have very little personal interest in Primaris marines) which is much less bloated than modern armies of the same points value.
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You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.
When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn’t really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.
Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.
OR
DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.
People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.
Nope.
Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.
They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.
Don’t forget the thousands of dollars in tools you’ll be compelled to buy and never being able to throw out even the small piece of wood because “you might need it someday”.
“It’s made outta offcuts.”
quietly pushes entire bespoke server rack under bed
Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.
I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.
We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.
shia_labeouf_slowclap.gif
After having worked with wood and son of a cabinet maker, I crave the strength and certainly of steel. I got into welding in a big way.some aluminium, but mostly steel. It’s such a wonderful material. Cut it, weld it, grind it, bam, new and bigger steel. You can’t make a piece of wood bigger.
LOL I learned so much from this, thank you.
And also: Fume and dust extraction is no joke!!
I just tell everyone where all the mistakes were.
… but you’ll know
My partner complimented my new shelf recently. Then she looked closer and realised it was a few boards stacked up on the cheapest engineering bricks I could find but rotated so the holes are not visible.
Only got a folding hand saw which I suspect isn’t the best for making straight cuts, I had considered cutting up a railway sleeper for blocks instead of the bricks. Bricks worked out cheaper. Wooden blocks could look nice though.
Just cut pieces of wood big enough to cover the front of the bricks, and glue them on. Wood on the front, and brick on the side, will look like a cool design choice.
My foray into woodworking began and ended with figuring “sheesh, custom picture frames are so expensive, how hard could it be?!”…
By the end of that experience, nothing felt real anymore. Every foolishly pure mathematical concept, every platonic ideal - shameful indulgences of the young and weak. Our grand edifices of knowledge, little more than piles of tattered rags with which we clothe our nakedness, arrogant and hubristic in our vulgar conceits.
Don’t do it y’all. That abyss gazes back.
You need to conjure the ancient dark magics of woodworkers long past.
I shudder to imagine such might. Utter your shriveled curses to the unwary, fiend, not to me!
Underappreciated comment of the thread.
That’s my dream, except I want to complicate it by building guitars. So it actually has to work, not just look like it might.
I can’t build a guitar. I can build a guitar-shaped object. But I cannot build a guitar.
Photosensitive polymer resin is nasty stuff, and stereolithography 3D printing requires a lot more safety considerations than FDM printing does! No regrets though, it’s still a lot of fun
My boss pushed us to research and acquire a resin printer a couple years ago. My coworker pushed the high-budget Form Labs direction due to his poor experience with resin printing in college. I had zero experience with resin (mostly only used Prusa FDM at that time) and pushed toward the relatively low budget Anycubic Photon direction, from the standpoint of “this is really not what we need to be doing with our budget, and this doesn’t make sense for our use case, so I’ll try to waste less money.”
Now that my coworker’s been gone for over a year, my boss thinks no one uses it because we don’t know how. I know how, but FDM is just so much more approachable. I can swap filaments, click print, and walk away in about two minutes and trust that I’ll come back to a usable part.
Changing out resin is its own special hell, and good luck if you have a print fail and have to clean off the bottom of the tray. I didn’t get to a point of trusting prints to finish. Even when it does finish, you still have to wash and cure, and every part I ever made in resin seemed to be dimensionally unstable. Even the sample parts a Form Labs rep sent us were badly warped in shipping. The Photon hasn’t been used in well over a year. CEO wants us to get rid of it, and I agree. Boss isn’t letting go.
Meanwhile we just got two P2S printers that are cranking out parts like a champ. I would rather take a leisurely stroll across Eastern Ukraine than print with resin ever again.
I absolutely hate gunk on my hands, so I stuck with FDM.
FWIW, resin is toxic and you need to wear gloves to handle it. So the gunk would never be on your hands.
- It’s always more expensive than I thought
- It’s always more physically demanding than I thought
- There’s never a local hobby/support group for it
… Sums up pretty much every hobby I have tried/am trying
There’s never a local hobby/support group for it This is the hardest part…
Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.
