What’s something you love, and love describing or explaining to people who are new to that interest, hobby, or activity?
Programming! It’s currently a hobby of mine (and has been for over 10 years) that I hope to make into a career of mine. I do some minor scripting and whatnot at work (and thankfully, I get paid at a much higher rate for the time that I’m doing that), but its not the “main” thing I do.
I live in a world of many unanswered questions, full of illogical conclusions and actions. But with programming, it is all about logic - the computer does exactly what you tell it to do, and I find a ton of beauty in that logic and how that logic makes sense to me. It doesn’t always make sense at the first pass, but at the end of the day, its always something that I (or someone above me) told the computer to do incorrectly. There’s always an answer!
Whereas the rest of my life, I hardly ever have the power to get my own answers, and others surely often don’t have an answer for me either.
I love to talk about programming! especially about optimizations, and you can come up with so many analogies and stuff.
glad it’s my career, good luck for you!
It’s honestly less about the particular thing than noticing that they’re receptive and actually do want to hear what I have to say. The last thing I want is to just like bore someone with something I find fascinating. I’m sure I end up doing this anyway sometimes, but I try to be aware enough to notice before going full on ramble mode.
People seem suuuper receptive to like counter-cultural and anti-authoritarian ideas and generally to anything that transcends preconception. They like honesty and realness that can exist comfortably without kissing ass or being a jerk. Just like expressing the idea that art and joy can have premacy over toil and misery seems to be sort of a revelation for some people. That you can just like, breathe, and not focus on making sure every little thing is just so.
Also like, music. But none of that is really explaining things to people, it’s just talking through stuff organically and in the process kind of giving them the freedom to realize what they usually already know. Music is a good example of this because most humans understand music quite intimately, they just don’t have the language of music theory to break down what’s going on and discuss it. But even with a little bit of that, you can see them light up with what they already know.
I tend to play information-focused characters on RP servers, and a lot of what I do comes down to spying, questioning, interrogation, and organizing others to collect information. When you ask someone if they saw anything useful, the answer you usually get will be no. If you ask if they can tell you anything about a person, they’ll usually say they didn’t get a very good look.
But if you ask if they had a hat on, they’ll know. If you ask what color their shirt was or if they were wearing a jacket, they’ll know. Same with piercings, tattoos, odd sayings or personal quirks, whether they were smoking, etc. The reality is that people know all kinds of things that they assume aren’t relevant. But if you ask the right questions, you can uncover loads of information.
The same is true of music, of art, of sooo many things. The barrier for entry isn’t that people don’t have the tools, it’s that they don’t recognize the tools they have. If I can point to a tool that’s already in someone’s hand, that feels pretty awesome.
Okay, so maybe this tangent is illustrative in more ways than one.
Btw, I use Arch.
Game Emulation,
Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.
But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don’t think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn’t quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he’d been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.
So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.
I got into pizza dough over covid. I currently have three different 00 flours. It’s really fun to try different things though, how long you do each thing, how much of what goes in, pizza stones, baking trays, etc. I’m not at my perfect pizza yet but definitely like what I’m making.
I don’t really like to explain stuff to other people because I often repeat myself too much and I don’t like to evangelize/lecture people. However, when I have to explain why I do things certain way it is usually about the following:
- FOSS + self hosting
- Retro console moding
- Mechanical Keyboards
- Board games
- Using the steam deck as a computer/emulation station
- Vegetarianism / Plant based recipes
Really wish I could follow an individual user on Lemmy! Hey, do you have a good N-bean chili recipe?
We usually make chili using Impossible ground meat. If you are okay with that I do have a recipe if you are interested!
I can get pretty deep into cannabis and the wide range of herbal vaporizers. I’m also in the long term process of making a board game for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and much of that show is at a forefront of my mind at any given time.
Otherwise, or rather, overall, I just am pretty decent at giving overviews. Making a PC build easy, some aspect of technology with repeatable steps, picking up on small details that can be utilized in some way (meta gaming etc). I was part of a lot of communities that allowed for an expiation and it was usually met with positive end results, which more than anything is what’s important about whatever it is I’m sharing.
Ironically the only thing of mine that I don’t like going into extreme detail on is audio related stuff. I’m a production technician for live events so I can run lighting, audio, video, the works, and I know my way around it well. But talking about signal chains or DMX sets is just kind of sterile. I like more brief tidbits, such as properly wrapping a cable to make your life easier, and things like letting it sit in the sun for 30-60mins before wrapping it.
Similarly, music production because it’s just so far beyond the basic level. Unlike a computer where for some reason a GPU and CPU feel simple to describe (I suppose because they are an object), describing what a Saw Wave or what an LFO does to it is less tangible and tends to be met with a less engaging response. I think in this case it’s in part the people it’s been with, because I really enjoy learning this sort of thing from YouTube and many of those creators feel like a shoot-the-shit format where you’re just hanging out and chatting about this cool noise.
It’s not necessarily something that I ‘love explaining to others’. However, academic biblical scholarship has been an interest and endeavor of mine for about thirty years. Luckily and thankfully, I’ve found my self in the center of this unique niche of interested parties with /r/AcademicBiblical and /r/AskBibleScholars.
Think about this for a moment. The biblical texts have had the most influence on western society, and arguably all other societies, for hundreds of years.
Wouldn’t you want to know what these texts are saying?
They aren’t saying what you think they are saying.
If you’ve had no experience with these texts, then you have many years of reading ahead of you.
It is incredibly daunting to know how little most people do not know about this subject. And, at the same time, shape our world based on misinterpretations and/or misunderstandings of this vast library of literature.
It’s kind of wild how much more Dante and Milton seem to have influenced the sort of now fairly standard apocryphal interpretations of the general shape of Abrahamic cosmology than the actual canon. Or like, maybe even Islam, honestly, or like Zoroastrianism. The hellfire and brimstone stuff really seems to come from somewhere else.
Also I’d like to give Christians who gripe about plural they a lesson on the etymology of Elohim.
The hellfire and brimstone stuff really seems to come from somewhere else.
Out of someone’s ass is my guess.
Yeah maybe, but whose ass? Zoroaster’s? Hinduism’s? Ideas that match hell and an evil opponent for a good god are all over the place.
I’m inclined to lean in the direction of some sort of proto-Hindu-Zoroastrian cosmology in the long run. Ahura Mazda looks a lot like the kind of fighty version of YHVH that modern Christians seem to like, with a nice clear villain and a power struggle in place of a confusing omnipotent being with a combative frenemy pushing its boundaries.
But like, maybe by way of some mostly suppressed gnostic tradition that leaks out through late medieval writings? It’s not hard to see the lower emanations in the 2nd and 3rd century gnostic stuff turning into the more kind of blunt angels and devils motif we associate with Christianity. Especially in the context of traditions like Mancheanism popping up around the same time and drawing parallels.
But like really who in America who votes based on the one particular line in Leviticus that they latch onto knows any of that? I’m guessing basically nobody.
but whose ass?
Someone (or some group) who wanted control over people. All religious literature is rife with politics.
I’ve read everything else that you’ve stated, and I’m aware of these theories, but in the end I lean toward the simpler explanation above.
Just look at the world today. Same type of shit. Most billionaires make their fortunes off the backs of the populace. And they use all of the well-known tactics to do so. Coming up with stories (propaganda) to influence minds across the board.
However, when you take the effort to drill down into the subject matter at hand you’ll find a ‘small still voice’ which points at the ineffable.
The ineffable is what I embrace.
I agree! There’s some potentially useful stuff in some aspects of various religions, but for me the value is in looking at the moon rather than the finger that points at it. The rest are just tools to bring me where I’m trying to get, which is just basically to chill out and be at peace with where I am.
But I definitely do find that the parts that helped point that out were more in tune with zen than the more ritualistic and mythological approach. Also psychedelics, in a sort of roundabout way.
I do have a big soft spot for some of the Greek pantheon, though.
A Catholic friend of mine studied classics at uni, so learned Greek and Latin, and they’ve been jazzed at how much nuance or alternative interpretations they’ve found when reading the Bible in Koine Greek.
Are you a Christian? I’m guessing probably yeah, but like you say, the biblical texts have had a huge influence on Western society, so understanding them is useful context for anyone. What got you started on this kind of biblical study - most people I know who do this kind of study are in training for an eventual position within their church
Are you a Christian?
My parents tried to raise me to become one, but that failed. No, I am not a Christian.
What got you started on this kind of biblical study(?)
Many years of spiritual abuse and indoctrination.
Lately I’ve found myself info dumping on people about some tangentially related subjects that I’ve been reading about over the last decade:
- Loss of the ‘third place’
- Privatisation of public space.
- Decimation of the high street & how removing, not increasing parking spaces will be instrumental in reviving it
- How out of town retail shopping parks contributed to the obesity epidemic.
- Why the UK has seemingly unique weather compared to it’s neighbours
Sounds like you have been watching bit just bikes
The lore of the primary setting for my novels. It can get really info dumpy really quickly though…
This post made me realize my interest in homelab stuff isn’t particularly interesting lol. As for niche stuff, I like old Minecraft trivia despite not really being in love with the modern game anymore.
I love map-making. Usually, fantasy maps. ill often spend hours a night working on a project, I don’t sell them or put them on social media or have some kind of fantasy world I’m making them for, I just think they’re neat.
Basically any interest of mine, doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll easily end up rambling on and on about it if the conversation goes there. I tend to end up rambling to people I know about geckos a lot, with varying degrees of interest on their part.
I love making hash! Will very easily go down the rabbit hole and have to pump the brakes so that I don’t overwhelm somebody 😂
What are your favorite mix-ins for hash? Besides the basic 2 ingredients.
Hash as the food? If yes, any ideas? Most of my hashes have been rather boring: [potato|boiled yucca], carrots, bell peppers, [meat|eggs and cheese].
Hahaha hash as in solventless hash rosin - but a good breakfast hash is nice too hahaha
Ah, got it. Sorry!
No worries! I wish you the best of luck on spicing you your hashes though!
dog training, all day every day.
I’ll take advantage, if you don’t mind. I need help specifically with obedience training.
I adopted my dog from the local rescue last year. She’s a two year old mixed breed, I’m thinking a rottweiler/bernese x golden retriever. As far as I can tell she’s had no formal training.
She’s an absolute doll and I love her to bits, but she’s as stubborn as a mule and when she’s committed to disobedience I can’t get her to focus on me. Do you have any tips on routines I could try with her, or any resources I could look at?
if she’s not paying attention to you, she’s telling you the distractions, duration, or distance are too much. i would start by using the name game in a quiet setting like your living room or whichever room in your home is most comfortable for her.
toss a treat on the ground right in front of you, let her eat it, and then say her name. wait until she looks at you, then mark the movement of her turning to look at you (some people use a clicker, some people use a marker-word like “yes!”), drop another treat, say her name, and wait for her to look at you again. the most important thing here is the timing. as soon as her eyes start to move in your direction, that’s what you want to mark.
once she’s got that down, you can start adding distractions. start very small. toss the treat a little further away from you at first, then maybe move to the other side of the room. wow! new place! new things to look at! we call this “proofing” the behavior. then you can move to another room. if she’s not reliably giving you the behavior you ask for, go back a step. she should be succeeding about 90% of the time before you move on.
these sessions should be short (5-10 minutes tops) and preferably multiple times a day. i typically train 3-4x a day on various skills, depending on what my goals are for any given dog. if she’s not responding to the treats, get better treats. my dogs tend to love string cheese and hotdogs the most, but every dog is going to be different.
here’s some fundamentals on clicker training which are really useful if it’s a new concept to you: https://www.clickertraining.com/whatis
I’m not a dog trainer, but when I was a kid I was the only one our rottweiler would listen to 100% of the time if I called him.
When you call her, are you like maybe somewhat anxious or uncertain that she’ll listen? I know it sounds like a catch 22, but I feel like when my parents called our dog they had like this anxious expectation that he would just go do what he wanted anyway. When I called him I felt, and he responded, as though he simply would come as I was expressing that he needed to.
But like, I also didn’t really care what he did in terms of dog stuff? Like, I wasn’t trying to get him to go a particular place all the time and I didn’t ask a hell of a lot, so I don’t think there were as many opportunities for waffling and confusion. My commands tended to just be like, come here or go to a specific person (because he’d ignore their calling), or go lay down.
Again, I’m not a dog trainer and the one here can certainly correct me if I’m way off, but for me it was mostly about confidence and not waffling, I think.
