There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
the fediverse.
weirdo
Yea, I wouldn’t want to be seen there either.
Yes. That could get embarrassing.
A truly sick and disturbed individual.
Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called “That Time I Found a Box” and got hooked on it. It’s a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.
The full version just came out on Steam - I’d recommend taking a look. It’s a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.
Sticky Mustache, is that you?
Uh, I don’t think so…
Okay, there just was a review that had pretty much the same content you wrote :)
That reminds me, I need to write a review for the full version, thanks!
This was funny because I went back to see if the review I just read was Sticky Mustache, and it was actually pruwyben!
I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.
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Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It’s just such an iconic building design. There’s a documentary out now on them, but I’ve been fascinated for almost a decade now.
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Meshtastic
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John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.
Meshtastic
If someone could find an extra 8 hours a week, I would so make this one of my hobbies.
What do you need 8 extra hours for? Affording the 8 other nodes you buy after your first one?
My experience with DIY home networking and self-hosting has been “This is going to eat up your weekend if you want it to work as intended”.
Ah, well the good thing is its pretty easy to set up. Most nodes are already flashed with recent enough firmware, so you just attach antennas, connect to your phone, do some quick setup for your region and go for a walk.
Then you realize you want a node that stays at home.
Then you want one on your car.
And reachable from work.
Then you see that hill in the distance and think “that’d be a good spot”.
Then you see the mountain on the horizon and wonder if you could hit a node up there.
Then all of a sudden you realize you’ve single handedly set up the infrastructure for your part of the state and are out more cash money than you told your partner and need a side hustle to afford to finish the second mesh you’re building out.
Oh god I feel seen.
(Meshcore rather than meshtastic but tomato tamato)
😮💨
You can buy premade nodes on AliExpress or Etsy that are easy to use and portable. Pair it to your phone and start war driving.
We started a meetup group in my local area. Someone put a node on the mountain now the entire city gets longfast. Its so cool.
!meshtastic@mander.xyz in case anyone else is interested!
Now that I live in a dense urban city, the number of nodes is wild.
I was going to ask if you were in my area, because we recently got some nodes on mountains, but I figure at this point if there’s a mountain, it’s got a node on it at this point.
I’ve been thinking of setting up a node at my local ski area, both for others to use, but also to make custom timing equipment that can send start and finish messages to the timing computer and keep us from having to haul wires up icy race courses all winter.
I’ve never actually set one up or used one yet though, so it’s probably a few years off.
It doesn’t take too long to set one up but hooking into the python can sometimes be a pain. Sounds like an excellent use case!
The amount of Pizza Hut buildings I’ve seen turned into Lions Den adult stores is too damn high. In second place, is the local wing place Jerk N Go.
Jerk ‘n Go sounds like the adult store. Just sayin’.
In my area every single one is a Mexican restaurant and I’m not mad about it.
Finding former Pizza Huts in North America.
Wait, I have a meme for this! (Forgive the lack of crop lol)
Pizza Hut in my hometown is still going. Do you go to operating Pizza Hut restaurants too?
Probably more in Edmonton, but this one came to mind. Pretty heavily modified.
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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 :)
You’re one in a million to me
i.e., there are approximately 1,400 people in China just like you.
Glad you found a happy cozy home. Appreciative that I can reply to you from heart of the old beast!
Relative to all the well known commercial social media platforms though aren’t we all into something here hardly anyone else knows about, whether 10 users or a few thousand?
nice!
What was your criteria?
I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)
I’ve tried telling a few friends about Lemmy but they give no fucks. Sad face yo
Lemmy is like internet jail. We got sent here for breaking the rules on Reddit, but now we’re institutionalised and it feels safe, even if there are some very odd people here with us - they’re mostly nice and just serving their time…
Not all of us…
I recently switched to CoMaps, performs so much better than OSMAnd on cheap hardware
I came to this thread to mention that I love editing OpenStreetMap, but then again, it really isn’t all that niche. It just isn’t talked about much.
I’m the only lemmy person in my circle too,
but OSM is getting some love from all kinds of people, and magic earth, and co-maps
I’m also the only meshtastic/ham.
and self-hoster.
These are all popular things, just not in my circles.
Whenever I’m going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.
It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don’t see that often. And at the same time, I’m increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there’s more to the EU than just Finland :)
I would guess it’s unlikely that all that many other people do the same.
There’s a lot of Robotech/Macross stuff out there, but I rarely see anyone post online about it, and I’ve never met anyone in person who even knows what it is.
I can’t even fanthom this but it was pretty popular in the 90’s. Maybe not as much anymore.
Never hear it spoken of, nor any online comments. We teens were hooked. A serious animated series about young adults?! We called it “japanimation”, maybe we just made that up, never heard the word elsewhere, but we had never heard the word “anime”.
Haven’t revisited as I’m afraid I’d be deeply disappointed.
Yeah, I called it Japanimation, too.
Oh you’re that old. I’m that old.
Ever watched Votoms ?
This looks amazing…I was literally thinking of the robotech books today because I heard some music that sounded like the background jazz and was thinking how Jack McKinney bio mentioned he played in fusion jazz bands! Also called it japanimation back then… how cool!!
I don’t recognize the name. I’ll have to watch it and see if it ignites ancient memories.
Man, the gamecube version of it was a lot of fun. Definitely not the most polished game, but it got me into the actual show.
and I’ve never met anyone in person who even knows what it is.
I guess it doesn’t exactly come up randomly in conversation.
But I intend to be the change I want to see in the world.
I usually mention it fairly soon after spending any amount of time with anyone. I’ve even got a nice big RDF roundel pin on my shoulder bag.
That is cool.
I’m really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name, but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.
That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.
Wait, I work in cleanrooms professionally. Fabricating my own semiconductors at home always seemed like a cool idea, but really out of reach. I kind of always wanted to keep old machines from the labs I worked at, but with such expensive things they never threw anything away (of course)!
Isn’t it prohibitively expensive and/or noisy? What type of projects do you do?
Have you seen the Sam Zeloof videos? He’s the main person I’ve seen actually build a chip in a garage.
He buys his wafers, which is critical. Given a hot furnace you could refine your own metallurgical silicon in a crucible, but cleaning it will be a whole thing. The machine needed would probably be based on spinning band distillation, which you could make in a pre-existing machine shop. To avoid toxic gases and explosion hazards - which are the two things chemists have told me not to mess with - you’d want to use SiCl4, which is a bit different from the standard approach which uses hydrogenated species. The Siemens process back to silicon and monocrystalline casting is all that’s left, and I wonder if they could be combined in a step if scalability isn’t a concern.
What type of projects do you do?
If only I had space for a workshop, so it’s all theoretical ATM.
Which machines are noisy? Polishers?
Ah, not to worry, even professionally it’s very common to buy your wafers. I am on mobile data right now so I’ll check out those videos later!
Basically, every single machine that needs a vacuum chamber - so almost all non-wet processes, like physical/chemical vapor deposition, reactive ion etching, scanning electron microscopy (although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).
Honestly maybe I’m just too used to the lab setting and am underestimating how much you can actually do without vacuum processing. I’ll take a look later: this all looked so out of the reach of an ordinary person that I never even considered following content creators who do this. Thank you!
High vacuums are tricky. The first high vacuums were achieved with mercury-based Sprengel pumps, but mercury isn’t available everywhere. Maybe you could make a small, slow turbomolecular pump work if it was mandatory (it’s all about the bearing) but it seems anything that needs sealing is going to struggle without either that or a massive petrochemical industry to supply the needed high-quality synthetic oils. If you’re doing technology all over again, I’d skip the vacuum tubes stage because of this.
If you can get away with a low vacuum, a piston-type pump with castor oil as the sealant will do. It seems like a low vacuum would work for at least some kinds of VD. Maybe you can help clear it up a bit.
(although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).
1 micron features is as ambitious as I’ve bothered to think about. For basic computing, like to run a CNC machine, that should do.
I should mention I met someone IRL who makes their own vacuum tubes. You can own your own pump, although I don’t know how it would stack up against what you’re used to.
This sounds like the entire premise behind the manga/anime Dr. Stone.
All humans on earth get turned to stone, and a young scientific supergenius teaches survivors how to essentially restart civilization from scratch.
It’s an absolute joy to watch. Maybe you’d dig it? :D
I’ll keep it in mind, although it might be that I know too much to enjoy it now. Kind of like anyone in IT watching TV hackers.
That’s fair, although to use that analogy, I hope it’d be like Mr. Robot as opposed to something like NCIS. 😉
I really like killing invasive plants. I think that’s probably my most niche passion. Like when I have some free time I’ll just go into the woods behind my house and cut down wisteria, ivy, Chinese holly… I just find it extremely satisfying idk. I love the idea that I’m clearing out space for native plants (and in turn native animals) to grow.
As a native plant lover and invasive plant hater, I support this and please don’t stop.
Are you anywhere near Connecticut? I have a 50-60 foot tree in my yard that’s been completely incased by a kudzu vine.
sharpens machete eagerly
That’s a cool idea. I also like illegal urban gardeners, so long as they aren’t planting invasives of course.
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t inspired me to give it go next spring:
I’m still on Second Life, which is a virtual world social platform. It has ~45,000 given active people on it, which is a piss squirt compared to other online platforms like MMOs and MMORPGs. But, nobody I know are into it save for about 5 people at least.
And I still somehow am bothering with Gaia Online which has even less users, from 1,500 ~ 4,400 on a good day and only know 2 friends on there.
Gaia Online still exists??
I was just thinking about second life the other day when someone brought up meta and its push for the ‘metaverse.’ I still remember the old pranks of making it rain dildos in someone’s area, or enclosing their head in a box.
Every so often I go through a phase:
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“Second Life was fun. Why did I stop using it?”
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Recreate account, log in.
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Watch FPS drop to a fraction with a lot of zeroes at the start of it as all the adverts struggle to load.
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“Oh, yeah. That was why.”
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Oh man, Second Life! I remember being absolutely wowed by it even though I never made an account. Its heyday was very much before I’d be able or brave enough to use real money in a virtual social game like that. (That wasn’t WoW lol)
I always fondly remember the lovable antics of the legendary troll: Esteban Winsmore!
Gaia Online reminds me a lot of Ragnarok, visually. That’s cool it’s still around! I remember hopping around F2P MMOs like crazy just trying to find something me and my long distance partner could interact together and vibe with. There were a lot of oddball ones that are shockingly still around!
Guix, there are dozens of us! Dozens!
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.
I’m right with you on both of those things. I just spent more time than is reasonable on a gatehouse over a chasm in foundry, and have a screaming antelope on the shelf next to me that I’m reasonably proud of.
I thin my friend group is on our 6th run of Kingdom Death. Such a great game
My wife loves Foundry for her virtual tabletop needs. All of her free time is spent playing games with friends from around the world in some kind of VTT. :)
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.
There are people who play solo TTRPGs and share logs, I think? Seems kind of similar
I’ve done it (just one session, nothing I want to share).
You mean you are actually role playing in a role playing game?
My my, you are strange.
I try to curate zines from around the world into local exhibitions, do hand translating alongside if need be, imitate the original paper best I can.
It’s kinda fun lol. That and kinda similarly, but I love♡ spending time on online software radio sites, just listening into different channels like I was there myself.
Death metal. I’m pretty clean cut and tat free so people are really taken aback when I tell them one of my favorite acts is called Cattle Decapitation.
My wife discovered “Powerwolf” recently. Not death metal, per say, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else whose heard of it. Worse still, this lead her down a rabbit hole to Dwarf Metal and the accursed song Diggy Diggy Hole which has bored its way into my brain.
The fact that Diggy Diggy Hole exists is such a wonderful thing. It was fun to watch the original, and then various evolutions of it. Its what the internet should be instead of the corporate, pay to play garbage we have ended up with.
Also Powerwolf and Wind Rose are just fun bands to listen to. Metal that doesn’t take itself too seriously of great.
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Thats epic haha.
Blind Guardian is another good one that makes songs inspired by fantasy. Their Wheel of Time album is pretty great. My personal favorite is Ride Into Obsession, which is sung from the point of view of one of the series’ main antagonists, though the last section of the eponymous “Wheel of Time” is also a banger.
Everytime anyone mentions Blind Guardian, Mirror Mirror starts playing in my head
Ah yes power metal is quite a thing in and of itself! Feel free to do whatever you want with this knowledge, but there’s also Goblin Metal, my most favorite being a band called Necrogoblikon. There’s no doubt some band singing in Tolkien Elvish to round out the trinity.
A search has given me the band Summoning (atmospheric black metal) whose theme is Middle Earth and they supposedly have passages in Elvish in their lyrics. I’m not in a spot to listen to them at the moment but it seems to be one I will definitely check.
A second place would be a band called Battlelore, seemingly.
Skin Thief probably my favorite Nekrogoblikon song
Lol, an ex introduced me to necrogoblikon. I was playing it for everybody who would listen for a few weeks afterwards.
Powerwolf is German Power-Metal and they’re not a bad band, I’ve heard lots of tracks from them. I’m into Sabaton which is another power-metal band who sing about historical subjects and figures. Oden Organ is another power-metal band.
The best part about Wind Rose is all of their songs are based off from Middle-Earth legendarium.
I mean, demons are a girls best friend
🎸
I got sent down a weird musical rabbit hole that started by letting my kid play some k-pop on my Spotify account. The AI DJ added “foreign music” to the list of tags I guess, and after finding a couple k-pop songs I liked, it bronched out into other genres & Landed on Melodic Mexican Metal, which I didn’t even know was a thing.
A buddy of mine and I used to play this game where one of us tried to think of an absurd metal concept and the other tried to find a band that actually fit that description. The game ended the day that the challenge was Maori folk metal and we discovered the band Alien Weaponry. At that point we pretty much decided that there must exist a rule similar to the internet’s rule 42 along the lines of “if there’s a genre of music, there exists a metal subgenre influenced by it.”
The one upside of The Algorithm. Wish that kind of Internet was the norm
Depending on what she’s into, there’s tons of fun power metal bands that I feel are kinda like Powerwolf. Gloryhammer and aramanthe are two that I really like that are in the same genre
I don’t know if I’ve heard one or both. Wife’s real love is for Ghost, but that’s hardly a “nobody else is into this” kind of band. I’ve definitely seen one of these in the Recommended For You feed
I love singing powerwolf at dive bar karaoke. Resurrection by erection always gets people going.
The only positive things I can say about Death and Black metal is that, the instrumentals go hard. It’s always the vocals that I can’t ever get used to.
I hit a similar wall back in high school but the instrumentation was just too good to stop listening. Now I love harsh vocals
