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.

I do calligraphy. Sometimes i meet someone who knows someone who does calligraphy. But I’ve never met another person IRL that does calligraphy. And the particular style I like makes it even more rare.

Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.

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.

I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)

I code Csound. It’s still sort-of being maintained, but otherwise the community is super dead. It’s a shame because it’s very versatile and fun, but realistically there are quite a few more modern alternatives for coding sound synthesis these days.

yoink

I strap GoPros on to hand built FPV Freestyle quadcopters and make videos out of it. When I lived in Orlando there were a few of us doing it. Lately I know of 0 in my area.

I like retro programming, in particular Windows 2000.

Now I’m making a little 3D toy now that works with OpenGL on Windows with WGL and on X11 with GLX (also on Cygwin). No third party abstractions!

I want to keep adding backends, like DX 7, 9, Vulkan, WebGL, bare Linux KMS, and then stuff like screen space reflections, shadows, materials, ray tracing where possible, maybe get it running on a console or two too.

I make games that are a mix of physical and digital mediums. I found some other people doing similar stuff but nothing exactly the same. A lot of escape room creators use similar technologies though so I find myself talking to those people a lot.

I still love Garry’s Mod animations. Basically using stop-motion-style tools to make low-effort animations with familiar characters on Source engine maps.

They don’t fit the YouTube algorithm now though; creators can’t just put up a new animation every few weeks. It was at its best when the whole community was just posting stuff in leapfrog formation, rather than competing for their audience every day.

I work in a technology field and I’m interested in “not AI” stuff. It’s a wild ride.

Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).

I’m into combining these in interesting ways.

While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.

It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.

I really love Japanese jazz fusion. None of my friends understand my excitement about the EWI solos, they just say it sounds like Mario Kart music lol. I’m also into Buddhism, but dont have anyone else with this interest.