The technical part is probably easier than the content moderation.

Take a look at Gadot 4. As a beginner you can think of it like an open source unity. But they just had a major update and seems to make a lot of the tedious aspects of game dev and streamlining them. Everything is an object which is really nice and they have a scripting language based on python. Easy to read and write

Python with PyGame can be quite a good start. And if you're just trying to build something for fun maybe use free assets from the internet.

I reccomend trying out GB studio. It makes gameboy games and comes as one binary file. Not too crazy to learn. I liked the music player thing.

I'm a hobbyist game dev also. Main advice would be that yes it is a lot of work and you may suck at everything, but the only way to get any better is to get started.

Pick an engine, it really doesn't matter which for the most part (I used to use Unity and recently switched to Godot, the way people evangelise the latter can be a bit offputting but as an objective user of both I can say they've got pros and cons like anything else). The exception being if you want to make a very specific kind of game like visual novels for example, then you'd be best served learning Ren'Py since that's what the engine is for.

Other than that, get something installed and hunt down some tutorials for it. Doesn't matter if they're irrelevant to what you hope you'll one day make, you're just trying to learn the basics here. Take what you learn in tutorials, and modify it in some way, that helps things sink in better and gives you more understanding about what your code (or your blender animation, or whatever) is actually doing and how it works.

TLDR: Just get stuck in!

p.s. there's a few general "gamedev" communities on here so far but I think the most active one is !gamedev@lemmy.blahaj.zone (direct link). Check out the pinned post in there with links to neighbours like engine-specific communities etc. Someone is also organising a Fediverse game jam for next month so that could be a good way to join a team and get started doing small tasks on a game that you wouldn't be able to make yourself yet.

I cringe watching someone struggling to turn the pedals when they are riding a multi geared bike.

Cycling is good for the knees, if you're not staining to turn the pedals. That's why gearing exists.

Use the gears to make the pedaling easier.

Wait a minute internet dude, did you make sure your seat was the right height? Having the seat at the right height I.e. fully extended legs, the down like an inch, really helped me out with the joint pain. I mention it because biking is generally considered a low impact activity. Knee surgery haver here, myself :')

My Hemorrhoids also disagree

Norwegian mountain also said no, but that hasn't stopped some Norwegians from riding uphill on a one-gear rusty bike.

Absolutely, im grateful every day I can pick up and play. One day my bones will be to weak to do much of anything yknow.

I agree, singing does that for me as well. Could be having a shit day but after choir things always seem a bit better

I know, there really is no barrier to music. And it's SO tactile or something, like there's no middle man to your own expression and emotion. You can play music with anything anywhere. And it feels so good, on a biological level, music is engraved into our DNA. It's the most fulfilling thing in my life and I think it's made me a better person. I'm sure the same can be said for many hobbies, music is just the one I chose I guess (:

Do you get to use it often? I'd imagine it's easy to forget how to sign if you don't keep practising, just like languages. Would be cool to learn it though!

how long did it take you to learn it?

that sounds wholesome! I'm going to try to learn it!

*That would be handy

lol, how it a party act?

I do not know how to live without a handbag.

Sounds like you have the most important part of the hobby down already, at least!

(see my reply to the other comment for various maybe-helpful links)

I think that's part of why I suggested it over knitting, you can do the complex projects with the counting and the actual effort OR you can just mindlessly crochet a long scarf or a bunch of cotton washclothes and end up with something practical.

Knitting is a lot slower and also less suitable for some of those small projects like washcloths so unless it's basic garter stitch you pretty much know you're gonna have to concentrate at least a little bit.

Well, I don't want to be That Person but technically I made a (long) video for total crochet beginners that I know quite a few people have used to great success. It's frontloaded with theory though and more for people like me who learn by understanding the "why" of what they're doing.

If you prefer to do it in shorter chunks or without all the tedious theory, which let's face it most people do, I've heard really good things about this Bella Coco series which has, um, slightly more views than mine 😅

There's a fairly new (aren't they all) crochet community over at !crochet@lemmy.ca (direct link) that seems very nice so far, I'm sure they'd love to help with your first attempts too!

How dare you, you dirty dirty child. You have a dirty, filthy mind. You should be...

Wait, what were we talking about?

Not OP, but I've asked myself this as well. I think it depends on where you live and what you want out of your language learning experience. If your goal is to learn something more useful in everyday life and you live in the southern US, Spanish is a great option. If you're from Canada, French is probably the most useful. German and Mandarin are useful in the business world, but the latter is significantly harder to learn. If you're not worried about maximizing the utility of what you learn, Norwegian is considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers, and let's be real, Norway is awesome.

It's more important that you stick with whatever you choose though. That's the part I've struggled with.

Spanish: it's the most return per effort.

Italian! Really close and easy to learn. It sounds so pleasant to hear.

Bit of an off-the-wall suggestion but I was having real trouble learning other languages mostly due to all the cases (and sometimes genders). So I started learning Esperanto, which admittedly is not the most practical language to know BUT it really helped me understand languages more in general. It's very simple to learn and easy for an English-speaker to pronounce, as well as having lots of recognisable words (the Esperanto for "yes" is "jes", which is pronounced "yes" lol)

Now that I've gone back to learning German I'm feeling much more confident about learning in general just because I got some of the grammar concepts from a much easier language. Might be worth a look if you've struggled before.

Esperanto is reckoned an easy pickup, has speakers globally, and will improve your default in most romance languages. The community is also quite nice, in my experience.

Oh I just meant cheap relative to like a grand piano or something. I don't mean to be insensitive, I'm doing pretty well financially, so to me $300 for decent quality but still entry level equipment isn't really a huge investment, especially for something I could return if it doesn't go well.

Also thinking about buying a 6" telescope like this bad boy right here

Again in the $300 range, entry level but still good value.

One lesson I've taken away from it is that playing good chess is much less about coming up with astonishing brilliant moves than I thought. It's more about making good decisions, positioning yourself well, and continuously applying pressure. If you keep doing that you will have good results most of the time. Great life lesson, hit me in the face like a ton of metaphors when I realized that.

Brain fog is real, definitely not talked about enough! One of the worst things to come out of being depressed and then being on SSRIs is that I struggle to read these days. I love reading but I don't have much brainpower left to take things in anymore

I've heard good things about Ender 3 printers and their clones if you're willing to tinker. AFAIK, the experience right out of the box isn't great, but they can be modded and upgraded over time and can be fairly capable.

That being said, those might still be too expensive depending on your geo. I seem to recall reading about reprap projects designed to be built as cheaply as possible using harvested components from things like old scanners and shit.

Check your local public library!

You might want to check out laser cutting. Same prize range and so much faster for board games. (basically works like a 2D lasercutter, most commonly used with wood or plexi glass).

Check out SDR dongles if you are on PC. I’d say it’s the most interesting $20 I’ve ever spent. It uses an HDTV tuner and you can use CubicSDR (or similar) to visually see all of the signals out there.

Absolutely! Another great thing about slow cookers is that they allow for time travel. When you get home from work, you're tired and can't be bothered to cook. Slow cookers let you borrow a few minutes of your morning, when you're awake and fresh, to do your evening cooking! Prepare it in the morning, set it off, and when you get back tired from a long day at work, all you have to do is dish up. Magic.

Someone else here mentioned AnimatedKnots.com and I second that recommendation. For gardening, I'd learn the bowline and the trucker's hitch. The Trucker's Hitch is what I use to cinch a bundle of cut branches together with twine. You can get it really tight and it's really dead simple. You can also use it anywhere you want to stretch a line and have it not sag. I've used it to lash things to the roof of a car, too.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=binding+knots&iax=images&ia=images there are so many wonderful choices! The simpler looking ones are usually the best. :) But they are hard to describe with text . . .

I learned how to tie a bowline one handed in boy scouts 25 years ago. I legitimately don't know how to tie a bowline with two hands.

Wait, there's people making money off of this shit‽ Like, my therapist and I work on mindfulness, but for me that just means being present in my body (not escaping into books/games/videos), considering my wants and needs, and listening to my emotions (even when they're unpleasant). Is there some other definition? I like talking to people about it, but I'll have to be more specific about what I mean in the future if there's someone out there selling something.

Interesting suggestion, I’ll have a look over the book. I mainly was referring to practicing meditation, doing things like gratitude lists, trying to maximize peace in my life on a daily basis versus maybe a lot of what other mindfulness practices teach. I will check out that book though, thanks for an alternate perspective.

Super valid argument. There are hundreds, if not thousands of videos on YouTube now showing you how to do it. However, if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, don’t risk it turning into a much more expensive maintenance item :)

The problem is sign language is not a universal language for some reason. I really feel that is one language that could be easily unified.

You should check out My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable and Get Your War On by David Rees.

He made a great comic strip that didn’t involve any drawing skill at all.

Sucking at something is the first step towards being kinda good at something. The more you write / draw, the better you'll get. Just keep practicing, take constructive feedback into account, and you'll start getting better and better.

(PS: Even if stickmen is all you can do, that's totally fine-- one of the most popular web comics of all time, xkcd, is almost entirely stickmen!)

Drawing gets a lot easier if you approach it as a muscle-memory skill like calisthenics or juggling - if you can write letters neatly, you can also learn to draw shapes you've practiced. The early exercises in books like Keys to Drawing (Dodson) or The Natural Way to Draw (Nicolaides) introduce ways to practice those skills, and then the rest is "find subjects you want to draw", which can be as simple as watching a video, pausing it, and quickly using that for the exercise. Do that for a few minutes a day for a few weeks and drawing skills will magically emerge.

There are tons of "how to draw tutorials" that don't explain any of this, speak about it conceptually, and tell you to go draw a thousand cubes, which will make you better at drawing...cubes. (There is some point to that kind of technical skill, but it's not the thing to invest in if you just want to use images to tell a story)

For writing, practice writing short stories using writing prompts (I normally use Reddit's /r/writingprompts but I'm trying to find an alternative here) and post them on the thread even if they suck. The commitment is low since it's a short story and you can afford to twist the story to match your writing style rather than the other way around. You'll also get votes and feedback from other members.

I started drawing as a kid, stopped for a while, and got back to it in my teens since I started doing a lot of writing then and wanted to visually depict what was happening as well. One thing that helped me a lot was to not look at other people's art or photographs but rather solely work with what you're visualizing in your mind and reiterate (with many many strokes) until the quality becomes acceptable. Use pencil and sketch with short and light lines. The point here is to develop your own intuition for perspective, splitting an object into basic shapes, and so forth.

I'll also add that it's extremely important to create your own style both for writing and drawing. Make your stuff look good, but always keep in mind that it's fine to have your own quirks and distinctions. E.g. if your lines are a bit sketchy or if your circles aren't perfect that can easily be part of your style.