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.

Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.

Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.

Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are "into it".

I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.

• 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.

• Meshtastic

• John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 addicted to buying crappy antique and vintage shotguns and restoring them. Have so many now I can hardly justify another. I know, I'm ruining the antique value by stripping the metal and wood, but they're ~$150 items, not exactly rare.

Look at this $119 ($160 by the time I get it home) piece of crap!

https://www.guns.com/...

Never even heard of that brand, let alone the model. Bet I could make it dance and sing for a week's worth of evenings. It's a single-shot, can't be too fucked up. Probably.

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.

Guix, there are dozens of us! Dozens!

I like to analyse stickers stuck on traffic lights and road signs.

I plan on making an app someday where people can contribute to a database of stickers and compare the sticker culture of different regions.

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.

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 like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s

I work in a technology field and I'm interested in "not AI" stuff. It's a wild ride.

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.

I like to rescue dogs. I just rescued one last week that I'm taking to get groomed. He's sleeping in his crate right now. It's not ideal, as I live in a small house with two cats, three people, and two dogs. But holy shit is it rewarding. Most of the time they just scamper away, although blessedly it's usually to their home. Every once in a while you get a friend for a while, and someone else gets a friend for life. Dogs are lovely animals, and they exist as they do because of humans. It is our duty to take care of them.

This little guy needs to be housetrained and neutered but then he's off to live a life on the open road as my trucker friend's road companion. Or at least that's the plan!

Idk how to attach pictures on this app so you'll have to imagine a very sweet Yorkshire terrier who only has a few dreads left to snip! When I found him he had a dread that was legit like two feet long. Poor baby.

Dune was my go to scifi...now it's popular and I feel like a hipster.

My dad got me into hard scifi, d&d, Tolkien...if I feel like a hipster, can't imagine what he feels like.

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.

At school, I seem to be one of the very few people who use Linux so there's that

My favorite thing in the whole world is dropping LSD, and listening to obscure music or watching weird shit...

Dude I can't find ANYONE to hang out with me... I wave that flag in every social situation I find myself in. I really thought there would be more people into it.

Well, that or I'm completely unbearable to hang out with. If that's the case I just wish people would tell me.

One year on Spotify I was in the top I think 1% of lou reed listeners.

I’m an avid reader, and I like reading in original language. That has brought me in a variety of rabbit holes, including trying to learn Russian, then Japanese. Unfortunately, I forgot most of it. I also forgot most of my ancient Greek, but my Latin is still vaguely useful. My German and Spanish never reached the “I can read anything” level, that is a shame because I really want to read the Don Quixote and Goethe... But I’m proud to easily read in 3 languages, struggling in 2-3 others (depending how much dictionary use is allowed).

I haven’t been able to find a community of people that like this. Most like a specific culture and go deep into a single language.

I curate about 90 cartoons and almost as many indie animation channels to create a weekly block of Saturday morning cartoon programming for my wife and kid.

I edit it together in kdenlive from files on my media server, and we stream it to my mini projector each weekend. Been going over a year now, only missing weeks when we're traveling. I would love to be able to share it with a wider audience, but I'm still not sure how, given it's all pirated.

How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science

Edit since a few people asked: I don't have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:

• According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
  • Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
• Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
  • Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord's Game (the precursor to monopoly)
  • This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
• Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn't due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
  • Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
  • Tak is another example that's a lot easier to learn (because it doesn't require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
• TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don't think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players' life experience, and via the setting/world.
• Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
  • No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
  • Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.

There are probably plenty more links. I've been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I'm just starting out looking in to game design..

edit 2: also, a plug for !complexity@lemmy.world

I'm sure there's probably someone out there, but I'm really interested in cool border crossings and how they represent nations on each side. As much as I am no nationalist, I find those projections of strength, friendship, security, etc. all super interesting.

Oh, and fake/fantasy transit maps. Those are always fun to draw up in my spare time.

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.

"space music" -- I played Mass Effect 1 long ago and got hooked on the idea of musicians trying (and often failing) to make music for futuristic settings. This is like Star Trek episodes that reference classical music but some person has to predict what classical music will sound like in 2300. So they go with with future retro stuff and it just tickles me. So I seek out these sorts of experimental musical pre-trend predictions cause they're often hilarious.

The design and building of authorization policy systems. And crypto (as in cryptography as the word originally meant) but that one tends to be slightly more common.

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.

Pure math, finite automata, math rock, analog synthesis, knitting (in my demographic), video games from before we knew modern UI and game design... to be fair, none of these communities are non-existent, but they're pretty niche even among my weirdo friends.

One of the very first mud games, mud2 by Richard Bartle.

http://www.mudii.co.uk/

When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?

Maybe ambient funk, a sub genre of São Paulo's funk bruxaria that is a sub genre of Brazilian funk.

Bet all the views on this song are mine putting it on repeat

https://youtube.com/watch?v=G1UoyoFBb0o

There are like only 3 producers of this genre of music.

I tried to find an in-person calligraphy meetup around my area and mind you, I live in one of the bigger metro areas in the country. Couldn't find squat. Don't know if my Google Fu was weak or I just don't know what to actually look up but there's nothing specifically for calligraphy as far as I can tell. Also, I don't count online spaces.

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'm not into gaming. I think I'm the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn't. I don't really know why. I think it's a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

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 really like the souped up versions of mom cars that they make before there's a model year redesign.

My dream car is Mercedes R 63 AMG.

Also a big fan of Station Wagons, but that's not that rare among enthusiasts.

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.

I am the only person I know IRL that plays soulslikes and rougelikes. Even online, it seems like it's not a lot of people compared to other genres and series. Especially so on smaller places such as here.

There was a very short lived time when I was the top ranked player of Shootmania in the entire US, tho. Because I was the ONLY US player at the time lol

In real life, I know all couple people who are also interested in watches, but mostly nobody wears a watch at all anymore, let alone is interested in them as a hobby.

Also, fountain pens. I love pens. I love finding them at antique stores and restoring them. There's a little bit of a community here, not like there was on reddit though.

Calculators. I think I'm alone there. Vintage TI, HP, and modern Casio.

Staplers. Especially Ace.

As for games, probably Battlezone II. Such fun multi-player, now I have nobody to play with. So many good mods, and I can't get any of them to work in Mint. One reason I still have an XP machine.

This is a great topic! I have more than one kinda odd hobby.

I got a bunch of old newspaper comic strips of Mary Worth from 1947 and 1951 (almost two full years’ worth) that I’m putting into ~3”x12” poly bags so I can read them more easily. I need to put them into a book of some sort.

I also got some color Sunday strips from 1951 but they’re a crazy size so I may need to put those in a separate book.

I think they’re so cool though! The strips have ads on the back from the time period.

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'm into making a blog about tech and art. The tech side being about teaching normies how to circumvent censorship and be anonymous or private, how to escape algorithms, and a personalized resource wiki and archive.

The art side is about the intersection between tech and art, AI art appropriation, raves and social justice, and some light electronica blogging.

I know of no one else irl that is fascinated by this stuff, let alone both simultaneously. None of my artsy friends are into the tech stuff, and the one tech friend I have knows nothing about this stuff. It gets lonely as both a tech and art nerd but I'm so filled with passion making this from scratch. Also the landing page will pull from a collection of liminal spaces, political cartoons, Y2K imagery and have the logo rotating back and forth. I think its pretty cool, very rigorous and time consuming to build though.

it will be called zoracle.life

I'm back engineering an old UART to replace the lightbulb on a projector with a UV bulb so I can use it to print images in gelatin Carbon transfer photography. LOL even the normies using transparencies are a few.

Probably not rare in general but rare where I'm from. Racing, asphalt circle track stuff. Like NASCAR but much smaller, cheaper, and local tracks.

I'm building a decentralised file system.

It works, is FOSS and all.

I have a fair amount of things that are not exactly popular but its not like zero people are into it.

I play the gatcha game Monster Strike, which is pretty rare in the West.

It only has a Japanese version after they ended support for the English version like 10 years ago.

I don't know anyone else who likes horror films.

Skydiving. The number of people that sign up for the training is tiny and only about ten percent of them make it through ground school, all the tested jumps, the written test and the oral test to get licensed.

But, it is surprisingly addictive and fun.

It also is a small enough community that when I say my instructor died this summer, I bet that others funjumpers reading this knew him or of him.

I miss you Frog.

I love listening to political music in languages I dont speak, I have music saved from 74 languages (so far).

I might just join you in that game, it looks cool.

I've been playing starbound again and feels like the game has been abandoned for the last 10 years, but steam db says there's still about ~800 players so that's not so bad.

Not really.

I know there are others out there, but I sometimes feel like I am the only person under 50 who loves opera. I have 2 streaming services that I mostly use for watching opera.

I honestly feel like many people would like opera if they gave it a chance. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cross between Lord of the Rings and The Avengers, but without the 30-min CGI fights (no disrespect to those who like fight scenes, but i get bored). My son and I love Mozart's The Magic Flute; my wife's favourite is Bizet's Carmen.

I really like this one MUD. I’m super casual. I guess about 200 people play. Which in the grand scheme of things is almost no one.

Every few years I get a yearning to play through Daikatana.

The entire thing.

I’ve been doing this from before the community patch.

I dunno.

Freestyle GunZ (fgunz.net) its an old game but it checks out.

BallisticNG maybe. Its like wipeout but very few players on steam, maybe 100 concurrent.

A vehicle building/combat game called From The Depths is my current obsession, well past 1000 hours in it.

At a glance, Tlatoani: Aztec Cities looks like a Pharoah game type city builder. I'm into this, thanks for mentioning this game OP.

Currently I'm in a similarly small population of people who play Motorstorm 1 (Monument Valley), and Motorstorm Pacific Rift online.

They work with real PS3 consoles with just a DNS change or on RPCS3 emulator.

Motorstorm Arctic Edge on PSP or PPSSPP as well but it's played less often.

Apocalypse also kinda works but it's pretty broken in very annoying ways, and reverse engineering needs more work.

Motorstorm RC is also supported, but I don't play that one.

Can find the Motorstorm communities on Discord and they're mostly using PSRewired.

Here's an invite link for Motorstorm Online World: https://discord.gg/4sJPGDxhx

Making almost all of my food from whole ingredients.

The most processed ingredient that I would use is corn flour and such, or maybe cheese. I'm not gonna find wheat or whole dried corn and fire up a grindstone lol. But yeah everything is made from the whole ingredients to the greatest degree reasonable. An example I think everyone can relate to is ketchup ... If I want it I start with fresh tomatoes and a cutting board.

But yeah it's fun as hell for me - a wonderful blend of nerdy science & chemistry, plus that beautiful artistic side which allows me to be a rule-breaking creator.

Most people think its cuckoo that I ferment my own peppers for hot sauce, make tortillas from scratch, braise my meats for hours, cut and desiccate potatoes for fries, pickle various vegetable concoctions, make mustards, fry my own chips for nachos...

I love the hell out of the craft but many think I'm a little overboard. Fair enough. No family, kids, girlfriend, mostly a loner... I got time plus it's super fucking nerdy and process-driven (in many ways) if you lean into it that way!

I also developed some great "systems" so I can batch cook, and its become so routine after 5 years that I've slip-streamed it all into my daily puttering so its like hours of time overall, but minutes of actual work.

I like learning writing systems, but I only know 4 of them, and two of them just for playing original Pokemon games in Japanese.

Crypto, LLMs, and cars.

Yeah they're popular outside of Lemmy, but mentioning that your a fan of any of those things on here is a great way to get your inbox flooded with hate. Everybody on here hates those three things with a burning passion.

Only reason why I still have a reddit account is so that I can talk about these things without getting berated for my hobbies.

Oh yes, definitely ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

In some games, I tried to play the role of a black smith and was heavily into crafting items.

I tried to go all renewables in a nation game.

B. Fleischmann

... Half of the rhythm games I play I've either never run into anyone else or like 1-2 random kids playing them. I've legitimately never met another person playing CHRONO CIRCLE, and only 3-5 year olds playing DANCE aROUND. Could just be an issue with Round 1 exclusive games though... also new arcade games are typically not that popular outside of Japan

On unrelated note, a slight flex... Backpack Hero is an inventory management roguelike that has been in early access for a while & was regarded pretty highly. When the game first came out of early access, I remember 100%ing the game in like 2-3 days, and Steam achievements suggest that 0.0% others have had the end-game achievements. I still think about that sometimes... (They do have a community now I think)

I am super into jazz and the evolution of the form going back to it's genesis in New Orleans.

I'm particularly interested in the Free Jazz movement that is thought to have originated with Ornette Coleman in the 50's but the truth is Lenny Tristano and crew were pioneering it in the 40's. Also post-bop and jazz/rock fusion mostly from 50-80s. I'm a lover of Japanese Jazz as well because it has a particularly unique cultural identity - both highly creative and wild, yet highly composed and tight.

I carried the Jazz community on Lemmy for a year or so until I gave up and deleted my posts. We're different people.

I also detest vocal jazz. It is an abomination. Also Miles Davis is a clown - a brilliant bandleader but a piece of shit human and a slightly-better-than-middling trumpeter.

A long forgotten game called Fear Equation. I still enjoy firing it up for a run at least once a month or so. I don't think anyone has even been on it's forums for a long time.

Wold Newtonry

Thanks! I know not what you asked but I just picked up the game. I guess my thing is I love trying out indi games :)

Theologie studies

yoink

Sumo wrestling. OK, it definitely has more fans than "basically nobody," although it's not exactly popular in the west. I have noticed a couple of people talking about it on Mastodon, and there's a community at !sumo@lemmy.world.

A while ago I stumbled upon a TV broadcast one night when I couldn't sleep, and immediately found it interesting. Now I intentionally watch them live when I can, and otherwise catch replays the next day. A very exciting tournament just wrapped up a few days ago. The next one is in November.