Was violist (played the viola) for years. It’s similar to a violin just a bit bigger and deeper. Have a true love for it… But it’s expensive to maintain after a while because it’s good to keep up private lessons, the maintenance of the instrument, and then having to buy sheet music/music books for only playing one song, one passage… I miss it… not the most expensive hobby, but got that way for me cause I am a mom of four and married… SOOOO yeah
My older sister was a very accomplished viola player; she was playing for the all-state youth symphony orchestra (2nd chair?) when she was 16 or 17.
Then she went to BYU, got married, had fucked-if-I-know-how-many kids (it’s at least eight), and… Just doesn’t do anything with it anymore. It’s such a damn shame. I don’t know if she could have been a professional concert violist, but she could have done more with it than she did. I have a friend that was a luthier before he had an accident, so I have a very rough idea of what a good instrument costs, and what maintenance and repairs run–and the cost of a good bow–so I know that shit’s expensive. But still.
Yeah I get it. I was second chair for our highschool orchestra and symphonic orchestra. I also played pit orchestra for our plays. I definitely miss it… but I just don’t have time to play it like I would want… I also need to relearn to count and sight read
All I need is a soldering iron… well of course it needs to be digital! I also need a DMM for troubleshooting, as well an ociliscope. Guess I should also pick up a bench power supply so I don’t need to run everything through two leads of the DMM to find the amps. A couple years laterWell this is a surface mount issue, I need a reflow heat gun.
Music production. Started with a old pc and a pirated version of ableton. Now I bought my first top tier laptop and a license of ableton… and oh whats that around the corner? Is that a modular synth?
Oh boy I know exactly where my next spare money is going… first a syntakt and after that my eurorack journey will finally begin! And I will be broke and happy!
Before you get into physical modular synths, have you tried VCV Rack? It could exacerbate things for you, but it helped me avoid/delay falling into the rabbit hole of buying such hardware haha.
Came here to also say knitting! Which also lead to me spinning yarn, which lead to processing my own fleece/fibers, then dyeing….just waiting for the day I decide to buy sheep and goats
I enjoy VR games, but I can’t get into VR racing. I can’t see the wheel, the shifter so it’s hard to enjoy immersion when I had to fumbling to find a grip. I can’t see the control buttons so navigating the menu is a pain in the rear end.
Similarly I lose immersion when I’m going into a corner and I struggle to see the car on my inside. That’s why I want to try VR.
I don’t play with a shifter, just paddles on the wheel (driving F4 in iracing), so I don’t think I’d have any trouble with where the controls are. Maybe the Apple Vision Pro will end up being the best racing headset though and solve your problem.
As in fully functional animatronics with hapatic feedbacks, micro-hydrolics, and micro-heater elements? Oh, and whatthehay - synthetic voice? I’m guessing.
Most of them are high end silicone toys from Bad Dragon and Mr Hankey’s toys and hold their value quite well. I purchased around 80% of them on the used market and can turn around and sell them for about the same amount so the depreciation hit is minimal.
Photography ended up becoming a really expensive hobby for me. I started with a phone, and then realized I enjoyed doing wildlife photography, and you need a real camera with a decent zoom lens for that.
For me it’s photography. I originally bought a camera and lens second hand. Now over the past two years its become rather a lot of money. I bought a Nikon Z8 last month and it was definitely worth the money.
Instant (analog) photography and collecting pins and buttons. Turns out film is expensive and buying pins are expensive. Started out with friends giving me pins to stick on my bag and now I have close to hundred pins on my pin wall. At least they look pretty rad.
You should still go for it though! You can contact people on radio, you don’t need to necessarily have anyone local join you to achieve that. At most times of the day, there are hundreds of radio contacts being made. Now actually receiving those, and reaching those stations yourself as well in order to make a contact, that’s the challenge. And there are many different ways to achieve that with different gear on different frequencies in all sorts of different conditions. You can do much more than just a bit higher power walkie-talkie, you can reach the other side of the world if you go at it well :).
My main motivation was game coordination around our camp. We didn’t have decent phone coverage until recently and phones aren’t practical for it.
As for reaching and connecting to other people it is fun but I don’t want to do it alone. It is better to have someone to share this hobby. I am homebrewer and my friends can at least enjoy my beer. This wouldn’t bring that enjoyment.
One option is to see if there’s any GMRS repeaters, and especially any repeater groups, in your area. The license is cheap and you can still go 50w with it, but it’s not as popular as the HAM bands. There’s a few really good, but simple enough, mobile stations. Pick up a better antenna (height is king!), and you’ll be able to listen & talk with the locals.
I’m in the beginnings…and yes, with two Baofeng handhelds lol. Then I got a little SDR kit for receiving. Of course I also needed some cable adapters and ferrite cores, while I was at it. Oh, and the ARRL license manual to study for my technician license (I knew nothing about amateur radio prior to this rabbit hole, so it was actually really interesting to read)
Was supposed to have my technician license already, but life got a little chaotic. Was passing all the practice exams easy and just needed to sign up for the real exam. Hoping to get it done soon, but I have to brush back up a little. Then I’m hoping to move quickly to my general class, while the basics are still fresh.
Even started learning morse code and was getting better at it. Had the alphabet and numbers, could read it just fine, but the listening is what’s hard… but still kinda fun. All the Q-codes and slang are what I think will take the longest if I really start getting into CW, but I know that’ll be time/experience more than anything
But for now, I just listen-in on my SDR around my area when I can, and have maybe looked into how to grab some NOAA satellite images lol
So yeah, I can see this becoming a bit of a thing for me, because I keep learning more and more, and it all just seems so cool to me. Using the ionosphere to propagate, tropospheric ducting, or even using freaking meteor scatter! So much cooler than I ever thought when I knew nothing
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