UnPassive

@UnPassive@lemmy.world
4 Post – 93 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

"I'll vote for him again because he isn't like the other corrupt politicians"

-My dad

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Not sure how badly you want it back, but it is possible to restore. Non-sugically. Basically skin under tension causes Mitosis (skin cells dividing to make more skin) - think putting on weight, gaining muscle, getting pregnant, or ear gauges. You tug the skin long enough and eventually have your hoodie back. The results are surprisingly impressive. r/restoring_foreskin has a bunch of info

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Only thing historically significant about the 10 commandments is that the founding fathers didn't want them in classrooms

My first Pi got me into computing which led to my software career now. Won it from a YouTube giveaway and kept it a secret because I wasn't allowed to have a computer. Put retroPi on it and told my parents it was for gaming. Coded my first game in Python (from a tutorial). I once put it in a crayon box and used that as a portable handheld. Later. Made a janky arcade cabinet. Sad that my kids may need to use a different brand device. I have no love for public companies

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I'll list some hobbies at the end but for me, I struggled feeling motivated after work to do anything but eat and be entertained. It got pretty bad until I decided I needed to figure out something different. I thought I was just missing hobbies but even as I picked some hobbies up (usually on weekends) I wouldn't do them during the week.

Most of my issues revolved around stress (from work), turns out.

I still struggle with this so don't expect a magic solution, but what I found was that my job was actually a lot more stressful than I thought. To the point where I'd wake up in the night thinking about work problems that for sure weren't a big deal and that for sure wouldn't be solved half asleep. So now I try and be more productive at work to make sure I avoid deadlines getting tight, and towards the end of the day I make sure my tasks are simple, if possible. I also try and take lots of breaks and I check in with myself "am I relaxed right now?" "would a break make me more productive" - and I unfortunately found that media isn't a good break for me at work. Somehow the stress stays, while also adding in cravings for more dopamine-inducing activities. Good breaks for me include walking, actively listening to music, daydreaming, planning stuff (holidays, dinner, my upcoming evening, weekend), reading (pretty much anything), and learning new stuff (I'm studying Spanish and chess right now, recently learned all of my PLL algorithms on a Rubik's Cube). I'm a software engineer for context.

The largest stress benefit for me has been biking to work. Yeah, I almost get ran over sometimes which is scary (even with bike paths 90% of my route, you still gotta cross roads, and even with a walk sign cars still won't see you), but driving during rush hour is stressful (there are studies on this but I'm too lazy to link any). Biking is just fun. I even bike in winter (studded tires and poggies/bar mits). Since not everyone has the luxury of biking, exercising immediately after work is something to consider. It for sure helps me separate work from home. There's plenty of studies on exercise lowering stress.

And if your job isn't too stressful, there's another issues with not committing to hobbies... For me, it was that I was/am addicted to media. Once I get started with some dinner and YouTube, it's hard not to lose a couple hours. Best advice for easing out of it is audiobooks make it easy after eating to do chores/walk/not get more food. But other than audiobooks, avoid consuming media while eating. Also avoid media served by an algorithm. It's so easy to watch a great video, and refresh the recommendations to look for another. Then you're watching sub-par videos just hoping for a good one... Wasting tons of time. I use an extension to hide video recommendations. I can still search, and browse my subscriptions, but it saves me a lot of time (extension is called unhook I believe).

My username is actually centered around the idea that the more passive an activity, the less valuable it is to you. I personally want more active hobbies in my life. It is weird to me that so many fulfilling hobbies exist, but I regularly waste evenings on YouTube...

If you can have low stress and minimal cravings for YT/Netflix, here's some hobbies:

  • Get a dog (huge commitment, consider a cat if you're too busy) but mine forces me on 3 walks a day, and I've love training her
  • Learn something on your bucket list (I mentioned Rubik's cubes, chess, and Spanish already), cooking has been mentioned by others
  • I enjoy free diving (diving with goggles, but you hold your breath instead of scuba). I enjoy training my breath hold, and everyone thinks I drowned when I first go underwater at a lake or something (I can only dive for around 40 seconds but that impresses people (this includes swimming)). I can also dive pretty deep which is fun. It's also a bit surreal to be deep underwater with good vision and be comfortable
  • I recently dipped my toes into making music, I have a guitar, trombone, and someday I'd like to learn piano
  • Having/riding a motorcycle is a great hobby. Seems like it wouldn't be, but in summer I'm often looking for excuses to go ride.
  • Bike commuting is great fun. Get some saddle bags to pick up groceries and enjoy the weather when you run out of eggs
  • Mountain biking was the easiest hobby for me to dive completely into. Spent loads of money, built my current hardtail part by part. I'm even thinking about traveling south to bike in the winter cause I miss it so much. I live in a place with good trails close to home. Easy for me to go riding before or after work.
  • Camping, Fishing, Backpacking, Hiking, Snowshoeing, Back-country skiing/snowboarding, all great fun. Make great weekend trips too. Go explore your state
  • Check out letterboxing. It's a bit like geocaching but no GPS, just clues/puzzles. My letterboxing journal always makes people ask questions
  • My wife and I like getting hotels in small towns nearby (within 2 hours). We'll walk the town, get food, and have a lot of free time to read or play board games, or other adult activities
  • Read. I try and read a book a month. I find that reading before bed helps me sleep WAY better. If I go to bed early and stay up late reading, I think I sleep better than if I went to bed somewhere in the middle without reading.
  • Write. I love writing. Sometimes don't know what to write about, but even typing out how I'm feeling today and what I'd like to get done - and then deleting it - lifts my mood
  • I'm into software, I run a homelab. Huge time suck. I love it.
  • Video games. Might seem super passive, but I think I actually play less than I want to. For sure different than watching YouTube. Some games are challenging even. I have a huge backlog. Tons of fun to play with friends. My wife and I just started Baulders Gate 3 together
  • Exercise can be great. I love running in good weather. Some friends of mine got big into cycling. My wife likes the gym. My favorite workouts are to run to the college track and then do body-weight exercises there (and practice my handstands) before running back. I also enjoy Yoga, but do a lot less than I'd like
  • Board games/Card games - I enjoy Magic, but the company has made it hard to be a fan (same for DND). Flesh and Blood has been fun, but I haven't played a lot of it. On the board game side; Starwars the deckbuilding game, chess, dominion, and cosmic encounters are all good. You'd be surprised how many people want to play board games. In the few game nights I've hosted we barely got to play anyone's games they brought.

Adventure is out there. Don't waste your youth. Some of these might not seem like ideal after work hobbies, but most are totally doable in an evening.

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Last weekend I talked my wife into trying Linux on her desktop on an extra SSD I had, she loves it. Loves that she can customize everything, says it's faster (especially boot time), we put it on her laptop last night

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At this point I just stopped buying chips. Feels like such a waste to fill the bag less than half way...

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Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable

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In my opinion, public transportation doesn't need to be profitable. Subsidized by taxes, like our freeways. Adds to the economy and is worth the investment

I got this one today on my work laptop - pretty surprising to me Microsoft pulls shenanigans like this without enormous backlash

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I was raised Mormon, am now atheist. Regret every conversation I had in high school about gay marriage. And evolution.

Science is different than peer reviewed science. The STI study has some big problems (especially moral problems) - one practical problem though is the hiv test in the study isn't accurate for some time (3 months I think) and that messes with their data and wasn't accounted for properly (some test candidates definitely had HIV before the study). Another huge oversight was that a freshly cut man isn't going to have sex for weeks while he heals, deceasing the chances of contracting HIV. Another sign that something is wrong is European countries that have less HIV than the USA. But even if it was guaranteed that you contact HIV 10% less often if circumcised, that's still not even close to a good enough benefit to justify the procedure.

The "data" on why circumcision is beneficial is mostly just cut men trying to justify why they're superior and is biased. The sensitivity being the same claims are silly. Studies done are controversial because measuring sensitivity is hard. A big red flag is reading testimants of adults who got cut - usually they say it was super painful while healing, then crazy sensitive, underwear was uncomfortable and they had trouble lasting during sex. But a couple years later and they'd lost sensitivity. Underwear feels fine, refactory period goes up. This is because of keratinization of the glans of the penis. Similar to a callous on skin tissue

I use an ad blocker and the empty space between information (presumably where ads should be) is hilariously large

They were scared of unmonitored access to the internet. And only up to T rated games were allowed, so for Halo I used to trade game cases with friends to hide what I owned. And since my parents were extremely Snoopy, I'd even switch my T rated games around so they thought I was just too lazy to match a game disk with it's case, and never get too suspicious.

Edit: Programming was allowed, just had to be on the shared computer in our living room where everyone could see what you were doing.

When I was leaving for college I bought a laptop and they made me keep it in the box until I left. It was honesty torture. I wanted to set it up and stuff but they insisted that our home computer would work fine...

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Cycling

I started biking to work after we moved closer and next thing I know I'm into mountain biking and have built 2 bikes

Crazy! I have a similar ish story. Girlfriend and I went to the bird refuge at night to smooch in the car and a truck pulls up behind us, after a minute we decide to leave and they follow. Very rural area. The truck passes and then stops in front of us, we go around and then it's like my life became a videogame. The truck passed again and this time stops more horizontal to block both lanes, I start to go around and they pull forward, I'm able to go around their other side. I had a shitty manual that could do 0 to 60 in like 40 seconds but I felt fast. A few 90 degree turns on the road. Quite a lot happened on the chase, they nearly rear ended me when I tried to not let them pass, turned around after they passed, turned around again later. Told my girlfriend to call the police but she was crying and screaming and didn't. And then they ran me off the road into a ditch. 2 guys get out of the truck, I get out of my camry and they're like "who the fuck are you?!!" I yelled it back at them. They said they're looking for some person who wasn't me. I called them a bunch of names. They towed me out of the ditch. I never told my parents because they were Mormon and I didn't want to get in trouble for going to the refuge with my girlfriend at night lol. It 100% doesn't feel like it really happened

It was literally a notification; made a sound and everything. Didn't go out of my way to see it. I'm not used to ads in my operating system so it was jarring. Surprised people accept it as normal

Check out France protests sometime

Bought halo MCC for my brother, very excited to coop those campaigns. Very sad no split screen

Most of us only know 5th grade math

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I use my steam deck docked as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) with a remote with a gyroscopic mouse and full keyboard on the back, and I love it. YouTube with ad block, jellyfin media server, and videogames

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Got one a few years back and I've been getting the emails that I'll lose my purchases if I don't make a meta account and I won't. Bye bye beatsaber. I'll wait for a better inside out steamvr headset in a couple generations

Forgot to mention that slow-living or whatever you want to call it is valuable. Just spend a while doing nothing. Thinking. Chatting with a friend. Be bored. You'll probably knock out some chores, and get really motivated to do something big (humans do not like being bored)

Edit: gonna put more hobbies I think of here

  • Skateboarding/longboarding, roller blading - pretty meditative once you get into the flow
  • kayaking, paddle boarding, canoeing - as a kid I went on a week long 100 mile canoe trip that I think heavily impacted my life. I've always wanted to do something similar again, but not been able to make it work yet
  • I tried paragliding, but it wasn't as fun as mountain biking for me so I dropped it
  • I've had a lot of fun making dumb games and publishing them for the web, hosting that on GitHub, and using netlify to make it into a website. I bought some domain names for family members so that's where I put them. I want to spend more time with Godot to get better at making games
  • Engage in the communities of the hobbies you enjoy - you'll learn and make connections and share your own insights
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IMO the Windows Store is why valve has invested heavily into gaming on Linux. Windows Store could easily become a huge Steam Store competitor if Microsoft were an effective company. So Valve wants to enable devices that don't run Windows. Numerous other benefits for something like the Steam Deck as well, but I'd bet we see another Steam Machine someday - probably after they convince more companies to support Linux

I've also enjoyed CalyxOS on my pixel

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AMD GPUs have open source linux drivers meaning no extra configuration is needed on install. Some linux distros make setting up Nvidia really easy, but I ran into problems years ago. I think Nvidia is theoretically releasing open source drivers soon though

It's a work laptop We're a small company - I still feel like calling our IT terrible instead of Microsoft is misguided though

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  1. Mountain bike - on my second bike now, my favorite hobby and form of exercise, excuse to get in nature with my dog, explored a lot of my state because of it.

  2. Kobo e-reader. The night light is amazing, I used to use a neck light for night reading to not wake my wife but this is way better. Easier to travel. The dyslexic font helps my dyslexic ass like 10% too which makes a huge difference in me reading more.

  3. My first raspberry pi in Jr high led to a career in software. Still love pis, and have even more toys now

I'm imagining that one Silicon Valley episode

You could think of it as the companies fault, you can combat Microsoft if you have the know how, but personally I feel like Microsoft is abusing their power by strongly coercing users to use their services.

Never has there been a company that I wanted to love so badly, but hate. I even proxy my pauper commander decks these days. In the magic world, so many bad decisions. 30 year anniversary cost $1k for non-legal cards. Power creep and complexity creep are frustrating. Huge inflation. Bad story. Bad quality cards. It could all be so much better, but they focus only on short term profit instead of the player experience

I pedal bike to work and have close calls weekly with cars. Couple months ago I was in the bike path and a car came next to me and matched my speed and then came into the bike lane and drove me into the grass. I thought they were doing it on purpose but they were just confused following their GPS and drifted... Similar stories on my motorcycle. Lane splitting is legal where I live but people still yell at me saying I can't "cut in line" and I had one lady drive on the sidewalk and around me onto the crosswalk (at a red light) saying "if you can cut then so can I." It was kinda terrifying.

Where I live, everyone drives and everyone hates driving and hates other drivers, but they hate bikes and motorcycles more because out grouping or something. Only way to stay alive is to pretend you're invisible and not piss car drivers off.

Midwest USA if curious

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Years ago I finally nuked my Windows dual boot after one of their updates broke it. I still remember my laptop booting into Windows and being so confused. Haven't missed it once.

Nuclear power plant waste doesn't significantly contribute to climate change or pollution? So it's "clean" by most metrics.

Nuclear waste can generally be stored on-site without issue. Reprocessing would be nice, but not even necessary. Just because you don't understand the problem, doesn't mean others are "religiously defending a technology."

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Twice after a windows update I lost my bootloader menu and my laptop would boot straight into Windows. After the second time I just removed Windows. Some investigation revealed that "Windows does not support dual booting" which I believe translates to "we will ocationally cause issues that a beginner would struggle to fix in the hopes of them staying on Windows." Just a theory. Separate drives for sure if you can. No idea if they still do this as it's been years since I dual booted

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You could pick up a used laptop for pretty cheap. Low TDP, leagues ahead of a Pi

I don't really see how the thought experiment differs from Christianity...

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Guess it depends on the denomination but mine had mandatory missions :P

Yeah definitely some lasting consequence. I'm a pretty good liar, and extremely skilled at manipulating people to calm down. Sometimes I wish I stood my ground better and let there be friction between me and others. Instead I sort of morph into whatever they need, sometimes abandoning my core principals. It came in handy to save my siblings' asses a few times though. But literally just yesterday my wife was video calling her mom and showed her my brand new ear piercings (which I've wanted my whole life, but is a huge no no for men in Mormon circles, so it'll be a big deal when my side of the family finds out) - anyway, I wanna stretch/gauge them because I like the look of small tunnels, so my mother in law says, "they look so nice, but you won't gauge them, right?" And I'm like "no of course not" because I know it's probably a bit shocking to her that I pierced them at all. But I wish I instead said something non-commital like "not now, but I love the look of small gauges"

Overall, the biggest effect is probably the distance I feel towards my parents lol

If your curious, I'd describe myself as quite chill, but very reserved. I wouldn't even say I was constantly on guard... I was just a good liar. Got caught for very few things. I have a lot of siblings though (10), so I doubt I'd have had as much opportunity if I were an only child or something

I can't see without a helmet when the wind picks up! Wife and I have bluetooth comms that make riding way more fun