To avoid confusion, just say driver and passenger side.
I meant this to be a joke, but if you assume your bed drives forward toward the side with your pillows then it actually works. But if you read in bed with a reading pillow then I guess you probably want to drive your bed toward your feet side of the bed…
The skin is for mercenary - definitely my favorite character to play as! Excited to have some new stuff to unlock too. The artifacts seem pretty fun
Bought halo MCC for my brother, very excited to coop those campaigns. Very sad no split screen
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.
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.
My first raspberry pi in Jr high led to a career in software. Still love pis, and have even more toys now
I usually eat, drink, and watch Youtube until I’m tired and it makes things worse. Instead, play loud music and do chores, then exercise, then do something productive that you enjoy
If there’s any retro games you like, consider emulating!
Also, just wanted to say that I enjoy docking my deck to the TV and playing with a controller. Been playing Ark Survival Evolved with my brother all week
Brother and I are playing Ark Survival Evolved this week. Wanna actually beat the island finally
Kinda hesitant to share because the URL’s are the names of my family members (kinda a gift to them, kinda me just holding on to the domain names in case they want them someday). But they’re definitely not impressive. One of them I’d like to spend some time to make more fun, but as it is now, it’s mostly a gimmick (zombies walk towards you and you walk away - 2d, score is just how many seconds you can avoid getting touched). Pretty rewarding weekend project though, and you can easily show it off
Happy to share! And glad you found value in it
I can definitely relate to this. It seems like even a little time with a hobby has a large impact on my evening. Sometimes I’ll do something a little hard like studying Spanish for a few minutes, which leads to guitar and then chess and then I feel more accomplished come bed time. Some how makes me feel more recovered from work
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
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:
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.
YouTube I know some peer to peer stuff exists but I haven’t checked it out. Not sure how federation would come into play
I relate - the nights I have been motivated to do something else after work make me wonder if I’m actually beat, or just addicted to TV (Youtube for me). Always feel better and sleep better when I don’t search mindlessly for something to entertain me while snacking nonstop. Even video games make me feel more fulfilled but I’m still struggling to watch less youtube. About to eat breakfast and of course I wanna watch a video while I do lol
Also trying to use less Youtube. I have quite a few hobbies and projects but Youtube sucks up at least a couple hours of my day. Didn’t realize how addicted I was until I tried to use it less lol. Fortunately my recommended page has been way off lately
Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable
Yeah, there’s something called Emudeck, it makes setup super easy. Even comes with tools to add emulated games into your steam library to launch like a regular game.
There is this one funky caveat - the PlayStation and Switch games I emulate didn’t run very well, after some research I found out that lowering the CPU cores helps a ton. And it did, they run great for me now. To do that I had to install a Deck extension called Powertools - super easy to do because Emudeck came with a user interface to install plugins, Powertools included. Anyway, with Powertools you turn off this thing called SMT and then can lower the CPU cores. Some people think it’s actually a bug in emulation or Steam Deck drivers because using less cores shouldn’t have a big impact on performance so it may not be necessary in the future.
Tons of video examples on YouTube make the install and setup super easy. Highly reccomend setting emulation up, I’ve been playing through games I never finished as a kid and it’s been great. The convenience makes it awesome
We’re competative I suppose. Grew up playing and nothing ever replaced it. There’s probably other arcade games we’d enjoy but the closest we’ve come was the Tetris Effect - but we haven’t picked that up again for a while. Tricky is one of those games that has a huge skill difference between being good and actually practicing. It’s fun, a bit janky - maybe it’s just what we know. My brother has a couple high scores on my steam deck and writing this has inspired me to go spend some time trying to beat them lol
Still play SSX Tricky with my family via an emulator
Probably gonna have a season pass and battle royale mode