it's really fun. my rec soccer/football team started playing 4:4 sepak takraw at practices (three teams with one getting to rest each match). that was the year we absolutely flattened the rest of the league.

This guy fucks

Riding my escooter through the local parks.

Would you mind talking a bit more about your approach to cooking? I take some satisfaction from being able to cook and sometimes from the feeling of improving my skill as a cook, but mostly it feels like a necessary chore.

What about playing FTL? :)

I'm with you on everything except gardening. It sounds appealing in the abstract, but then in the spring it turns into "ugh, too much to do" and "ugh, gotta get up early to water" in the summer.

Actually...what DID get you into gardening in the first place? Maybe there's something to it that I'm missing.

I love forests, especially when the terrain is rugged enough to straddle the line between hiking and freeclimbing.

For books, I like the feel of turning the pages by hand, but I won't begrudge anyone their e-reader!

I love this! There's a family in my neighborhood that has three cats, indoor/outdoor. My wife and I check to see if they're about basically every time we walk in the neighborhood. The cats will saunter up to us for pets most of the time :D

You can get to my redgifs easily enough if you're curious

Sure! But it's not particularly sophisticated. Other than staple recipes (like e.g. vegetables stews) I learned while growing up, when there's a product I was previously dependent on buying ready-made that gets enshittified by the food industry so much I'm unwilling to pay the full asking price, I start looking into the recipe for it and experiment to calibrate quality, time efficiency, and material cost to the exact tradeoff I consider best for me. Frozen pizza vs self made pizza being one example.

My joy in cooking, aside from the above optimization process I find fun, comes from knowning I pay less money to eat a better quality (and almost always less unhealthy) meal than I'd otherwise be able to. Once I have a recipe dialed in, it also requires virtually no thinking to get done, which is the opposite of my daily work; that's the "unwinding" for me. I can then also combine it with listening to some audiobook or TTRPG actual play / podcast.

Due to this depth-first approach my actual list of recipes isn't incredibly large, but it's enough to never get boring by now, at least.

Ayy you got the reference!

I started because I wanted to grow Thai holy basil which I was struggling to find in stores, extended to different varieties of kind of pricey hot peppers, then a few flowers to keep it looking nice. I've had a few bad seasons over the years that made me almost quit but at this point it would feel weird to not have a garden to take care of.

The maintenance can occasionally be a pain but it's sometimes nice to have a good reason to get up early. It only becomes too much work if I get greedy and take on too many plants at once. I try to keep it to a small and manageable amount, and choose plants that don't require a lot of care.

I love my time on my bicycle and my time spent fixing it up.

I really enjoy board games and ttrpgs

Also huge fan of getting the tar beaten out of me in my local kink scene, but that's not a hobby for everyone

Oh and the wife has gotten me hiking more with her, which has been good for us both

Arson.

I just got a DS and love it. Is a 3DS worth it also? Not sure how much different they really are

Cross stitch and jigsaw puzzles

Yeah, but idk if it'll reduce worries, it's more likely to make you work through them

this is all a great idea. its a shame the TV is in the lounge! (my wife loves it)

Playing guitar, riding a bike, reading a book...

But who am a kidding, when I play guitar i often plays chords off the internet to the background music from YouTube.
When i ride my bike i listen to podcasts.
And when I read a book, i do it on Kindle.

Sounds fun, but the people in the park may have a different opinion 😅

Thanks :) I really like that it has an immediate positive effect. I typically work on digital documents and long projects, so it's at most a couple times a year that my work has a tangible end result that I can leaf through. Litter picking gives immediate satisfaction :)

It reminds me of a scene in Iain Banks's sci-fi novel Use of Weapons:

Haha I live in Glasgow, so it's often not fully dry, and I have to turn bottles and cans upside down to let the rainwater pour out before bagging them.

Yeah, I enjoy feeling/smelling paper books, but ebooks win me over by their overwhelming convenience 😅

Cooking. Gardening.

"literally" everything else I do is online :)

dude thank you this is very cool! I've noticed the forest meeting the field being interesting but hadn't thought past that