Ask Lemmy

What the consumables are. As a noob, you don't look at a metal bike cassette and think "that's going to wear out". Or at a metal 3d printer nozzle. Or at paint brushes (I keep ruining expensive ones! 😭).

• It's always more expensive than I thought
• It's always more physically demanding than I thought
• There's never a local hobby/support group for it

... Sums up pretty much every hobby I have tried/am trying

That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.

Typewriters - mostly just buying/using them, haven't delved too much into the actual restoration/cleaning part just yet:

• There's a Discord that has a lot of information and a nice, welcoming community.
• Typewriter Database is a very handy tool to help you identify your typewriter model and year based on the serial number.
• The case can get messed up depending what you clean with, so do your research well so that you don't accidentally strip the paint.
• Estate/garage sales are great for finding typewriters.
• When buying a typewriter, bring a piece of paper with you and test it out: type with every key, use the shift and caps lock, try the red and black inks, backspace, tab, set a few tabs and then tab through each one, reach the end of the line and see if the bell rings, etc. Don't let social anxiety get in the way of you testing a product before buying, especially if it's costing a pretty penny.
• Speaking of price, I'm not sure how it is everywhere, but where I am you can get a good typewriter for under $100, even under $50, fairly consistently. I just went on OfferUp and I was able to find a few at around $50 that I would purchase myself tonight if I wasn't already strapped for cash.
• The few typewriters I would spend over $100 on if I had the money (all in working condition, even better if it has a case): Royal Model 10 with the glass side, Olivetti Lettera 33, and the Hermes Baby.

About me when it comes to all of my hobbies: I like to collect things.

Don't get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don't die from an aneurysm first. It'll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can't see that don't go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don't know, they'll never know, and they don't need to know.

It eats too much time (and money).

Eating all the food you cook will make you fat

For coding, I wish I had known that I will need to basically relearn the entire thing every 2-4 years due to frameworks and language design changes.

The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.

I want to know why I have to be naked all the time. I didn't sign up for this.

Cocaine can become addictive really quickly

That those forensics chaps can find the tiniest spatters of blood on your clothes, on your skin, and inyour hair. And people make a lot of spatter.

Warhammer 40K is what some may call…MEGA EXPENSIVE.

Losing Joann's has made it really difficult to find fabric locally. Michael's needs to step their game up.

I did astronomy like 25 years ago, yes a good telescope is kind of $$$, eyepieces, etc. I wanted to do some astro-photo but back in the days it was top$. But anyway the biggest problem, being in eastern Canada, is that you can only use it at night (hé), and in winter it is so freaking cold it's almost unusable, so you only have summer where night starts at like 10PM... When you have a life, job, house, partner, house, kids, name it, you don't have time or energy for this.

So I went to RC cars, cheaper!!! can be used during the day, even for 10 minutes, not requiring a setup, just take the remote and the car, make sure the battery is charged, that's it. Buy one for the kid too, bash them, take a brand like Traxxas and you can find cheap parts everywhere for 20 years.

For cycling, more expensive parts don’t really help much. Mid range everything is fine. I don’t need clip on pedals, regular ones are great. For kayaking, anything inflatable is really slower than hard sides and it matters for the enjoyment.

Climbing is fun but climbing outdoors requires mountains. Getting to mountains requires a car, or at least people willing to drive you.