To be polished into an essay later: old posts we made about hobbies
Hobbies that one or more of us have: writing, oldschool website-making, crochet, origami, fountain pens, digital and traditional art, cello, multiplayer gaming, mechanical keyboards, lucid dreaming, indoor gardening, reading miscellaneous nonfiction.
For starting points for the more accessible of these...
Writing: everyone hypes up writing a novel. You really don't need to write a novel. Write short stories, drabbles, single scenes, sequences of words that got stuck in your head, rants about this or that. Get into the habit of writing and prioritize writing something rather than something polished.
Oldschool website-making: there's a number of hosts around, Neocities being probably the most known, Nekoweb being a newer option that's pretty good. Look up tutorials on HTML and CSS (you don't need to touch JS)
Origami: lots of patterns around the web. Look for beginner ones. You don't need fancy paper, we made stuff out of printer and notebook paper for years. Just familiarize yourself with cutting your own squares (fold edge over until flush with the other edge to make a triangle, cut off the trailing paper, unfold triangle into square, ta-da).
Traditional art: hardest part here will be mindset. You'll compare yourself to other artists and angst about how you're not where you want to be a LOT, and it sucks. Think about it like a video game - any art you draw, no matter how shitty, is EXP, while no art means no EXP. Read the "50% Rule" on Drawabox.com and do your best to keep its principles in mind.
Multiplayer gaming: bunch of free multiplayer games out there. Of the ones we play, Warframe and Sky: Children of the Light probably give you the most access to the game without paying, just be prepared to be sad about not being able to afford many things. Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV are fun, but they only give you free access to parts of the game, and then you gotta pay for expansions.
Tbh, if you have a computer that can run it + mods, I would recommend buying Minecraft if you have money to spare - the huge modding ecosystem means you'll get objectively more game for your money than buying an MMO expansion.
Lucid dreaming: "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge is probably the most comprehensive book I've found on the topic, and you might be able to read it for free on Archive.org. I've personally found that reading about lucid dreaming + keeping a dream journal is usually enough for me to lucid dream without having to dip into the more involved techniques, but your mileage may vary. Be mindful of getting into this if you have chronic nightmares - lucid dreaming can help you manage them, but ime there's a transition period where you remember dreams more vividly but aren't lucid in them yet.
Reading miscellaneous nonfiction: again, Archive.org is your friend! If you have a library card, Libby lets you borrow ebooks from your library.
Regarding web development, I fully believe that you have it in you. CSS is daunting, often arcane. But in our experience, it does not remain that way forever. Some years ago, it took us hours to center a single element; now, we delight in debugging others' CSS and have written all of the styling on our site by hand. Like fronting, there is only one way to improve, and that is practice.
As for resources, I will disclaim that we haven't used all of these. But we have seen them recommended by several others.
Free and Newbie-Friendly Static Site Hosts
- Neocities (The best-known host, by far!)
- Nekoweb (This is the place that our site is hosted. We began on Neocities; it is more established and populous, but we enjoy Nekoweb more.)
Resources for Learning
Documentation
- MDN Web Docs (The most comprehensive reference for HTML, CSS, and Javascript, maintained by Mozilla, Google, and many volunteers.)
- w3schools (I have seen people say to take this one with a grain of salt. But it has been generally helpful to us. We prefer the MDN documentation, but we will often cross-reference the two if we're unsure how something is used.)
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