Your Backup Hobby

Love Dub, cannot stand Dubstep, so I enjoy the laid back groove going on here. It skews a bit more toward electronica in places than I would normally go, but then comes back in with some nice horns or smooth vocals which keeps me happy. Going to listen through while I work in the breaks between meetings today.

Gary Sax wrote: I got fly fishing gear, including my rod and the essentials, for christmas from my family and I'm ordering some other fancy bibs and bobs (expensive hobby, explains the old man demographic). I'm pretty excited about fucking everything up, losing all my flies, and not catching anything!

The next step is tying your own flies. That’s pretty much the equivalent of miniature painting in terms of adding a hobby to your hobby.

I took the week between Christmas and New Years off and spent time with two of my new Christmas toys, a chain saw sharpener and a cant hook.

Apparently I can sharpen a chain saw blade! Who knew? In fact it was pretty easy and the kit only cost me $17. I took another shot at the oak branches (ten inchers) we had removed and damn if it didn't make one hell of a difference. I feel so manly now.

The cant hook is for rolling logs. It's a two-prong thing with a long handle that gives you leverage to roll something that weighs a hundred pounds and doesn't want to go uphill. When they cut down my huge silver maple much of the wood logs, though cut, were down the hill from my driveway meaning I needed to split them there and haul up the pieces in a wheelbarrow, which sucks, or get them up the hill so I can cut them in my wood yard. With the cant hook I can do the latter much more easily.

So here I am some guy from the suburbs doing logging in my spare time! All I'm missing are those cut-proof chaps that they wear, and my wife said no. She knew I'd be out there in just the chaps, just because I could, and she wasn't on board with that. Promising to wear safety glasses as well didn't close the deal, no chaps under the tree this year.

This won't make sense to most of you who live in parts of the country where this just isn't a thing, but I bought my first ice auger and have been getting out with my flasher pretty regularly at night after the kids go to bed to ice fish. High pressure systems and clear weather have made it a pretty tough bite the last week, but things tend to get more active when a front comes through. I'll probably look to get a small pop-up shelter at the end of the season when retailers try and clear things out for spring.

On a semi-related note, there's an amazing GoFundMe being launched by a young gal who drove her car out onto Wayzata Bay of Lake Minnetonka and had it go through the ice. The DNR and sheriff coordinate the vehicle recovery and charge people the costs to get it out of the lake. She's asking for $10,000 to pay for the fees and a downpayment on a new car. So far she's raised $30!

Sagrilarus wrote: Apparently I can sharpen a chain saw blade! Who knew? In fact it was pretty easy and the kit only cost me $17. I took another shot at the oak branches (ten inchers) we had removed and damn if it didn't make one hell of a difference. I feel so manly now.

As an amateur woodworker, I got into milling my own wood. Apparently you want a different chain for ripping logs into planks and you can sharpen an existing blade to a different tooth angle or just buy a pre-made one for like $40. So without doing any research on how to sharpen a chain, I just bought a pre-made one.

Since you need a chainsaw with an bigger CC engine than a basic chainsaw, I’ve been borrowing my boss’s chainsaw. I think I’ll spend some xmas money to buy my own. I don’t do it too often as it’s hard to find hardwood logs that people don’t want, but it’ll be nice to have it when I need it.

JoelCFC25 wrote:
On a semi-related note, there's an amazing GoFundMe being launched by a young gal who drove her car out onto Wayzata Bay of Lake Minnetonka and had it go through the ice. The DNR and sheriff coordinate the vehicle recovery and charge people the costs to get it out of the lake. She's asking for $10,000 to pay for the fees and a downpayment on a new car. So far she's raised $30!

ive been messing around getting a twitch streaming setup going, im about to play some solo Dungeonquest if you want to see how its going

twitch.tv/ah_pook23

I'm planning on streaming board games MWF at 6pm EST, as a way to play more games more consistently. I tend to get lazy and just watch stuff or play video games in the evening, so this seems like a good way to get games to the table more. Plus messing around getting lighting and stuff set up has been a fun thing to do, and there's always more stuff to tweak and mess with with Twitch.

So anyway, if you want to tune in and see what I've got going on you're more than welcome. I'm going to stream Marvel Champions on Mondays and then whatever else the other days, is my current plan. Think I'm going to do Xia tomorrow, but I'll have to see if I can fit it in the frame

You can watch my first couple stream archives currently (MC and Faiyum are what I've streamed so far), any feedback re technical aspects or anything else is appreciated! It's really fun so far.

www.twitch.tv/ah_pook23

edit: if you want to see what the stream looks like without having to click on things, heres the VOD from last night

CranBerries wrote: Even though I have been buying all of Barnes' cast off games lately, I haven't been playing much. So my backup hobby has been hitting the surplus book sales at two local libraries. I guess they use an algorithm to cull books that aren't being checked out, so I've been getting stuff that the local residents don't want--a lot of it historical or sociological--for pennies on the dollar, or even free on the last day of the month. My collection of books on British hijinks during the 18th century in the Middle East and Africa has slowly been growing, including a mint copy of Stanley Livingstone's journal, complete with a facsimilie, hand-drawn fold out map. Books on the Iraq war are hitting the surplus shelf right now, even some Pulitzer prize winners. I tell myself that I'm gathering research for a book I know I'll never write, and it satisfies my hoarding impulses much more affordably than gathering board games. Like really, has anyone actually ever played East Front (first edition)? I didn't think so.

What is the sweet, sweet methadone that you stand in line for and hurriedly gulp to keep away the shakes and night terrors?

It has been almost exactly three years since I posted this, and I fear that this particular dopamine engine may be burning out. I still buy some amazing books for pennies on the dollar, but originally I was running this sweet arbitrage angle where I would buy books at the surplus sale that were undervalued, then exchange them for credit at the local indie bookstore, amass a pile of credit and then purchase something interesting. At some point the library started pricing their books more accurately, so it became a push-your-luck game to see what was still on the shelf on "dollar bag" day.

Then the guy who priced books and actually liked books was replaced by a robot in human form who went strictly by an algorithm involving the books ranking and resale price on Amazon. He told me he doesn't actually like books that much. These are tough times, and I don't want to begrudge the store their right to eke out a living, but the problem with algorithms is this: the library dumps books based on an algorithm. The bookstore uses their own algorithm, derived from Amazon, to purchase books, many of which they resell online. Unfortunately, the net effect of this particular system of exchange is that your shelves start resembling an airport bookstore after a while, because you are using a too-narrow model of value. So a lot of popular but sort of crappy books burble up to the surface.

My favorite bookstores (Powells in Portland, The Last Bookstore on Earth in L.A., etc) always give off the vibe that some really thoughtful curation is taking place, bringing the good stuff to the surface, or the end caps.

In my romantic world, a bookstore should have really good books of negligible commercial value in the store. Classics, pulitzer-prize winners, important books. This is a college town. There's room for those books as well as the commercial stuff, because they have a lot of third class books on their shelves. I'm talking about books that are knockoffs of really popular books, mostly nonfiction, that look interesting but are kind of vapid. I guess these could be called mediocre books. The final wrench in the dopamine machine is the fact that the indie bookstore allows you to request books in advance, and then when they show up, you are texted and go buy the book for 10 percent less than evil Amazon. That makes total sense from a seller perspective, but the end result is the likelihood of my being able to browse the shelves and find something amazing (the random rewards component of every addiction) is greatly reduced because the good stuff goes right out the door. Add to that the fact that I talk to the staff too much and have become That Customer, and I'm thinking I need to turn off the book hoarding machine.

In other news, I just scored Modern Art (Mayfair edition) for $10 via Facebook marketplace, but I'm leery of getting back on the boardgame acquisition merry go round.

Edit: I have about 900 books by rough estimate, and our local library just surplused a bunch of Cormac McCarthy.

CranBerries wrote: the end result is the likelihood of my being able to browse the shelves and find something amazing (the random rewards component of every addiction) is greatly reduced

i hate our world

possibly more relevant to the interests of this site, i streamed Xia last night. if you check it out any feedback is more than welcome! the ending of this game was pretty much the ideal outcome of a game of Xia

Went fishing by myself for the first two times this week. Didn't see any fish, spent the whole time practicing my cast and getting flies stuck in trees.

That’s a good day fishing right there.

My wife and I are redoing our kitchen. This is for fun, not need, so doing it ourselves puts it in the hobby category. In the coming weeks, I need to cut a ten foot butcher block countertop down to 100 inches, and cut a sink hole into it.

I’ve already cut a smaller one for the other side of the kitchen, and it went well. I bought a good diablo finishing blade, went slowly with a ginned up guide for the saw to follow and presto — no need to sand at all. Pretty neat.

I fear the sink hole. I need to cut in without an edge to start from, and I think I know how to plunge the blade in. But I’ve never done it. So this may be a $380 mistake in the making, and that doesn’t include medical bills or the prosthesis.

We live in the woods so the butcher block looks killer. Gives the place a rustic look.

Oh, and the national bird count is this coming weekend. That will keep us a little busy.