Ronnie the Rotter
Banned
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2026
- Posts
- 231
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For me, I do not really have “hobbies” in the traditional sense. Most hobbies involve other people or some end goal like improvement or showing something off. Mine are more like routines that I repeat because they’re quiet and measurable.
One thing I do is walk long distances and count repeating structures (sidewalk slabs, fence posts, streetlight spacing, tiles in train stations). If you keep track long enough you start noticing where patterns drift a few millimeters off what they should be. Most people don’t notice those small irregularities because they’re looking at their phone or wherever they’re going next.
I also collect and repair small obsolete electronics. Old digital watches, cheap radios, pocket calculators, things like that. Nothing rare or expensive, just devices that were mass-produced and abandoned. I like opening them up, cleaning contacts, replacing capacitors or batteries, and seeing if they still behave the way the engineers originally intended.
Another hobby that I have is recording ambient audio. Mostly mundane environments (offices at night, vending machines humming, elevators, empty hallways, that kind of thing). Later I look at the recordings in a spectrogram and see how the background noise changes over time. Buildings have their own rhythms if you listen long enough.
I also archive small technical oddities I find online, old manuals, blog posts, documentation for forgotten hardware. A lot of useful information disappears when websites go down, so I keep local copies of things that only seem to exist in one or two places.
I like hobbies where the rules are consistent and the results don’t depend on other people.
One thing I do is walk long distances and count repeating structures (sidewalk slabs, fence posts, streetlight spacing, tiles in train stations). If you keep track long enough you start noticing where patterns drift a few millimeters off what they should be. Most people don’t notice those small irregularities because they’re looking at their phone or wherever they’re going next.
I also collect and repair small obsolete electronics. Old digital watches, cheap radios, pocket calculators, things like that. Nothing rare or expensive, just devices that were mass-produced and abandoned. I like opening them up, cleaning contacts, replacing capacitors or batteries, and seeing if they still behave the way the engineers originally intended.
Another hobby that I have is recording ambient audio. Mostly mundane environments (offices at night, vending machines humming, elevators, empty hallways, that kind of thing). Later I look at the recordings in a spectrogram and see how the background noise changes over time. Buildings have their own rhythms if you listen long enough.
I also archive small technical oddities I find online, old manuals, blog posts, documentation for forgotten hardware. A lot of useful information disappears when websites go down, so I keep local copies of things that only seem to exist in one or two places.
I like hobbies where the rules are consistent and the results don’t depend on other people.
