Actually my self esteem increased this past few years but I won't pass up an ADHD infodump opportunity. DDR is, IMO, the most efficient path for videogamer enthusiasts to transition to healthy exercise.
DanceDanceRevolution (DDR) is an arcade rhythm game that is certainly not dead, much to your surprise perhaps. The Japanese arcade scene is a whole, far more in depth iceberg to chip at, but trust me when I say Konami focusing on machines did not (only) mean pachinko machines, it also meant their multiple arcade rhythm games under the Bemani brand.
I am not kidding when I say there was a DDR setup in my middle school in southern USA. I started a bit there, but I never got real dedicated gameplay until there was a new DDR cabinet installed at both Dave and Busters and a local arcade joint. Having access to a machine can be substituted by a home pad. Please, buy the L-TEK pad without the bar. Cheapest exercise equipment out there at 250 + shipping from Poland.
You start off just browsing the songs in the roster until you find ones you like. There's some token English licensed songs, but the bulk come from Konami original songs and a selection from the massive library that is the Rhythm Game Song Genre(TM). Most weebs get their beginnings from anime OPs and TouHou and Vocaloid, so if you have early YouTube nostalgia jump right into Bad Apple and Night of Nights. Later on you get addicted to the super high BPM (400+) techno mixes of the "Boss" songs (more on that later).
So how is gameplay? Visually, four lanes of arrows travel from the bottom to the top, indicating when you have to step and in what direction on the four directional pads at your feet. You should learn quickly that keeping your feet on the arrows and never stepping in the center is the key to actual gameplay. The song's patterns are designed to lead one into another. It's far from dancing, but you transition from paying attention to each arrow to just stepping to the beat. You internalize patterns and you get better, right?
But then, there's a hurdle. Some songs demand you turn your hips and move your right foot on the left pad and vice versa. Difficulty is based on number 1 to 19, so you keep track that you can pass 11s, but not 12s. Each new song introduces new patterns in ordering and timing. Your old highest level becomes your warmups as you get better and better. You start to take a liking to faster, more complex rhythms like triplets, syncopated notes, and more sounds that a drummer doing prog rock would grok. One particular song has you galloping like a horse to Japanese festival music. If you know, you know.
But there's a catch, a limitation: your own body. Nearing difficulty 12 and 13, you're doing the equivalent of a decent jog for around two minutes, right? You might start needing some time between songs to take a break and drink some water. At 14 and 15, you're going for something called High Intensity Interval Training. That is, you go at your MAXIMUM SPEED for as long as the song demands you go. You don't give up because that means losing and you paid for this arcade game, right? You push and push and sometimes fall over, but eventually you're running ragged at 600 steps per minute begging that your life bar doesn't sink anymore. You need more training. The next song is 440 BPM with 880 steps per minute.
You want it. You want to play the harder songs in the difficulty ranking. You start to jog outside of the game on treadmills and otherwise. You put on the same heartrending songs and you find yourself sprinting desperately for 2 minute bursts because it's impossible to stop while the song is playing. I'm running for almost an hour straight, and I get a head start at running progress because of my DDR experience! It pays off and you can play up to 15s, but there's still 4 more levels until you get to 19. Over 4 years (at college, see?) I bike to the arcade, I play my heart out, I bike back. My blood pressure decreases, I breathe slower and deeper, and my snacking habits are at least counteracted. Best videogame of my life.
Only downside? I can't convince anyone outside of the rhythm gamers at the arcade that the music is good. The rhythms of those "Boss" songs are etched into your soul by the end. I can namedrop MAX 300 and everyone in the scene can practically play the song out in their heads. It's literally a lifestyle hobby, and a rather healthy one at that.
I work in Tech but I dislike most tech products. They are not repairable, are spyware, abandonware, shiteware and overall not a win-win situation that it is supposed to be. To be away from screens, I got into woodworking. To make things to old-fashioned way. To be repairable, to be sustainable and mostly to be imperfect. And yes, the imperfections are not on-purpose. I am doing my best to buy the old 'Quality' stuff that wont break and restore them to working order.
With shoes I buy second-hand Leather, Goodyear welted shoes and I splurged on Darntough socks. My feet are so happy. Currently I am seeking the best jeans, and almost all cotton seems to the trick.
So not the most niche per se, but I like it.
Birds. I guess it doesn't feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it's my thing.
There's this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it'll listen to and identify all of the birds you're hearing.
And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I'll be damned if I didn't eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It's just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.
I've learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I've gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha
I'm also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the [email protected] community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @[email protected] makes the most amazing educational posts. It's a lot of fun.
Theres a mysterious stone wall that I found in the middle of nowhere in the forest with no road access that I've been investigating for years and nobody else cares!
There are other weird characteristics nearby that are visible on Google maps
Why? Who made you?
Edit: Here is a link to a gallery of photos I've taken of some segments of the wall:
https://postimg.cc/gallery/KkPj5H1
Here is an annotated map of the area with unusual features, some of which may be natural:
Here is the location in google maps. The sat imagery has recently been updated: https://www.google.com/maps/@-32.2335528,116.1823985,644m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
I've been out to this location 10 or so times, and in all my digging, I haven't found a single railroad spike or tie, so I really don't think it's railroad-related. The bush is extremely dense, especially near the creek, and often impossible to walk through, hence the photos are from a distance.
The stone wall is not mortared, and I really dont think it would bear the weight of a train even in its brand new condition.
Its very old and someone put a lot of work into it, near as I can tell its at least 50m long, maybe much longer
I did find one very large iron nail, about 1m in length, and took it home with me, but I don't have it any more.
On the raised band of black stone, the stones are about melon or basketball sized, much larger than railway ballast which us usually not larger than a fist. It could be a natural formation.
Rabbits. Rabbits are fuckin' awesome. Did you know they don't have paw pads like cats and dogs? There's just fur there, which means they have less traction on slick surfaces. They can be taught to use a litterbox, too !
They also have such different personalities from cats and dogs. Netherland dwarf bunnies are twenty pounds of bunny in a 2 pound body. They're crazy energetic and need plenty of space even though they're tiny. The bigger a bunny gets the more chill they generally are, but the bigger the bun the more likely there will be issues with their back or other joints as they get older.
I really like how far third party nerf blasters have come (worker, monkey mods XYL etc.) and really want to get into it, but I'm too old to play with kids and there's no adult community here that would pick it up (as opposed to airsoft or paintball).
So I'm left with a nice ass blaster I spent $130 assembling, and can only plink around a small apartment with it
I intern at a scuba shop for free classes but the shop is incredibly poorly managed so I'm in a race to get all the certs before the business folds.
I'm a massive networking nerd. I have literal stacks of old networking hardware, probably enough to connect a small town. It's almost all used and some is damaged and I love the shit out of every scrap circuit board with those glorious ports.
I usually end up ranting about home networking on Lemmy, and the networking subreddits are generally the only reason I go back to that site every now and again.
I've become a wireless expert, and I regularly flex that knowledge at work. It always amazes me how bad some people's wifi is and they just accept it, like, it do be like that sometimes.... But it doesn't have to be like that.
Because of this I often find myself ranting about what to do, or not do, when it comes to home networking projects. I always feel like this falls on deaf ears because I end up repeating the same or similar rants regularly.
Gestures broadly to about half of Lemmy
I have like 6 pages of stats for space ships, stations, weapons, factions and races for a game I play in my head while at work. It's like X4 but with Elite Dangerous' scale and ship customization.
I have another 15 pages of lore information for a world inhabited by furries that goes into the cultures of each race, (Melkin, Avastin, Scala, Exiranni and Drai,) how they interact with one another, interracial tensions, a timeline of major events, the story of one of my main characters during the Electromedeival period and the otherworldly horrors that they face. It also has a more futuristic-modern era, with futuristic cyberware mixed with 2000s architecture, where a group of investigators part of the government organization Advanced Research and Investigation Agency (ARIA) search and dispose of anomolous entities and secure anomolous areas. I've been working on it for years tbh, and idk why lol.
I spent 20 hours creating a custom school of magic for my favorite board game Black Rose Wars. It’s a school that summons all the hell demons from the inferno expansion since there’s currently no school of magic that calls them up. I got the cards printed and we played a game with them and people love them.
Qwerty fucking sucks. This guy Sholes who invented the typewriter put no thought into the actual letter arrangement and doomed us to this disaster.
Dvorak exists and there's a new one called Colemak (now on windows) but they both have fundamental mistakes too. There are dozens of us on the other site debating keyboard layout design.
And for some education qwerty was originally alphabetical with the vowels on top. https://youtu.be/blRn9U9Fapg?t=625s Pause the video. *Jamming was not an issue and was not a design point. That's common myth.
I haven't slept in a long while so I don't have the energy or memory to infodump too extensively but please for the love of all that is holy listen to the Magnus archives. I am begging everyone who sees this comment and has even marginally enjoyed horror atleast once to immerse themselves in this masterpiece.
To give an incredibly brief description it is a 200 episode long horror audio drama that follows an archivist at the Magnus institute; an academic establishment focused on archiving paranormal events in the form of experience statements from the general public. Jonathan sims, the archivist, is tasked with transforming some of these statements into an audio format (along with every other aspect of an archivist job but he kinda sucks at it) and he starts to notice some connections.
That's as much as I can say without spoilers. I think with this amount of information it can be enjoyed to the fullest with the maximum feeling of wonderment, fear, and curiosity. However for those of you who need more convincing and don't mind knowing a bit more I'm gonna add a little under this spoiler tag. Nothing too major but I think knowledge of it takes a bit away from the experience.
spoilers
You ever heard of checkhovs gun? The Magnus archives is checkhovs firing squad. Everything is connected, every detail is important. Every single moment builds to its finale.
This audio drama focuses on the nature and catagorization of fear itself. Being controlled, contagion, filth, destruction, being watched, having your secrets known, darkness, being prey, your own flesh, suffocation, isolation, how tiny you actually are, war, random violence, fire, strangers, madness, death; these are all things to be feared and they all manifest supernaturally. Sometimes the blend together sometimes they are incredibly distinct but they are all just manifestations of fear. Jonathan Sims is forced to face the reality that the world isn't as he thought he knew it and he must piece together what it all means. Between cults, books of power, people who channel the power of these fears, rituals, and names that just won't stop showing up it becomes obvious to Sims that these events are in no way random. Should he do something about it or just continue to observe? What will he do when these powers inevitably confront him personally?
It's fucking riveting
I hope someone here sees this and becomes as obsessed as I was. I shit you not I listened to 200 20min episodes in the matter of 2 weeks and that was my second time listening. It's sequel, the Magnus protocol is currently releasing every Thursday and I just don't know If I can handle e listening at that pace
I LIED I ABSOLUTELY DO HAVE THE ENERGY TO INFO DUMP
Next up on the roster is sweet home by by Kim Carnby and Hwang Young-chan. I'll make this as quick as I can
You like depression, monsters, tense group dynamics, apocalypse, and the constant nagging fear that you will never make it out of this shit hole of a situation? Yeah me too, sweet home has it all. Star of the show hyun is a shut in who just moved into a new apartment building after the death of his sister and father iirc. Not long after being there shit starts to get a lil weird but he doesn't notice all that much because he's a shut in. Eventually even he has to notice the world's gone to shit when he starts seeing posts on the intenret about it before the Internet stops working. One look outside is all it took really. Will hyun ever get to see the finale of maria from the sky? Probably not but a man can dream.
I'll be back to info dump some more if I still can't sleep. You better pray I don't turn this comment into an 8 page rant. I don't know the character limit for Lemmy comments but I'll fucking find it.
I have a bizarre and completely unprovable theory Leonardo Da Vinci was a trans woman based largely on a recognition of my own behaviours and desires as a trans person and the convoluted history of the Mona Lisa.
Many people have posited that the picture, while supposedly a commissioned portrait of a patron, is actually a self portrait of the artist but your run of the mill scholarship tends to be a little stumped why he would do that... But look at the history of the painting and it was in his possession for a very long time "unfinished". Layers of the painting show jewelry had been added and subtracted from the painting over time becoming more austere as both portait and painter aged. The title of the painting originally basically translated to "the happy one" supposedly for that enigmatic smile... but what if this painting was actually "the happy one" smiling at the artist who struggled in their own body gaining what wistful euphoria there was to be had meeting the eyes of his ideal physical form, carried around as a wish and temporary escape from the mirror.
Da Vinci had a complicated sexuallity as we know it. As best we can figure he was repulsed by heterosexual intercourse but adored the male form sexually. He had a number of very strong friendships with women but he tended to not render their forms sexually in his art preferring to focus on male genetalia... But his art also featured numerous themes of sexes with poses, characteristics and so on intermixed into androgyny or with subversive femininity. He veiwed women as paragons of grace, dignity and quite frankly I think he pined for motherhood.
As a trans person who has decided for reasons not to physically transition I know that wistfulness. Staring at the genderswap snapchat filters of yourself during a moment of low spirits or the pictures of youth where you actually properly passed as your gender and thinking "if only".
At the end of his life the Mona Lisa was not passed on to it's supposed commissioner but instead to Leonardo's long time apprentice and known gay lover. Perhaps a final sentimental bequeathal of a cherished object
The more I read and see of the artist's works and life the more I see a distinct queer identity emerge. Perhaps not worth much to scholarship but the idea that maybe the most popular and highly valued picture in the world could be of a trans woman's encapsulated self conceptualization and the true self portrait of a genius hidden from veiw only by the veil of cis blindness that cannot recognize the distinct behaviour patterns and dearly held desires of trans people... Would be immensely satisfying.
I've been teaching myself to make cheesecake.
I'm generally proficient in the kitchen but never bake or work with sweet things.
I've started with mini cheesecake and after a couple failed attempts, they've come out so good as to share with coworkers who tell me to make more.
One of these days, I'll graduate to full sized.
Bonus: I've learned to make lemon curd from scratch. Did lime curd as an experiment once I got the lemon down.
I enjoy kitchen undertakings that are far beyond my capabilities and actually enjoy the initial fuckups because they represent progress toward getting it right.
I also tend to listen to a mix of eighties alternative and sixties jazz while I'm doing it because why wouldn't those two genres go together?
i love the history of television and broadcasting and could watch old footage of news broadcasts and behind the scenes footage of the television industry and old commercials forever.
old youtube home video footage of ordinary people walking in cities or in old department stories is the best thing ever.
youtube channels like @NASS_0 are the closest thing we'll have to time travel. i mean like watching people wave to the camera without knowing they'd be on youtube 100 years later is so amazing.
i love pre 1960 pro wrestling history and finding footage on youtube actually makes me the happiest :)
Theres a small indie game called Gods will be watching. Great pixel art, buut its main thing is crisis management, that happens with the player character, a hostage situation gone wrong, surviving on a desert planet behind enemy lines, and my favorite: making a cure for a deadly disease, while being caved in.
The virus couses paralysis, and in 72 hours shuts down your body systems. Not a fun way to go. All of your teammates are infected, which includes a doctor, a researcher, a robot engineer, a robot assistant, you and your friend who's a soldier, and his dog. The only way to make a cure in this deadline is abandoning all ethics and jumping to human trials.
First you synthetise the drug, the first of maybe on pure guesses, but each completed test narrows down the possible compounds needed for the cure. Each test has a chance of killing the "lab rat", you can try making it more stable, but it takes longer to make, and you don't have much time. Do you go for sale ones, or try to get the cure faster? Who would you sacrifice? Obviously not the doctor, he's needed for the cure. The researcher can help making drugs, so not her. The robot can't be tested on, but need repairs by the engineer, so not him. You can try on yourself, but if you die you fail, so you can't sacrifice yourself. Your friend? Or maybe the dog?
I don't know why I'm so engrossed with this game, is pretty old by now, and on youtube there's only a handful of playthroughs of it, but I really like the situations it puts the player in. Also the game is a bit punishing, but tells you before the game. There are no checkpoints in a chapter, which means you can lose 30+ progress by making a bad choise, out just having bad luck. But the mc has a... well not optimistic, but something similar vibe, like it doesn't matter how bad things are, you can always work in some way to your goal.
I've been working for months on transcribing Green River Suite from Robbie Basho into TAB. It's a wickedly difficult piece of music and I can hardly play it.
The Game Boy line of handheld consoles revolutionized the gaming industry and were fascinating devices, even if they had some absolutely bizarre models and accessories at times. Did you know there existed (but was never used) a Game Boy Color accessory used to anesthetize children before surgery? True story.
Ever wondered what’s the difference between NA and NULL?
Let’s say you have a string of numbers like 5, 8, NA, 3.
What’s the first number? It’s 5.
What’s the third one? It’s NA (missing).
What’s the seventeenth number? It’s NULL, meaning it doesn’t even make any sense to request a number like that when this vectors is so short.
BTW some programs/languages may treat these terms differently.
I turned my teenage hobby into my career. I see a lot of content against that kind of thing (don't ruin your hobby), but I love it.
It has also skyrocketed my upward mobility because I don't see my work as work, for the most part, and I didn't enter the job market with only a degree to prove my competence in the field (also experience). After ~10 years working, maybe I will change my mind in another 10 years.
For whatever reason, trivia and esoteric facts stick to my brain like glue. My head is packed full of eyebrow-raising, but not always useful, stuff from the internet.
This whole thread is my niche.
I'm spending way too much time and money working on and collecting every release of the 1999 PC video game Recoil. Sometimes I feel like MattKC with his Lego Island obsession.
Hidden game lore. On that ive found is with payday 2 and hotline miami. Hotline miami has a character named Tony, who is a beloved and memorable character with a mask of a tiger with a missing eye. However, no one figured out where the mask came from, as it's not Jackets tony mask (jacket being another important character), and the only other time we've seen the mask on someone, it was destroyed. But in payday 2 in the jacket character pack, you can get a mask called Tony's revenge, where it says the mask belong to an Italian American who was born in the 1970s. This is important because 1: payday 2 and hotline miami happen in the same universe, and 2: this Italian American can't be the tony from hotline miami because they were in a war in around 1985, meaning there is another character who we have never seen before.
Youtube Poops, when done well, are the best example of modern punk art. DaThings is a true genius when it comes to turning commercials and narrated content into pro-communist, anti-capitalist, anti-police state propaganda and I fucking love it. It’s true art and I wish it not only had a bigger following, but was respected as an art medium.
Moonshell 2 was a better multimedia software than any current proprietary or FOSS software available.
Supported every popular audio codec, the proprietary DS mpeg video codec, MOD and chiptune formats, various picture formats, text files, and music playlists.
The audio player had a builtin equalizer, would automatically turn off the screen for battery, and could very easily be controlled by the DS's trigger buttons when closed.
I can actually name several android music players that don't support playlist files, it's actually absurd. VLC doesn't even generate relative path M3Us.
No one cares about my opinion because no one uses the DS anymore, let alone as a multimedia device.
repairable electronics and small, simple "assistant"-free cars, apparently.
i daily a 2002 Toyota Yaris, and i get to drive modern cars decently often. a few months ago i got to drive a turbo-diesel manual shifted opel.
first of all, boring as fuck. you barely hear the engine, so i had to have one eye on the rev counter all drive long. also very sluggish, mushy clutch on an almost 2-ton vehicle isn't fun.
the shifter somehow felt even more muddy, and i got back pain from the seats.
then, ten minutes into the drive, the lane keeping assistant kicked in. why would i need that shit if i've been keeping my lane just fine on my own?
all kinds of lamps and sounds just add to the confusion. until the traffic warning feature in the radio blows out your eardrums at max volume, even though THE RADIO IS OFF.
long story short, my yaris is better. it starts every morning, doesn't complain, doesn't interfere, it lets me do my thing. it has one single warning sound that kicks in if you left the lights on, that's it.
also i own a fairphone 4, that one explains itself.
Best thread ever
I like Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. I describe it as "play fighting for adults", and it's one of the few sports that has a really wide demographic of players. I can be training alongside professional fighters, lawyers, police, electricians, retail workers, and software engineers - and ultimately anything about you doesn't matter because all you're focusing on is the sport. It's also a great stress reliever, as I can have a terribly stressful day at work, and everything will disappear as I stop a stranger from trying to strangle me.
It's not a particularly popular sport, but it's popular enough that I can pack a gi with me anywhere I go, and find somewhere to train that'll welcome me, and sometimes even let me train for free. While there are some Joe Rogan types that love the sport, my experience has been very good, and have met some of the nicest people from all walks of life.
Artificial Life simulators. I nerd out every time I discover a new one and spend weeks/months trying to evolve the ultimate death machine.
I also develop a couple prototypes every year and write them off when they’re near completion because they’re not good enough.
I like lore dumping on people who have some understanding of what I'm talking about.
I don't have much interest in explaining everything to someone who knows *nothingď about it, but if they have a vague understanding/interest in the topic, enough that I know they can understand what I'm talking about, I could talk for hours. And have.
Once while playing Halo, a friend of a friend asked the group why something was the way it was. I told him I can give him the short answer in about 30 seconds, or the long answer which will be very long. He wanted long answer.
Three hours later only two other people were still listening, he knew the entire context of his answer, and he knew never to ask for the long answer again.
I've done tye same for star trek multiple times.
But give me someone who doesn't know the first thing about either and they would have to be super interested to learn for me to keep going. I don't do well with blank stares.
The funny thing is it isn't any specific thing either. It's not just halo or star trek or even Sci fi or games. Its anything I have interest in and know a lot about.
It's that a "weird niche thing" or just a "weird quirk about weird niche things"?
https://www.c82.net/euclid/en/book1/
The absolute beauty of geometry - I dream of working with an artist and coder one day to explore hyperbolic geometry in this format.
Taking a class right now about fiber arts combined with action/movement arts by a performance artist. I am only two classes in but it has been so much fun! As a plus, most of my classmates are little old ladies who thought it was an ordinary embroidery class lol so that adds to the amusement.
The Free Software movement. So the idea that people deserve certain rights when using computers, so that they can control their own devices.
I'm a flow artist! I spin a puppyhammer! It's not what it sounds like! It's cool as fuck!
Amidoinitrite?
Bad cult movies and documentaries.
I fancy libertarianism.
I use Linux. And not just any Linux, but NixOS. Which might just as well be called NicheOS.
Receiver 2 is an amazing game. So is Crypt of the Necrodancer.
I am the weird niche thing.
PIGEONSSSSSSSSSS
Heh, my weird niche thing really is a niche but I'm not alone. I grew up in the early 60s and for some reason, nostalgia and/or just plain weirdness, I'm really into exotica/mid-century modern/tiki decor. Tiki bars were a big thing then, and I remember the hawaiian-themed restaurants all around town. I'm just strange, but I still love collecting tiki-related items like mugs and retro art and stuff. My bedroom is all tiki-themed.
There's nothing more satisfying than sticking a reverse pre.
Every time I see a wacky internet fight over some niche science adjacent topic, I think of a better, cleaner, more controlled test that could plausibly settle the matter, then do nothing with that information.
The most recent one was Sugarologie vs. How To Cook That on the topic of blending meringue based buttercream frostings in order to darken the color. Sugar believes that the important difference blending makes is causing the dye to fully mix with the water droplets in suspension in the butter. HTCT believes that the important difference blending makes is removing a significant portion of the air from the icing.
My proposed test is to make three icings. In all icings, the butter will be blended before addition. In the control icing, dye will be added to the finished icing, then stirred in. In the butter theory icing, the coloring will be added to the butter before blending. In the counter butter theory icing, the dye will be added to the meringue, before the butter is added.
If air theory is correct, all icings will be a similar shade. If butter theory is correct, only the butter theory icing will be significantly darker. If something else happens, I think that implies neither theory is supported by the test, but I'd also be confused, so I'd probably think about it a lot more.
Love to hear it. I'm only saying it's lame cause I'm burned out with my work rn. Biology is beautiful regards
