So naturally I am building an 8 foot tall wind-driven kinetic sculpture of a Wendigo.
I bought a welder and a cutoff saw. All the materials are retrieved from the trash gully that every respectable high desert property must have.
It’s a form of cope and even ritual magic for me. Embody the spirit of hoarding and greed so it is vulnerable and can be imprisoned, that sort of vibe.
It will take all winter to finish it. The rebar armature is flexible and bobs in the wind. I will add sun bleached oak branches to give it flesh.
A bunch of FOSS hardware and software. https://twystlock.com was my latest creation. My next is a suite of modular open source home automation sensors including everything from air quality to mmWave presence.
In a more "professional" FOSS sense I just presented a new federated identity management system at IIW based on ActivityPub and OpenID Connect: https://fedid.me.
I also make a lot of behind the scenes algorithms.
Oh, that must be exciting and nerve wrecking at the same time, seeing your characters come to life. How do you convey what you imagine the characters to sound and act like?
Oh yeah, its amazing to hear the voices for these people but, as you say, it's scary. Since I'm the director and creator it all falls to me to decide everything. I mean EVERYTHING from inflictions in their voices, how a line is delivered, scheduling, payment etc. Of course, I give my actors freedom to interpret how they see the characters. You have to have a fine balance between making decisions but also letting them be creative with what they do during directing sessions.
I'm releasing it concurrently with the book. I've still got a lot to do before I can release anything however so I'm just doing the chapters that I know are 100% done
Me: "If I make a new mascot platformer (gratis) with vertex colors, maybe someone would get me out of here? What are the chances and outcomes? Would I even have enough time to make something decent with current conditions?"
Blender, Godot 4, player controller in Nim-lang via gdext-nim, and on top of the 3 hats I need to learn I don't have many viable ideas.
Also somewhat related to the social isolation thread in showerthoughts, I live on the edge of nowhere and don't even want to drive.
For the last year and a half I've been writing and drawing a fluffy, sapphic comic based on a very unserious British science-fiction show about a time travelling alien in a blue box (4 chapters so far). It's on AO3.
Has anyone asked OP what they create? What do you create, OP?
I am a senior data architect and infrastructure programmer. I build the tools and design the data persistence that folks at my company use to build solutions for clients.
I had a shop that made flaming nipple tassels, though I just closed down until the future is more certain. I also create sideshow and fire performances. My most recent one involves a drill and my skull.
And finally, a lot of D&D content, such as an entire world setting inspired by the tarot deck
I would've assumed just a programming job/hobby. The programming is the organizing of the electrons and the semiconductor fab is the organizer of the fancy sand?
Nope. I'm going to stay vague so I won't DOX myself, but the only stable job I could find in years is for an organization that doesn't have the best intentions for humanity (or profit strangely enough) and actively hurts people.
I had a professor whose ice breaker question was some version of, "what book do you want to write/planning to write?" Everyone seems to have one.
Might not be as relevant today after blogs perhaps cleared that out of peoples' systems.
As for me, I cycle through mostly craft-based hobbies. Embroidery, leather work, candle making, 3D printing. I can make candles much faster than I can burn them, so that's self-limiting. 3D printing is great to have the materials and skills for, and I'm slowly learning to design in Blender. But at the moment I only use it when I suddenly need to have a thing-a-ma-widget and remember: "hey! I've got a 3D printer. Of course I can make a valve stem cover!"
I'll probably be back to leather crafts as we head into the fall and winter.
I recommend you try gaffer tape instead of duct tape.
Advantages:
Remains flexible and removable forever.
Looks nicer, a cool matte black or manynother colors.
Where I get off making this recommendation:
I needed a light-excluding bellows for a photographic project. I made one using black illustration stock and gaffer tape. It worked extremely well on the first version and held up to hundreds of cycles of extension/compression. My application was sensitive to pinhole light leakage and there was none.
It would have lasted longer but that was the end of that project.
Fair comment. I used gaffer tape a lot at the beginning of my journey because it was convenient and available, but everything I built fell apart eventually, so I started using cloth duct tape. I recently discovered aluminium duct tape which is genuinely amazing. It's like regular cloth duct tape, but it can be shaped really precisely, and it holds it's shape even if everything else falls apart around it.
I have a podcast that I create with a couple of friends. We take an ordinary object—such as a ceiling fan, or a paper clip, or a toilet brush—and we create a movie plot based on that object. The show is called Almost Plausible, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.
This month I'm building Bluetooth headphones for a teen I work with, he needs them to function but his parents won't spend money on them and he keeps breaking the cheap sets he has.
I'm working with a school metal shop to make steel frames for them and I've made the cups 3d printable and easy to replace. Of he does manage to break these, it will take no skill to repair them.
Carbon dioxide. A metric [emphasis]-ton of dust. Other waste.
Sometimes I write small Perl programs or Bash scripts, but that's rare, and it's mostly for my own benefit or amusement; even more rarely do I share them.
Sometimes despair. Sometimes happiness. Hopefully a sense of being informed and/or entertained if not also a (weak?) sense of camaraderie by means of weird little text interactions with people online.
As a welder, I create a ton of shit. Today, I created a new handle for a lathe, cut off the old one, and bolted on my part so the lathe functions (mostly).
A good bit actually though. I'm disabled, so no job. This means that while I'm on my ass recovering from the necessities of living like cooking and cleaning, I have a shit ton of spare time.
Part of that is spent fucking around on lemmy.
The rest is usually spent on some variety or another of writing fiction. Short stories, a few ongoing novels, that sort of thing. Here and there a poem or song will pop in my head.
Then there's a bit of panting, occasional drawing, that kind of visual art.
I've also been known to run ttrpg sessions here and there, which is its own art form in a way.
I create hastily designed lumber creations that are used to organize and store things.
Every couple of years I create a world for friends to play tabletop games in for a shared experience.
Some days I get paid to create written documentation and shared understanding of complex systems used to collect and report data that someone else will hopefully analyze and use for improving the educational opportunities of children.
I create useless applications for daily use. Now im working on an organizer that reads my work ins and outs to control my work hours and eventually cash in free days due to excess working hours.
Various 3d printed items, Last week I sewed some dust covers for my HOTAS peripherals, scripts to help manage my media library, nonsense comments on Lemmy.
It's a byproduct of our society to ask what value your work does rather than you as a person. A better question would be "what stuff are you interested in?" I bet taking that spin will actually make people stop and think a second not only because it's not the normal question, but people have lots of interests and now they'll have to pick one that they want to share.
Resin dice, novels, 3D prints, paintings, video games, wooden furniture, RPG scenarios. I have way too many hobbies and maybe two hours per week to work on them, so in reality I create very little. But making something physical is incredibly helpful for keeping the worst of my depression at bay.
I definitely didn't read it that way from the post. I thought it was about your hobbies and creative interests. I guess you could infer social strata by whether the answerer has time and disposable income for hobbies. Some don't require much investment, but it's usually more than none.