The Great Unlucrative Hobbies For Fun (Not Profit) Validation Thread

Discussion in 'Brainbent' started by IvyLB, Apr 29, 2017.

  1. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    So, a discussion in the homestuck fantown thread lead me to realize that it might be a good idea to just have a thread in which we can help with validating eachother with hobbies that do not have a capitalist application, or that we do not want to eventually evolve into a job. Because money isn't everything, and hobbies are supposed to be fun, not profitable!

    Everyone can come, and ask for support as far as I care. I support your weird hobbies and "useless" ways to pass the time. I want you to have fun and feel good about your interests. That book? Hell yes you deserve that. Want to start something new but you're on a budget? Here's resources and tips and tricks!
    Want that new tool?
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Apr 29, 2017
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  2. Codeless

    Codeless Cheshire Cat

    Hello, I am an artist. That is part of my identity. It is to me personally more than just a pastime.
    I don´t ever want to do it for my job because it is mine, and I don´t actually WANT my job to contain that much of me.
     
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  3. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    That's absolutely fair and I mean a bunch of people actually caution against making your hobby your job because it's a risk of making it stop being fun? Something can be a huge part of your identity without having monetary value, and nobody should tell you you have to monetize parts of your identity!
     
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  4. winterykite

    winterykite Non-newtonian genderfluid

    as someone who grew up with the everpresent phrase "breadless craft", i'm going to camp here, because jesus fuck does that phrase and the whole notion that everything needs to earn you money pisses me off.
    (i was dissuaded from acting and arts beyond extracurriculars. "it's very difficult to go far there", my mother said, and meant that if i'm not her perfect carbon copy i'm worthless)

    I want to make money with my art, but I know it's difficult and my ADHD and lacking discipline is dragging that out, and I'm pursuing a job I learned (librarian) (oh gods I'm an officially learned librarian now) to support myself while I work on that, but if I hear one more person telling me "but you can't live from that" IRL I swear I will ask them if they would've told that to Van Gogh. Or any of the other artists and free thinkers who, you know, created the basics of our culture and science.

    On a more contemporary (and literary) note: Would you have asked Andrew Hussie that? Or Kate Ashwin? Or Phil and Kaja Foglio? Or Wendy and Richard Pini? Or Tom Siddell? Or Kate Beaton?
     
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  5. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    sfar as i'm concerned, anything you do for fun is just as valuable as something you do for profit because while money+what you buy with it maintains your body, hobbies and interests maintain your mind

    pitches a tent
    i have a lot of issues revolving around 'unless it's Perfect and tackling something you think is an issue in fandom, you shouldn't make it' and!!!! fuck that!! to quote myself, I LIKE MAKING ART THAT'S BAD* AND HAVING FUN

    *bad is, of course, subjective, and refers only to my view of my self-indulgent stuff
     
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  6. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    So far, I prefer having jobs that are not art, because I like to have a clear and clean distinction between On The Clock vs my time. When I'm at work I work hard, and as effectively and efficiently and all that as I can see to do, and do my best to get everything taken care of. And when I leave, I can drop all that crap behind and go do what I can and want to do with the time that is my own.

    I watched my dad work too many hours for too many years, stressed as hell because he's not temperamentally made for managing other people but circumstances put him there, and like heck do I want to be as miserable as he was. He went above and beyond what would have sufficed for home and food and some comforts, because of garbage between him and my mom, and what does that get him? Years later divorce with alimony that's absurdly far in her benefit, having lost most of the opportunities to connect with his kids. What's the point of maximizing income for family benefit if the family loses out on the company of the person doing it? Even when he was around, he was angry and tired and resentful as fuck.

    One of the big things that did keep him sane, and did provide positive experiences between us, were some of his hobbies! We went sailing from time to time, giving him an excuse to read and reread a bunch of books about sailing to be sure he knew what he was doing out there.
     
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  7. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    *sticks m'legy out real far*
    I have a vast and somewhat eclectic array of hobbies and interests pretty much all of which tend to cost money and I feel super bad about it a lot but! Fuck it! I am having fun! I like doing shit like making ludicrous amounts of jam or booze and pushing most of it onto friends! I like LARP! I like the fact that I spent the majority of my life learning about music because that means I can really dive into the tiny bits that make music work! I like that I learned conducting and how arrangements work! I like that I can compose (basic, not very good) music! I like drawing! I like writing! And roleplaying! And acting! I like fashion and fibercrafts! And Makeup! I fucking love gardening holy shit I spent so much of my parents' money on our garden recently. These things bring me joy and make me feel like an actual person rather than a capitalist output machine!
     
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  8. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    TELL ME ABOUT YOUR GARDEN IVY PLS PLS

    gardening is super important to me because i had like, 10+ succulent plants when i lived in wyoming and for a while they were the only thing that kept me alive, and i had to leave them with someone when i moved back home, and i miss having them super lots. it helped me get up in the mornings! gotta get up, no sitting in your depression pile, gotta turn the plant children and check for rot and make sure the soil is dry enough and water them if it's tuesday
     
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  9. sirsparklepants

    sirsparklepants feral mom energies

    I like to cross stitch and read a lot about dog training. Neither of those have a thing to do with any job I've ever had but they're still fun. One of these days several years in the future, perhaps I will train a dog more elaborately than basic commands, but until then I'm perfectly happy to just read lots and lots of article on different ways to do it.
     
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  10. shmeed

    shmeed plant me

    I spend a lot of time and energy writing and thinking about fanfic and I feel mad guilty about it because it isn't productive and it's pretty frowned upon by society but it's really fun and I enjoy it. I really like telling stories. Also i feel like I'm making progress, I can tell longer stories than I used to be able to, and do more with characters and motivations, and figuring out how to make ideas into words is getting easier. It's! Fun!

    Also I was really into succulents for few years (seed is a play on sedum, actually) but I have been moving too much to maintain it lately. But, always hunting for accessible ways to give them the fast drying soil and heavy lighting they need, researching techniques and stuff, that was fun :3
     
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  11. Codeless

    Codeless Cheshire Cat

    Two thoughts:
    1. Things which bring people joy have value
    2. You are a people
     
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  12. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    Okay so here's some background:
    Hilariously enough I thought I'd never want a garden, because I'm super photosensitive, get cold easily, dislike touching dirt... I'm very very much not an outdoorsy person generally? (and now you may remember that I put LARP in my list of interests and YES THAT CONRTIBUTED TO GETTING OVER MY DISLIKE OFTHE GREAT OUTSIDE. I do camping and hiking more than once a year now. LARP is amazing that way lmao, BUT BACK ON TRACK.)
    Now my grandpa moved to an assisted living facility so we got his house. Suddenly??? Garden??? and I was kind of meh on it because still, super senistive to sunlight, and cold and shit. But then over the last year a few things happened. My parents and brother were on holiday without me (i dislike travelling generally) so I was house sitting and... okay so watering the garden in the evenings? Super soothing.
    And then late summer and fall I realized how great it is to have fruit trees (those were established by my great-grandparents) for things like apple butter and jams and??? Wow??? it tastes so much better when you were involve in every step of the production of this?
    So we spent this spring mostly with planning and rearranging things and buying new plants! Our concept is somewhere between monastery/abbey/cloister gardens, farmer's gardens and eclectic overgrown fairy grove.
    We have four apple trees, one pear tree, a very old plum tree that is dying (and that we want to get rid of, none of us like the kind of plums that one makes), a sour cherry tree, a super old blackberry bramble, wine, gooseberries, currant, forest strawberries, and roses everywhere. Also newly bought are a juneberry, an appleberry, a bloodplum, cornelian cherry, flowering quince, more roses (old cultivars used for perfumes and kitchen things), and we want to get another appletree (with pink apples!!!!), along with maybe another mini pear or maybe a nectarine??? We are probably getting more strawberries, always... definitely a blueberry, a mulberry and an elderberry... Oh we were thinking about a buckthorn, but probably not? AND SO MUCH LAVENDER.
    Other than that we have a herb planter that helps with not having to bend over so much!
    We've also ripped out most of the lawn grass and we wanna use different floorcovering cultivars of like raspberry, thyme and roses to cover it instead, because that's much more fun than having to take care of a lawn >:3
    We have a witchhazel in the front yard alongside a magnolia! witch hazel is one of my favorite trees ngl, I'm so glad mom bought me one. It's so prettyyyyyy~
    I should organize my photos and upload them lmao.
     
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  13. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    yes please post photos i want to put my eyes on it

    it sounds so wonderfullllll oh my gosh, i bet it's beautiful!! i'm jelly :0 (geddit? eh? eh?)
     
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  14. Jemmy

    Jemmy Don't Do A Hit

    I love to cosplay and collect porcelain dolls, and absolutely neither of these things are ever going to bring me any money. Sometimes I feel bad for spending money on this sort of stuff, but finding that perfect thing for my new cosplay or a cute new doll in a thrift store makes me really, really happy.

    And it's interesting, because my mother is really in the same boat. She's spent most of her life working herself down and not making a whole lot of money, and because of that she has kind of forgotten that she's allowed to have nice things. The other day I bought her a vase that she really wanted, and I had to explain to her that it didn't matter that it wasn't really helpful in our house, she wanted it and I could afford it. She's hecking 60 now, if you can't have frivolous and pretty things at that age then what's the point even
     
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  15. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    dfghjk i think it's super pretty! I like that we get so many bee friends and birb friends visiting QuQ they are so cuuuute.

    Have a google photos folder with some pics for now. The one wth the stepstones is how stuff looks atm, though we aren't done with that part yet, obv. I might take like a video tomorrow of walking through the place to show how it actually looks in context?
     
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  16. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    OH, CAN CONFIRM, VERY PRETTY
     
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  17. winterykite

    winterykite Non-newtonian genderfluid

    Gonna visit Ives' garden tomorrow, super stoked ::D
     
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  18. sirsparklepants

    sirsparklepants feral mom energies

    I forgot about my other Useless Hobby, which is collecting old (pre-ww2) medical texts. We're well beyond that tech level, so even though it's sort of related to my chosen career it's never going to be relevant to it, but I like to read them and think about all the advances in medicine we've made and how some things are actually older than we think!
     
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  19. Lizardlicks

    Lizardlicks Friendly Neighborhood Lizard

    I love bird watching and spotting. It brings no one anything save myself, in which I get Joy and Copious Eyerolls of the "oh no, here that go again" variety.
     
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  20. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    birds are good and important and should be spotted and watched at length and with great passion. Observe the Birb.
    (I know nothing about bird spotting and watching tbh and I wouldn't even know where to begin with learning but I always thought it sounded super neat???? I'm however also not super patient so it's unlikely to be a great fit for me. But that means I admire people who do it even more!!)
     
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