I've been acquiring pins and patches and such for my battle jacket

These are both sort of in-progress pics (as if a battle jacket is ever truly finished,) I've added a couple more band patches to the front and finished adding the pyramid studs around the bottom edge, and the fish wasn't sewn on for that pic of the back but is now

It's at a place where I'm pretty happy with it now, but still on the lookout for more things to add to it.

Researching transition. Also plan on going clothes & accessory shopping with my friend. I have never wanted to do that or gave a shit and suddenly I'm kind of excited about clothes shopping. Still kind of limited on what I plan on buying because ATM I just look like a scrawny guy and I'm not brave. But some accessories, hats, rings, gloves, etc are planned purchases. And I'm really excited!

Also since learning I'm trans I suddenly want to actually do things again in general: I've been playing my video game backlog more actively. Playing the new Quake 1 expansion Dawn of The Machine. Its pretty good.

Been a little light on the socializing as of late.

Other than that though unfortunately a lot of more boring stuff relating to insurance, chores, diet planning, my car, and work.

Switch 2. I haven't bought a Nintendo product since the Wii.

It's way better than I expected and I have enjoyed it a lot

I signed up for pickleball. Gonna give it a try.

Reading TTRPG rulebooks. If you have the mentality of "any interaction with the system is play", I've been playing quite a bit even though schedules and conflicts abound. The most recent one I'm going through is Ker Nethalas: The Midnight Throne, which is a solo dungeon crawler.

Playing bass guitar!

Picked it up in May after not playing anything since tuba about 3 decades ago. Getting used to fingering notes across strings and frets took forever but I'm making huge strides now. Even played with a few friends at a smalll gathering last weekend.

Replaced my strings for the first time today and did the setup adjustments. Doing the setup myself was a good choice as I'm getting a lot more familiar with how the thing works by messing around with it.

Making another keyboard. I recently made a folding wired keyboard for work, and now in making a single piece wireless one for home. I've needed 3D printed parts for this and found a nice guy locally who charges a tiny amount and prints the parts for me.

Stumbled onto plans for a small trackball too. Got all the parts together and now in waiting to make this after my keyboard is done.

Progressing through Silksong Act 3 and loving it. Not getting enough time for this.

I put Opengym on my home server, and having a great gym workout tracking app is somehow making the exercise more fun.

I've been on a hot streak of good movies. Getting through movies and podcasts I enjoy is the single biggest impact on improving my mental health and mood on a daily basis.

I sported out my automated offsite backup properly. It was holding a lot of outdated junk files and costing me money in Backblaze storage. Also got multiple monitors feeding back alerts to my Mattermost deployment (I use this as a knowledge and file dump, so I see the alerts here regularly).

I want to start writing academic material for my area of work. I think this could be a decent side hustle, but can't find the motivation to look at work content in my little spare time.

Now that I come to listing it out, I've for a bunch of stuff done in the last couple of weeks..... Didn't realise since it always feels like I'm overloaded and short of time.

Getting my wood shop set back up after moving earlier this year. It's really nice to be back to building things.

I have been fucking around with making a multiplayer mod for my friends and I on Caves of Qud. Its going really well, I just have to work out a few more bugs and its ready to go. I dont think I'm going to go around the entire game and test it before I get my friends in on it. But its working for the most part right now and I just got movement to be slightly less ass (it will always be ass in Qud with multiple players)

Thermal bath and my husband ;)

I found a little underground music club about 20 minutes from my house that hosts both local and national touring acts for dirt cheap. For 30-40 bucks I can get three hours of live music in an intimate setting and enjoy the vibe. Been trying to go at least once a month. Doesn’t matter if I know the acts; I get to experience new music and support upcoming artists.

I am falling headfirst into home labbing.

I'm also sorta getting into solar and water conservation stuff!

Ocarina of Time remake

DDR, found some song packs with my favorite artists

Meshtastic!! I did not get the hype but...its like knitting for nerds. Or something. Its just fun. And theres a good community around me I had no idea.

Sure its cheap electronics from China, maybe a bit wasteful. But fun to do.

Playing piano. I started learning almost 4 years ago and have a chance to play Scott Joplin’s Bethena on a grand piano next week if I can get it ready in time.

It’s a little rough right now but I’m having a blast practicing it so I’m happy either way. I haven’t been challenged in a way I enjoy like this in a long time.

I recently got a used Donner Hush X Live in mint condition off of marketplace. I’m a keyboardist but I play guitars on my music as well. I already have a headless 8-string guitar but it’s too unwieldy if I’m not playing heavy chug-y stuff.

It’s technically a travel guitar that you can break down into 3 pieces and stuff into a case the size of a bandminton racket bag. Since I already have my own plugins and effects pedals, I don’t really need the speaker attachment, so I only have the top brace attached and it looks like I’m playing half a guitar. It’s a fun little instrument and definitely live worthy as long as you’re not a snob for branding.

Performing much-needed maintenance on my car. I love working on cars but I've been in a real funk the last few months and have now accrued a long list of things to fix.

I've been developing a bash application at work because I was bored, and then it got blessed as a good use of time. I've been having a blast with making it, and can't wait to declare that it's shippable.

I crawled back into the factorio hole, and this time decided to make an early-game megabase for funsies. I maxxed out an offshore water pump with 200 boilers and 400 steam engines, leaving room for steam storage tanks.

I was going to learn blender so I could make a 3d printed globe, but I crawled back into the factorio hole

A little weird maybe, but…exercise.

A nice workout session gets my brain to making the happy juice.

Other than that, the usual…modular synthesis, beats, poetry…

Picked up my old box of floppy disks and an USB floppy drive, and have been doing some archeology. I already found one of my ancient assembly files, dated 1997.

Wow forever

Reading instead of just doing audio books. I do both now but I read the book first and if I like it then I listen to it while I bike

Also, started biking.

And very recently someone gave me a week long access key to WoW forever. I played the original before any expansions and loved it back then, but whenever I checked out new expansions it was just too different. WoW Forever is like classic but with a little new stuff and QoL, plus with its recent release its populated and feels like it did when I first played.

I've never replaced suspension before and I recently replaced the front and rear shocks and springs on my Hilux. It took me hours by myself but I loved and sweated every minute of it. Very satisfying.

I recently got back into Linux, and installed CachyOS on an old Chromebook that wasn't getting much use, breathing new life into it. Been having a lot of fun learning Linux and tweaking my UI customizations!

I've been trying to perfect making a Boston Cream Pie. Took a break recently after the entire household was sick of eating pastry cream with vanilla cake trifles after one too many failed attempts. Can't quite get the pastry cream thick enough to stand on its own yet. But it's been fun trying!

My kid and I have been working on Pokopia together as well! I love passing the sticks back and forth as we work through the storyline.

Got an old computer that a friend gave me up and running. It's much better than the crappy one I was using, so I handed that one off to my Dad.

This will let me get back to a couple of personal projects I was struggling to complete on the old computer.

Also indulging in political news again, which I had to swear off for a couple of years for my mental health.

Bit of trolling on Lemmy, got a few likes.

Lotta video games. Still playing Gears E Day, and now Ocarina as well, and soon to be GTA.

Playing Space Station 14, i had no idea it existed and now I'm addicted.

I'm considering getting an embroidery machine, been playing around with digitalising. And a bit of web development for funsies.

I've been watching Star Trek DS9 for the first time. Half way into Season 5.

Luanti, the free and open source survival game engine formerly known as "Minetest"!

I'm pretty late to the party on this one, because I've been hearing about this project for years. But I've finally gotten into trying it out and it has been a ton of fun!

At a basic level you can think of it as a free and open source reimplementation of Minecraft. But there's actually a whole lot more to it than that because Luanti isn't just a single game with a single set of entities and rules, but actually an entire platform for making a wide variety of voxel-based games. It's extremely modular and all written in Lua, so there are a lot of opportunities to customize the experience and every server you join can be wildly different. There's everything from classic Minecraft-esque survival and create experiences, to Factorio-esque automation games, and even weird little experiences and silly PvP servers.

So there's a lot of stuff to explore in the Luanti community, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've joined other people's servers, I'm self-hosting another one for my friends, and I've even started hacking in some mods that I think will make the game even more fun for our group.

I can totally recommend it to anyone who has even so much as a passing interest in Minecraft-like games.

Outside of that I've been enjoying other video games lately, including Zelda Ocarina of Time Switch 2, Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, and Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart.

Baulder's Gate 3 - first play thru and its only taken me since August to get to Act 3, that is like a gaming speed run for me now a days.

Jiu-Jitsu! It's rough, but tons of fun. Builds friendships really quickly too. Not for everyone but it's a ton of fun for some of us.

I've been making walking sticks. Giving them away to my friends and family. I also recently bought 2 bows, one recurve, one long bow.

I write scripts that scrape the internet for porn for the inevitable end of internet porn.

I'm collecting it for two possible solutions.

1. in the event that the world economy crashes and we see a world economic regression on the scale of decades if not centuries, I will sling my collected sin to locals in lieu of tradable goods and services.
2. if the world remains stable enough to maintain internet access, I am also writing software based on torrents that will sync subscribed content from client to client. it won't be publicly available and will index across the tor network and sync (encrypted) over public or VPN networks. by becoming a part of the ring, you can publish your own content and allow it to be subscribed.

Signed up to a challenge called GRIT100 where you do 100 miles of activity in November. I hurt my back a little while ago and it really put a dent in my fitness routine but it's been really fun to have a challenge I can still get stuck into, have fun and feel like I've still achieved something.

Had some board games arrive this week and got in several plays with my teens. Specifically Herbcraft, Pyramido and Targi have been especially fun.

Fantasizing about having the skills or time to play with 3d printing / laser engraving. The tech has advanced so far in the last year or so. Lasers can now make color patterns in steel - just based on different wavelengths of laser light. Those are the expensive lasers, but still really cool that you could take a flat metal panel and turn it into a picture with the power of lasers.

Ripping out and redoing all my flower gardens. Renewed soil, native seeds that I know work for my location, separated bulbs, etc. Great therapy for me.

Been studying Japanese in my spare time, and I'm close to finishing my first full JRPG: Keroro RPG: Kishi to Musha to Densetsu no Kaizoku.

Really fun game, it's a licensed anime spinoff developed by Namco Tales Studio that runs on the Tales of Hearts engine. So it's basically just a full Tales game starring the cast of Keroro Gunsou, and I'd even say this weird spinoff might be one of the best in the series. But because it's based on a shounen anime, it's got full Furigana for younger readers and the silly lighthearted plot is a lot easier to follow along with as a learner. It's the perfect My First JRPG.

Just finished the penultimate dungeon, so I'm on track to wrap this up before I take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N3 next month. Great study material, I've learned a lot going through this.

The November Nethack Tournament

https://tnnt.org

🎶It's the most wonderful time of the year! 🎵

Barbecue. I got a lightly used offset smoker/ grill that wasn't working right. The install on the firebox was wrong and it took all of fifteen minutes to fix. The pit works great now.

I've made baby back ribs and chicken tenderloins on it a couple of times now. It takes five or six hours to do the ribs but it's a good reason to be outside since I have to tend the fire, plus it gives me time to read.

The chicken to a while to figure out how to do properly but the ribs have been amazing every time. I use a dry rub or salt, pepper, and garlic. They're great with barbecue sauce, but they don't need it.

Despite being a frustratingly difficult game, playing Sonic R on emulator has been real fun. I've been getting somewhat decent at it. Not enough to unlock metal knuckles or get all the chaos emeralds, but still good enough to eventually unlock the other characters. Great soundtrack all around for each level. Having a lot of fun with it.

Also, let's not even get started on me realizing a few days back that Plants vs Zombies Universe got an update that added levels 1-10 of Big Wave Beach and one of my all-time favorite plants: Homing Thistle. It's genuinely fun despite it being a difficult game all things considered. Especially Fright Noght Theater 3, which I cannot beat at all without debug mode despite doing pretty well on levels 1&2. Pretty cool to have a fangame that's trying to include as much content from all the official games as possiblr while also being given the choice to play on either PC or mobile. So nice and such a fun game so far, IMO.

Also am doing good on working through various missions on Mindustry, capturing sectors from both the official campaigns and many modded ones. There are definitely some amazing modded campaigns.

Tinkering with Potato Salad and Deviled Egg recipes, restarting a Hoya collection, embroidery and dip penning new Bottle inks. Also rasslin' demons.

Replaying Red Dead Redemption 2 and just roaming around in chapter 2 hunting and having a good time. I got my raccoon skin hat that I always wear and I'm avoiding all the story quests!

• Running might be my most fun and healthiest hobby recently.
• Really into running public and local servers but it’s sort of arrived at the stage where I don’t need to touch them much.
• Got into my PSVita, Gameboy, and iPod again. iPod is by far the best because it has a week of power so I can always have music. Also have been keeping a small camera on me as well. Diff vibe than phone photos and longer battery.

Queen's Domain. I'm guessing I'm roughly 25%-30% of the way through.

Ableton. It is fun to fuck around and connect all sorts of things.

And I get to a point where I can generate some working drums to emulate a jamming session with my friends. So that's cool to get some ideas going.

Photons. !flashlight@lemmy.world

Gazing longingly upon the new chest freezer and meal preping.

Also playing Heaven's Vault.