Eating all the food you cook will make you fat

Buying more expensive and better gear will not make you better at it. I not even going to tell you what the hobby is because this applies to so many of them. If you can do your hobby with the gear you have and you think “oh man I wish I had that, I could do awesome things” - it’s only worth it if you spend a whole lot of time on your hobby. If you’re like me and you only spend a couple hours a week or month on your hobby, it’s usually not worth it. Unless it’s something that let’s you do stuff faster. Because then you can do more in the few hours you have. I’m sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but in general, before you buy some shit, think to yourself “Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?”

Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.

The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.

A box of comics isn’t going to take up too much space.

Boxes of comics have taken over an entire room.

You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.

When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn’t really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.

Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.

I got into retro computing during lockdown. Kind of a nostalgia thing. Refurbed My Atari ST and ZX Spectrum. Got an Amiga, and Amstrad CPC464 and an old Atari 2600. Spent a lot of money and did loads of mods. Now they just sit there and I have no idea what to do with them. The games and demos were a fun novelty, but I’m not really a gamer. I don’t want to sell them, but they don’t really bring me any joy either. I’m pretty happy, mostly and have a good family life. Certainly not depressed. But yeah, this kit is just sitting in my den, rarely used. Probably should have anticipated that before I got so deep into it.

For guitar and bass:

• The mostly ortholinear grid relationship between frets and strings mean that you can think a lot about “shapes”, or positions of notes relative to other notes. Unless open strings are involved, sliding any shape up and down the next gives you the same quality of chord or scale just shifted up and down in pitch/key. (Not all instruments have such an intuitive layout!)
• You don’t need to memorize the note names (C, C#, D, Eb, etc.) of every fret on the fretboard! It’s essential to learn the names of the open strings first, so that you can tune your guitar using a tuner. But did you know that the notes at the 12th fret (often marked with double dot inlays) are the exact same notes 1 octave higher? This means that everything above the 12th fret is an exact copy of everything on the lower half of the fretboard (cutting the task of memorization in HALF)! Similarly, because the lowest and highest string are both tuned to “E” in standard tuning, they have the same notes all the way up and down the neck (that’s another 7.5% of the task eliminated). Finally, I recommend starting to memorize the note names strategically, starting with only the inlay/dot frets (3, 5, 7, and 9) on the 2 fattest/lowest strings (E and A string). Once you’ve memorized these key “landmarks” on the lowest/fattest strings, you can use logic to deduce the other notes pretty quickly! (What’s the note between A and B? Bb! Between C and D? C#)
• Finally, learning 2 note intervals will eventually be your best friend. Not only can you use octaves to make deducing note names easier while memorizing the fretboard, but you can also play octaves to enhance all kinds of music from punk to jazz. A perfect 5 interval is the heart of the “power chord”. And knowing intervals will help you do everything from reading sheet music to writing interesting guitar parts in all genres.
• The huge number of popular rock music that you hear can be played with 2 or 3 note “power chords” alone. This is important because it means that you can become proficient enough to play rhythm guitar parts with a band in a matter of weeks of solid practice! All you have to do is memorize the note landmarks on the lower strings, be able to build a power chord on the appropriate note, and strum it in time with the music! Whether it’s guitar or bass, you don’t need to be an expert to start playing or writing songs.
• When you eventually learn your first scale, try to learn it in 2 positions on the neck. For example, if you learn E-minor pentatonic, learn it starting from the 6th string at the 0 fret (which is the same as the 12th fret, remember!) AND learn it starting from the 5th string at the 7th fret. This may seem harder at first, but over time you will learn how to connect these scale shapes with intermediate shapes, and you’ll unlock the entire fretboard for soloing!
• On a right-handed guitar, your right hand can be mostly thought of as a rhythm instrument, just whacking away at strings like a drummer whacks at their drums. Whether you hit all the strings, some of them, or just 1 string at a time, the rhythmic aspect is what matters most. It takes practice to become fluent here, but looseness and fluidity is key. Eventually you can incorporate other techniques to change the timbre of the rhythms being played, but remember to keep the rhythm going in constant movement. (On a left-handed guitar or bass, this would apply to your left hand.)

For coding, I wish I had known that I will need to basically relearn the entire thing every 2-4 years due to frameworks and language design changes.

That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.

Warhammer 40K is what some may call…MEGA EXPENSIVE.

3d printing, specifically FDM with PLA since I’m not down to mess with the chemicals for a resin printer. Keep printing until you’re out of an opened filament roll, otherwise your filament will absorb water and degrade. I often learn filament goes bad when a tiny piece breaks off in the feeder right above the heating element, requiring some annoying disassembly to diagnose and correct the problem. If you’re not sure what to build with the last bit of filament, a small square trash can/pencil holder is always useful.

Stick to a maintenance schedule. Putting off a lubrication or dusting can lead to debris getting stuck somewhere and ruining a print when you least expect it. Also learn about every component in your printer and how to get a replacement when it inevitably breaks. That way you can purchase a few of the more commonly broken parts to lower printer downtime.

Start off with a brand name printer that does auto leveling. That cheap CR10 you bought for a hundred dollars sounds like a bargain until you realize it can’t print a solid first layer, causing all sorts of other minor annoyances with your print quality. Trying and failing to fix the issues might eventually turn you off on pursuing the hobby.

I was already well versed in Solidworks, but learn how to use a CAD program. You can get a lot of use from the many publicly available models out there but you might eventually have an idea or require something that requires a custom design. Being able to physically manifest your own design ideas quickly was a big drawing point for me to get into the hobby.

Rock climbing:

• Do regular full body workouts/yoga/antagonist work. A lack of core strength and scapular stability will end up wrecking you if all you do is climb.
• To get better at climbing, training helps a lot. But 90% of the training you need to do is just climbing more. Your problem isnt that you arent strong enough, it’s that you havent developed the necessary techniques to climb harder because you havent experienced enough rock. 90% of the change you need to improve your climbing is simply to start consistently logging what you do in your climbing sessions.
• Work your way up to climbing 20 pitches per day, 4 days per week, lowering the grade as much as needed to get the pitches in. You’ll find your biggest problem here is simply time management and finding a willing partner. This is a great time to get used to leading, since almost all your pitches will be quite easy.
• Once you can consistently get 20 pitches in per climbing day, start increasing the number of pitches at your onsight grade. Your sweet spot for progression is a climb that you may or may not be able to get on the onsight attempt, but which you will probably get second go. Aim to put 10 burns on onsight-level climbs per day.
• Once you stop easily progressing through the grades week by week, your climbing logbook comes into its own. If you find that a certain grade feels like it would take more that 2 or so attempts to put down, start tracking sends in the grade below it. You are only allowed to be disappointed in your inability to send the new harder grade in when you have put down 100 sends on the grade below it.
• When progress starts stagnating purely from increasing volume, start bouldering one or two days per week instead of rope climbing. It can be satisfying to send boulder problems, but spend at least some of your time on boulders that are so hard that you can only do one or two moves at a time - practicing doing just one or two extremely hard moves at a time is where you will really learn how to use your body. It is helpful to boulder in a big group, so you are forced to rest between burns.
• The easiest way to improve at climbing is to climb a lot with people who are better than you. If you can do this, disregard all previous instructions and just go climbing with these people.

I kinda wish I considered my social anxiety and picked a better solitairy instrument than drums. They’re super fun to play, but I was only ever in one band and I’m too anxious to play with strangers right now. I just jam by myself, but I suspect I’d have an easier time actually writing music if I had more experience with melody. I tried picking up guitar and violin later, but so far I haven’t had the energy to really devote the time needed to learn another instrument.