I’m not really sure how to respond to today’s Blaugust Promptapalooza prompt, which is from Solarayo of Ace Asunder:
Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche.
What even is my “specific niche”? Is gaming a “niche” hobby that I really need to develop interests outside of? Maybe the prompt should have been, “Tell us about the interests you don’t share on your blog”.
This has all the potential for bloggers to start bragging about all the intensely interesting stuff they do, I guess.
I have other blogs, though.
Here’s my bridge hunting blog, though I haven’t been bridge hunting for a few years now:
I also used to really be into a particular minigame in Neopets called Shapeshifter, where you had to fit random shapes into a puzzle to flip all the pieces into the same picture. The first few levels are easy. But to go to level 100, you need computer help. There were some programs out there to help, but I wanted to write my own. For a few months, I was obsessed with algorithms and hit upon my “flip counting” method to prune a move tree and solve most puzzles fairly quickly. I had a lot of great discussions with other solvers.
It’s my trap to get really focused on things to the detriment of everything else, and that includes gaming.
Since the pandemic started, I’ve been teaching myself to play Kalimba. It’s the instrument circled above. I recorded a song I wrote for it (based on a theme I found) just this morning, so you can kinda hear what a kalimba sounds like, though if you go on YouTube you can find plenty of examples of what a kalimba sounds like if someone actually knows how to play one.
But it’s a lot quieter than the woodwinds I usually play, and I can keep my hands busy plinking on the kalimba while listening to meetings at work… I guess this counts as a hobby outside my niche?
Oh, we had one of those in the house for a while. I never knew what it was. Nor where it came from for that matter. I think we used to call it the “thumb piano”. I used to plink on it sometimes. Eventually most of the keys or whatever they’re called fell off and it got thrown away. If I could have made it sound as good as your recording does I’d have kept it and had it repaired.
Tuning is the issue with these, they need to be tuned regularly. I actually play better than this most days, I just did a quick recording and made mistakes but went with it anyway. It’s a really fun and easy to play instrument.