What do y’all do?
My wife is a writer and I enjoy creating music.
Is there something, in particular, that you like to use (software, hardware, tools, utilities, etc.)?
My wife writes using whatever, she’s been collecting fountain pens more recently and I’m thinking of getting her a typewriter.
I like to use VCV Rack for music, probably the most engaging way I’ve created music for myself.
I am homebrewer (for now). After 6 years I eyeball nearly everything. How my friends put it - you never brew bad beer and it is always different.
There are some software tools but I don’t need to use them (mostly). For hardware/gear I have this DIY Frankenstein monster of brewery which works better than most bought ones I tryed.
How did you start out? Does it require much space or can I start relatively small and are there any safety concerns I should be worried about?
Like time I tried to ferment anything was a jar of pickles and they were too salty for King Neptune lol
https://beehaw.org/post/727140
Look in brewing community (I linked start guide for beer from there).
For beer you need 2 big pots (I use modified 50l pots) and fermentation vessel. You can start smaller but it takes same time and effort to make 10 or 50l of beer.
Safety - you could get burned. And sometimes need to repaint the kitchen when you make bombs.
There’s a fantastic community on Reddit, /r/prisonhooch, that has lots of info and some of the simplist, easiest, least expensive ways to start making your own alcoholic stuff. You can start with a jug of plain store bought apple or grape or pretty much any fruit juice, some yeast (even plain ol’ grocery store bread yeast,) and some sugar. It’s really fun! & A whole lot safer than I thought it would be before I started diving into researching about it.
There are also cider making and homebrewing and other related communities there that are great, but the one I mentioned is, in my experience, the most welcome to newbies and is not prickly or elitist and weird like some of those booze making communities are.
Photography and 3D modelling in Blender. The former I don’t do as much these days because every place I go is so incredibly packed with people.
I can see how crowds aren’t fun to photograph but people are beautiful in their own way, I hope you can enjoy photography again sometime soon.
Knew a guy in college who adored it, makes my heart swell just thinking about how he would look at the photos he took with admiration of the scenery he captured.
I do a lot of digital art. I draw sometimes, but my motorskills leave a lot to be desired (I draw with my wrist, not my arm, and I have shaky hands); so if I’m doing anything more than sketching, I need to draw in Procreate so I can keep retrying each line until it looks how I want.
Because of this, I usually stick to vector art, which is much cleaner regardless of motor skills. I lucked out and bought Illustrator when it was CS6 and not Creative Cloud, so I’m still using that and will likely continue to use it forever (I hate consumer SaaS with a passion).
I sing almost all day, still occasionally find time to noodle on guitar, and garden all the time. In the winter I’ll do wood burning art projects that usually get donated to charities for raffles.
Do you have any local charities that you normally donate to? Larger ones I might recognize ike Rotary and United Way or any specific organizations that you feel deserve some attention?
The only thing I create and donate is my hair hahaha, my small contribution but it’s nice to hear that someone has a hobby that impacts their community in a positive way.
We like to donate plants to the local library and food bank plant drives each spring, for local ones. The artwork is usually donated to Games Done Quick to benefit Malala Fund, Médecins Sans Frontières, Prevent Cancer Foundation, and others.
GDQ, MSF, and PCF??? Wow! Those are just the organizations that I recognize off the top of my head and I can already tell that you do great work. Very respectable, thank you.
I’ll look into making my next charitable contribution to the Malala Fund in honor of you because this is the first time I’ve heard of this organization.
Follow YouTube procreate painting videos. I’m not good at drawing or painting, but I like to put on a random step by step procreate video and follow it.
I like cooking too.
