Hobbies are amazing

A few months ago Alyson and I took up a new temporary hobby and knocked out 5 different road run 5k's (Part 1 & Part 2) in a few weeks time. As summer struck the amount of races declined, but we found some cool ones to register in October a few months away. I started thinking that most of my hobbies come and go and don't really often share free time with another hobby. I tend to go all in on a hobby until exhaustion and swap to another and rinse and repeat.

What I mean is a couple months ago any free hobby moment was working on the Cicada 3301 puzzles which led to a Part 3 and Part 4 blog posts and a build out of a public GitHub repository. I had an urge to work on Cicada research again, but coworkers pulled my focus to a new active treasure hunt that is unsolved (as of this post).

This new treasure hunt required purchasing a book which reminded me of A Treasure's Trove, which was the same idea - real treasures hidden in real life with clues in the book. However I ordered this book on April 23 and haven't even read a single page yet which just shows how many other hobbies are competing for this.

If we look purely at nerdy "coding" hobbies I'm presently balancing:

• Apktool - Java reverse engineering tools.
• Cicada 3301 - A repository collecting and documenting the puzzle.
• Leaf - Halo Infinite stat sites that just passed 100 million games logged.
• Ingress - Random tools for my team.
• OpenAI/PHP - Library for using OpenAI in PHP.
• pi-stats - A long-term storage for logging all my DNS traffic project.

Basically a set of random hobby programming projects that my focus takes turns moving between and those are the purely technical coding ones. Leaf for examples gets focus when a Halo update comes out and Apktool tends to follow the AOSP release cycle in terms of when I focus it the most.

If we look in the outdoor world those hobbies would expand even further to:

• Kayaking to the little islands around Florida.
• Running to stay in shape and compete in races.
• Exploring trails or parks to see nature.
• Playing Ingress anywhere and everywhere.
• Rollerblading at a place that feels like its stuck in the 90s.

Basically exploring Florida's natural attractions is always a fun hobby unless its blistering hot with no shade. Like building my fold-able kayak to kayak around some mangroves in a shady area is a tough hobby to beat.

Yet I can ignore all of that and head into mega nerd mode with even more hobbies at home with activities like:

• Busting out the old GameCube to play Zelda Windwaker.
• Playing Halo 2 on the original Xbox with Insignia.
• Playing anything on the gaming computer like Overwatch, Gears of War or Halo.
• Working on my Homelab or weather station or WiFi defense.

I can share hobby time from a digital world to a physical world with hobbies in both and that is exciting, but honestly not as exciting as date night.