A Gray
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I got into this hobby due to 3 things:
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I made a spreadsheet of Mugwort's aromachemical composition, and the suppliers and descriptions of those chemicals:
It's a bit of a mess at the moment, because the research papers from which I've constructed some values are a bit contradictory, and the primary research paper lists the 'most important aromachemical components' both in a summary and in two tables, but (to my untrained brain) the summary somewhat contradicts the tables (some aromachemicals listed in the tables have higher aroma-activity than those listed as the 'main components' in the summary - which might simply be because these smells are common and the research paper is trying to find what is unique about Mugwort).
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Searching Youtube for perfumery content results in long lists of those 'demonic' grins on clickbait thumbnails, and almost everyone is advertising their own brand. Man, Youtube is terrible.
Personally I find Sam Macer's videos quite good. He occasionally reminds viewers that he sells a course or sells the raw ingredients used in his videos, but it seems a lot less fake than the others I've come across.
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I think I got into this around age 13, by trying the 'Wake-Induced Lucid Dream' (WILD) method - waking up with an alarm at 5am, reading a book for half an hour, and going back to sleep. After my first lucid dream, I was hooked - I put so much effort into writing down my dreams, first thing every morning, until I was writing more than 2 full A4 pages of dreams every day. I had lucid dreams successfully maybe once or twice a week, but they lasted only for a few seconds of lucidity. I gradually stopped trying.
I only started wearing glasses around age 16 or 17, despite needing them since at least age 13, so lucid dreaming was also amazing for the fact that I had perfect vision in my dreams, something that real life could never match until I started wearing contact lenses much later.
When I was 17, I got back into it, because my housemate - who lived next door - kept on waking me up at 1am or 2am by hosting parties in his room and having his guests slamming the door shut. I actually didn't mind his noise, because it genuinely worked at giving me lucid dreams.
My backups from this era include some scientific journals about doing maths in lucid dreams (“Lucid dream mathematics: An explorative online study of arithmetic abilities of dream characters” - Stumbrys, Erlacher & Schmidt, 2011, International Journal of Dream Research). So I guess I wanted to open up some time in my sleep to study, but that is never what I actually did, because lucid dreams are too fun to waste on that kind of stuff.
I bought some USB-controlled lights - which were quite difficult to find - so that I could flash lights through my eyes are certain times during the night. I accompanied this with sounds through my headphones, such as occasionally narrating the time - the idea was that, if I was dreaming, I would possibly notice the time was night-time and I would become lucid. It worked several times, but not enough to justify the effort - it may simply have worked by priming me to pay more attention to what time it is.
I often find that in my dreams I understand that the time is 3am or something, despite the sun being out in the dream, thus the limiting factor is probably that my brain isn't putting two-and-two together.
After moving to a new place, with less-noisy neighbours, I stopped trying.
I got back into it maybe around a year ago. I got so into it that I even drank some Mugwort tea, because people said it makes dreams more vivid. For me, it didn't seem to have any effect on my dream - but the intention to have vivid dreams did have an effect. I also discovered that I liked the smell of Mugwort, leading eventually to my interest in perfumery, just to replicate the smell.
Actually, I've just been looking through my old emails and I can see I also bought some Mugwort essential oil when I was 17, alongside the Vitamin B6 I got. B6 supposedly increases dream vividness, but it is dangerous to take too much so I never took as much as other people suggested. The side-effects of taking too much for too long apparently include tingling nerves.
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When I was 13, I enjoyed watching Lego 'movies' on Youtube. Most were made by taking photographs and stitching them together into a movie, but some were so smooth that I tried to find out how they were made. They were rendered in Blender, which is why I started learning that.
My first Blender output was a 1 GB video of a terrible shiny Earth and a weird-looking moon orbiting it. My next Blender videos were short videos of Lego men moving their limbs, trying to learn how to use Blender's animation rigging. I gave up eventually, keeping to making my Lego movies from photographs instead, although I continued to use Blender for other projects.
By the way, on my computer the colours for these videos are completely mangled, but they are correct in the thumbnails. Presumably there's some colourspace conversion going on (sRGB -> RGB or something) but I'm going to edit these archived files.
Also, viewing these files by Gwenview changed their filesystem modification timestamps - weird behaviour, maybe NTFS-specific behaviour for Gwenview (which might be trying to modify access timestamps instead).
Anyway - my sister got a 3D movie for her birthday, which was the first 3D home movie I'd ever seen. So I had a brief period of making 3D images in Blender, by rendering a scene from two different places, and using red-blue glasses to pseudo-polarise the light.
I continued using Blender for 3D modelling and video editing - things that it does very well. Most of my content from this era is uninteresting, although I did pirate many many gigabytes of 3D models and textures for future planned cityscapes.
Then Blender switched to a new UI, a radical overhaul - centralising many different settings into one control flow chart (the Node Editor). In hindsight, after getting to grips with the concept of node configurations, it was a great move - if you think like an engineer, you will love it. But at the time, it confused the hell out of me, and I stopped using it.
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I think I started roleplaying with D&D 4e when I was 12. It was very steampunk, set in the ruins of an advanced Dwarven race who built mechanoids.
When I was 13 I used Blender to create very over-done avatars for my characters, and on the online wiki (was it Obsidian Portal?) I wrote extremely detailed character biographies.
At one point I temporarily joined a different group, who played D&D 5e. It seemed a lot worse to me.
By age 15, I had got it into my head to make massively-overdone 'epic' avatars like these:
Much later, my main D&D group switched to trying other game systems - one, which was my favourite long-term game, was set several hundred years in the future, in a fully-colonised solar system, with what I'd call a 'tech optimism' theme (essentially it was the Wild West if you could hack systems to get IDs etc).
My favourite short-term game was a dungeon-crawler, where you started off with 10 characters each, and they'd die very quickly, leaving you at the end with between 1-3 survivors each. I don't think how you could make a long-running campaign from this, but it's fun.
I continued playing roleplaying games after I moved, although now with different groups of people. It was hard to find a group that I enjoyed playing with, because I can struggle to understand what people are saying if there are multiple people speaking at once, and roleplaying groups often hosted at noisy pubs.
Most recently I have been playing over video chat, with a friend and his other friends, who are all living far apart.
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I heard about the Coronavirus pandemic back in early January 2020, when it was just a 'strange but not alarming outbreak of pneumonia'. Since Britain spent months acting like it was going for the 'herd immunity' strategy - not lockdowns - I bought enough F95 particulate filter masks for what I assumed would be several months of high Coronavirus prevalence in a business-mostly-as-usual society.
That didn't happen of course - instead we just got boring lockdowns, and those masks went mostly unused. I was never trying to avoid getting infected - I only wanted to get a low initial dose, to ensure that the infection would be less severe. I didn't expect - and nobody else at the time expected - a vaccine to be developed anywhere near as quickly as it was. So my plan was to get infected to get immunity, but to control when I got infected, to avoid the months where I'd assume the NHS was overloaded and where I'd assume viral load was at its peak.
Yes, I'll get to the point. Basically, I got somewhat into disaster 'prepping' during this time. This was only because I used a prepper subreddit to find F95 masks early on, and then I stayed around and found their other articles interesting.
The most interesting part of this, for me, was how one could restore technology after a huge solar flare (Carrington Event) or nuclear war.
Most likely, there would be access to computers and generators, but no access to a national electrical grid or to new parts.
I found several websites that hosted archives of PDFs for building technology. One was an anarchist collectivist commune kind of thing, but I suppose that's the kind of people who are most prepared for this.
What was lacking from these archives was a maths education strategy.
So I did my own research, learning about maths education strategies, the debates around them (particularly the failed Cold War 'New Maths' attempt), and France's and Russia's maths education systems.
I haven't found where I put my research, but what does linger is an 'open' interest in this field. Sometimes I stumble on something closely related to maths education strategy, and it piques my interest.
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If I found school maths boring, I can't blame anyone else for finding so too.
The only things that got me interested in maths were:
Why is maths taught so boringly? If we accept a boring maths education, why not teach taxes and Dijkstra route optimisation to everyone, instead of trigonometry and Pythagorus's Theorem?
Since our modern world is underpinned by cryptography, isn't it concerning how nobody in the general public is aware of the what/why/how of public key cryptography? How many companies have lost intellectual property, or leaked personal customer details, because somebody in the supply chain had insufficient mathematical intuition (e.g. to ensure things had a proper hashing algorithm)?
Whatever system I'd come up with would be optimised for the child version of myself - so maybe it wouldn't work for everyone. Well, I don't know how to finish this paragraph off, so do me a favour, dear reader, and go to the next paragraph of content.
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This is a lovely steampunk-style game, although ship combat games are definitely not everyone's taste.
I painted these when I was 13. I liked the Antarctica faction because they were a super-high-technology faction that promised to topple the feudal monarchies and introduce a world-spanning technocracy.
See how I painted these all grey? The official paintings, and everyone else, have them as a mixture of wood and iron - but I think I went for a more WW1-and-Tesla-coils style of navy.
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I used to play this game with some mid-40s men at my local war games club, while the other children my age were playing Warhammer (a much more expensive game).
The men had enough money to buy any platoon they wanted, but I had to basically stick with what I could get cheaply - either hand-me-downs from my father's soldier collection, or from cheaper places like 'The Plastic Soldier Company'. This meant my soldiers looked quite weird compared to the official FoW soldiers (who were meant to look a bit cartoonishly-proportioned).
Initially I had a British infantry platoon, but I transitioned to a German Gepanzerte Panzergrenadierkompanie (armoured mechanised platoon). The half-tracks were my favourite models - they looked so cool.
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When I was 13, I went through my early art and created digital copies before trashing the paper originals.
Here's some of the images:
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During the Coronavirus lockdowns I did some pen sketches, but I was annoyed at how rubbish they were for how long I had spent making them.
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This is something I did a lot as a teenager - lathes and chiselling.
In my opinion, I think I spent too much time chiselling - my first chisel product (a lion on a rectangle) was adequate and required no real training. All the subsequent products just felt inadequate to me, because quite honestly my creativity didn't expand to match my expanding skill.
Not that my skill expanded that much - it's basically just hand control, familiarity with what angle and strength to hit with, muscle memory (especially with finer chisels), and most of all, familiarity with the different woods (softness, grain strength, risk of fractures).
Lathes, on the other hand, are more satisfying - it is very easy to set up a pedal-powered manual lathe, its products have at least some applications (e.g. as candlesticks, chair legs, handles), and you could advance onto powered lathes, then powered metal lathes, which is where the very useful applications are (you can't 3d-print or cast a metal stronger or finer than you can achieve by lathing a chunk of metal to the correct shape).