There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)
I really like killing invasive plants. I think that’s probably my most niche passion. Like when I have some free time I’ll just go into the woods behind my house and cut down wisteria, ivy, Chinese holly… I just find it extremely satisfying idk. I love the idea that I’m clearing out space for native plants (and in turn native animals) to grow.
I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.
I do calligraphy. Sometimes i meet someone who knows someone who does calligraphy. But I’ve never met another person IRL that does calligraphy. And the particular style I like makes it even more rare.
Dune was my go to scifi…now it’s popular and I feel like a hipster.
My dad got me into hard scifi, d&d, Tolkien…if I feel like a hipster, can’t imagine what he feels like.
I like retro programming, in particular Windows 2000.
Now I’m making a little 3D toy now that works with OpenGL on Windows with WGL and on X11 with GLX (also on Cygwin). No third party abstractions!
I want to keep adding backends, like DX 7, 9, Vulkan, WebGL, bare Linux KMS, and then stuff like screen space reflections, shadows, materials, ray tracing where possible, maybe get it running on a console or two too.
I’m sure there’s probably someone out there, but I’m really interested in cool border crossings and how they represent nations on each side. As much as I am no nationalist, I find those projections of strength, friendship, security, etc. all super interesting.
Oh, and fake/fantasy transit maps. Those are always fun to draw up in my spare time.
I work in a technology field and I’m interested in “not AI” stuff. It’s a wild ride.
I like to analyse stickers stuck on traffic lights and road signs.
I plan on making an app someday where people can contribute to a database of stickers and compare the sticker culture of different regions.
I’m not into gaming. I think I’m the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn’t. I don’t really know why. I think it’s a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.
Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.
But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.
I like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s
It’s true that barely anyone is into actually contributing, but I assure you a fair amount of people are into the actual open source implementations and are thankful for your efforts!
Any game in particular you contributed to that you want to share?
Sorry, I use different accounts and hence nicknames for each project; letting one loose would dox me too much for my liking. Thanks, though!
Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).
I’m into combining these in interesting ways.
While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.
It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.
I’m still on Second Life, which is a virtual world social platform. It has ~45,000 given active people on it, which is a piss squirt compared to other online platforms like MMOs and MMORPGs. But, nobody I know are into it save for about 5 people at least.
And I still somehow am bothering with Gaia Online which has even less users, from 1,500 ~ 4,400 on a good day and only know 2 friends on there.
Gaia Online still exists??
Every so often I go through a phase:
-
“Second Life was fun. Why did I stop using it?”
-
Recreate account, log in.
-
Watch FPS drop to a fraction with a lot of zeroes at the start of it as all the adverts struggle to load.
-
“Oh, yeah. That was why.”
-
I was just thinking about second life the other day when someone brought up meta and its push for the ‘metaverse.’ I still remember the old pranks of making it rain dildos in someone’s area, or enclosing their head in a box.
Oh man, Second Life! I remember being absolutely wowed by it even though I never made an account. Its heyday was very much before I’d be able or brave enough to use real money in a virtual social game like that. (That wasn’t WoW lol)
I always fondly remember the lovable antics of the legendary troll: Esteban Winsmore!
Gaia Online reminds me a lot of Ragnarok, visually. That’s cool it’s still around! I remember hopping around F2P MMOs like crazy just trying to find something me and my long distance partner could interact together and vibe with. There were a lot of oddball ones that are shockingly still around!
Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.
I know there are others out there, but I sometimes feel like I am the only person under 50 who loves opera. I have 2 streaming services that I mostly use for watching opera.
I honestly feel like many people would like opera if they gave it a chance. Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cross between Lord of the Rings and The Avengers, but without the 30-min CGI fights (no disrespect to those who like fight scenes, but i get bored). My son and I love Mozart’s The Magic Flute; my wife’s favourite is Bizet’s Carmen.
