My cooking. I love to cook, be it simple meals or extravagant dishes, and everyone I know loves to eat my food - which is exactly why I’d never ever do it professionally. I really don’t want to risk losing the enjoyment and relaxation I get from cooking. Being in the kitchen for an hour after i came home from work is my way to unwind after a long day.
Also, cooking as a job fucking sucks. Long hours, low pay, high pressure to get things done fast, and people generally seem to treat each other like shit. Why would you do that to yourself if you had different options?
To the extent of what I know of modern cooking, my country is an outlier. If you walk in a restaurant, there will be one or two dishes ready to serve and from that point forward you can order à la carte.
The first will get you served in a few minutes, the second you get to wait. And there is no point in complaining it’s taking too long, as you’ll get shown the door.
In all my life, the best restaurant I ever went to worked three nights a week, started serving by seven p.m. and closed the kitchen by nine. Last customer out the door by ten thirty, lights out by eleven thirty.
Small room, no menu. If you wanted a specific dish you could request in advance and pay as you’d make you reservation. They would serve around 40 people a night.
Best food and mood I ever had the opportunity and pleasure to enjoy.
I bake. I’m known for making birthday cakes for people.
I just made one November the 15th, and that night I was bombarded with “how much would you charge to bake one of these for-?”
Absolutely not. People are bastards. The instant my baking turns from “thoughtful gift” to something owed, I will be stuck with all the bullshit that entails. No thanks. Delicious, complex, mesmerizing bakes and absolutely zero strings attached thank you very much.
Cooking. I love to cook for my friends and family. I’ve been perfecting my homemade pizza for years. It’s very good and I love to make it for guests.
I’ve had people say I should open a pizzaria, especially since the one good one in town shut down.
Fuck that.
Electronics repair and manufacture. I do this sometimes professionally – however my special talent is doing it with none of the right tools or parts. It’s mostly hilarious and not useful at work, where I need to use the right parts so you can scale to manufacture.
I once fixed a DVD drive using a gas stove. A graphics card with a tube of toothpaste and some rubber bands. A Macbook with half a cardboard box. Today I built a microphone amplifier from a broken Android development board, a IC from a particle detector, and surface-mount resistors and capacitors from a dozen different things. I could probably work as an engineer in Kerbal Space Program :D
I would watch the shit out of this YouTube channel.
Sadly, my irritation with YouTube is fathomless and eternal :P
I can clue you in the the first case though – A faulty motor was unable to eject the drive, and a magnet held it in place. So I used the Curie effect to weaken the magnet by roasting it for a short time and putting it back in. I was very poor in those days so knowing these things was pretty useful.
Is your name Gyro Gearloose?
I did this thing, stretching decades back, where I would publish every project under a different name, then throw away the password.
Even I don’t know everything I’ve done, or all the names I’ve gone by.
Music. I can play close to a dozen instruments with enough skill that I could sit in as a stand in player for a large variety of genres. I do everything in my power to avoid letting people around me know.
I make music as a way to meditate and relax. I can throw down a synthesizer drone and spend an hour+ noodling on the piano, guitar, cello etc without doing any recording or writing down stuff. I’ve got probably 100 or so short 4-12 bar ideas saved on my computer. I probably will never do anything with them but I like going back and rediscovering where I was musically/emotionally.
The dubstep phase was, in a word, terrible.
Massage. I know that if I did it professionally it would become a chore and I would no longer want to massage the people I love.
Writing. Specifically, tech writing. I’ve got an intuitive sense for it, but other than business communication and the occasional bit of internal documentation I don’t have any desire to do it professionally.
I get along great with our tech writer, though, since I’m the only other person at the company who can hold a discussion about the Oxford comma.
My music, songwriting. I’ve never once had the desire to make money from it. In fact, one of the things that killed my band is I discovered the bass player was charging a cover for what I had assumed were free shows and then keeping it.
I fix stuff. I like fixing stuff. Cars, computers, cell phones, appliances, tvs, small motors, etc. It’s all like a little challenge/puzzle to me. I like doing it. It’s never been in my field of work, but I get asked all the time why I don’t do any of it for $$$.
Well, because I want to keep liking it is why.
This is me 💯
I’ve been told that I’ve gotten pretty good at wildlife photography, and I do it because I enjoy the experience.
