I need new hobbies. I was reflecting, and realized that some of my old hobbies aren’t that fun anymore; so I’m in search of new hobbies. What were my old hobbies you ask? Here’s a list:

Music
This includes finding out about, listening to and “collecting” music. I’ve been lackadaisical about finding out about music for awhile, ever since I was in a music-immersive environment like Seattle. Recently I have been relying on people to tell me what to listen to, but their picks don’t have a high hit rate with my preferences.

I still listen to music, and all is good. Maybe I don’t spend as much quality time listening, but I still spend a lot of time with my iPod. I used to be anal about collecting music and then tagging them correctly. Everything had to be 192kbps (CBR natch, VBR wasn’t popular), and I went searching for all the songs I liked. Now, it’s more of a find what I can and throw them into a folder. Don’t even get me started on discographies.

Going to Concerts
I would do this more often except invariably CD versions are good-enough and a live act doesn’t provide enough incremental value or atmosphere. Also, it’s too expensive in Toronto, it’s not like the Seattle scene with sub-$20 concerts featuring good bands that I actually want to see.

Consumerism
I think I got tired of wasting time being a mall rat once I left high school, and now shopping isn’t fun because I have nothing to buy! Plus, it’s not good for the bottom line, so that’s two strikes. I do like looking for bargains which I still do on occasion on CD crawls or say Boxing Day. I’ve also scoured the bargain forums (i.e. Red Flag) for a couple of months, but realized that I hardly ever bought anything from there so it wasn’t a good use of my time.

Making Web Pages and Other Web Stuff
This hobby has its ups and downs, sometimes I’m enthusiastic and start working on a project; but those instances are fewer and farther between now. The main problem is that it’s too tedious and there is too much repetition to build a web application, and usually there’s a free alternative that does the same thing. So why bother making it?

Photography

This hobby is still good and interesting, but it doesn’t work so well in the Winter nor at night. Plus, I don’t like the organizational aspect or using Photoshop.

Watching TV
When I say watching TV, I guess I mean the shows that I follow (i.e. BSG, Smallville, etc) rather than just using TV as background noise (hello Space). I used to be good at putting aside time to watch the shows on actual TV, but then I got lazy and started time-shifting via BT. Now, I’ve been slacking at even downloading the shows because some of the shows aren’t as good as they once were (BSG) and I realized that the others were pretty dumb (Smallville, Everybody Hates Chris). I have no idea what happened to Hockey Night In Canada; maybe the Leafs are just too crappy now.

Earning AdSense Revenue
This is also still fun, but again limited — you can’t force people to make money for you! Also, I realized that while I do make decent income, it doesn’t bring in enough to significantly augment my discretionary income.

Blogging
Still do this, still fun. I can only write so much though.

Playing games
I still play Warcraft and I still play Gamecube games. But this isn’t a hobby per se but rather a default. If I have nothing else to do, then I play some games.

Reading
I don’t usually put reading in my list of hobbies, because usually it refers to reading books. However, I realized that I do the generic form of reading quite often. In addition to books (that I hardly read, so I can’t really call a hobby), I read stuff on the net, comics, and my 150+ RSS feeds. This is for the purposes of wasting time (like gaming) or for interest (say an article on one of my hobbies). But again, you can only read so much before you go crazy.

Actually, I found an even more interesting phenomenon which I will blame on Digg. I think that there is now too much to read, so I’ve been forced to skim through articles instead of actually reading them (yes even the ones I’m interested in). But I digress.

StalkingFacebook

Ok, this site was fun when it was new; but adding new friends and seeing their news feed is not really as interesting as it seemed to be. I used to have a tab up which I refreshed every couple of hours; but this has since become checking the site once a day. Maybe if I take a longer break from it, it will be more interesting.

Travelling
This is a great hobby, and I would love to do it more if not for the time, money, and effort commitment.

So these are my hobbies. Some are still good, and some need to go. But what will I replace them with and why do I have to spend so much time blogging about them? Well you will have to wait for my forthcoming blog on Hobbies to find out (hey, blogging is a hobby, not a job).

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: hobbies, introspective