Opposite of regret: projects and hobbies you're glad never got past the aspirational stage

I gave up watercolors and any kind of painting when I saw the amazing stuff coming out by ballpoint pen artists and thought all this cleanup and setup for painting is for the birds! Just grab a bic and go to town! What a relief -- A+ decision, no regrets!

But the number of ballpoint pen art pieces I've made since then is also zero, so... maybe that's a push.

On your deathbed, what creative bullet will you have been glad to have dodged?

Thought for a minute as a teen that I might be into model trains, started to build a massive landscape in the basement. Realised that the grade of slope I hoped to build the tracks on was simply not going to work and abruptly abandoned the project. Thank Christ

that sounds like a parable for municipal transit infrastructure! -- maybe you did end up modeling the thing after all...

I took one acting class as a child and realized it was NOT FOR ME and I never tried to act again. I do not regret this. It was not an experience I enjoyed at all.

I have three big projects on the go, then another five or ten which I know I will never really do but get hyperfocussed on from time to time.

My real answer here is Parkrun, I went one time and realised immediately that what I hated wasn't jogging or even exercise in general, but doing it in the company of other people.

i'm glad i got discouraged by a mean livejournal community from pursuing poetry further. i don't like poetry

I spent a lot of time in high school and college trying to write poetry and short stories and I have zero regret about not pursuing that further. Among other things, working alone all day depresses me.

I own a pocket trumpet that will likely never come out of its case again.

I’m really glad my parents never bought me a video game system after NES.

I thought ironing would be a lot more “fun” but I hated it (I like tedious stuff)

There was an SNES ironing peripheral??

There was an SNES ironing peripheral??

― Philip Nunez

I don't think so, but there was this Famicom game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Jyi7K9oCM

I saw a really entertaining video on the topic of "what counts as a Super Mario game" where the person making it made an argument that "Super Mario Sweater" should count as a Super Mario game. Not really seriously, mind you. It was just a fun argument.

a publisher offered me real money once to ghostwrite a book with a hair metal musician and i was so bored and had no money so i said sure! i'll do it! and it almost got to contracts being signed but luckily it fell through because omg what the fuck was i thinking there is no way i could have done such a thing! i would have to, like, meet them and stuff! i was so dumb. i totally dodged a very awkward bullet.

Ghostwriting is hard. I feel like that phase of my life might be over — the agency I worked with since 2017 has stopped giving me assignments — and I'm kinda OK with that. The money was pretty good (a full book project would pay between $12-15,000), but I'd be working on a given project for six months to a year if not longer and sometimes the clients really sucked.

i was totally not equipped to do such a thing. i think i was just feeling desperate.

Definitely “being smart”

I took a very basic pottery class for a while - no wheel, no kiln, just handbuilding and coiling and making pinch pots and that kind of thing. The instructor fired our items in her own kiln once a month. I was so bad at it. I kept the finished items in a box for a while and then eventually heaved them into the bin, with great relief. There are things you can be not great at but still produce OK results - you don't have to be a gifted knitter to make a scarf or a basic hat, for example. I don't think pottery is one of those things.

basically anything i tried requiring manual dexterity

i tried model car kits for a while. that didn't work out. sports. i was in a bowling class, i played baseball for years despite the fact that i could. not. hit. the ball. couldn't field, either. i have basically no depth perception, which kind of limits my ability to play baseball.

a lot of the stuff i tried as a kid was "boy stuff", the kinda stuff boys were supposed to like, but i mean, it's not like i would've been better at "girl stuff". jumping rope? hopscotch? would've been fucking nightmares. i don't envy not having had the opportunity to do that stuff. i don't feel like being bullied by girls would've been a vast improvement over being bullied by boys.

somehow i got into an evangelical bible study group. i got no idea how the hell that happened. i grew up catholic. but i did it for a little bit. i don't think it ever clicked with me that i was supposed to believe in god too. i just liked hanging out with people and memorizing shit. it was the same way with me and baseball. i subscribed to baseball digest and looked at all the statistics and they were meaningless statistics but i loved looking at them. i did know i was supposed to hit the ball in baseball, they eventually kicked me out for not being able to hit the ball.

is doing drugs a hobby? i tried to get into drugs for a while. when i was younger, pot, and then mushrooms after i transitioned. i just didn't see the benefit. it's the kind of stuff people would swear up and down about how great it was and i just didn't ever see it.

In the late 80s I had a crazy idea to collect all the Marvel comics from FF#1 onward, in ratty reader copies for the key/expensive books. I got a ton of stuff from quarter boxes at cons and from shops in Memphis, but bailed on the project after a year or so. And now I can find all that stuff online, so I'm glad I didn't put too much into the project.

i tried to get into drugs for a while. when i was younger, pot, and then mushrooms after i transitioned. i just didn't see the benefit. it's the kind of stuff people would swear up and down about how great it was and i just didn't ever see it.

I tried weed, acid and of course alcohol in high school and into my early twenties, but once I realized I couldn't write if I was in any way impaired, I stopped doing any drugs at all, and when I was diagnosed with diabetes my doctor said to stop drinking beer, because it might interact with the pills I was on, so I did.

I tried smoking for a few weeks in my early twenties but it never got its hooks in me. I guess I just don't have the gene for physical addiction to chemicals. Instead, I buy CDs I'll never listen to, DVDs I'll watch once, and books I'll stare at for years and maybe read one day. And write thousands of words a week, which is an addiction, too, obviously.

i think people who don't enjoy drugs or alcohol or smoking are SO lucky. like winning a lottery of sorts.

think people who don't enjoy drugs or alcohol or smoking are SO lucky. like winning a lottery of sorts.

― scott seward

idk i feel like we all have our own addictions

i spent decades just rawdogging suffering

i don't mean masochism, i enjoy that too, but that's fundamentally healthy

i just looked at drugs and i saw that ultimately it drugs were just going to make me miserable, and i figured, shit, i can be that miserable without the drugs

not that i didn't get addicted to drugs as well. kinda by accident. benzos, prescribed for my anxiety. it was some bad shit.

oh and there was also the porn. i was supposed to want to have sex and i didn't really want to have sex ever, but i still had these desires and i didn't know what to do with them. i'm not really glad or sad that i never got into sex. it's just not for me, apparently. but that fucking T, i had to do _something_. i used to worry that porn fucked me up, made me weird and not able to enjoy sex. i don't really believe that now. it was just me trying to make sense of my sexuality. actually having sex just left me more confused and disappointed. i don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with porn, except that a lot of it is kinda awful.

anway i'm still confused, i don't know how to make sense out of what i want, but now the only time i do things is if i feel like it. that's a lot better. i like that.

T-shirt screening -- I looked at the clean-up stages and decided to go into inkjet iron-ons, which I also abandoned.
Like frying chicken I feel like T-shirt production is something I feel is a great bargain to pay other people to do!

About fifteen years ago I bought an Airfix model kit and a tiny airbrush. My plan was to finally make an Airfix model as if I was grown-up. With the correct amount of glue. Using paperclips to make sure it was held in place while the glue dried. Painting it with an undercoat, all proper-like.

But I remember looking at the model kit and thinking "this is crap", and "it would be far simpler to buy a finished model", and "do I really want to hang out online with people who know exactly which camouflage sceheme Jagdgeschwader JG 45 used in Spring 1943", and "this is not what God intended". I don't know if you've ever looked at any WW2 aeroplane forums, but the users are almost without exception massive assholes who spend their days arguing about the availability of 100-octane fuel during the Battle of Britain.

So I put that to one side and haven't thought about Airfix ever since.

Also, being a LEGO mogul. I was alive when Star Wars LEGO first came out, and I remember being in a position to buy multiple copies of 7191 X-wing Fighter. That was the first release in the Ultimate Collector Series. There may or may not be an Ilxor thread about it from when it was new.

My plan was to buy multiple copies and put them in the attic and sell them years later for a hefty profit. The X-Wing is an iconic design; my rationale was that it would continue to excite people my age, even if the Prequel Trilogy faded away. And my plan might have worked. 7191 was around £120-150 when new. It now sells for £900 MISB. That's "mint in sealed box" for the benefit of casual readers. You and I know what MISB means.

But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I just couldn't make the final cut. I'm tempted to say "instead I invested wisely in Cisco, and after just eighteen short years I finally broke even" but I did not invest in Cisco. And now Ilxor tells me that my url tags are wrong. I used to be able to write HTML in real time. Now I have to check and double check. I've lost so much.

Chin up! Whatever you lost, you gained sevenfold by abandoning WWII model kits...

It's a touchy subject among lego enthusiasts but the knockoff lego kits are shockingly good!

As a kid I had a big tub of generic LEGO bricks. They were all different colours, like a zebra. But different colours. Like a zebra. But different colours. Like a

I used to make things without caring about the colours. Houses. Pyramids. Cubes. I only cared about the shape. But then I moved to Vienna to further my education, and suddenly it dawned on me that my LEGO models were an abomination. Because the colours were mixed together. This was shortly after I was turned down by the local art school for the second time despite the fact that the idiot Kubizek was accepted. It dawned on me that the people who sold me this... filth, this knock-off LEGO, they had an ulterior motive. They wanted to make their perversion seem normal.

And so from that day to this I have only ever bought official LEGO products, and in very narrow range of colours.

A couple of times in my life I've decided I should put myself forward for committees, go to meetings, exchange ideas, make new friends and expand my social life. In my early 20s I joined the union at work and about 20 years later became a governor at my kids' primary school. Both times I was bored by the meetings, had nothing to contribute and left as soon as possible at the end rather than hanging around to socialise. I am not that sort of person.

exchanging ideas sounds good. i don't think i actually know too many people who have that many ideas. or they don't tell them to me if they do. maybe i need to tell them an idea to get the ball rolling. but then i remember that i don't really have any ideas either.

I asked for a fishing pole for my birthday once, having had some vague notion of getting into what I perceived was a relaxing and low-stakes hobby. It always looked that way in movies, anyway. Then I realized I don't really like worms, don't own a boat, and don't live very close to a body of water. I still have the fishing pole, but I have never used it.