Everyone has hobbies, well almost everyone does anyway. Those who don't, really should. Hobbies help you stay relaxed. They also help keep you from going insane. Some people play sports, some collect things, some go fishing or hunting, and others yet let their creative juices flow. I'm one of the latter.
Someone had asked me about my hobbies, and I said I had plenty. Rather than post this on Facebook or Twitter, where I have limited space, I figured I'd use huri.net for what it was meant for: a place to spill my thoughts, for all the world to see. I hope you find reading about my hobbies, as interesting as I find writing about them :-)
Programming
I know what you're going to say: "Hey, isn't that your job?" Yes, in fact it is. I am a software developer, so I do programming as a part of my job. However, I also do hobby programming. Most of my personal projects are things that aren't very high demand, or are slightly obscure. XML libraries for Perl 6? Yeah, that's sane. A static website content engine? Who would ever use that? It doesn't matter who, I use my pet projects, and I enjoy writing them. Do they make me any money? No. But they take my mind off my work, while still keeping my skills strong. If that's not a good hobby, I don't know what is.
Short Stories
So, one of my hobbies is writing short stories. I'm sure anyone who has read this site is probably well aware of that. The evidence is all over this site. Actually, I guess you could say this site itself is an extension of my writing hobby. Sure, when I'm whipping up an article for this site, I'm not writing stories, but I am expressing myself in words, and isn't that what writing is all about?
I'm not a professional writer, not by any stretch of the imagination. I was asked, not that long ago, if I was interested in becoming a professional writer. If I wanted to take my writing to the next level, and maybe even have a career in it. The honest truth is, not really. See, the thing about hobbies is, once they become a job, they're no longer a hobby. I write as an escape from programming (although you could argue that writing a story, has many similarities to writing a program, and could be considered a form of programming), an escape from what I do on a daily basis. If it were my job, it would no longer be an escape, and honestly, I don't think I'd make much of a living as an author. It took me almost 4 years to finish a just-over-15,000 word short story (although I then wrote a just-under-10,000 word story in 2 days last week, so my writing times definitely vary.) Anyway, yeah, I'm not a professional writer, and have no intentions of being one.
Comics
If you can consider jargon comics to be artistic, then I guess they count as one of my creative hobbies. What is it about making comic strips that I find appealing? I think it may be that you can get away with so much more in comics than you can anywhere else.
I mean, come on, I had a storyline with a character called Ashlie Madison (I can't imagine what the character was named after) who was actually a demonic monster who convinced people to cheat, and then ate them. I didn't go so far as to have Poly Man, and his trusty side-kick Swing Girl show up to save the day (not yet at least), but I did have two supernatural, married-to-each-other, incestuous sisters (one half-demon, the other half-angel) show up and slaughter the monster. Tell me what other medium could be half as messed up as that? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Poetry
Now this is interesting, as I haven't worked on any of my poetry in a while. I think that has a lot to do with where I am in my life now, compared to where I was when I started writing the Book of Shade. A lot of that poetry was dark, depressing and filled with longing, frustration and self-loathing. Then again, a lot of it was also positive, progressive and powerful! BUT (and this is a big but), the positive stuff needed the negative stuff to counter-balance it! They needed each other to survive. When I met Nancy, she filled a hole in my soul, pushing out the depression that had been hiding in there. It's a lot harder writing depressing poetry, when you're not depressed yourself.
Of course, there can be darkness without depression. I do intend to write poetry again, some of it may be just as dark as the Book of Shade, and some of it will be just as progressive too. It just will be coming from a completely different viewpoint (nearly a completely different person) from my previous works. I hope it lives up to the standards Shade set, and maybe even exceeds them.
Audio & Video
I'm grouping these two together, not because they are the same category, but because they are both inactive in my current list of hobbies.
At one time, The New Era was a major hobby of mine. An amatuer comedy video series, that was about as screwed up as a bunch of teenagers could come up with. Whether it was the originals with Ryan and Nathan Lewis, the standalone session with Jason Pigeon, the oddball tapes with Chantel and Savannah, the Salmo relaunch with Vurn, Bailey, Miiike and Joe Evyl (raise your hand Kurtis, you know you want to), or the Trail/Castlegar Remix with Javan, two Jareds, Paddy, Dylan, Cass and in the latter-days, Brian (somehow Travis managed to stay behind the camera throughout the majority of that era) -- every version of The New Era was twisted beyond all hope. Once we even tried to make a TNE-branded movie, The Vega Conspiracy. After a few years of on-and-off filming, and complete rewrites of the so-called storyline, we abandoned it. If I ever find a compact-8 tape reader, maybe I'll piece together what we made, and turn it into something. Not a movie, but a film: a bunch of random moments strung together in no apparent order. Storyline? Ha ha ha! Nobody said films have to be movies, or even adhere to any rules or strict format. Heck, my screenplay, "Scene. Seen." should be obvious evidence of my non-traditional approach to film.
Pre-dating The New Era was an earlier set of audio skits, recorded on good old cassette tapes. I may have some of those still around. The earliest were with Desiree and other kids from the trailer park. Later on, Javan and Jared Szeles joined in, and we managed to get a few had cameo bits added by my mom, and step-sister Pat. Then there were the narrated, mixed music tapes that Jason Pigeon and I used to make for each other. Oh, those were fun.
In the audio-side of things, there was also delimiter, and the endless list of concept albums that I came up with, wrote some songs for, and never finished. Probably a good thing, as I can't really play any instruments, and while I can write lyrics, I can't write music (or read it.) I can hear it inside my head, and I'm sure if I worked with some musicians, I could get the idea expressed, but as it is, delimiter is on indefinite hiatus. At least until I get bored and decide to see what a distributed co-operative music development process would be like. Open-source music, with different portions done by different artists, then mixed together. That's the next stage for delimiter to take when it returns.
As a Consumer
Not all of my hobbies involve being the creator, some of them involve being the consumer. For all the things I like creating, I like consuming as well.
I read stories and novels all the time. I love reading. I may not be the fastest reader in the world, and books take me a while to get through, but I read plenty of them. As of writing this, I'm currently working on reading The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, greatly enjoying it.
As for comics, I am an avid reader of web comics. I can't even start to name how many web comics I've gone and read the entire archives of. I've even referenced some of those web comics in my own jargon strips. I'm a fan of plenty of traditional, non-web comics as well. The Far Side, Bloom County, Non-Sequitor and of course Calvin and Hobbes being some of my favorites (although a small sampling of my taste in comic strips.)
I tend to prefer comic strips than comic books. Oh, I've enjoyed my share of the classic comics, but unlike many-a-nerd, I'm not a comic-book junkie. That said, I loved the manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and I am a pretty big fan of Buffy Season 8 too.
When it comes to films, I love the ones that break from the usual molds, and try something different in film-land. Stuff like American Beauty, Punch Drunk Love, Eyes Wide Shut, Momento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Waking Life and The Princess Bride are all examples of films that push the envelope of traditional movies. Great stuff.
My musical taste is too varied to even begin to describe in a simple writeup. Let's just say I listen to a lot of music, and leave it at that.
One thing I don't do too much of anymore is watch TV. I haven't had a cable subscription in 7 or 8 years, and don't miss it. That said, I still watch some TV shows, I just wait until they are out on disc, or obtain them in other ways... cough cough, okay, anyway, yeah, I like my sci-fi. Star Trek (all series'), Babylon 5, Lexx, The X Files, Firefly, Buffy, Angel, The Vampire Diaries, and of course (in case you thought I'd forgotten) my favorite TV show of all time: Doctor Who (and all its spinoffs.) There are a few select non-scifi shows I like, such as Dexter, the CSI franchise, Monk, Lonesome Dove, Trailer Park Boys, and The Muppet Show. There are plenty of others, but those are the ones that stick out in my head at the moment. Dexter is an interesting one as I'm also a huge fan of the book series, bringing me back to reading again.
Holy crap
Wow, that was a longer writeup than I'd intended, sorry for the verbal diarrhea, but I seem to have a lot of hobbies!
Anyway, now if you're ever sitting at home, wondering what that weird guy from huri.net does in his spare time, well, now you know.
Have a great day, I hope you have time to put into your own hobbies.