A Place Where You Can Rant About Your Current Special Interest!

[QuestJan]

I on


Yep that's exactly it, I do believe though all the different topics kind of feed into each other in unexpected ways...

I could not have said it better! I also get very depressed and have to drug myself if I get between special interests. I love my OCD (and also ADHD)

My close-in-age, also autie sister is just the opposite.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

I think I have new special interests blooming. I'm suddenly very interested in exercise. I think it's a sign of my healing. I'm in very little pain and I have so much more energy than I used to. I want to go to the gym so badly, and I know if I was careful, and proceeded gently, it would speed my recovery, but who can do cardio with a facemask on? I'll just have to continue doing yoga at home, and working on my walking until the world opens up. And that's fine too.

Another budding special interest is looking at and learning about classical portraiture. I love poring over websites filled with works by the great masters of art. I have no idea how they could make some of their works look so realistic and three dimensional. It's breathtaking.

 

[NB79]

I think I have new special interests blooming. I'm suddenly very interested in exercise. I think it's a sign of my healing. I'm in very little pain and I have so much more energy than I used to. I want to go to the gym so badly, and I know if I was careful, and proceeded gently, it would speed my recovery, but who can do cardio with a facemask on? I'll just have to continue doing yoga at home, and working on my walking until the world opens up. And that's fine too.

Another budding special interest is looking at and learning about classical portraiture. I love poring over websites filled with works by the great masters of art. I have no idea how they could make some of their works look so realistic and three dimensional. It's breathtaking.

I wish to you that you can totally recover from your health issue! God bless.

 

[Gerontius]

After three years I found another one!

This Friday I hope to pick up a 1929 Royal Portable typewriter, this one equipped with the rare Vogue typeface. Most old Royal typewriters have standard Pica or Elite font in them, but to find one with the more art-deco style of Vogue is quite rare. The machine I found has white keys and an immaculate wood-grained finish, still comes in its original carrying case.

I have another old Royal Portable, but that is a 1930 model in gloss black with the standard typeface in it. They are good solid machines--a trifle slower than a regular desktop typewriter but they aren't built for office work. They're the Model A Ford of portable typewriters--a neat design for the 1920s but not super great today unless you're willing to plug along at moderate speeds, kick back, and enjoy what you're doing. A writer's friend.

Typewriters are a major special interest of mine--repairing them, writing with them, etc. I've always loved a good typewriter. Vogue was a sans-serif font that was popular in the late 1920s and early '30s, with F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda using that font on one of these portables when she sent out her invitations. The last Vogue machine I had I bought for $90 and sold for over $500. Now they are over a thousand; I saw one advertised at around $4K once but don't think it sold. Thankfully I found this one cheap and acted quickly--the moment the seller sent the type sample I knew this one was coming home with me. Satisfies the cravings for all things mechanical, typewritery, and Art Deco.

 

[Unclewolverine]

I love reading about other people's passions and hearing the excitement in their, (written,) voice. Since the kids are getting old enough to be interested in, and ride real sized motorcycles I have been switching from cars to dirt bikes. Really since my spitfire project fell through and I resolved to give up project cars for the time being I had been in between interests. We bought my daughter a 82 honda xl100 enduro and rebuilt the engine, she absolutely loves it. Now my son is bored with his coleman mini bike and want a real bike like his sister but he is pretty sure he wants a classic two stroke like a yamaha dt 100. I had been wanting and enduro for a while, but now that the kids can ride real bikes that desire is ramping up so I can have fun with them.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

After three years I found another one!

This Friday I hope to pick up a 1929 Royal Portable typewriter, this one equipped with the rare Vogue typeface. Most old Royal typewriters have standard Pica or Elite font in them, but to find one with the more art-deco style of Vogue is quite rare. The machine I found has white keys and an immaculate wood-grained finish, still comes in its original carrying case.

I have another old Royal Portable, but that is a 1930 model in gloss black with the standard typeface in it. They are good solid machines--a trifle slower than a regular desktop typewriter but they aren't built for office work. They're the Model A Ford of portable typewriters--a neat design for the 1920s but not super great today unless you're willing to plug along at moderate speeds, kick back, and enjoy what you're doing. A writer's friend.

Typewriters are a major special interest of mine--repairing them, writing with them, etc. I've always loved a good typewriter. Vogue was a sans-serif font that was popular in the late 1920s and early '30s, with F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda using that font on one of these portables when she sent out her invitations. The last Vogue machine I had I bought for $90 and sold for over $500. Now they are over a thousand; I saw one advertised at around $4K once but don't think it sold. Thankfully I found this one cheap and acted quickly--the moment the seller sent the type sample I knew this one was coming home with me. Satisfies the cravings for all things mechanical, typewritery, and Art Deco.



View attachment 70138

Typewriters have been a longstanding special interest. Tap-ta-tap-tap-tap! Just the picture is wonderful!

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

My current special interests are: natural medicine, freight trains, plain anabaptists, wild plants, solar cycles, my daughter's future, aerospace, dance classes, history of warfare, off grid survival, water, soil, volcanoes, compost, other peoples' happiness.

 

[Nervous Rex]

Cubes!

In 2020, I had to re-learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube, because my son wanted to learn. Now he's got about 20 different puzzles and can solve way more than I can.

I like trying patterns, and seeing how long it takes some set of repeated moves to return a puzzle back to solved (my best record: a two-move pattern on the 5x5 cube that takes over 3,000 moves to return to solved).

So, I made a spreadsheet that can model moves on a 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 1x2x3, and Skewb. I can enter in the moves and it'll show me what the puzzle will look like. I'll get around to adding more different puzzles, in time.

Then I added a worksheet that can reference any puzzle type that I have entered in and it'll project the pattern and determine how many moves to restore it to solved (e.g., I can enter in some set of moves on a 3x3 cube, then point my Pattern Projection worksheet to my 3x3 worksheet and it'll tell me how many times I need to repeat that pattern to get it back to solved).

Then I added a worksheet that will take all the rules for moves that I've entered in for some puzzle, and it will explore the entire puzzle, and determine the God's Number and total number of possible arrangements. Since this is just a spreadsheet, not a high-powered program, it will only work on very small and simple puzzles.

So, I found a few websites that say that the God's Number for a 1x2x3 (Usually shaped like a Bear or a Christmas Tree) is 3 moves. However, my spreadsheet proves that the God's Number is actually 6 moves. So, I created an account on one of those websites and edited the page to correct it. Then, I worked out a Devil's Algorithm for the 1x2x3 (a pattern that will produce every possible arrangement once and only once, and then return it to solved) and added that to the website.

None of this is groundbreaking. It's just little stuff on a simple little puzzle. If it's new, it's just because no one else took an interest in it before I did. But I've had a lot of fun with it.

Then about four days ago, I found that I was eating, breathing, and dreaming cubes. It became too much of an obsession, so I had to stop and focus on something else for a while.

 

[Gerontius]

For whatever reason-- I SHOULD be better at a lot of other things--I'm still working on type writers.

This 1918 Oliver was recently re-polished and looks a lot better than it did. I wetsanded it with 600-grit paper from the car parts store and some oil. It will look better with rubbing compound and wax--which I should keep around anyway. The paint had crackled a bit with time, so I wanted to clean it up and get it looking as it would have 100 years ago.

These are seriously bizarre little machines to type on but they can run at a respectable speed--also quite user-friendly. Oil consumption is high, though, with a bunch of exposed parts and loose tolerances. Olivers go through a lot of oil. What they don't leak out will get slung all over the place.

I also fixed the mainspring in this 1909 Fox 23. The Fox is damaged in a few spots but it will work OK when I am done working on it. The blown-out mainspring was the worst problem. Fox Typewriters are fairly hard to find--I spent a few years looking for this one--but it's nice to have finally found one. Behind it--the 1929 Underwood 5. Not valuable nor rare nor exquisite, but a special machine to me anyway due to its backstory.

Then there's the 1920 Royal that I'm rebuilding. I have a couple of Royal typewriters-- 1918, 1920, 1929, 1930, 1941, 1942. Three portables & three desktops. They were a good reliable brand. It's pretty dusty, to be honest. I'm going to have to replate all the nickeled parts, paint the black parts again (or at least touch up all of it) and replace all the rubber in it--and the paper letters inside the keys. It's a major overhaul and I don't have a dead one to scavenge for parts--actually this typewriter is one of my "junk" machines. Oh well.
I found this one underneath an old store in a basement (along with a bunch of other old typewriters.)

Here is the same frame getting a good bath. You're never supposed to get a typewriter wet but in this case, it's not like I'd make it more broken. There were 2 erasers, a bunch of leaves, and a coughdrop wrapper in here, along with about a pound of greasy old sawdust. Yes, that's the shower. It's what writers play with in the bath tub. All the mechanism in here will have to be broken down & polished & put back in (and the water has finished spoiling the keys, to be sure--time for replicas.)

Royal No. 10 typewriters are supposed to be beautiful, light-running aristocrats of mechanical design. They should be clean and polished and FAST, not seized up and rusted solid on a shelf somewhere. There were plenty of other Royal 10's in the shop but something about the rusty one under all the sawdust seemed to stand out--maybe it was the completely awful condition it was in; I don't know. I felt sorry for the machine a little bit & it came home with me.

(Below is my other Royal 10, a 1918 model--it is in mostly good condition, and works fine. The shift keys on these are very heavy but the rest runs very quickly. Print quality is wobbly but that of course can & will be remedied. Not my "best" but nonetheless every inch a good typewriter.)

 

[Nervous Rex]

@Gerontius, how far back do you have to go until you find different keyboard layouts from different manufacturers? Or, I guess the question should be, when did they start standardizing the keyboard layouts?

Also interesting is that a lot (most? all?) of typewriters didn’t have a ‘1’ key. Instead, they used a lowercase ‘l’ for a 1. I learned to type in high school on a typewriter (PCs were brand new) and switched to a PC in college. I had to help my retired aunt learn to work her PC - she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t get option 1 on a menu to work, because she kept typing a lowercase ‘l’ instead of a 1.

 

[Gerontius]

@Gerontius, how far back do you have to go until you find different keyboard layouts from different manufacturers? Or, I guess the question should be, when did they start standardizing the keyboard layouts?

Also interesting is that a lot (most? all?) of typewriters didn’t have a ‘1’ key. Instead, they used a lowercase ‘l’ for a 1. I learned to type in high school on a typewriter (PCs were brand new) and switched to a PC in college. I had to help my retired aunt learn to work her PC - she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t get option 1 on a menu to work, because she kept typing a lowercase ‘l’ instead of a 1.

The lack of a 1 key is pretty common--I have "1" on a 1960 Torpedo, which is a little German-built machine for the American market. The lowercase L is the usual solution--and most also don't have an exclamation mark either. You have to type ' and then back up and type . to get the ! on the page. After a little bit it's second nature.

So--About keyboards. Remington basically pioneered typewriting with the Sholes & Glidden machine of 1874, and it had a QWERTY keyboard. You needed this to get the work done without jamming it. If the keys were arranged alphabetically, it would be easy for them to strike one another & lock up the machine. There are other keyboards--the Blickensderfer typewriter pioneered the DHIATENSOR scientific layout, most German machines are QWERTZ, and the French had AZERTY typewriters for awhile. But since Remington got started with the keyboard typewriter and made them for so long, most operators in the 19th century trained on a "blind-writer" Remington and wanted the same layout on their next machine.

Remington screwed over the company that was making their ribbons & carbon-paper--Some guy named F.X. Wagner. He got mad and went off & invented around 1895 the Wagner typewriter, and repurposed the Underwood ink company to make the Underwood typewriter. Maybe you've heard of those...It was really the Underwood machine that was the first "modern" typewriter.

Thomas Oliver, a Presbyterian minister with bad handwriting, took it upon himself to make his own sermons legible. I guess this is the difference between a mackerel-snapping Papist like myself and a Presbyterian's work ethic: he didn't practice his penmanship, but he cut up all the tin cans in the kitchen and built the Oliver Type Writer on a piece of wood. (History is silent on the opinion of Mrs. Oliver.) Anyway the idea of a U-shaped typebar came to him in a dream and like Archimedes from the bath tub he literally jumped out of his armchair yelling Eureka and draws up the design that would build the Oliver Typewriter. Trouble is, the keyboard on an Oliver only has 3 rows--each typebar has 3 characters and it has dual shifters for figures/punctuation and capitals. This takes getting used to. Since you have to shift for a period, or settle for a comma by default, I consider that the default typewriter of the run-on sentence. (Not to mention the oily splatters all over the desk, the slightly wavering line of type, or the little "Printype" mascot on the paper tray, a traffic cop in a 1912-style uniform, with buff trousers. It looks like he went to work without his pants that day.

The real difference in keyboards isn't where the letters are--it's where all the small controls are. Margin release is something we don't think of with a computer, but it's crucial on a typewriter. You get to the end & the line-lock comes on, locking all keys solid. Each model is a little game to use. All the different models have some tiny difference in their function keys and with all those weird unmarked mechanical levers on the carriage, there's always something going on.

 

[FlowerFlo]

Seeing and hearing about those old typewriters reminds me of the one my grandpa owns. Its a grey Adler from around 1950, if i remeber correctly. When i was a child i was sometimes allowed to use it. But if you accidentally pressed mutiple keys
add once, the letters became stuck for a while .

 

[Gift2humanity]

I have lots.
I need to overcome a challenge with one, people.
I fixate on one person, this needs fixing.

 

[AprilR]

Astrology is my all time special interest.
Yesterday was a New moon in Capricorn, it made me feel refreshed as a Capricorn.

 

[FlowerFlo]

I have counted my plants today. If i counted correctly i have 32.Most of them are cacti /succulents.

 

[Nervous Rex]

I like to memorize things - lists, poems, songs, etc. If I like something and I memorize it, then I can have it with me whenever I want.

When I have trouble sleeping, I will recite the things I memorized (in my head, not out loud) until I fall asleep.

I just found out that my grandfather did the same thing. He memorized certain lists and recited them to himself to go to sleep at night.

Also, about two years ago, I memorized The End of the World as We Know It by R.E.M. This Thanksgiving, after our big meal, my brother-in-law hooked his phone up to some speakers and we had a karaoke night. So, I got up and did The End of the World as We Know It. It was fun to show off a bit.

 

[Nervous Rex]

Any time I play a game, I want to calculate the possibilities of that game.

On Monday, we took our kids bowling. I calculated that there are 5,726,805,883,325,784,576 ways to fill out a single-player bowling card, or that many unique outcomes of an entire bowling game. That's way more than the number of bowling games that have been played since the game was invented. So if you play a game, it's quite possible that no one else in history has ever filled out a bowling card exactly like your game.

I also verified that it's possible to hit every score, from 0 to 300. Not a very interesting result there - it would have been more interesting to me if there were some scores that are impossible to hit.

 

[VintageKitty]

The lack of a 1 key is pretty common--I have "1" on a 1960 Torpedo, which is a little German-built machine for the American market. The lowercase L is the usual solution--and most also don't have an exclamation mark either. You have to type ' and then back up and type . to get the ! on the page. After a little bit it's second nature.

So--About keyboards. Remington basically pioneered typewriting with the Sholes & Glidden machine of 1874, and it had a QWERTY keyboard. You needed this to get the work done without jamming it. If the keys were arranged alphabetically, it would be easy for them to strike one another & lock up the machine. There are other keyboards--the Blickensderfer typewriter pioneered the DHIATENSOR scientific layout, most German machines are QWERTZ, and the French had AZERTY typewriters for awhile. But since Remington got started with the keyboard typewriter and made them for so long, most operators in the 19th century trained on a "blind-writer" Remington and wanted the same layout on their next machine.

Remington screwed over the company that was making their ribbons & carbon-paper--Some guy named F.X. Wagner. He got mad and went off & invented around 1895 the Wagner typewriter, and repurposed the Underwood ink company to make the Underwood typewriter. Maybe you've heard of those...It was really the Underwood machine that was the first "modern" typewriter.

Thomas Oliver, a Presbyterian minister with bad handwriting, took it upon himself to make his own sermons legible. I guess this is the difference between a mackerel-snapping Papist like myself and a Presbyterian's work ethic: he didn't practice his penmanship, but he cut up all the tin cans in the kitchen and built the Oliver Type Writer on a piece of wood. (History is silent on the opinion of Mrs. Oliver.) Anyway the idea of a U-shaped typebar came to him in a dream and like Archimedes from the bath tub he literally jumped out of his armchair yelling Eureka and draws up the design that would build the Oliver Typewriter. Trouble is, the keyboard on an Oliver only has 3 rows--each typebar has 3 characters and it has dual shifters for figures/punctuation and capitals. This takes getting used to. Since you have to shift for a period, or settle for a comma by default, I consider that the default typewriter of the run-on sentence. (Not to mention the oily splatters all over the desk, the slightly wavering line of type, or the little "Printype" mascot on the paper tray, a traffic cop in a 1912-style uniform, with buff trousers. It looks like he went to work without his pants that day.

The real difference in keyboards isn't where the letters are--it's where all the small controls are. Margin release is something we don't think of with a computer, but it's crucial on a typewriter. You get to the end & the line-lock comes on, locking all keys solid. Each model is a little game to use. All the different models have some tiny difference in their function keys and with all those weird unmarked mechanical levers on the carriage, there's always something going on.

Can I just say that collecting typewriters has got to be the coolest hobby ever?
What’s your favorite model out of your collection so far?

 

[Gerontius]

Can I just say that collecting typewriters has got to be the coolest hobby ever?
What’s your favorite model out of your collection so far?

Doesn't really matter; I like Remington 12's from the 1920s and am looking forward to getting the Remington 10 going again. It is from 1916 and I am in the process of replacing the whole keyboard & all the rubber parts; it should be a good one when I get finished.

I'm fond of different models for different reasons but mostly any pre-WWII office typewriter (the big tall ones) is what I like to use. My 1936 Woodstock 5N checks all my boxes for being almost the Platonic ideal of typewriting perfection. It's fast. Wicked fast. It sounds like a boat motor idling.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

Weaving.

For about two decades, I have been weaving on homemade looms made from large, sturdy portrait frames.

Just recently, a friend of mine bought me some upgraded weaving tools. This is my inkle loom. It can make hems and bands from the width of a shoelace, up to about 5 or so inches wide.

Attached are weaving cards, which do the same thing, when attached to a backstrap, and anchored on a wall. But when you warp the cards onto the inkle, the work becomes so much more efficient.

I also just recently got a weaving sword, which helps open the different sheds, and it also beats down the rows, so they are uniformly tight.

And with the addition of a wooden weaving needle, the work goes so smoothly these days. I'm really enjoying weaving.