There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.

Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.

What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called “That Time I Found a Box” and got hooked on it. It’s a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.

    The full version just came out on Steam - I’d recommend taking a look. It’s a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.

  • VictorPrincipum@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.

    Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.

    Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are “into it”.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I touch r134a the most in my day to day life, cuz i fix a lot of people’s car AC… But I have a soft spot for propane (R290) or propane/butane blends. Yes it’s flammable to a degree but it’s naturally provided, cheap as hell, zero ozone depletion and very low GWP. It has usable pressure/temperature curves that are easy for compressors to handle and can produce temperatures as low as -30C.

        I’ve refilled old farm trucks with propane from a BBQ can and gotten good AC out of them. It’s kind of cool.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      If you haven’t before, you should play Stationeers. It sounds like you’d love it.

      • Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        Ohh yeah! Though I do wonder: Why limit themselves to the guy who is evangelizing (and rightly so!) when he could also hang out with crazy swamp guy HyperspacePirate who not only thinks of the crazy cycles but actually builds some as well?

  • smeg@infosec.pub
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    3 months ago

    I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.

    • Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It’s just such an iconic building design. There’s a documentary out now on them, but I’ve been fascinated for almost a decade now.

    • Meshtastic

    • John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.

    • univers3man@piefed.world
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      3 months ago

      The amount of Pizza Hut buildings I’ve seen turned into Lions Den adult stores is too damn high. In second place, is the local wing place Jerk N Go.

  • sjmulder@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    I like retro programming, in particular Windows 2000.

    Now I’m making a little 3D toy now that works with OpenGL on Windows with WGL and on X11 with GLX (also on Cygwin). No third party abstractions!

    I want to keep adding backends, like DX 7, 9, Vulkan, WebGL, bare Linux KMS, and then stuff like screen space reflections, shadows, materials, ray tracing where possible, maybe get it running on a console or two too.

  • Tuukka R@piefed.ee
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    3 months ago

    Whenever I’m going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.

    It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don’t see that often. And at the same time, I’m increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there’s more to the EU than just Finland :)

    I would guess it’s unlikely that all that many other people do the same.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    FoundryVTT, baby! Somewhere north of 70,000 downloads for a very feature rich virtual tabletop that you’d think more D&D / Computer Nerds would be into.

    If you want to get even more bespoke, I’m the proud owner of a version 2 box of “Kingdom Death”, a $400 boardgame designed in the spirit of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls. You play a primitive band of survivalists, hunting horrifying monsters for their body parts, in order to slowly claw your civilization’s way out of a Lovecraftian dark age.

    • Azathoth@fedia.io
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      3 months ago

      I’m right with you on both of those things. I just spent more time than is reasonable on a gatehouse over a chasm in foundry, and have a screaming antelope on the shelf next to me that I’m reasonably proud of.

  • Stonewyvvern@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Dune was my go to scifi…now it’s popular and I feel like a hipster.

    My dad got me into hard scifi, d&d, Tolkien…if I feel like a hipster, can’t imagine what he feels like.

  • Tuukka R@piefed.ee
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    3 months ago

    Well… I’m using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)

    I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy’s and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.

    And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I’m apparently one out of ten :)

    • AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
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      3 months ago

      It’s true that barely anyone is into actually contributing, but I assure you a fair amount of people are into the actual open source implementations and are thankful for your efforts!

      Any game in particular you contributed to that you want to share?

  • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    I do calligraphy. Sometimes i meet someone who knows someone who does calligraphy. But I’ve never met another person IRL that does calligraphy. And the particular style I like makes it even more rare.

  • reluctant_squidd@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).

    I’m into combining these in interesting ways.

    While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.

    It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.

  • hammocker@leminal.space
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    3 months ago

    I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      You mean you are actually role playing in a role playing game?

      My my, you are strange.

  • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?