Unique New Year's Resolutions
Jan. 1st, 2022 05:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithI keep seeing lists for New Year's resolutions that are "unique," "strange," "unusual" ... but list the same common suggestions. 0_o Clearly, this needs to be fixed. Here is a list of New Year's resolutions that few if any other people will be attempting. Let your freak flag fly!
* Learn or create an invented language. Esperanto is the most widely spoken. Láadan and Klingon are well worth considering for cultural interest, especially contrasted against each other. Explore the Language Construction Kit or other resources to build your own. Consider Lexember as a December monthly resolution.
* Learn a natural language from a different language family than your native language(s). This is easiest to do if you skip to a continent not connected to your own, or pick an isolate. (I note that Antarctica has no native languages; somegeek really needs to fix that by inventing one there, since it has science outposts.) Big bonus points if you also make it an endangered language; there are over 3,000. This list sorts them by number of speakers. Save a world, help rescue a threatened language.
* Give yourself the equivalent of a college degree. You don't need to spend a mountain of money to learn things. You have the internet, probably also a local library or bookstore, maybe a community center that offers classes. Pick a topic -- you're going to emulate a major, minor, or certificate here -- and study it seriously. Each good-sized book counts as one course, provided that you read the whole thing and do some practical or theoretical exercises to put it in practice. Apparently it only takes three books to make an expert. You might look up how different colleges lay out their programs to get an idea of how to structure yours. These places offer free online classes.
* Explore big topics and ask deep questions. Big Think is a great resource for this. You could also subscribe to a magazine on something like philosophy, astronomy, or international politics.
* Study your failures. Keep a list of significant mistakes you make during the year. For each one, analyze what went wrong, how to prevent a repetition, and what you learned from it. Here are some things you can learn from your mistakes. Remember that mistakes are a natural and necessary part of the learning process. If you're not making any mistakes, you're not learning, you're coasting!
* Dress entirely in your Pride Flag colors for a week. This page has gender identities with flags. Some of those have multiple options; pick whichever you like.
* Get a copy of the Kama Sutra and try some of the sex positions. It's available online, and here's a modern version. Here are some sample positions. (If you are single, ace, etc. then you can try some things alone or do the Cuddle Sutra instead.) Take note of whether your satisfaction is more, the same, or less compared to your usual activities.
* Design something for disabled people. It should be focused such that an abled person either couldn't use it or would need to modify it. For example, a garment with only one sleeve, smooth without a seam on the other side, for a one-armed person -- instead of the usual where they have to cut off or pin up the empty sleeve. Computer programs or apps are an excellent choice as accessibility there is often poor. Here are some tips for accessible coding. I recommend a mode toggle so people can easily switch between text-based or visual-based formats.
* Challenge: any 2 ingredients. A partner will name 2 culinary ingredients, and you have to make something delicious using both of them together. Example: marmalade and horseradish.
* Challenge: hide the ingredient. A partner will name a culinary ingredient, and you have to hide it in a delicious recipe so nobody can identify what it is. Example: spinach brownies.
* Go to an ethnic restaurant or grocery store and buy a food you don't recognize. Eat it and report your experiences. (If you have special dietary needs, you may need someone to make sure it falls within your parameters.) You can also order a far-out ingredient from online and experiment with it. Here are some online spice vendors.
* Invent a new art/craft medium. If you are a chemist, you can try to mix up something new and useful. Otherwise, look for materials that have not generally been used for artistic purposes and make artworks with them. Ideally, describe your process of selecting the medium and then exploring its artistic potential. Document with photos, video, podcast, or whatever else you wish. You will likely be the only person working in this medium, so you get to make up all the practices it starts out with. Here are some previous odd art media.
* Create a landrace, a cultivar (plants) or breed (animals) suited to your area. To do this, you throw together as many different types as you can get, let them reproduce, and keep the best of the offspring. With plants, use open-pollinated varieties if possible. This example features melons and here's a discussion about chickens. It occurs to me that I've basically done this with my sunchokes since I bought seedling packages instead of stabilized cultivars; unsurprisingly they grew stupendously. [MET 9/5/23 named Shithouse Marigolds]
* Turn something bizarre into a planter. It has to be something you haven't seen as a planter before. Here are some past planters.
* Upcycle something you've never seen upcycled before. These are some previous upcycled oddities.
* Stockpile fans and/or window air conditioners. When the heat gets bad, you'll have them to share with friends who don't have any or whose equipment is broken and taking weeks or months to fix. Climate change makes cooling a survival need now, in more and more places. I'm not kidding, heat waves now kill thousands of people, and ALL of those deaths are preventable. This is a cheap, easy way to save lives. You can also do this with portable heaters. While extreme cold events are less likely than extreme heat events, they are starting to happen in places where they never did before, catching people dangerously unprepared.
* Create an apocalypse bookshelf or library. Include titles on how to survive disasters and restart civilization if necessary. You can see an example in my notes for "Seeds of Civilization."
* Take up reality alteration as a hobby. Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are good authors to read. Prometheus Rising is especially helpful due to its exercises; find an excerpt here. (I don't recommend that you binge those; spread them out.) RAW additionally offers the option of spelunking in other people's reality tunnels, one of my favorite hobbies.
* Build a universe. There are worldbuilding resources for gamers, novelists, fantasy writers, science fiction writers, artists, and this set by subtopic. See my poem "Build with the Mind" and its extensive notes on how to run a worldbuilding class or workshop. Dream no little dreams.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Construct a tiny house from something strange.siliconshaman suggested a scrapped rocket prototype. This list of oddballs includes a mirror house, a 3D-printed house, and one covered in branches.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Take up an endangered craft or hobby. (Courtesy offuzzyred.) Here is a list of endangered crafts. Some of these sound really fun, like glass eye making; you could do realistic ones or phantasmagoric ones, and they'd make great collectibles in addition to their original use. This article lists some of the least common hobbies. It mentions trainspotting; one of my interests is treating trains as a rolling gallery of public art, because I admire graffiti.
EDIT 12/30/22 -- Explore the wonderful world of tea. Meet exciting new teas and learn what they can do for you. This can be done by buying cartons to use at home, or by sampling individual cups at a coffee shop.
EDIT 12/30/22 -- Try exotic produce. Explore fruits, vegetables, or a combination. The weirder, the better! Fresh whole food is good for you anyway. You may fall in love with something healthy!
EDIT 12/30/22 -- Buy and learn a new piece of kitchen equipment. Make it something that requires you to learn a whole different approach to cooking, like a wok or a crockpot.
EDIT 1/1/24 -- Learn to write upside down and/or backwards. This makes an amusing party trick.
EDIT 1/1/24 -- Learn to draw, write, or pick things up with your feet. It's practical if you injure your hands or just don't want to bend over.
Can you think of any other far-out resolutions?
* Learn or create an invented language. Esperanto is the most widely spoken. Láadan and Klingon are well worth considering for cultural interest, especially contrasted against each other. Explore the Language Construction Kit or other resources to build your own. Consider Lexember as a December monthly resolution.
* Learn a natural language from a different language family than your native language(s). This is easiest to do if you skip to a continent not connected to your own, or pick an isolate. (I note that Antarctica has no native languages; somegeek really needs to fix that by inventing one there, since it has science outposts.) Big bonus points if you also make it an endangered language; there are over 3,000. This list sorts them by number of speakers. Save a world, help rescue a threatened language.
* Give yourself the equivalent of a college degree. You don't need to spend a mountain of money to learn things. You have the internet, probably also a local library or bookstore, maybe a community center that offers classes. Pick a topic -- you're going to emulate a major, minor, or certificate here -- and study it seriously. Each good-sized book counts as one course, provided that you read the whole thing and do some practical or theoretical exercises to put it in practice. Apparently it only takes three books to make an expert. You might look up how different colleges lay out their programs to get an idea of how to structure yours. These places offer free online classes.
* Explore big topics and ask deep questions. Big Think is a great resource for this. You could also subscribe to a magazine on something like philosophy, astronomy, or international politics.
* Study your failures. Keep a list of significant mistakes you make during the year. For each one, analyze what went wrong, how to prevent a repetition, and what you learned from it. Here are some things you can learn from your mistakes. Remember that mistakes are a natural and necessary part of the learning process. If you're not making any mistakes, you're not learning, you're coasting!
* Dress entirely in your Pride Flag colors for a week. This page has gender identities with flags. Some of those have multiple options; pick whichever you like.
* Get a copy of the Kama Sutra and try some of the sex positions. It's available online, and here's a modern version. Here are some sample positions. (If you are single, ace, etc. then you can try some things alone or do the Cuddle Sutra instead.) Take note of whether your satisfaction is more, the same, or less compared to your usual activities.
* Design something for disabled people. It should be focused such that an abled person either couldn't use it or would need to modify it. For example, a garment with only one sleeve, smooth without a seam on the other side, for a one-armed person -- instead of the usual where they have to cut off or pin up the empty sleeve. Computer programs or apps are an excellent choice as accessibility there is often poor. Here are some tips for accessible coding. I recommend a mode toggle so people can easily switch between text-based or visual-based formats.
* Challenge: any 2 ingredients. A partner will name 2 culinary ingredients, and you have to make something delicious using both of them together. Example: marmalade and horseradish.
* Challenge: hide the ingredient. A partner will name a culinary ingredient, and you have to hide it in a delicious recipe so nobody can identify what it is. Example: spinach brownies.
* Go to an ethnic restaurant or grocery store and buy a food you don't recognize. Eat it and report your experiences. (If you have special dietary needs, you may need someone to make sure it falls within your parameters.) You can also order a far-out ingredient from online and experiment with it. Here are some online spice vendors.
* Invent a new art/craft medium. If you are a chemist, you can try to mix up something new and useful. Otherwise, look for materials that have not generally been used for artistic purposes and make artworks with them. Ideally, describe your process of selecting the medium and then exploring its artistic potential. Document with photos, video, podcast, or whatever else you wish. You will likely be the only person working in this medium, so you get to make up all the practices it starts out with. Here are some previous odd art media.
* Create a landrace, a cultivar (plants) or breed (animals) suited to your area. To do this, you throw together as many different types as you can get, let them reproduce, and keep the best of the offspring. With plants, use open-pollinated varieties if possible. This example features melons and here's a discussion about chickens. It occurs to me that I've basically done this with my sunchokes since I bought seedling packages instead of stabilized cultivars; unsurprisingly they grew stupendously. [MET 9/5/23 named Shithouse Marigolds]
* Turn something bizarre into a planter. It has to be something you haven't seen as a planter before. Here are some past planters.
* Upcycle something you've never seen upcycled before. These are some previous upcycled oddities.
* Stockpile fans and/or window air conditioners. When the heat gets bad, you'll have them to share with friends who don't have any or whose equipment is broken and taking weeks or months to fix. Climate change makes cooling a survival need now, in more and more places. I'm not kidding, heat waves now kill thousands of people, and ALL of those deaths are preventable. This is a cheap, easy way to save lives. You can also do this with portable heaters. While extreme cold events are less likely than extreme heat events, they are starting to happen in places where they never did before, catching people dangerously unprepared.
* Create an apocalypse bookshelf or library. Include titles on how to survive disasters and restart civilization if necessary. You can see an example in my notes for "Seeds of Civilization."
* Take up reality alteration as a hobby. Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are good authors to read. Prometheus Rising is especially helpful due to its exercises; find an excerpt here. (I don't recommend that you binge those; spread them out.) RAW additionally offers the option of spelunking in other people's reality tunnels, one of my favorite hobbies.
* Build a universe. There are worldbuilding resources for gamers, novelists, fantasy writers, science fiction writers, artists, and this set by subtopic. See my poem "Build with the Mind" and its extensive notes on how to run a worldbuilding class or workshop. Dream no little dreams.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Construct a tiny house from something strange.
siliconshaman suggested a scrapped rocket prototype. This list of oddballs includes a mirror house, a 3D-printed house, and one covered in branches.EDIT 1/1/22 -- Take up an endangered craft or hobby. (Courtesy of
fuzzyred.) Here is a list of endangered crafts. Some of these sound really fun, like glass eye making; you could do realistic ones or phantasmagoric ones, and they'd make great collectibles in addition to their original use. This article lists some of the least common hobbies. It mentions trainspotting; one of my interests is treating trains as a rolling gallery of public art, because I admire graffiti.EDIT 12/30/22 -- Explore the wonderful world of tea. Meet exciting new teas and learn what they can do for you. This can be done by buying cartons to use at home, or by sampling individual cups at a coffee shop.
EDIT 12/30/22 -- Try exotic produce. Explore fruits, vegetables, or a combination. The weirder, the better! Fresh whole food is good for you anyway. You may fall in love with something healthy!
EDIT 12/30/22 -- Buy and learn a new piece of kitchen equipment. Make it something that requires you to learn a whole different approach to cooking, like a wok or a crockpot.
EDIT 1/1/24 -- Learn to write upside down and/or backwards. This makes an amusing party trick.
EDIT 1/1/24 -- Learn to draw, write, or pick things up with your feet. It's practical if you injure your hands or just don't want to bend over.
Can you think of any other far-out resolutions?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-01 02:28 pm (UTC)'Almost cut my hair, it happened just the other day'........ :o)
Hee!
Date: 2022-01-01 03:53 pm (UTC)As for out there resolutions... Taking up an endangered/rare hobby or craft? (You wrote about this in one of your Polychrome Heroics poems, but I forget which craft you used.)
Re: Hee!
Date: 2022-01-01 09:33 pm (UTC)Go you!
I quite like Hawaiian, both the pidgin and the indigenous language.
>> As for out there resolutions... Taking up an endangered/rare hobby or craft? (You wrote about this in one of your Polychrome Heroics poems, but I forget which craft you used.) <<
Brilliant, must add that one.
Re: Hee!
Date: 2022-01-02 01:11 am (UTC)I'm glad you liked that goal. I also wanted to say something about learning a new-to-you topic, (like space exploration for someone who is mostly into fiber crafts) but I couldn't think of a way to phrase it.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-01 04:25 pm (UTC)I've done upcycled ladders and shutters before...
I must admit there's one upcycle project I would love to try... I keep watching the webcams from SpaceX Boca chica starbase, and they have all these scrapped prototype rockets... I swear, I would love to turn one of their starships sideways, and turn it into a Tiny Home (although, they're not so tiny)
Pretty sure you can't just buy one of the unused rockets though..
Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 09:29 pm (UTC)Go you!
>>I must admit there's one upcycle project I would love to try... I keep watching the webcams from SpaceX Boca chica starbase, and they have all these scrapped prototype rockets... I swear, I would love to turn one of their starships sideways, and turn it into a Tiny Home (although, they're not so tiny)<<
Quite a common concept in some SF settings. "Well, she's been a great house, but I don't know if she'll fly."
>> Pretty sure you can't just buy one of the unused rockets though.. <<
Well, that depends. If the "scrap heap" is actually a record of failures that they study or a trove of resources that they raid, probably not. But if it's literally just junk they pushed aside so they don't have to pay to haul it away, they might be thrilled by an offer. If you approach them with the idea, point out what interesting publicity it could make for their project. That might appeal if they're trying to get backers.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 09:45 pm (UTC)They've got some, two or three, where they built a prototype and completed or mostly completed it before a major design revision, so it was obsolete before it was used. They've a bigger pile of parts that were never used because of design changes.
I guess I could try email or twitter and see what happens.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 09:51 pm (UTC)Reusing everything is a vital spacer custom that we really need to get going before people permanently leave the planet. You cannot waste things in space. Heck, I've been in worlds where the spacecrafts were designed to be reused as habitats, and I've seen proposals for Moon and Mars landers with that intent.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 10:14 pm (UTC)Ok, tweet sent... it would make sense to reuse them on Mars as temp habitats as well, while they're 3D printing more permanent housing.
Although if a bloody big lorry turns up outside carrying a delivery from Boca chica Texas, I shall probably fall over.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 10:48 pm (UTC)Go you! Dream no little dreams.
>> it would make sense to reuse them on Mars as temp habitats as well, while they're 3D printing more permanent housing. <<
That's a popular and effective approach.
>> Although if a bloody big lorry turns up outside carrying a delivery from Boca chica Texas, I shall probably fall over. <<
:D If measurements are available for the prototypes, I do suggest checking your space in advance. Should you need to arrange an alternate location, that's easier to do earlier than at the last minute.
Another option is that you could form a team with some folks in Texas, for the purpose of analyzing a prototype to figure out how it could be turned into a house. Then neither people nor rocket would need to be moved.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 10:55 pm (UTC)The latter option would work rather better... I don't even have space to fit a bubble car on my property, much less something that's 50m long by 16m wide.
Consulting by zoom however, that I can do. Although I'd prefer to see it in person. I'd be able to see the possibilities then, literally. (don't ask me how my brain works sometimes, it just does.)
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-01 11:42 pm (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-02 12:00 am (UTC)Eh, lot easier to calculate the risks and mitigate them when going into orbit.. less so when going to texas.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-02 12:05 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-01-02 04:06 pm (UTC)Our healthcare system is not good at the best of times, and at this moment we're either going through a metamorphosis or collapse...likely won't know for sure until next month at least.
Either way, Not. Fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-01 10:54 pm (UTC)I'm pretty sure we've got Engines that'd have the thrust and take up less space. and use safer fuels in the bargain.likely redo the airframe with modern materials as well.
The result would be a fun little plane.
designing in retractable wheeled landing gear is probably a bit much, but would be nice if doable.
No way I could build one, much less fly one. but even if nobody built one, you could use it in fiction.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-01 10:57 pm (UTC)Building a 1:16 scale Rc model however would be possible. We've got model rocket engines after all.
I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already done that actually...
Yes ...
Date: 2022-01-01 11:43 pm (UTC)Also I have Rad the Squirrel riding them, over in Terramagne. :D
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2022-01-02 12:01 am (UTC)Lets not introduce the hyper-intelligent squirrel to the concept of model rockets and space flight!
Yes ...
Date: 2022-01-01 11:40 pm (UTC)