What are some skills that can be turned into hobbies that would be good for a Leftist to know?
Like the title! I want to cultivate some helpful skills but do so gradually, as a hobbyist. Tempted to get into lockpicking, haha.
An old school communist comrade of mine swears by geocaching
Huh, interesting! Wonder why?
I gotta assume dead drops and stuff like that. geocaches are literally stash spots designed to hide in plain sight in public places, plus just navigation is a survival skill
Oh, that makes a lot of sense!
What Aceivan said. Personally I enjoy plain old fashioned land navigation with a pencil, compass and a pocketful of rocks.
Learning both digital and non-digital land navigation can be a critical skill ranging from your phone's dead and all you got is a handful of descriptions of where you need to go to in a part of town you know nothing about, to being stranded in the middle of literal nowhere and all you got is the sky and the land to orientate yourself. Even learning the most basic thing like watching the direction the moon or sun is moving and at what relative angle they are to setting or rising to help figure out your mental compass can be life-saving is emergency events.
Also when my friend showed me geocaching I was extremely surprised at the creativeness of the dead drop props used in urban environments to help them blend in. Like who the fuck would look for a secret message hidden in a fake electrical access panel on a random highway lightpole? Strap on a reflective yellow vest and a hard hat and nobody would ever question you looking for all the random shit around town while you geocache!
Just wanna point out here if you want to learn map navigation from the comfort of your home you can play any number of SP or (preferrably SP) Arma games / missions with the magic floating markers and GPS turned off, some come like that by design especially in Arma 1 and 2. I can see sightlines out of topological maps
I would play Arma 3 just for a taste of the old bullshit I used to do when I get a yearning for a hit of nostalgia, but nothing beats really experiencing getting abso-fucking-lutely getting lost in the middle of a huge fuck-off forest in the middle of winter somewhere in the middle of Alaska for 18 is hours a day for several days in a row. Or whatever your local equivalent would be lol
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say getting absolutely lost in the wintery alaskan wilderness with no honed navigational skills is more of an advanced move
I survived and that's a fairly low bar concidering I'm me.
Never put much thought into navigation and geocaching, but y'all have me sold. I'll have to look into that!
Late answer, but in the same vein as hiking, navigation, and geocaching, I've always been curious about orienteering.
I'd also suggest learning camping up to like Luke Nichols on his YouTube channel "Outdoor Boys". It's a bit extreme, but at least knowing how to not be completely miserable out in the middle of nowhere is always a nice trick in the bag to have. If nothing else, learning how to start a fire with an empty Bic lighter can be a cool trick to show off to your friends.
Thanks, will do! And I actually do know how to strike a fire up with an empty bic, though finding tinder can be hard.
Oh yeah if you got a knife or a sharp rock you can just scrape off plastic shavings off the lighter to get the small tinder pile set up along with grinding the flint a bit for some of that sweet sparky sparky dust to give it that extra oomph
Oh, didn't know that part! That's handy in a pinch, if there's no dry wood to scrape up into dust.