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I'd likely play wargames more than once a week if I had the FTF opponent nearby like I did 40 years ago.

But, I also love other things.

Some things, you don't really do as an 'activity' but just as a way to spend cash. So my buying Barbies isn't the same as buying models or reading books, or role gaming.

I'm trying to revive my love of model trains. Ok, not revive the love of them, trying to revive being able to play with them. It's looking good so far. Moved the 4 foot high 12 inch deep bookcases into the back room. I have 7 of the things. In a room that offers me a 10-foot by 7-foot space. The idea being, run the train in an oval with the bookcases as a support. Not that making a base would be hard, but why make something if you don't need to eh.

Out of the blue, I got a great offer for some President's Choice train sets. If you have not seen them, they are pretty good. I already have one. Poof, instant collection. The train layout though is a secondary function of the real purpose for the layout as a whole. I want to build a hyper-real-looking town.

So I have numerous hobbies. I like to cross-stitch, and I like woodworking. One is easier to do in the living room than the other I like to bake, and well, guess where my woodworking tools are stored In the kitchen of all places. But the balcony is off the kitchen.

Given a choice, I'd rather spend ALL of my spare time surrounded by lumber and the smell of sawdust. I'm a cabinetmaker originally. More than anything else. I'd like to have my hobby table where I made my models, out there in the woodshop. I'd probably sit out there and play my wargames when not making something. My shop would be my 'place'. Where I played my music loud (like I once used to do).

But life is change (don't I know it). I rarely get to hear the sound of my tools now. I read romance novels more than I write them. I build models because it's easy to do so. Don't always get to paint them. But I love to assemble them. I role game with my teddy bears these days. They don't argue over the rules and don't fudge their dice rolls. It's refreshing But I likely sound a bit 'odd' talking to them. Oh well, I sounded odd when I gamed with humans too.

So when not wargaming, what is your relaxing time filled with?

Very simple tastes really. I love Football (Tottenham Hotspur), F1 Motor Racing (Lewis and George Russell at the moment (and Lando Norris if he gets his head down and applies himself). I love reading history - military history in particular and the Second World War in particular in particular. I love listening to music - all kinds. I like watching good series - crime drama, thrillers, that sort of thing.

But most of all I enjoy being dad to my (not longer so) little warspites.

Music. My collection is massive & spans over a hundred years. [:D]

Anime & manga

Sorry what is manga again?

ORIGINAL: ETF

Sorry what is manga again?

Japanese comic books (anime are animated movies and series).

Like many kids, I would create and fly paper airplanes.
Many different kinds and shapes. Some with working
flaps, some with penciled-on details: cockpit windows,
pilot's head, rivets, roundels, cannon housings etc.

One day as I was testing a plane, an invisible updraft
passed near and trapped my plane. I stared in stupefaction
as it circled higher and higher, becoming a tiny speck way
up in the sky.

I raced along after it, leaping ditches and jumping barbed
wire fences. Eventually it came to rest in pasture maybe
a half kilometer away.

I remember walking home slowly out of breath, holding the
plane aloft in triumph, as if it were the head of a vanquished
foe.

I suppose you could say I enjoy flights of fancy.

I think about how to use certain body parts . . . [;)]

College Football (American). Roll Tide, baby!! We just won another NC!!! We're the flagship of college football!!! And I really love reading.

Is it still a hobby when you do not do it any longer?

I like roleplaying, but I do not really do it any more. I plan my super campaign. And I plan on altering a roleplaying game, rather than creating an entire new system. But, at the moment, it never leaves the planning stage because I keep thinking that there is no point to write it down since it will never get played.

I like card games where you co-operate to beat the game.

I like board games.

I still read a lot. But not as much as I would like.

And I like to play a wide variety of computer games. And watching TV-series.

And I like sleeping. Although, at times, sleeping seems like a complete waste of time.

I also like to watch football. But, at the moment, that is a no-no as well. And even if that wasn't a no-no then it wouldn't happen as much anyway because I find it to expensive. I used to watch icehockey as well but they killed that long time ago for me. They made it way to expensive for the product they delivered.

I liked watching American Football. But many matches was in the middle of the night so I couldn't watch it as much as I liked. So when they put it behind a separate paywall I was out. I do not mind paying for what I want to watch. But the cost should be reasonable when compared to what I get.

Reading WW1 and WW2 books. Listening to audiobooks. Collecting action figures\toy soldiers etc. Reading Graphic Novels. Flying WW1 planes in Wings Over Flanders Fields. Other non wargame digital games. The watching the odd film and TV series. Listening to music from around '65 to '72, usually sixties garage, folk or psychedelic upto early prog that still has psych influence, krautrock and space rock (first Hawkwind albums upto and including Space Ritual). I have 294 albums on my PC with probably only two or three not falling into above category. I doubt anyone can say the name of all the albums shown below. Huge kudos if you can!

Listening to music from around '65 to '72, usually sixties garage, folk or psychedelic upto early prog that still has psych influence, krautrock and space rock (first Hawkwind albums upto and including Space Ritual). I have 294 albums on my PC with probably only two or three not falling into above category. I doubt anyone can say the name of all the albums shown below. Huge kudos if you can!


excellent collection !!! I see the top album of all time(dark side of the moon) ; and wow, 13th floor elevators !

ORIGINAL: pkpowers

Listening to music from around '65 to '72, usually sixties garage, folk or psychedelic upto early prog that still has psych influence, krautrock and space rock (first Hawkwind albums upto and including Space Ritual). I have 294 albums on my PC with probably only two or three not falling into above category. I doubt anyone can say the name of all the albums shown below. Huge kudos if you can!


excellent collection !!! I see the top album of all time(dark side of the moon) ; and wow, 13th floor elevators !

Well spotted:) You know your stuff! If you like 13th Floor then check out the artist Golden Dawn and their album Power Plant. Also Cold Sun - Dark Shadows

I'm also a model railroader. N scale and Chessie System are my preferences, but I have a bit of older O scale Lionel stuff from when I was a kid and from my dad. Building a house this year that will have a bonus room over the garage for my future railroad empire.

I also love triathlons and cycling in particular. More sedentary hobbies are reading fantasy and sci-fi and watching movies. I'm a big ice hockey fan and watch as many of my Carolina Hurricanes' games as I can, going to the games when I can afford it (non-pandemic times).

Playing electric guitar, longer then I have played war games (by 2 years).

*picking things up and putting them down
*sampling the finest (and highest alcohol content)stouts, IPA's and other brown liquors.
*discovering "new" music I like that is not -10 to 10 years older than me.

Let's consider wargaming and military history as a given. [:)]

I don't like following sports, except for three events: the FIFA World Cup, the Soccer European Cup and the Olympics. Many, many years ago I was a supporter of Juventus F.C. - but mostly because I'm a supporter of athletes I like and back then a lot of them played for Juventus. Then, since the mid-'90s, my interest for soccer waned and never returned. I do have a maxi-screen in my restaurant, as anyone else in my line of work has, because it is either that or when there is an important soccer match we can keep the doors closed.

Supporting the "Azzurri" at the World or European Cup is, of course, totally another matter. Yet, I'm uninterested even when Italian teams play in European competitions. I just don't have my heart in it anymore.

Same with Formula One. Today it just bores me.

I love ghost and horror stories in any medium and I still play the Call of Cthulhu RPG with a group of friends. Finding good horror movies is not easy but I recently liked The Conjuring 1 & 2, Hereditary, The Witch, Midsommar and some unexpected gems like Unfriended, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Last Shift and Grave Encounters (the latter seems a quick cash-grab in the found footage/Paranormal Activity genre, but it is actually both a satire of it and a movie full of its own interesting ideas).

In horror literature I like more the classics (Lovecraft, R.E. Howard, Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, M.R. James...) Modern authors, from King onwards, are often hit-and-miss - and when you digest a tome like "Insomnia" over a few weeks only to arrive at that ending... hours of my life I'll never get back.

And in videogames I'm always hoping for the next scarefest. Resident Evil, sadly, lost his way (they tell me that RE 7 is worth a try, however). Thankfully we got Outlast (truly one of the scariest game ever [X(]), Alien: Isolation (played three times - the last one with mods that make the Alien even more scary), Amnesia: the Dark Descent and The Forest. There are some "lovecraftian" games, like The Sinking City, but, sadly, they do lack the fear factor.

I still wonder where the creativity once seen in titles like Silent Hill 1 and (exp.) 2 went. Death Stranding, BTW, defeated me one third in. It is not a game, it is work [:@]

I, of course, do like cooking and experimenting with new recipes. This, however, overlaps with work, and thus it isn't strictly "an hobby".

What else? Hmmm... I don't know if it can be considered an hobby, but when I'm a tourist I do walk all day. I'm not interested in "All Paris in three days on a coach!" I stay there one week and walk everywhere. My wife hates me. She likes to walk too, but my legs are longer than hers and, for some reason, we always end up with her grabbing my arm and stopping me cold while panting. This happened when we started dating, more than 25 years ago, and still happens today. Male insensitivity, I guess.

Lost hobbies: photography. A few years ago, after squeezing what a Lumix could do to the limit, I took the plunge and bought a Canon Eos 5D Mark IV + 50mm lens. And then... I... dunno... stumbled. Too many options, too many things to learn, not enough time to go out there, experiment and learn... a fiasco [:(] Now my basically still brand new equipment is gathering dust somewhere. My only consolation is that my eldest daughter is taking a photography class with a cheap Nikon, so maybe one day it will be hers.

Define 'horror' as you see it?

One of the 'scariest' films I have seen in recent years, is the 4 films under the name Insidious. I found them to have shock scenes and just plain unnerving scenes. Some parts can even be a bit triggering and might make some uncomfortable.

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

Then, since the mid-'90s, my interest for soccer waned and never returned. ...

Same here. I think at the moment clubs started rotating entire squads in and out between seasons and started addressing their supporters as 'customers' they lost me.

ORIGINAL: MrsWargamer

Define 'horror' as you see it?

The beauty of horror and supernatural stories is that they don't have a "rule": either they work or they don't. They don't even need to be scary. One of my favoured novels ever, "The Terror" by Arthur Machen, is not scary at all. Bad things happen, sure, but what involved me was the mystery itself, the description of WWI England and the unique story structure (Machen upends the classic "Bad things that start in one place and then invade the World" with a story that begins with "something" involving the whole of the British Isles in 1916, and then scaling down to the events happening in a county and ending with what happened in a single, isolated farm).

My first exposition to this kind of tales was when I was 14. An old anthology from the '60s, belonging to an uncle, creatively titled "Storie di Fantasmi" (Ghost Stories). The book collected some of the best works from some of the best writers in the field (and not strictly about ghosts). "The Call of Cthulhu" by Lovecraft was cool to the 14 years old me, but not really scary - except that later the book hit you with "The Color Out of Space", something that gave me (coloured) nightmares for months. "Qui Est Iste Qui Venit" by M.R. James was another "sleeping with the lamp turned on for months" hit (one of the pinnacles of the classic ghost story, with a ghost literally appearing as waving rags), but the much acclaimed "The Monkey's Pawn" by Jacobs was, to me, both boring and predictable. And so on.

Regarding movies, I forgot to mention "The Babadook", a great, great movie (to be clear: one of the best I saw in any genre) which works both as a horror story and as a tale about a nervous breakdown - but that to me isn't scary at all. "Shutter" OTOH (the original Thai movie, not the remake) doesn't pretend to be deep about life, but it is as scary as hell.

And I still like a lot the original Blair Witch Project for both how ballsy the idea was back then, and the worldbuilding of the "lore" surrounding the Witch (I was amazed to discover that the directors had invented everything about the legend - I was sure that they had, at least partially, based their plot on already existing folktales).

One of the 'scariest' films I have seen in recent years, is the 4 films under the name Insidious. I found them to have shock scenes and just plain unnerving scenes. Some parts can even be a bit triggering and might make some uncomfortable.

True (when the devil appeared "just like that" I almost had an heart attack [:D]). And, talking about uncomfortable movies, "Sinister" too was very unnerving.