Ok guys, I come to the BGSF in need of worldly advice! I must be desperate. Anyway, I am currently back in the UK for the first time in a couple of years, due to me [censored] my shoulder and a mystery illness that I have managed to attain.

Anyway, I am going to have surgery on my shoulder and that means that for 2-3 months I have a LOT of spare time.

I'm starting to feel that spending all my copious free time playing Skyrim isn't a brilliant idea and I am left feeling a bit underwhelmed and dissatisfied with life.

I'd rather it be something I can do at home, I have limited to transport. Hoping to get good at cooking and also get mega fit. What can I replace the games with though?

Maybe we could use this as a thread to try new things! I want to come out of this extremely frustrating part of my life with a sense of accomplishment!

Learn a new language... http://www.theblaze.com/stories/swedish-man-tries-to-build-homemade-nuclear-reactor-in-kitchen/

Check out the http://www.open.ac.uk/.

You could start a work out routine if you want fitness. There are tons of simple body weight exercises that could get you in shape. I could even help you out with that to a certain degree. (Bear in mind that I'm no certified personal trainer though).

Or you could learn painting, or drawing, or something. What I usually do when I have a crapload of time like in summers is find a new show/anime to watch.

I wish I could draw, unfortunately I am terrible at both art and music. I've been meaning to get in to writing more. I already speak spanish, but I've let it slip since I moved back from Spain. I definitely need to start reading in Spanish again!

Thanks for the ideas! I've gotten in to some new shows. I am up to date on all the breaking bad series. I'm going to start the walking dead next. Is it good?

Yup, Walking Dead is good. Second season is a bit slow, but still good.

find some mechanical device and tinker with it. Take it apart, find out how it works. study something. Ever wonder why something happens? find out why. Learn about something you wanted to learn for awhile, brush up on old skills. Stuff like that.

Getting in shape should be at the top of your list, as well as learning a new skill. The best hobbies are fun and improve yourself.

Certainly trumps my http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAp_hJJlkBo


wow.. together though.. think of the possibilities

I've been there and even far worse than you. I used to be a big sports junkie and then I got osgood schlatter so my usual from dawn to dusk schedule of spending all my free time on sports had to be completely re-arranged and I didn't even have a PC back then.

What replaced sports in my life at that point was first and foremost books. Good old fashioned fantasy books. I was only a kid back then so I read a lot of short and nice books like Broken Sky, Harry Potter, Eragon and so forth. And then I moved into still short books but many and I started reading a series by an author called Margit Sandemo where I read 77 of the 82 books in the series (the last 5 were never translated from the other Nordic languages to neither Icelandic nor English so... never read them ) but perhaps at your age you'd like something more advlt like A Song of Ice and Fire (not that the children and teen books can't be nice when you're advlt too).

Then aside from books there are card games. My mom bought me my first pokémon cards the very day after I learned I had to quit sports which became a big hobby of mine, I then went into yu-gi-oh and currently I'm playing Magic: The Gathering which is a very fun card game if you like that and have some friends to play with. It's a rather expensive hobby though.

Then there is manga and anime. Some of the longer ones out there are the 3 biggest currently running ones. Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. They can all be enjoyed at any age but many would argue that One Piece is mostly for the younger audiences. You may also enjoy Azumanga Daioh if comedy and slice of life are for you and Berserk if you like more gritty stuff. The work done by Rumiko is also pretty famed two of the biggest works being Ranma 1/2 a slice of life comedy and InuYasha a adventure/comedy/slice of life/romance/omgwtfhowdoyoulablethis. I'd make a bigger list here but we got a pretty good anime thread that can inform you better. Manga is often better than anime though.

You could get engrossed in the MLP:FiM community

You could discover your latent modding powers and not play Skyrim, but make Skyrim!

Then there are always other games, on the PC or the console. If you got a PS2 then it's worth hunting for a game called Okami and another called Persona 3.

Start a collection of pictures. Download and organize everything on the Internet. That should keep you busy FOREVER.

Ah, why not try yourself at a world first OP ? You could do something like count all the particles in the world. I doubt that has been done before I'm rooting for you!

Cards(Poker, Big Two, etc.), card games(Magic: The Gathering, Yu Gi Oh, etc.), foreign languages, computer languages, writing(stories, poetry, etc.), drawing... There's a lot to choose from. You just need to get to it.

I would recommend learning a computer programming language, if you have not already! I think it is a very rewarding activity, especially in relation to jobs!

Or, mathematics... . Really! I would recommend Michael Spivak's, "Calculus." Basically, if you never really took any theoretical courses or whatever, this is a great place to start, and most certainly gives you a different view of math.



...If someone actually happened to be interested about the last thing: for example, you start with about a dozen properties of numbers (ex. a + b = b + a), prove simple algebra, like why a negative times a negative is a positive, with them, and go onto things like functions, limits, least upper bounds, the calculus, and a lot of neat appendices as well as a chapter dedicated to the construction of the real numbers, (mostly) all on the basis of those properties! It is a difficult read though, in my opinion.

EDIT: *the theory of mathematics, haha, not "theoretical"

How about competitive nose-picking?

Or if that's not exciting enough, cooking is a tasty way of passing the time, which you already seem to be interested in.

Poker. It's a really interesting game to play and can earn you a lot of money if you become good at it. I've recently learnt to play and it's not hard at all. As long as you're quite good at reading people and can do simple maths it's easy enough to pick up. Read a few books, watch a few hands and get a bit of practice under your belt and you will soon be really good.

Other suggestions above are great like languages, and getting fit - anything you find interesting.

But how does that work. I hear the exact same story from every single person I've ever met that has ever had an interest in playing poker for money. "It's easy to win if you practice and understand math and can read people. I win all the time!" I could ask a whole table of poker players and everyone would say the same.

So let's say the OP does go and learn poker, he becomes good and then one day he plays poker with you. Someone has to lose and someone has to win right ? Or does the universe implode as a rift in reality is created and somehow you both end up winning at the end of the day ?

To oblivion with magnets, I ask how does poker work!?

Watch Anime, listen to music, download pictures, sort downloaded pictures. That's pretty much all of my hobbies right there.

Read books. Now hear me out on this one, it seems like a boring idea, but if you get yourself a nice long series like Discworld and start working through them you won't even need self-actualization.


How many times do I have to tell you! Nuclear bombs don't work the same way reactors do! You couldn't make a random pile of uranium explode if you tried.

Well besides probability-calculations and all that stuff it's also a game of wits. Bluffing is a big part of poker, and I think I've become pretty good at it myself. If you're good at bluffing, reading people become difficult, and I doubt there are "psychic" poker players that can read absolutely anyone. People say it takes more skill than luck, and I've got to agree, that's what makes the game so great.

Unfortunately playing poker for money is illegal in Norway so it's not easy to to play, but there are lots of secret events that I would love to participate in at some time.

I love poker, and would love to play competetive at some point.

I never said it's easy to win, or that you can win all the time. Even the best players in the world lose. I just mean that you can become good enough to enjoy playing and win (sometimes).

In a nutshell:
I play Texas Hold'em which is basically your best 5 cards made up of the 2 in your hand, and any 3 other cards in a 5 card flop (series of dealt cards). You can choose to bet (raise), call or fold at most points in the game and bluffing is obviously when you pretend to have a hand and you don't. It uses the normal Poker score system:

High Card < Pair < 2 Pair < 3 of a kind < Straight < Full House < Four of a Kind < Straight Flush < Royal Flush.

There are bound to be guides online that show you how to play properly and it's great fun.

Write a short story, or a few. Anything, I know in this terrible economy that's what I'm doing. Slow work, or fast work since you set your own pace.

Geocaching! http://www.geocaching.com/

I'm not sure how active you can be due to your shoulder, but you don't have to go on huge hikes to do it. Basically it's a treasure hunt using GPS. I've got an old GPS that hikers use, but there is an app on smartphones. You stick in the coordinates near where you are and get searching for the treasure. You normally find little things like keyrings and magnets hidden in tupperware tubs and film canisters which you take and then replace with your own treasure for the next person.
There's also a log book to write in, although sometimes the cache is so small there's only a tiny logbook hidden in it with no treasure. The smallest I've found was a teeny tiny roll of paper hidden inside a fake snail shell attached to a wooden fence. Took me more than one visit to find. Frustrating but I was very pleased when I finally found it
I don't know about you, but I was surprised how many geocaches in my local area I have walked past without ever knowing they have been there.

Pfft. How about building your own http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-homemade-danish-rocket.html?

I endorse this message.

Start reading poems Just search one every day, print it, and think about it. About what it means for you, what it meant for the author, stuff like that. Think your own thoughts on poems, print them and compare them with other people's thoughts about them. It's an interesting way too spend time, and you learn to really think about things.

A good poem to start with is If by Rudyard Kipling

(On a totally unrelated note, I just discovered how the spell-check here works. And only after two years! )