[trevett]

I've accepted that we kind of lost the net to the money people and bureaucrats. Mid-late 90's it really was a frontier full of adventurous nerds. I would spend entire weekends on Efnet learning and experimenting with a tight group of people. Since a parallel non-commercial web has never taken off (and VR fizzled) I've ended up adventuring outdoors, the old school way. It's less intellectual but triggers similar feelings of discovery. There's a lot of experimentation and improvisation once you get into things like ski mountaineering because something always goes wrong. The camaraderie is also strong.

Another alternative is simply Science, if you can handle the barrier to entry.

[steve_adams_86]

I like your point about the outdoors. My best adventures happen there these days. One of my most recent hobbies is using a fine net to capture microfauna from random bodies of water and checking it out with my microscope. It sounds lame but my god, I’m enthralled by what I find in there. Every time there’s something new. I’ve been writing a blog post about it for weeks but I can’t finish because I keep finding cool new stuff I want to write about. Maybe I need to do an ongoing series, haha.

I also started cleaning urban creeks and streams (with permission from my city) and made a little project out of it. It’s related to my business, but primarily just a volunteer project I enjoy. Definitely find some weird stuff. It’s a lot of fun just discovering new spots and pulling trash out of nature though.

I don’t think that’s a good idea for anyone but the possibilities are pretty much inexhaustible for a lot of people. Outside is big.

[trevett]

That's funny I'm also setting up a home lab and buying a vintage microscope (state of the art 1999 from auction) to look at the creatures living in my pond. There are always new avenues.

[steve_adams_86]

Ponds are amazing. Really, I think tons of urban homes should have them. They make an incredible difference to local ecology. You’ll find so much cool stuff!

[rchaud]

> Since a parallel non-commercial web has never taken off

There's Neocities, but it's kind of a graveyard as well.

[throaway89]

Yeah, I was always a high-achieving, intellectual kid, and I've been really struggling as an adult to recapture that same love of learning. I think maybe some of it is actually a love of adventure and discovering new and interesting, exciting things. Not necessarily academic or intellectual pursuits. The Internet used to provide so much of that, it just doesn't anymore.