GD, Help Preserve my Sanity

Soldato
Joined
16 Nov 2009
Posts
16,034
Location
UK
Santa brought me a load of silly, incurable illnesses for Christmas and I spent most of December ticking off the hospital’s groovier departments (each completely amazing, I must add). I now have three months of complete convalescence and will likely be totally house-bound, perhaps with further problems. I am a very active and hard-working sort of chap and this inability to do anything, along with the symptoms, will be challenging. I’m being told a lot that keeping up one’s spirits will be hard and I will need entertainment and distraction strategies to help.

The trouble is, I’ve been so busy with work and fatherhood for the last 10 years that I don’t have a clue what’s out there. I used to love gaming and I’ve resubbed to Warcraft and dug out Anno 1404 but my PC is old and won’t play anything nearly up-to-date. I know Netflix is a thing and Amazon do some TV things now.

If anyone else has been through this kind of thing please share what got you through, no matter what it is, especially if it is productive—as I feel the best when I’m not being a useless lump. I'll honestly consider anything, from basket-weaving to practising telekinesis.

Thanks in advance and I hope you’re all enjoying the festive period!
 
YouTube - there are tons of really great and interesting projects you can follow from people travelling around the world in strange or unusual ways, Adam Savage's one day builds or someone making a fully drivable smaller scale replica of historic tanks and so on and so forth.
 
IIRC you're a good writer or has this been affected with the health issues? Personally I wouldn't sit and game all too much as I find at the end of the day you go to bed feeling very unproductive, at least with Rroff's suggestion you're building something tangible :)
 
Earn some money via Amazon's Mechanical Turk?

https://www.mturk.com/worker

Depending on your mobility you could practice card tricks or other magic. Or play online chess - you can play against people at pretty much any level and it'll keep your brain working
 
Earn some money via Amazon's Mechanical Turk?

https://www.mturk.com/worker

Depending on your mobility you could practice card tricks or other magic. Or plan online chess - you can play against people at pretty much any level and it'll keep your brain working

Haven't seen this before - Can you make any decent money with it?

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Try Civilization on PC (or on the iPad now) - It sucks up days like crazy :p
 
Haven't seen this before - Can you make any decent money with it?
Apparently it very much depends on the task - some will take you well below minimum wage, but some are not bad. OP could use it to make some money to spend on Lego :)
 
Gaming is definitely something that helps keep me sane. Glad I can still enjoy them even after all these years.

Edit: Wow is also in a pretty good state these days, Legion has been a pretty decent expansion. I've picked it up again recently myself and been having fun.
 
Depends on your financial situation.

Could you, for example build yourself a new PC?

Get some books, build up a watch list of films, do some jig saws, get some colouring books, paint, photography?
Decorate, clear out the loft/garage (if you have them!)

Get a cheap Pi and learn to code, create a blog?
 
If anyone else has been through this kind of thing please share what got you through, no matter what it is, especially if it is productive—as I feel the best when I’m not being a useless lump. I'll honestly consider anything, from basket-weaving to practising telekinesis.

I know someone else has mentioned coursera and udacity (EDX is another MOOC site to look at) - these two sites predate them and are worth a look too as they contain full fat university modules not the watered down versions you sometimes get on MOOC sites:

https://see.stanford.edu/

https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
 
Sorry to hear about your illness. You could study something, whether a free online course or the OU or something?

Hookers are good for all situations.

EDIT - I’m a potato and didn’t read dowie’s post properly. So just do the hookers thing.
 
Sorry to hear of the illness.

Depending on what you're up to doing how about model making/building?
Possibly one of the tabletop wargames involving painting models?
As you say about Warcraft possibly look at something like Warhammer Age of Sigmar or 40k (originally Warcraft was meant to be a Warhammer game back in the early 90's, but from memory they couldn't get the licence so did something oddly similar).
Or something like Zombicide or Infinity.
 
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