Unique New Year's Resolutions
I keep seeing lists for New Year's resolutions that are "unique," "strange," "unusual" ... but list the same common suggestions. 0_o Clearly, this needs to be fixed. Here is a list of New Year's resolutions that few if any other people will be attempting. Let your freak flag fly!
* Learn or create an invented language. Esperanto is the most widely spoken. Láadan and Klingon are well worth considering for cultural interest, especially contrasted against each other. Explore the Language Construction Kit or other resources to build your own. Consider Lexember as a December monthly resolution.
* Learn a natural language from a different language family than your native language(s). This is easiest to do if you skip to a continent not connected to your own, or pick an isolate. (I note that Antarctica has no native languages; somegeek really needs to fix that by inventing one there, since it has science outposts.) Big bonus points if you also make it an endangered language; there are over 3,000. This list sorts them by number of speakers. Save a world, help rescue a threatened language.
* Give yourself the equivalent of a college degree. You don't need to spend a mountain of money to learn things. You have the internet, probably also a local library or bookstore, maybe a community center that offers classes. Pick a topic -- you're going to emulate a major, minor, or certificate here -- and study it seriously. Each good-sized book counts as one course, provided that you read the whole thing and do some practical or theoretical exercises to put it in practice. You might look up how different colleges lay out their programs to get an idea of how to structure yours. These places offer free online classes.
* Explore big topics and ask deep questions. Big Think is a great resource for this. You could also subscribe to a magazine on something like philosophy, astronomy, or international politics.
* Study your failures. Keep a list of significant mistakes you make during the year. For each one, analyze what went wrong, how to prevent a repetition, and what you learned from it. Here are some things you can learn from your mistakes. Remember that mistakes are a natural and necessary part of the learning process. If you're not making any mistakes, you're not learning, you're coasting!
* Dress entirely in your Pride Flag colors for a week. This page has gender identities with flags. Some of those have multiple options; pick whichever you like.
* Get a copy of the Kama Sutra and try some of the sex positions. It's available online, and here's a modern version. Here are some sample positions. (If you are single, ace, etc. then you can try some things alone or do the Cuddle Sutra instead.) Take note of whether your satisfaction is more, the same, or less compared to your usual activities.
* Design something for disabled people. It should be focused such that an abled person either couldn't use it or would need to modify it. For example, a garment with only one sleeve, smooth without a seam on the other side, for a one-armed person -- instead of the usual where they have to cut off or pin up the empty sleeve. Computer programs or apps are an excellent choice as accessibility there is often poor. Here are some tips for accessible coding. I recommend a mode toggle so people can easily switch between text-based or visual-based formats.
* Challenge: any 2 ingredients. A partner will name 2 culinary ingredients, and you have to make something delicious using both of them together. Example: marmalade and horseradish.
* Challenge: hide the ingredient. A partner will name a culinary ingredient, and you have to hide it in a delicious recipe so nobody can identify what it is. Example: spinach brownies.
* Go to an ethnic restaurant or grocery store and buy a food you don't recognize. Eat it and report your experiences. (If you have special dietary needs, you may need someone to make sure it falls within your parameters.) You can also order a far-out ingredient from online and experiment with it. Here are some online spice vendors.
* Invent a new art/craft medium. If you are a chemist, you can try to mix up something new and useful. Otherwise, look for materials that have not generally been used for artistic purposes and make artworks with them. Ideally, describe your process of selecting the medium and then exploring its artistic potential. Document with photos, video, podcast, or whatever else you wish. You will likely be the only person working in this medium, so you get to make up all the practices it starts out with. Here are some previous odd art media.
* Create a landrace, a cultivar (plants) or breed (animals) suited to your area. To do this, you throw together as many different types as you can get, let them reproduce, and keep the best of the offspring. With plants, use open-pollinated varieties if possible. This example features melons and here's a discussion about chickens. It occurs to me that I've basically done this with my sunchokes since I bought seedling packages instead of stabilized cultivars; unsurprisingly they grew stupendously.
* Turn something bizarre into a planter. It has to be something you haven't seen as a planter before. Here are some past planters.
* Upcycle something you've never seen upcycled before. These are some previous upcycled oddities.
* Stockpile fans and/or window air conditioners. When the heat gets bad, you'll have them to share with friends who don't have any or whose equipment is broken and taking weeks or months to fix. Climate change makes cooling a survival need now, in more and more places. I'm not kidding, heat waves now kill thousands of people, and ALL of those deaths are preventable. This is a cheap, easy way to save lives. You can also do this with portable heaters. While extreme cold events are less likely than extreme heat events, they are starting to happen in places where they never did before, catching people dangerously unprepared.
* Create an apocalypse bookshelf or library. Include titles on how to survive disasters and restart civilization if necessary. You can see an example in my notes for "Seeds of Civilization."
* Take up reality alteration as a hobby. Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are good authors to read. Prometheus Rising is especially helpful due to its exercises; find an excerpt here. (I don't recommend that you binge those; spread them out.) RAW additionally offers the option of spelunking in other people's reality tunnels, one of my favorite hobbies.
* Build a universe. There are worldbuilding resources for gamers, novelists, fantasy writers, science fiction writers, artists, and this set by subtopic. Dream no little dreams.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Construct a tiny house from something strange.
siliconshaman suggested a scrapped rocket prototype. This list of oddballs includes a mirror house, a 3D-printed house, and one covered in branches.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Take up an endangered craft or hobby. (Courtesy of
fuzzyred.) Here is a list of endangered crafts. Some of these sound really fun, like glass eye making; you could do realistic ones or phantasmagoric ones, and they'd make great collectibles in addition to their original use. This article lists some of the least common hobbies. It mentions trainspotting; one of my interests is treating trains as a rolling gallery of public art, because I admire graffiti.
Can you think of any other far-out resolutions?
* Learn or create an invented language. Esperanto is the most widely spoken. Láadan and Klingon are well worth considering for cultural interest, especially contrasted against each other. Explore the Language Construction Kit or other resources to build your own. Consider Lexember as a December monthly resolution.
* Learn a natural language from a different language family than your native language(s). This is easiest to do if you skip to a continent not connected to your own, or pick an isolate. (I note that Antarctica has no native languages; somegeek really needs to fix that by inventing one there, since it has science outposts.) Big bonus points if you also make it an endangered language; there are over 3,000. This list sorts them by number of speakers. Save a world, help rescue a threatened language.
* Give yourself the equivalent of a college degree. You don't need to spend a mountain of money to learn things. You have the internet, probably also a local library or bookstore, maybe a community center that offers classes. Pick a topic -- you're going to emulate a major, minor, or certificate here -- and study it seriously. Each good-sized book counts as one course, provided that you read the whole thing and do some practical or theoretical exercises to put it in practice. You might look up how different colleges lay out their programs to get an idea of how to structure yours. These places offer free online classes.
* Explore big topics and ask deep questions. Big Think is a great resource for this. You could also subscribe to a magazine on something like philosophy, astronomy, or international politics.
* Study your failures. Keep a list of significant mistakes you make during the year. For each one, analyze what went wrong, how to prevent a repetition, and what you learned from it. Here are some things you can learn from your mistakes. Remember that mistakes are a natural and necessary part of the learning process. If you're not making any mistakes, you're not learning, you're coasting!
* Dress entirely in your Pride Flag colors for a week. This page has gender identities with flags. Some of those have multiple options; pick whichever you like.
* Get a copy of the Kama Sutra and try some of the sex positions. It's available online, and here's a modern version. Here are some sample positions. (If you are single, ace, etc. then you can try some things alone or do the Cuddle Sutra instead.) Take note of whether your satisfaction is more, the same, or less compared to your usual activities.
* Design something for disabled people. It should be focused such that an abled person either couldn't use it or would need to modify it. For example, a garment with only one sleeve, smooth without a seam on the other side, for a one-armed person -- instead of the usual where they have to cut off or pin up the empty sleeve. Computer programs or apps are an excellent choice as accessibility there is often poor. Here are some tips for accessible coding. I recommend a mode toggle so people can easily switch between text-based or visual-based formats.
* Challenge: any 2 ingredients. A partner will name 2 culinary ingredients, and you have to make something delicious using both of them together. Example: marmalade and horseradish.
* Challenge: hide the ingredient. A partner will name a culinary ingredient, and you have to hide it in a delicious recipe so nobody can identify what it is. Example: spinach brownies.
* Go to an ethnic restaurant or grocery store and buy a food you don't recognize. Eat it and report your experiences. (If you have special dietary needs, you may need someone to make sure it falls within your parameters.) You can also order a far-out ingredient from online and experiment with it. Here are some online spice vendors.
* Invent a new art/craft medium. If you are a chemist, you can try to mix up something new and useful. Otherwise, look for materials that have not generally been used for artistic purposes and make artworks with them. Ideally, describe your process of selecting the medium and then exploring its artistic potential. Document with photos, video, podcast, or whatever else you wish. You will likely be the only person working in this medium, so you get to make up all the practices it starts out with. Here are some previous odd art media.
* Create a landrace, a cultivar (plants) or breed (animals) suited to your area. To do this, you throw together as many different types as you can get, let them reproduce, and keep the best of the offspring. With plants, use open-pollinated varieties if possible. This example features melons and here's a discussion about chickens. It occurs to me that I've basically done this with my sunchokes since I bought seedling packages instead of stabilized cultivars; unsurprisingly they grew stupendously.
* Turn something bizarre into a planter. It has to be something you haven't seen as a planter before. Here are some past planters.
* Upcycle something you've never seen upcycled before. These are some previous upcycled oddities.
* Stockpile fans and/or window air conditioners. When the heat gets bad, you'll have them to share with friends who don't have any or whose equipment is broken and taking weeks or months to fix. Climate change makes cooling a survival need now, in more and more places. I'm not kidding, heat waves now kill thousands of people, and ALL of those deaths are preventable. This is a cheap, easy way to save lives. You can also do this with portable heaters. While extreme cold events are less likely than extreme heat events, they are starting to happen in places where they never did before, catching people dangerously unprepared.
* Create an apocalypse bookshelf or library. Include titles on how to survive disasters and restart civilization if necessary. You can see an example in my notes for "Seeds of Civilization."
* Take up reality alteration as a hobby. Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are good authors to read. Prometheus Rising is especially helpful due to its exercises; find an excerpt here. (I don't recommend that you binge those; spread them out.) RAW additionally offers the option of spelunking in other people's reality tunnels, one of my favorite hobbies.
* Build a universe. There are worldbuilding resources for gamers, novelists, fantasy writers, science fiction writers, artists, and this set by subtopic. Dream no little dreams.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Construct a tiny house from something strange.
siliconshaman suggested a scrapped rocket prototype. This list of oddballs includes a mirror house, a 3D-printed house, and one covered in branches.
EDIT 1/1/22 -- Take up an endangered craft or hobby. (Courtesy of
fuzzyred.) Here is a list of endangered crafts. Some of these sound really fun, like glass eye making; you could do realistic ones or phantasmagoric ones, and they'd make great collectibles in addition to their original use. This article lists some of the least common hobbies. It mentions trainspotting; one of my interests is treating trains as a rolling gallery of public art, because I admire graffiti.
Can you think of any other far-out resolutions?