I've always liked 3D art. Drawing and painting with physical media gives a tactile satisfaction, but I liked that 3D renderings could be precise and graphical, and endlessly edited.
On early-2000s computers rendering a small 800x600 image in Yafaray took hours. In the Blender 1.8 scanline renderer you had to manually set up bounce lights with just spot and point light types. There was this trick to simulating ambient occlusion by cloning point lights to the vertices of an icosphere. Good times.
On the elysiun (blender) forums there is this thing called the Weekend Challenge. Each week the winner decides the topic of next week's challenge.
I won a few times, when the incumbent robertT wasn't around.. I think the best thing about Blender has always been its supportive and open community.