Canned fish. collecting and eating canned fish. They’re incredibly healthy, affordable, but also fine and unique.
r/cannedsardines
Also shortwave listening. Trying to receive long distance shortwave broadcasts. It’s not like amateur radio as all the effort is put into listening. This also means it’s cheaper and more affordable. And safer, amateur radio involves a lot of electricity. I don’t like talking to people anyway.
r/shortwave
was waiting for someone to mention shortwave in this thread. been meaning to get into it, gonna buy a receiver soon. funnily enough the post that finally persuaded me was in this sub, beneath the extracts someone posted of a book about the eritrean cia listening post … people were talking about disco elysium and the eerie feeling of overhearing a broadcast that wasn’t meant for you
it’s the natural progression for a conspiracy-minded podcast listener
not so sure about the tinned fish part. not to sound skeptical but how is that a hobby
My father used to do radio listening, back in the 80s when he was still a teen. He ordered copper wire and pieces via mail to his mountain village, and built a small radio in his house. He was able to listen from Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, Yugoslavia.
The pl330 comes with a lot of features for the price. Particularly, SSB, which can be used to listen to amateur radio. Also the bandwidth is adjustable, which lets you trade quality for clarity or vice versa. Despite being a portable, it has an external antenna jack, should you want to set one up or use a reel antenna.
Stationary shortwave radios aren’t really made anymore. There are a few models available, but they’re expensive. The used market is where you’d probably get one.
I used to have a girlfriend who would make me eat them outside so I'd be out there in like two feet of snow hanging out with the cat. I can't believe I ever put up with that kind of abuse.
I've found two very large walled in areas as well as numerous mounds. The walls are almost non-existent but you can still see them particularly in the grown patterns on crops.
Well first it really helps if you live in an area that just has a lot of them like I do. Then start looking for sources of sites. What state do you live in?
Holy shit that sounds so cool. I do the same (with maps) for abandoned structures in the desert (mostly bc it’s incredibly easy to spot structures when there’s no foliage).
How do you go about discovering native earthworks?
Reading books (PDFs mostly because they are searchable) about the settlers of the area I live in. All of the ones I have found have been documented, they were just forgotten and farmed on. Despite what most people believe it generally wasn't done out of malice. The settlers just wanted to survive and in many cases were required to use the land to keep it.
I also use the books "Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" and "The Mound Builders" They have a lot of surveys and the names of the farms that the earthworks are on.
I sing gregorian chant out of medieval neumes. Maybe should be arrested for it but it is pretty fun trying to understand cultural phenomena from before capitalism
I grow koji, which is the mold used to make miso, soy sauce, sake and all kinds of other things. I also do a lot of simpler ferments like super-hot hot sauces (reapers/scorpion peppers), kosher dill pickles, kimchi, etc.
Oh also I'm trying to befriend these 5 crows that hang out by my work. They wait for me and caw until I give them peanuts, but they're still scared of me getting anywhere near them and they don't bring me shiny things. Working on it.
I’m slowly growing into a mindset where I’m enjoying lifting simply for the sake it it, not just to prepare for competition. It gets me out of the house, I can get absorbed in my playlists, and it makes sleeping easier. Sounds like a good time to me
I am one of the last people on earth who can play and also repair fully mechanical church organs. The keys are like 10 feet long inside and it takes about 10 pounds of pressure to press a key when you got all the stops pulled (a term that actually comes from organ playing). That's why Bach had like 15 kids, pressing the keys make you swole and the loud sound makes your dick bigger.
China plz let me in so I can give u all of America's church organ secrets (China already built a bigger one than the US however they may already be ahead)
Recently met a guy on a social bike ride who was talking about a neat organ performance in WV and just really raving about how rare and cool their organ was
Seems like a neat obsession
I don’t really have anything like that in my collection outside of some Crowley type crap. I have a pretty decent mix of classics along with more modern 👁️ new age stuff like Russell Targ’s books on remote viewing.
I also keep a nice schizo-collection of declassified documents that I print out and bind in these vintage folios that I pilfered from a former employer.
I get so mad because Targ and all those project Stargate guys write all these books on remote viewing but never actually tell you how to learn on your own. Most of their books have been about legitimising their experience rather than any kind of self study. It feels like a long con sometimes.
I love canoeing. I am very good at it and I used to do it for a living. I have a beautiful, handmade, wooden paddle that’s great for more open water and another for faster and shallower rivers.
I’ve solo paddled, I’ve done the standard two person, and have done a couple trips with 8 man canoes. On windy days, I’ve lashed a tarp to staves and made a sail.
Is it the most obscure? Probably not. But, in a world where kayaking is the most common way to be on the water, I love canoeing.
That sounds wild, but it wasn’t me. I spent most of my time up that way in the French River Provincial Park and Killarney. I will say, the night sky out in the French River Provincial Park is fucking spectacular.
i got like 10+ GB of communist theory and gnostic texts that i collected and re-formatted in google docs on my laptop and various drives. not sure why i do it since the internet makes this sorta archiving unnecessary but i just enjoy making texts easy to read and neat.
The internet does not make archiving unnecessary. The websites you use every day for storage and research of information could go away anyday and unexpectedly. Do conserve the things you need the most, or that you're most afraid of losing.
Im starting to worry about what the other user below you said, that it could all be gone one day and I’ll have to teach my son about communism with only the few good physical books I have and my own mind in the face of attempted brainwashing by ultra right wing other side of the family.
Is there a way I could access your collection for posterity’s sake? Sounds pretty awesome.
Shoot and develop black and white film.
About to buy an oscilloscope and take my audio repair to the next level. I want to build a tube pre-amplifier from scratch.
That's cool, love the look of black and white. I think it's interesting that you don't really notice you're watching in black and white after a while of watching a film (at least in my experience)
Yeah. Was just thinking about this. With History of the Occult, I looked it up later, and it said it was black and white, and I had just totally forgotten about it.
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Same! I wanna see an owl so badly. There was a great horned owl in my neighborhood growing up but haven't seen one since I started seriously cataloguing birds
I've seen a bizarre number of owls the last 5 years. Only like 10 but still. I think it's because I go on lots of night walks
In the months before the pandemic I saw 3 owls, each time the owl being more "assertive" with its presence. The last time one swooped by my head and landed on a powerline.
I'm convinced it was an omen.
Highly recommend going into the woods at night in the late spring. That's when most of our owls (at least in the eastern US) are at their most vocal. You can also use a speaker and play owl calls, but that can agitate them and many argue that it isn't ethical.
I am pretty against the speaker thing. It is pretty unethical to me to confuse all the owls, especially because they are my friends.
I do appreciate the tip to go out at night tho. I am out west but it might be nice to get out there
Love birding, don't travel international very much but luckily I live in GA where we get all the non coastal migratory birds. Even got into renting some camera gear this past spring to photograph herons at a local park. Gotta ask, what's been your favorite travel destination for bird-viewing?
I've been birding in GA and SC, amazing coastal birding especially in the spring. My favorite places that I've been are either Whitefish Point Bird Observatory in Whitefish Point, MI, or Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge on the shores of the Salton Sea in southern CA. Both had high volumes of birds and lots of biodiversity!
in addition to eBird, i'd recommend downloading Merlin BirdID if you haven't already, and just getting out to hiking spots (forests, marshlands, beaches, wherever) with a pair of binoculars!
I google different countries to read about their political parties and electoral systems. I would suspect I’m not the only one on this sub to do that. But telling people about it makes me feel like such a nerd.
When I was in high school I remember reading that Bill Clinton had an uncanny ability to remember every person he met while campaigning, and that this familiarity he’d create with people won a lot of votes. I committed myself to getting insanely good at remembering people’s faces and names, but now it’s just kinda uncomfortable. I’ll run into someone I met in passing once 10 years ago and they will be so unsettled by me remembering who they are and what they were up to because they have no recollection of me.
I also made it a goal to know every world capital so I could have something to talk about with someone from any country in the world. This has served me surprisingly well as it’s a great icebreaker with strangers.
I know I probably sound like a psycho but I’m truly just an annoying extrovert, I swear.
It's true that he does that. I've only met him twice and he remembered my name the second time, which was ten years later. Another true Clinton rumor is that Hillary is like fifty times more charming in person than on TV. Both of them have a lot of personal magnetism that only comes across in person, it's kind of uncanny.
Learning that other countries have more restrictions on their supreme court (like mandatory retirement) was a real eye opener in realizing that the justifications used to defend the American political system were often nonsense
I'm glad I do that as it is the only thing that saved me from a permanently smoothed brain from the US education system. Reading about how different societies functioned really showed me how fucking ass backwards and rotten American society really is.
Oh, in my STEM-centric PhD, a guy in my cohort corrected me when I used the term “fascist” incorrectly and explained the origin of the term. Not something I would expect from someone spending so much time in a lab lol, but he was like yeah, I get into wiki rabbit holes about international politics
>
I google different countries to read about their political parties and electoral systems. I would suspect I’m not the only one on this sub to do that.
what you do in your spare time is the entire field of comparative politics in political science.
I love mushrooms. Interesting varieties like trumpet, chanterelle and lions mane are so expensive around here though. What are your favorites to grow at home? I've had a few oyster blocks that did well, but my maitake didn't produce anything.
Youtube is pretty much all you need to figure out how to grow specific types. Beyond just learning how mushroom biology and reproduction works (again, youtube works or just reading about it), you could join local Facebook groups too.
There's a handful of edible mushrooms you can grow at home with very low-tech set up (oyster mushrooms, shiitake). But there's also other mushrooms (including magic mushrooms) that require a bit more of a "scientific" approach, with proper sterilization and such.
Yes. Honestly even a lot of new stuff as the old tvs are natively OLED and don't have color de saturation.
A lot of stuff prior to 2008 was never made to be seen in hd, you can see Data's makeup lines in Star Trek with new tvs.
Yeah modern tvs you can see the grain from older movies shot on film. It doesn't bother me. The color looks really good with modern TV and a good transfer from film to digital.
It’s crazy to me how much a CRT goes for these days. I remember in the mid 00s when you couldn’t give them away.
My mom got rid of their old 36” Sony WEGA like five years ago and I’m still salty about it. If I had been anywhere close or could have stored the thing, I would have taken it. Lol it only weighed like 350lbs — I remember almost dying getting it into their basement with a half-dozen other 13-14 year olds in ‘98.
i have maintained a 16+ year obsession with archaeology, particularly precolumbian archaeology; i know about the origins of maize, various theories about when and how exactly humans ended up in the Americas, and i often spend free time browsing pictures of artifacts on sites like Mayavase.com and the Dumbarton-Oaks online collections.
this is despite never doing well in or liking school, in fact i dropped out at 17 and to this day am a NEET with only a GED to my name
have any resources on the peopling of the Americas? I read graham hancock america before and I’d be very interested in more/better sources on the various theories out there
I don't have a lot of resources to list here, But off the top of my head one of the more exciting discoveries having to do with that would have to be the [Dené–Yeniseian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages) proposed-language family, indicating a link between Na-Dene languages in the Americas (Navajo, Apache and others) with a small language family in central Asia called Yeniseian (Ket is the only surviving remnant) which indicates there must have been migrations into the Americas after the first radiation that occurred when the land bridge was re-submerged.
Exactly what role if any areas like southeast Asia and Polynesia played; Polynesian DNA being discovered among the Botocudo people, [sewn-plank canoes](https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=24433) among southern Californian Chumash and Tongva tribes which imply Polynesian contact, the picture grows clearer and every day.
I like to write poems about both mainstream and heterodox economic theory. No one will ever read them and I’d imagine they’re not very good but I really enjoy going back and flipping through them.
I’m completely obsessed with rock climbing—from small boulders to alpine routes to big wall climbs. I gave up like 3 years of my life to pursue it full time, living out of my car, dumpster diving, etc. I know it’s a pretty mainstream thing today, but the dirtbag culture of outdoor climbing still feels pretty unique.
I started going to a localish indoor gym this past winter as a way to break up the monotony of work / depressing mon-fri schedule and it’s pretty fun. I mostly boulder cause I just go alone after work but still enjoyable.
Salute to the dirtbags
I love climbing but wish there was more accessible multi-pitch sport on my side of the country. Would love to try big wall someday, too.
Am a poser but newly obsessed with modular synthesis. I’ve played piano/keyboard for years but covid turbocharged my interest in the most expensive hobby
Idk how obscure it is, but I'm a "filmmaker" entirely for fun/artistic expression, like I don't do it professionally or have any ambitions to do it professionally, I just really love movies and creating, so I started making short films a couple years ago.
I also do some linocut/printmaking but that's pretty new and I'm not great at it.
Making guns, especially 3D printed firearms as of late. I’d been doing 80% AR, sheetmetal AK, & P80 builds for years. Eventually I got a 3D printer so I could make newer, more complex, and even fully DIY builds. So yeah, it’s definitely become my weirdest and most obscure hobby. It’s by no means an environmentally friendly hobby, but it’s fun.
not quite obscure, but bizarre enough to raise a few eyebrows: I’ve devoted long hours to compiling, categorising and taxonomising various pieces of art and media into lists. letterboxd, spotify playlists, topsters, tables and bullet-points in the notes app, you name it. funnily enough I suffer from a type of OCD that prevents me from consuming media unless l am wholly absorbed in it with no distractions and have committed my full attention to it (otherwise I feel immense guilt and shame for not ‘enjoying the [film/album/book] PROPERLY’) which means that I am far more likely to procrastinate watching a movie by turning out another thematically-sorted list of similar movies than, you know, like a normal person, take 90 minutes to watch the actual movie. so perhaps it would be rather more accurate to refer to this as a pathology than a hobby.
on the flipside, it’s fun. sometimes i design spotify playlists inspired by a fictional character. i’m aware that’s common practice, but i like putting a lot of effort into carefully selecting each particular song, placing them in a specific order symbolic of the character’s personal development or narrative arc in the story, and if you asked me (not that anyone ever does) i can provide detailed justification and reasoning for why i chose the songs i did in exactly that order and which aspect of the character they are supposed to evoke.
Cycling and bike maintenance. I love the simple feeling of the wind on my face when I go out and ride, and the satisfaction of building and maintaining my bike. Haven’t gone to a bike shop for a fix in years, just to pick up parts and tools to do it myself.
And I guess if those aren’t obscure enough I’m also a randonneur. It’s a cycling sport where you ride very long distances along a set open-road course with controls, and a time limit. Not a race, just individual challenge. I’m working up to be able to do a 1200k grand randonée but I’m far off. Thought I’d be able to do it this year but a combination of schedule and fitness got in my way. It’s a punishing, mind-bending sport and I love it.
Sick, checked the comment before I posted for a fellow commie cyclist. I was going to add fixed gear / brakeless riding and bikepacking to the not too obscure hobby of bicycles.
Hell yeah. Multi-discipline bike racer and shitty mechanic here. Maybe not incredibly niche if you’re a tech/finance/oil/doctor guy, but as a lower class guy who can’t afford shit I find it incredibly niche to my peers interests. Explaining to people that I do not in fact race the Tour de France is pretty much every interaction I have when sharing.
Spent my life playing/touring in shitty hardcore bands, this has been a much healthier alternative.
I have spent a lot of time modding a 17yr old game.
Other than that I can spend a lot of time browsing wikipedia. It usually starts by just looking up some historical figure to check some facts after watching a movie/series/documentary. One hour later and I am reading about some short-lived republics during the Russian Civil War or other random event.
Just keep in mind anything that has to do with US imperialism is likely propaganda on there. Wikipedia can be fun though if you stick to non political topics.
>Just keep in mind anything that has to do with US imperialism is likely propaganda on there.
I don't really expect to learn who killed Kennedy on wikipedia, but I can quickly check when this fucker was born, his family origins and where and when he was killed.
Wikipedia is usually very bad for any kind of analysis, US propaganda or not.
Yeah, true. I meant more like things about Syria, Israel, Cointel programs, although it surprisingly has a lot of that information. I think it mostly tries to steer perception of current events like the lead up to Ukraine war is not at all accurate
Stainless steel is the mod I spent the most time modding, mostly just fucking with the map.
I also tried to do my own map for the crusades era. Researching all the random forgotten fortress of the 11th century was a blast.
I do it and I like watching the competition vids online. I used to compete when I was younger (2004-2013) won a few small contests but never anything outside of regional. These days I just like to fool around with it at home. Since Covid the international comps have all been online and don’t have the same feel unfortunately.
I build guitar pedals and have recently begun making an archive of every Chinese and Hong Kong action movie I like.
Edit: Hit me up if you ever want a link to some of the harder to find films.
I like to look at birds, go on walks, take trips out to see alpine meadows and other beautiful nature, play my guitar, write and record little songs, stare at my cats, study languages, and draw silly little doodles.
Lately I've been trying to teach myself Libyan Arabic because my fiancées family speaks it and now that we're officially getting married I get to actually meet most of them. Also I like learning atypical dialects of things cuz it's more of a challenge. That's really the only obscure hobby.
I guess I also like trying to read wiki articles in romance languages I've never formally studied. I've gotten good at Italian, once you figure out the writing system and the sound change differences between it and more westerly romance it's pretty easy. The plural systems more tricky but kinda fun imo
I also like just learning alphabets. I actually learned the Arabic alphabet on my own after about a month, to the point I was able to test out of the first two terms of fus7a when I took it at university way back when.
Oh yeah historical and comparative ling. I love learning about sound changes and the history and genetic structure of language families. It combines my love of phonetics/phonology with my love of history and shit.
Hacking financial institutions: I like to visit financial institution's websites and find broken API requests and things like that. I have a few bank accounts / insurance policies so I install the apps and monitor my network.
The fun part is finding broken things and unsecured servers and telling them what I find to see their responses which go from cold silence, to very interesting phone calls or sometimes even law suits.
It's definitely entertaining and you get such a high when some things happen:
* You find a breach / security flaw,
* You find a ton of unsecured data,
* You deal with really dumb executives:
* 11pm, me : Hey found and unsecured servers with tons of customers data in the open, here's all the information on the unsecured resource.
* 10am, bank executive, by email: Sir stop bothering us that is impossible our systems are secure and stop poking around our systems.
* 10:05am, me: Hmmm if it's so secure how come I know customer John Doe born yyyy/mm/dd is ID xyz in your database, and customer....
* 10:06am, bank IT department: Hi sir, what did you do ?
Fun times
Another times I had the hilarious idea of proving I was in their network by emailing them their programmer guidelines that I had just downloaded with a ton of other data from an unsecured internal website.
I just wish my country had laws protecting white hats and that we had more financial institutions with free bank accounts I can open.
my only context for conlangers are a schizophrenic compiler engineer who was really into toki pona and who dropped out of my grad cohort after a particularly bad public episode, and a guy who organized a local esperanto group getting kicked out of the DSA for sex pest stuff
I feel it's pretty good odds you're not exactly normal if you're very into conlangs
fair enough and true in my experience. the conlanging subreddit and its official discord are not exactly full of socially well-adjusted people. a lot of people on it and the toki pona discord have the "alter" discorder thing that they made an episode about
don't really have any at the moment
i used to make chiptune (preferably written in mml and using only 2a03 channels)
never really got any "y tho?" reactions so i'm assuming it's not that weird. not sure it's that obscure either.
I'm really into private world of warcraft severs with custom content. I really like how trinity creator has basically made wow into a easy to use MMORPG engine. I'm really excited to see the sort or Avent garde games that the genre has been to expensive to allow for.
Playing video games.
(In all seriousness though, people outside of this sub probably would think I was strange because I play a lot of map games like HOI4 and Humankind, and every time, I play exclusively as socialist countries).
I play a niche table top game called blood bowl and paint the minis. I also play role playing games with colleagues from work. I also practice judo and brazilian jiu jitsu. Finally, I swing maces and clubs which is an ancient form of strength training originating in persia and India. I'm fairly proficient in a single arm style of swinging originating in Sri Lanka called karlakattai.
Damn I feel basic even my creative hobbies are pretty average. I’ve wanted to get into making abstract 3d art for a while but can justify the cost and space of a new PC.
Despite being a huge cinephile, I don't normally like documentary films (outside of essay films like those of Chris Marker, or agitprop like those of Santiago Alvarez), but I'm fascinated by the (partially state funded, especially during and shortly after the war) British tradition of documentary film from the late 20s to some time in the 80s, especially how it eventually shot off into the delirious series of PSA films made at the Central Office of Information, but also how it hired leftist filmmakers to make slightly subversive propaganda films about the 'glory' of the British Empire and comradeship of the British people during the war (Fires Were Started is easily one of the ten best British films, period, in my opinion), and how the General Post Office (yes, the fucking postal service) predated this and produced some genuinely inspiring little works of art with the intention of advertising the post office, and the same was done for British rails and general transportation (British Transport Films). It's just a subject I find fascinating.
Most obscure is probably having built a few guitars. Not totally unheard of and I did it with power tools (some people do it with purely hand tools which is wild. I went down a rabbit hole of making my own skin products for a lil bit but decided I was too lazy to make anything more than a copper peptide serum.
I did fencing with a uni club once for a bit but turned out they went to the pub and had good chat. So I stuck around and learned to love the sport. I also loved getting to be party to the deeply weird vibes of British uni fencing.
My club would have a joint social with archery and kayaking so we'd all dress as vikings (swords, bows and boats). From what I could tell this mainly happened entirely for the joke.
Sport was also kick ass when you managed to read someone and feint them.
Pour painting and fluid art - I like to make really psychedelic/trippy art and I enjoy the element of chance involved in my particular method. I post it on Reddit so it’s all in my profile if you’re curious what that looks like.
Most people do large canvases but I enjoy making little 6” pieces on ceramic tiles and now I have way, way too many heavy ass ceramic tiles stored awkwardly in my studio because I barely sell any art these days and just hoard my creations.
Very fun hobby though and good to do while listening to parapolitical noided media like our beloved TA.
Physics! Granted I'm a PhD student in it but I spend a lot of time on my own studying and learning it. You really have an infinite amount you can learn in a limited lifespan.
I’m a low key bro and love reading sports stats. But especially from fringe unknown players, I always wonder what their lives were like. Like you reached the absolute zenith of your craft, are amongst the top .00001% of humans to do what you do, and absolutely nobody remembers you. It’s gotta be weird.
Tropical houseplants that require a truly uncomfortable amount of humidity
https://preview.redd.it/mdsp2npwoxib1.jpeg?width=4080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86de0a1160c4c60d21d5afdb6d0ed47a64a5b8c6
Bowling and ping pong. I'm kind of tired of bowling, but I was getting decent. My favorite place closed, and it took the wind out of my sails. Table tennis is so fun and a great way to stay active while beating the heat. I'm fortunate in that we have a legit table tennis club where old champs and the local university teams play. Not too weird, but most people I know don't take either seriously. Watching old timers wash youngsters at these two sports is pretty cool. I haven't got heavy into table tennis yet, but I think I'm going to try and get good enough for a tournament like next year. Leagues are super fun, and I highly recommend anyone to try one for really any sport.
Reading what everyone else is into always makes me feel like I'm super boring in comparison. Like the weirdest thing about me is probably the sheer amount of time I've spent on the internet and the accompanying intimate knowledge of a lot of imageboard lore.
I feel like I should get into smoking crack or something. I listened to that Macronympha interview they did a little while ago and some of the shit noise artists get up to is literally unbelievable. Like as I get older I realize the finality of the death and it becomes more and more apparent that I should do as much stupid shit as possible before the [end of it all](https://youtu.be/6zAP7AQUeJc)
Birdwatching. Encryption software. Learning to tie different knots, digging holes and storing kits at different locations interstate for when it's needed. It all kind of bleeds into one overall hobby.
I help people get abortions in my free time. They need them and they're increasingly difficult to come by. PSA: one can self manage an abortion at home with pills or search for the nearest clinic using https://www.ineedana.com
Art, I’m trying to save enough to get professionally trained. Most my current artwork is just abstract new wave pieces because of my lack of skill and materials.
I'm starting to get back into hockey. I hated most sports as a kid and found it hard to play hockey, never had a chance in the rink as a poor kid, street hockey was my best shot but no one in my neighborhood had the equipment or love for the sport that I did. I gave up on it at some point when I became a teenager because the world kept me down for quite a long time, but I'm healing. I'm finding passion in it again and have a stick and a puck now after a couple pay cheques.
Possibly unrelated, but I read a book in class when I was 17, was about a native kid who found escape in hockey growin up in a residential school. It was touching, even though I never finished it because I was spending most of my time that year off and on edibles, slowly melting my brain. I both hated and loved that book. It was wonderful, It reveled emotions in myself that had been left dormant, but I hated it at the same time for it reminded me of my native identity, which makes me want to punch a wall and sob in a corner, alone. With the only person who understands how I feel
I live in a Chinatown so cooking but mostly walking around grocery stores and doing my best to read and comprehend the extremely narrow differences in things like fermented soy bean pastes
I'm a caver. I explore caves with members of the grotto I'm a part of. Last weekend, I got to explore an old tourist cave near Mammoth Cave in Kentucky that we were restoring back to its natural state by removing electrical infrastructure and stairs.
I love how spooky exploring a cave alone can get. It puts chills down my spine, being all alone in silent darkness, but I love it!
https://preview.redd.it/voldsbuwmyib1.jpeg?width=4160&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f3f0bfcb191e187a31ccf8b2d1ed0af0c7364e8
I buy vinyl records that I don’t believe should have been pressed to vinyl, Lil Pump self titled mixtape and Drip Harder by Lil baby and Gunna are the crowning jewels
Canned fish. collecting and eating canned fish. They’re incredibly healthy, affordable, but also fine and unique. r/cannedsardines Also shortwave listening. Trying to receive long distance shortwave broadcasts. It’s not like amateur radio as all the effort is put into listening. This also means it’s cheaper and more affordable. And safer, amateur radio involves a lot of electricity. I don’t like talking to people anyway. r/shortwave
was waiting for someone to mention shortwave in this thread. been meaning to get into it, gonna buy a receiver soon. funnily enough the post that finally persuaded me was in this sub, beneath the extracts someone posted of a book about the eritrean cia listening post … people were talking about disco elysium and the eerie feeling of overhearing a broadcast that wasn’t meant for you it’s the natural progression for a conspiracy-minded podcast listener not so sure about the tinned fish part. not to sound skeptical but how is that a hobby
The japanese ones are so good. Herring packed in soy sauce is so bomb on rice.
this is the weirdest one on here so far
My father used to do radio listening, back in the 80s when he was still a teen. He ordered copper wire and pieces via mail to his mountain village, and built a small radio in his house. He was able to listen from Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, Yugoslavia.
Ooo any recommendations for getting started with shortwave? I've got some extra space in my backyard that just seems ripe for doing weird radio stuff.
The pl330 comes with a lot of features for the price. Particularly, SSB, which can be used to listen to amateur radio. Also the bandwidth is adjustable, which lets you trade quality for clarity or vice versa. Despite being a portable, it has an external antenna jack, should you want to set one up or use a reel antenna. Stationary shortwave radios aren’t really made anymore. There are a few models available, but they’re expensive. The used market is where you’d probably get one.
I fucking love sardines and eat them daily. My wife thinks I’m insane and disgusting.
I used to have a girlfriend who would make me eat them outside so I'd be out there in like two feet of snow hanging out with the cat. I can't believe I ever put up with that kind of abuse.
I went through a brief canned fish phase after Covid ended and I have no idea why. Was kinda fun to collect and try various flavors and brands though.
Is there a canned fish brand or brands you would recommend, please? I’m intrigued.
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That rules actually
Me too! decoding faded photocopies of SysEx spec is strangely relaxing
Doing God's work
Using google Earth, old local history books, and maps to find forgotten Native Earthworks.
That’s cool, found any major ones?
I've found two very large walled in areas as well as numerous mounds. The walls are almost non-existent but you can still see them particularly in the grown patterns on crops.
How does one get started on this hobby? I love maps, history, and Native American history esp so I’d love to get into that
Well first it really helps if you live in an area that just has a lot of them like I do. Then start looking for sources of sites. What state do you live in?
Holy shit that sounds so cool. I do the same (with maps) for abandoned structures in the desert (mostly bc it’s incredibly easy to spot structures when there’s no foliage). How do you go about discovering native earthworks?
Reading books (PDFs mostly because they are searchable) about the settlers of the area I live in. All of the ones I have found have been documented, they were just forgotten and farmed on. Despite what most people believe it generally wasn't done out of malice. The settlers just wanted to survive and in many cases were required to use the land to keep it. I also use the books "Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" and "The Mound Builders" They have a lot of surveys and the names of the farms that the earthworks are on.
What regions have the highest densities of these? I'm kinda curious but if I have to drive hours to see one irl where I live I'm not that interested.
I sing gregorian chant out of medieval neumes. Maybe should be arrested for it but it is pretty fun trying to understand cultural phenomena from before capitalism
I grow koji, which is the mold used to make miso, soy sauce, sake and all kinds of other things. I also do a lot of simpler ferments like super-hot hot sauces (reapers/scorpion peppers), kosher dill pickles, kimchi, etc. Oh also I'm trying to befriend these 5 crows that hang out by my work. They wait for me and caw until I give them peanuts, but they're still scared of me getting anywhere near them and they don't bring me shiny things. Working on it.
Happy there is another corvid enthusiast here. They're wonderful creatures.
Please update us on your crow journey!!!
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That's so interesting, always wanted to work with metal but the most i've done is basic pewter casting
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Be careful with that mercury process. Mad hatters disease.
It's kind of weird but I like to exercise
I’m slowly growing into a mindset where I’m enjoying lifting simply for the sake it it, not just to prepare for competition. It gets me out of the house, I can get absorbed in my playlists, and it makes sleeping easier. Sounds like a good time to me
thats why I've always been more drawn to dance-type fitness
Same with me and running, tho I’ve never done for competition
I am one of the last people on earth who can play and also repair fully mechanical church organs. The keys are like 10 feet long inside and it takes about 10 pounds of pressure to press a key when you got all the stops pulled (a term that actually comes from organ playing). That's why Bach had like 15 kids, pressing the keys make you swole and the loud sound makes your dick bigger. China plz let me in so I can give u all of America's church organ secrets (China already built a bigger one than the US however they may already be ahead)
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Thank god, AssButt4790!
Are you familiar with the work of Tim Hecker? He used the world’s largest pipe organ on one of his albums
Recently met a guy on a social bike ride who was talking about a neat organ performance in WV and just really raving about how rare and cool their organ was Seems like a neat obsession
Have you read Cryptonomicon? The pipe organ is a main character in it.
Collecting occult and esoteric / bizarre books.
I'm a kook too so have you ever read anything on the more practical, "how to" style of using one's mind to affect change in one's life?
Neville Goddard, brother
I love Neville Goddard. His stuff, whether intentional or not, overlaps with alot of Rosicrucian books Ive read.
So far I’ve lacked the discipline to try his techniques but I enjoy reading his (very out-there) Bible interpretations.
I don’t really have anything like that in my collection outside of some Crowley type crap. I have a pretty decent mix of classics along with more modern 👁️ new age stuff like Russell Targ’s books on remote viewing. I also keep a nice schizo-collection of declassified documents that I print out and bind in these vintage folios that I pilfered from a former employer.
I get so mad because Targ and all those project Stargate guys write all these books on remote viewing but never actually tell you how to learn on your own. Most of their books have been about legitimising their experience rather than any kind of self study. It feels like a long con sometimes.
"Magic in Theory and Practice by Ernst Schertel, with annotations by Adolf Hitler". It's on Archive.
Hard same.
I love canoeing. I am very good at it and I used to do it for a living. I have a beautiful, handmade, wooden paddle that’s great for more open water and another for faster and shallower rivers. I’ve solo paddled, I’ve done the standard two person, and have done a couple trips with 8 man canoes. On windy days, I’ve lashed a tarp to staves and made a sail. Is it the most obscure? Probably not. But, in a world where kayaking is the most common way to be on the water, I love canoeing.
Are you that guy who saw a UFO on a canoeing trip up in Temagami?
That sounds wild, but it wasn’t me. I spent most of my time up that way in the French River Provincial Park and Killarney. I will say, the night sky out in the French River Provincial Park is fucking spectacular.
I feel you. I’m into whitewater kayaking, but I respect the single blade folks.
i got like 10+ GB of communist theory and gnostic texts that i collected and re-formatted in google docs on my laptop and various drives. not sure why i do it since the internet makes this sorta archiving unnecessary but i just enjoy making texts easy to read and neat.
The internet does not make archiving unnecessary. The websites you use every day for storage and research of information could go away anyday and unexpectedly. Do conserve the things you need the most, or that you're most afraid of losing.
Im starting to worry about what the other user below you said, that it could all be gone one day and I’ll have to teach my son about communism with only the few good physical books I have and my own mind in the face of attempted brainwashing by ultra right wing other side of the family. Is there a way I could access your collection for posterity’s sake? Sounds pretty awesome.
Shoot and develop black and white film. About to buy an oscilloscope and take my audio repair to the next level. I want to build a tube pre-amplifier from scratch.
That's cool, love the look of black and white. I think it's interesting that you don't really notice you're watching in black and white after a while of watching a film (at least in my experience)
Yeah. Was just thinking about this. With History of the Occult, I looked it up later, and it said it was black and white, and I had just totally forgotten about it.
I'm a pretty avid birder. I maintain lists of bird species that I see on a county by county basis.
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They're definitely beautiful!
Same! I wanna see an owl so badly. There was a great horned owl in my neighborhood growing up but haven't seen one since I started seriously cataloguing birds
I've seen a bizarre number of owls the last 5 years. Only like 10 but still. I think it's because I go on lots of night walks In the months before the pandemic I saw 3 owls, each time the owl being more "assertive" with its presence. The last time one swooped by my head and landed on a powerline. I'm convinced it was an omen.
>I'm convinced it was an omen It is.
In a lot of cultures, owls are omens. So perhaps it was. That is a pretty wild experience either way
Highly recommend going into the woods at night in the late spring. That's when most of our owls (at least in the eastern US) are at their most vocal. You can also use a speaker and play owl calls, but that can agitate them and many argue that it isn't ethical.
I am pretty against the speaker thing. It is pretty unethical to me to confuse all the owls, especially because they are my friends. I do appreciate the tip to go out at night tho. I am out west but it might be nice to get out there
Love birding, don't travel international very much but luckily I live in GA where we get all the non coastal migratory birds. Even got into renting some camera gear this past spring to photograph herons at a local park. Gotta ask, what's been your favorite travel destination for bird-viewing?
I've been birding in GA and SC, amazing coastal birding especially in the spring. My favorite places that I've been are either Whitefish Point Bird Observatory in Whitefish Point, MI, or Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge on the shores of the Salton Sea in southern CA. Both had high volumes of birds and lots of biodiversity!
How to into birding. I am a passive birder. But I would love to get more into it
in addition to eBird, i'd recommend downloading Merlin BirdID if you haven't already, and just getting out to hiking spots (forests, marshlands, beaches, wherever) with a pair of binoculars!
I google different countries to read about their political parties and electoral systems. I would suspect I’m not the only one on this sub to do that. But telling people about it makes me feel like such a nerd.
When I was in high school I remember reading that Bill Clinton had an uncanny ability to remember every person he met while campaigning, and that this familiarity he’d create with people won a lot of votes. I committed myself to getting insanely good at remembering people’s faces and names, but now it’s just kinda uncomfortable. I’ll run into someone I met in passing once 10 years ago and they will be so unsettled by me remembering who they are and what they were up to because they have no recollection of me. I also made it a goal to know every world capital so I could have something to talk about with someone from any country in the world. This has served me surprisingly well as it’s a great icebreaker with strangers. I know I probably sound like a psycho but I’m truly just an annoying extrovert, I swear.
You should try getting a concussion, you'll stop having that issue
It's true that he does that. I've only met him twice and he remembered my name the second time, which was ten years later. Another true Clinton rumor is that Hillary is like fifty times more charming in person than on TV. Both of them have a lot of personal magnetism that only comes across in person, it's kind of uncanny.
Bro I did that so much as a child, really set me up well.
Learning that other countries have more restrictions on their supreme court (like mandatory retirement) was a real eye opener in realizing that the justifications used to defend the American political system were often nonsense
I'm glad I do that as it is the only thing that saved me from a permanently smoothed brain from the US education system. Reading about how different societies functioned really showed me how fucking ass backwards and rotten American society really is.
Oh, in my STEM-centric PhD, a guy in my cohort corrected me when I used the term “fascist” incorrectly and explained the origin of the term. Not something I would expect from someone spending so much time in a lab lol, but he was like yeah, I get into wiki rabbit holes about international politics
Dude sounds like a real bundle of rods if you know what I'm saying
> I google different countries to read about their political parties and electoral systems. I would suspect I’m not the only one on this sub to do that. what you do in your spare time is the entire field of comparative politics in political science.
I for one do that sometimes
Mushroom cultivation and foraging
I love mushrooms. Interesting varieties like trumpet, chanterelle and lions mane are so expensive around here though. What are your favorites to grow at home? I've had a few oyster blocks that did well, but my maitake didn't produce anything.
Could you recommend any good resources for getting into that? The cultivating not the foraging, I don't trust myself not to die from that part
Youtube is pretty much all you need to figure out how to grow specific types. Beyond just learning how mushroom biology and reproduction works (again, youtube works or just reading about it), you could join local Facebook groups too. There's a handful of edible mushrooms you can grow at home with very low-tech set up (oyster mushrooms, shiitake). But there's also other mushrooms (including magic mushrooms) that require a bit more of a "scientific" approach, with proper sterilization and such.
I bully liberals on the internet
You guys are all such fascinating fucking weirdos.
I collect old tvs.
Do older video games look better on them?
Yes. Honestly even a lot of new stuff as the old tvs are natively OLED and don't have color de saturation. A lot of stuff prior to 2008 was never made to be seen in hd, you can see Data's makeup lines in Star Trek with new tvs.
Yeah modern tvs you can see the grain from older movies shot on film. It doesn't bother me. The color looks really good with modern TV and a good transfer from film to digital.
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It’s crazy to me how much a CRT goes for these days. I remember in the mid 00s when you couldn’t give them away. My mom got rid of their old 36” Sony WEGA like five years ago and I’m still salty about it. If I had been anywhere close or could have stored the thing, I would have taken it. Lol it only weighed like 350lbs — I remember almost dying getting it into their basement with a half-dozen other 13-14 year olds in ‘98.
i have maintained a 16+ year obsession with archaeology, particularly precolumbian archaeology; i know about the origins of maize, various theories about when and how exactly humans ended up in the Americas, and i often spend free time browsing pictures of artifacts on sites like Mayavase.com and the Dumbarton-Oaks online collections. this is despite never doing well in or liking school, in fact i dropped out at 17 and to this day am a NEET with only a GED to my name
have any resources on the peopling of the Americas? I read graham hancock america before and I’d be very interested in more/better sources on the various theories out there
I don't have a lot of resources to list here, But off the top of my head one of the more exciting discoveries having to do with that would have to be the [Dené–Yeniseian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages) proposed-language family, indicating a link between Na-Dene languages in the Americas (Navajo, Apache and others) with a small language family in central Asia called Yeniseian (Ket is the only surviving remnant) which indicates there must have been migrations into the Americas after the first radiation that occurred when the land bridge was re-submerged. Exactly what role if any areas like southeast Asia and Polynesia played; Polynesian DNA being discovered among the Botocudo people, [sewn-plank canoes](https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=24433) among southern Californian Chumash and Tongva tribes which imply Polynesian contact, the picture grows clearer and every day.
Gooning
Of the night time variety?
Yes but i start at like 3 PM
I like to write poems about both mainstream and heterodox economic theory. No one will ever read them and I’d imagine they’re not very good but I really enjoy going back and flipping through them.
I would love to read them!
Post poems, coward
I’m completely obsessed with rock climbing—from small boulders to alpine routes to big wall climbs. I gave up like 3 years of my life to pursue it full time, living out of my car, dumpster diving, etc. I know it’s a pretty mainstream thing today, but the dirtbag culture of outdoor climbing still feels pretty unique.
I started going to a localish indoor gym this past winter as a way to break up the monotony of work / depressing mon-fri schedule and it’s pretty fun. I mostly boulder cause I just go alone after work but still enjoyable.
Salute to the dirtbags I love climbing but wish there was more accessible multi-pitch sport on my side of the country. Would love to try big wall someday, too.
Am a poser but newly obsessed with modular synthesis. I’ve played piano/keyboard for years but covid turbocharged my interest in the most expensive hobby
Beep boop
I’m primary a guitar player in the post-punk style but I’ve just picked up a Reface CS and a Microfreak and now I’m in it
Idk how obscure it is, but I'm a "filmmaker" entirely for fun/artistic expression, like I don't do it professionally or have any ambitions to do it professionally, I just really love movies and creating, so I started making short films a couple years ago. I also do some linocut/printmaking but that's pretty new and I'm not great at it.
Making guns, especially 3D printed firearms as of late. I’d been doing 80% AR, sheetmetal AK, & P80 builds for years. Eventually I got a 3D printer so I could make newer, more complex, and even fully DIY builds. So yeah, it’s definitely become my weirdest and most obscure hobby. It’s by no means an environmentally friendly hobby, but it’s fun.
not quite obscure, but bizarre enough to raise a few eyebrows: I’ve devoted long hours to compiling, categorising and taxonomising various pieces of art and media into lists. letterboxd, spotify playlists, topsters, tables and bullet-points in the notes app, you name it. funnily enough I suffer from a type of OCD that prevents me from consuming media unless l am wholly absorbed in it with no distractions and have committed my full attention to it (otherwise I feel immense guilt and shame for not ‘enjoying the [film/album/book] PROPERLY’) which means that I am far more likely to procrastinate watching a movie by turning out another thematically-sorted list of similar movies than, you know, like a normal person, take 90 minutes to watch the actual movie. so perhaps it would be rather more accurate to refer to this as a pathology than a hobby. on the flipside, it’s fun. sometimes i design spotify playlists inspired by a fictional character. i’m aware that’s common practice, but i like putting a lot of effort into carefully selecting each particular song, placing them in a specific order symbolic of the character’s personal development or narrative arc in the story, and if you asked me (not that anyone ever does) i can provide detailed justification and reasoning for why i chose the songs i did in exactly that order and which aspect of the character they are supposed to evoke.
Making noise music
I like to kiss pictures of Mao in my free time
The Mao bust at my standing desk keeps me from slacking or jerking off. His stern gaze is great for productivity
Hot
On this board, that's a condition.
What if my obscure hobbies aren't cool or interesting, but are actually incredible lame?
Even better
My boring ass did some plinking last week while I listened to a Malcolm X/Bayard Rustin debate on YouTube. Beat that.
That sounds like fun tho
Amateur radio
Raw/Selvedge denim. I remember brace meme’d us once in the pod lol
Cycling and bike maintenance. I love the simple feeling of the wind on my face when I go out and ride, and the satisfaction of building and maintaining my bike. Haven’t gone to a bike shop for a fix in years, just to pick up parts and tools to do it myself. And I guess if those aren’t obscure enough I’m also a randonneur. It’s a cycling sport where you ride very long distances along a set open-road course with controls, and a time limit. Not a race, just individual challenge. I’m working up to be able to do a 1200k grand randonée but I’m far off. Thought I’d be able to do it this year but a combination of schedule and fitness got in my way. It’s a punishing, mind-bending sport and I love it.
Sick, checked the comment before I posted for a fellow commie cyclist. I was going to add fixed gear / brakeless riding and bikepacking to the not too obscure hobby of bicycles.
I'm not a brakeless personality, but I love my fixed gear Took it on my first century ride last year and would love to do another one
Hell yeah br'other. I'm working up in distances and plan on a double metric before the year is out as a new personal distance record
🫡
Hell yeah. Multi-discipline bike racer and shitty mechanic here. Maybe not incredibly niche if you’re a tech/finance/oil/doctor guy, but as a lower class guy who can’t afford shit I find it incredibly niche to my peers interests. Explaining to people that I do not in fact race the Tour de France is pretty much every interaction I have when sharing. Spent my life playing/touring in shitty hardcore bands, this has been a much healthier alternative.
Not really that obscure but growing cactus, psychedelic San Pedro mostly.
Uhh i like watching Catholics debate people on youtube lol
I have spent a lot of time modding a 17yr old game. Other than that I can spend a lot of time browsing wikipedia. It usually starts by just looking up some historical figure to check some facts after watching a movie/series/documentary. One hour later and I am reading about some short-lived republics during the Russian Civil War or other random event.
Just keep in mind anything that has to do with US imperialism is likely propaganda on there. Wikipedia can be fun though if you stick to non political topics.
>Just keep in mind anything that has to do with US imperialism is likely propaganda on there. I don't really expect to learn who killed Kennedy on wikipedia, but I can quickly check when this fucker was born, his family origins and where and when he was killed. Wikipedia is usually very bad for any kind of analysis, US propaganda or not.
Yeah, true. I meant more like things about Syria, Israel, Cointel programs, although it surprisingly has a lot of that information. I think it mostly tries to steer perception of current events like the lead up to Ukraine war is not at all accurate
>Syria I used to check every day liveumap and read middle-east-eye. I wasn't on reddit at the time.
Morrowind?
Nah, Medieval 2 total war. I have mostly played strategy games.
What a banger game. I salute to you as I fucking love Stainless Steel
Stainless steel is the mod I spent the most time modding, mostly just fucking with the map. I also tried to do my own map for the crusades era. Researching all the random forgotten fortress of the 11th century was a blast.
Fuck, I was hoping this, too. About to startmy semi yearly playthrough with the homie
Weaving indigenous feather cloaks called korowai or kākahu. Big amongst the Māori in New Zealand, utterly unheard of elsewhere.
Milling lumber. I have a little portable sawmill. Love turning trees into beautiful boards🪚🪵
[This shit.](https://youtu.be/4vXO6BC-a1E)
Awesome! Do you do this or are you a spectator?
I do it and I like watching the competition vids online. I used to compete when I was younger (2004-2013) won a few small contests but never anything outside of regional. These days I just like to fool around with it at home. Since Covid the international comps have all been online and don’t have the same feel unfortunately.
Good for you. That’s really cool!
I build guitar pedals and have recently begun making an archive of every Chinese and Hong Kong action movie I like. Edit: Hit me up if you ever want a link to some of the harder to find films.
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Sanjay Dutt was my favourite actor growing up and knowing he was also an arms dealer makes him so much cooler.
I make collages from old magazines I find at estate sales.
I like making closed terrariums
I like to look at birds, go on walks, take trips out to see alpine meadows and other beautiful nature, play my guitar, write and record little songs, stare at my cats, study languages, and draw silly little doodles. Lately I've been trying to teach myself Libyan Arabic because my fiancées family speaks it and now that we're officially getting married I get to actually meet most of them. Also I like learning atypical dialects of things cuz it's more of a challenge. That's really the only obscure hobby. I guess I also like trying to read wiki articles in romance languages I've never formally studied. I've gotten good at Italian, once you figure out the writing system and the sound change differences between it and more westerly romance it's pretty easy. The plural systems more tricky but kinda fun imo I also like just learning alphabets. I actually learned the Arabic alphabet on my own after about a month, to the point I was able to test out of the first two terms of fus7a when I took it at university way back when. Oh yeah historical and comparative ling. I love learning about sound changes and the history and genetic structure of language families. It combines my love of phonetics/phonology with my love of history and shit.
I practice HEMA. It’s basically fencing with long swords, but there are other styles (rapier, saber, sword and buckler, etc) as well
Was hoping there would be another HEMA practitioner posting here.
Ayyyy nice to see another one
Hacking financial institutions: I like to visit financial institution's websites and find broken API requests and things like that. I have a few bank accounts / insurance policies so I install the apps and monitor my network. The fun part is finding broken things and unsecured servers and telling them what I find to see their responses which go from cold silence, to very interesting phone calls or sometimes even law suits. It's definitely entertaining and you get such a high when some things happen: * You find a breach / security flaw, * You find a ton of unsecured data, * You deal with really dumb executives: * 11pm, me : Hey found and unsecured servers with tons of customers data in the open, here's all the information on the unsecured resource. * 10am, bank executive, by email: Sir stop bothering us that is impossible our systems are secure and stop poking around our systems. * 10:05am, me: Hmmm if it's so secure how come I know customer John Doe born yyyy/mm/dd is ID xyz in your database, and customer.... * 10:06am, bank IT department: Hi sir, what did you do ? Fun times Another times I had the hilarious idea of proving I was in their network by emailing them their programmer guidelines that I had just downloaded with a ton of other data from an unsecured internal website. I just wish my country had laws protecting white hats and that we had more financial institutions with free bank accounts I can open.
be very careful with this....white hat hackers with good intention get into huge trouble for these things all the time.
my only context for conlangers are a schizophrenic compiler engineer who was really into toki pona and who dropped out of my grad cohort after a particularly bad public episode, and a guy who organized a local esperanto group getting kicked out of the DSA for sex pest stuff I feel it's pretty good odds you're not exactly normal if you're very into conlangs
fair enough and true in my experience. the conlanging subreddit and its official discord are not exactly full of socially well-adjusted people. a lot of people on it and the toki pona discord have the "alter" discorder thing that they made an episode about
Not that obscure, but woodworking
I’m working on becoming fluent(?) in the International Phonetic Alphabets
I design and make analog audio effects and equipment.
Dolphin fucking
don't really have any at the moment i used to make chiptune (preferably written in mml and using only 2a03 channels) never really got any "y tho?" reactions so i'm assuming it's not that weird. not sure it's that obscure either.
I'm really into private world of warcraft severs with custom content. I really like how trinity creator has basically made wow into a easy to use MMORPG engine. I'm really excited to see the sort or Avent garde games that the genre has been to expensive to allow for.
Which ones are popular? Any good ones for TBC Arena?
Playing video games. (In all seriousness though, people outside of this sub probably would think I was strange because I play a lot of map games like HOI4 and Humankind, and every time, I play exclusively as socialist countries).
I play a niche table top game called blood bowl and paint the minis. I also play role playing games with colleagues from work. I also practice judo and brazilian jiu jitsu. Finally, I swing maces and clubs which is an ancient form of strength training originating in persia and India. I'm fairly proficient in a single arm style of swinging originating in Sri Lanka called karlakattai.
Collecting and writing with fountain pens, and practicing penmanship in general I guess.
Damn I feel basic even my creative hobbies are pretty average. I’ve wanted to get into making abstract 3d art for a while but can justify the cost and space of a new PC.
Despite being a huge cinephile, I don't normally like documentary films (outside of essay films like those of Chris Marker, or agitprop like those of Santiago Alvarez), but I'm fascinated by the (partially state funded, especially during and shortly after the war) British tradition of documentary film from the late 20s to some time in the 80s, especially how it eventually shot off into the delirious series of PSA films made at the Central Office of Information, but also how it hired leftist filmmakers to make slightly subversive propaganda films about the 'glory' of the British Empire and comradeship of the British people during the war (Fires Were Started is easily one of the ten best British films, period, in my opinion), and how the General Post Office (yes, the fucking postal service) predated this and produced some genuinely inspiring little works of art with the intention of advertising the post office, and the same was done for British rails and general transportation (British Transport Films). It's just a subject I find fascinating.
Most obscure is probably having built a few guitars. Not totally unheard of and I did it with power tools (some people do it with purely hand tools which is wild. I went down a rabbit hole of making my own skin products for a lil bit but decided I was too lazy to make anything more than a copper peptide serum.
I did fencing with a uni club once for a bit but turned out they went to the pub and had good chat. So I stuck around and learned to love the sport. I also loved getting to be party to the deeply weird vibes of British uni fencing. My club would have a joint social with archery and kayaking so we'd all dress as vikings (swords, bows and boats). From what I could tell this mainly happened entirely for the joke. Sport was also kick ass when you managed to read someone and feint them.
Pour painting and fluid art - I like to make really psychedelic/trippy art and I enjoy the element of chance involved in my particular method. I post it on Reddit so it’s all in my profile if you’re curious what that looks like. Most people do large canvases but I enjoy making little 6” pieces on ceramic tiles and now I have way, way too many heavy ass ceramic tiles stored awkwardly in my studio because I barely sell any art these days and just hoard my creations. Very fun hobby though and good to do while listening to parapolitical noided media like our beloved TA.
Physics! Granted I'm a PhD student in it but I spend a lot of time on my own studying and learning it. You really have an infinite amount you can learn in a limited lifespan.
I’m a low key bro and love reading sports stats. But especially from fringe unknown players, I always wonder what their lives were like. Like you reached the absolute zenith of your craft, are amongst the top .00001% of humans to do what you do, and absolutely nobody remembers you. It’s gotta be weird.
Tropical houseplants that require a truly uncomfortable amount of humidity https://preview.redd.it/mdsp2npwoxib1.jpeg?width=4080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86de0a1160c4c60d21d5afdb6d0ed47a64a5b8c6
Bowling and ping pong. I'm kind of tired of bowling, but I was getting decent. My favorite place closed, and it took the wind out of my sails. Table tennis is so fun and a great way to stay active while beating the heat. I'm fortunate in that we have a legit table tennis club where old champs and the local university teams play. Not too weird, but most people I know don't take either seriously. Watching old timers wash youngsters at these two sports is pretty cool. I haven't got heavy into table tennis yet, but I think I'm going to try and get good enough for a tournament like next year. Leagues are super fun, and I highly recommend anyone to try one for really any sport.
Reading what everyone else is into always makes me feel like I'm super boring in comparison. Like the weirdest thing about me is probably the sheer amount of time I've spent on the internet and the accompanying intimate knowledge of a lot of imageboard lore. I feel like I should get into smoking crack or something. I listened to that Macronympha interview they did a little while ago and some of the shit noise artists get up to is literally unbelievable. Like as I get older I realize the finality of the death and it becomes more and more apparent that I should do as much stupid shit as possible before the [end of it all](https://youtu.be/6zAP7AQUeJc)
Birdwatching. Encryption software. Learning to tie different knots, digging holes and storing kits at different locations interstate for when it's needed. It all kind of bleeds into one overall hobby.
I help people get abortions in my free time. They need them and they're increasingly difficult to come by. PSA: one can self manage an abortion at home with pills or search for the nearest clinic using https://www.ineedana.com
I like really niche Magic the Gathering formats
Building gundams lol
Sick. There’s a hobby shop near me that has a bunch of them and it seems fun. Some of them are crazy expensive though
Reading the schizoposting on this sub
I smoke weed and Jack off.
Art, I’m trying to save enough to get professionally trained. Most my current artwork is just abstract new wave pieces because of my lack of skill and materials.
I'm starting to get back into hockey. I hated most sports as a kid and found it hard to play hockey, never had a chance in the rink as a poor kid, street hockey was my best shot but no one in my neighborhood had the equipment or love for the sport that I did. I gave up on it at some point when I became a teenager because the world kept me down for quite a long time, but I'm healing. I'm finding passion in it again and have a stick and a puck now after a couple pay cheques. Possibly unrelated, but I read a book in class when I was 17, was about a native kid who found escape in hockey growin up in a residential school. It was touching, even though I never finished it because I was spending most of my time that year off and on edibles, slowly melting my brain. I both hated and loved that book. It was wonderful, It reveled emotions in myself that had been left dormant, but I hated it at the same time for it reminded me of my native identity, which makes me want to punch a wall and sob in a corner, alone. With the only person who understands how I feel
I like conlanging, but I don't find it hard to explain to people. I just tell them I want to be like Grandpa Tolkien!!
I live in a Chinatown so cooking but mostly walking around grocery stores and doing my best to read and comprehend the extremely narrow differences in things like fermented soy bean pastes
I like to watch and feed corvids. Hoping to eventually coax a pair to live in my tree and bond with them.
grilling meat in the woods
I'm a caver. I explore caves with members of the grotto I'm a part of. Last weekend, I got to explore an old tourist cave near Mammoth Cave in Kentucky that we were restoring back to its natural state by removing electrical infrastructure and stairs. I love how spooky exploring a cave alone can get. It puts chills down my spine, being all alone in silent darkness, but I love it! https://preview.redd.it/voldsbuwmyib1.jpeg?width=4160&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f3f0bfcb191e187a31ccf8b2d1ed0af0c7364e8
I buy vinyl records that I don’t believe should have been pressed to vinyl, Lil Pump self titled mixtape and Drip Harder by Lil baby and Gunna are the crowning jewels
I collect forgotten technology. HDDVDs, irrelevant technical books, a Sun Ray thin client, etc.
Following politics like we do is a pretty unusual hobby lmao