What's the weirdest hobby you've heard of?
What's the weirdest hobby you've heard of?
What's the weirdest hobby you've heard of?
Memorising door colours of every house and flat in a small Scottish town of about 30,000.
Yes, the hobby-ist was on the spectrum.
In Eve Online, when a capsule was destroyed, a frozen corpse was left behind.
I knew someone who would go around collecting corpses. A battle is going, he'd be out there scooping them up. He's running a hauler, and this was the day that when your ship got destroyed, every bit of loot went out in individual units, so when a pirate would try to shake him down he'd respond with "If you blow me up, you'll crash back to desktop."
That was how he played the game, gathering corpses.
This guy isn't a weird, he's straight up dangerous
“If you blow me up, you’ll crash back to desktop.”
What does that mean?
I carried my own corpse around until I got into trouble crossing a Concord border with it.
Anvil firing
You get 2 anvils
Pack some gunpowder between them
Light a fuze
Run
The top one shoots off into the air
And you try not to looney tunes yourself.
Thank you for reminding me about this classic
I stalk random people on the Internet
I like watching people on the internet. 15y ago, I was using Shareaza, Kazaa, Emule as my music sources. For those who aren't familiar with those software: it's p2p file download. You install Shareaza on your computer, and give access to specific folder to the Shareaza network. Anyone using Shareaza can then download the files located on your shared folder. But, in the mid 00', even more than today, people weren't that tech savy and what happened, way too often, was that a user would give access to the "My Documents" folder or even worse, their whole computer. I was looking for those thoses and I was reading their MSN messenger history, looking at their pictures, their resume, their schoolwork... I was really enjoying learning everything about their life through their My Documents folder.
Fast forward to 2018. All those p2p software disappeared. But I found an alternative: 4shared. 4shared allows you to upload pictures and share them (like img). When you download the app, you can setup the app to automatically upload all your pictures (from your phone). But a lot of users don't know that, and they end up with all they smartphone pictures on the net, with a public settings. I enjoy going to 4shared, looking for those non savy users, and learn everything about their lifes.
And I don't even need that. I have hobbies, friends, I don't have issues meeting women or people, but I like stalking on those strangers on 4shared.
I guess it was on people who shared entire drives, or, can you trick nicotine to go folders above the shared ones? Like ../
.
When I discovered SoulSeek I did something alike, I saw that I were able to explore other shares of the same user, and then you got me there doing some clicks to see how far I could went.
Yeah, some people share their entire drives, so the people who share system files are likely to have their private files there as well.
That's just the NSA Agent-in-training, don't worry about it 😁
IMG0001
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMGXXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
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\ Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.
Closest thing to that I ever got was buying a hard drive from ebay.
They didn't format it. Best I can tell it was used by a teenager in texas around 2018. Who either went out with, or stalked a girl in his class. Hard to tell. Tons of pictures labeling her as his girlfriend, no pictures with them together.
I did find about 4 different folders of call of duty pc files though.
I did that back then with emule, I searched for any file that started with dcim or img0 and put everything on the download list. Lots of random shit. HAHAHAHA
I'm surprised no one has mentioned hobby horsing yet.
I was just scrolling down to see if anybody had mentioned it
Oh boy, this is actually the perfect example.
In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the titular character speaks at length of the peculiar hobbies and obsessions people have, which he calls "hobby horses". He even coins the term "hobby-horsical" to describe the concept.
We're on Lemmy, half of us find-it actually cool, the other half has weirder hobbies :)
Seriously, some of play flight simulator on VATSIM, some of us LARP, some of us are furries, or have other kind of exotic hobbies. hobby horse looks like a normie workout in comparison
Trainspotting (a now largely obsolete English hobby). Back when trains were a thing, nerds would gather at at the front end of the platform to write down the numbers of the engines. Exciting stuff. If you ever saw a movie called 'The Station Agent' with Peter Dinklage you kind of get the idea. Now a slang for a pointless, useless activity (which is where the movie about Scottish heroin addicts gets its name from).
A close second is commenting on the internet.
Japan still has a lot of campaigns with special prints or characters on trains. Fans find their schedules and wait at stations to take pictures. Its quite fun to ride one of those trains and see tens of ethusiasts at every stop.
There are airplane and bus spotters too. I don't think it weird though, people geek out about all kind of things. Trains are cooler than cars anyway _
I used to raise mystery snails and sell them on eBay and Aquabid. Margins were too thin. After shipping in their special bags, and worse if I had to add a hot or cold pack, only netted me about $5 a sale. Still, never met another that did that for kicks and the same couple of sellers were still active after 10 years last I checked Aquabid.
Counting counties aka keeping track of every county you visit. My husband has this hobby, and sometimes on road trips we drive way out of the way for him to grab a new county.
The fire alarm collecting community is larger than you might expect. I first got one recommended to me on New Year's of a guy setting off all 20 or so of his linked fire alarms when the clock struck midnight. He needed hearing protection the next room over.
Frog jerking. I made the cover of toad load weekly once.
Is......is it what it sounds like? Because the weirder part for me is that there's a dedicated weekly newsletter about giving frogs handjobs....
Wait, is this why everyone in Portland was protesting ICE dressed as frogs???
A weird hobby of mine used to be collecting pictures of camgirls balancing shoes on their heads. I misclicked the [ x ] on a camgirl popup ad, and discovered that it wasn't a big link to some site, but an actual chat room with a live girl. For anyone unaware, you can talk to them for free, while they try and lure you into paying for whatever acts you want to see. I told the first one I don't believe they are real because I didnt, and to balance a shoe on her head so I can see its not just a collection of prescripted gifs or something. She did it. Screenshot. Did it to a few more for the lols. I had a few thousand over a year or two before I finally lost interest.
Also telling them how cool it was they keep tarantulas as pets, because I just saw it go behind that poster on the wall.
I dont feel proud of myself now, they were at a point in their lives where taking their clothes off for a few quid on the Internet was a good idea, and I was just fucking with them. Was fun though.
The tarantula thing is pretty funny.
Wow, shoe-on-head takes me back.
Serial killers just murder hobbyists so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That I've heard of? I'm gonna count that guy who commissioned fanart of women buying way too much Wonderbread and destroying rainforests.
Thinking about that guy, he's probably having the time of his life with AI image generators.
the fediverse.
What a silly hobby!
Trainspotting is up there.
My American brain refuses to believe this is a real hobby.
we are real thank you very much
You just need to meet someone sufficiently autistic and you still won't get it, but you will believe it
I knew someone at school who was into bus spotting because "train spotting was boring"
I live near a river that has a lot of freighters that go through it. Boat watching is pretty common here. And there are a handful of people who watch for the different trucks that go over the bridge there (literally thousands go over every day).
The telephone pole appreciation society...
You reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of early-ish internet history that is still up: the Traffic Cone Preservation Society
Collecting plastic lawn chairs.
Butterfly collecting because you have to kill one to collect it.
I don't remember the name, but the being hanged by chains attached to your skin thing is really weird
Think it's just called "suspension". I know someone who has done it professionally at least once
I don’t remember his name, but there was a guy who collected sex dolls. He had like over a hundred of them. I think his wife left him because of it. I wanna say I saw him on My Strange Addiction, but I don’t remember.
Edit: I looked it up and it’s not the guy from My Strange Addiction. He “married” a doll, but I think he just had the one. I don’t know where I saw about the other guy.
I met a worm farmer when delivering a package.
I had no idea that was a thing.
This is only the second time I've heard about it. The first time, someone was talking about worm composting (vermicomposting), which uses worms to convert organic waste into nutrient-rich compost.
True crime gets really really weird especially when you dive into more rare extreme niches.
Gooning.
That's just a modern term for jerking off, I don't think it's niche or weird, I just don't get why it's gotten so popular calling it that way.
It's more like edging, but to an extreme degree.
This is definitely not true. Gooning usually means like multiple continuous hours of masturbation, usually with the purpose of entering some kind of zoned-out trance state. I think it is somewhat niche, as I'm pretty sure most people just masturbate for 5-15 minutes, just looking at porn but not by any means "entranced" by it. The term gooning has gotten so popular because the activity itself has gotten more popular. Personally I attribute it to people's strong need to dissociate from the world in a way that isn't expensive, and that isn't so harmful that you can't do it really frequently. It used to be that drugs would fill that void for the populace, but now people need more drugs to cope than they used to, and they can't afford it anyways. Plus drugs fuck with your ability to stay employed, etc.
Another major contributor to it, imo, is the deluge of horny-bait content on Tiktok and Instagram. Even things that aren't trying to market an onlyfans still are gonna feature people doing forced cleavage jiggles and whatnot. Sex sells, there's nothing new there, but nowadays it's almost like you NEED sex to sell. Basically anybody who is into vtubers or modern anime is an example of someone that just can't really engage with something unless there's constantly some ass or titties on screen, or some kind of horny undertone or subtext at the very least.
Ultimately I think gooning is a better form of "indulgence" and dissociation than the alternatives, but its popularity is a sad sign of the times. All humans like to turn their brain off once in awhile, but if a large subset of the population is basically crying out to have their brain off every day for hours at a time, and for it to be in every form of media and relaxation, I can only see that as a sad situation.
I dunno if it's really a hobby, but one time I heard about bug collectors. They're not people who go around catching insects, instead they're people who go around catching STDs. On purpose.
Wow, I bet they don't even bother warning their sexual partners about it. I wish I had never learned that.
Actually, from what little I recall about it, I think they do alert their partners about it, or maybe they just stuck with fellow bug collectors.
Real estate. Apparently you buy like a house and then find people that need a place to live and let them live there for a fee that not only covers the price of the house but also whatever extra due to something called the "market". Then you wind up with a free house and extra money! It's crazy!
Making murder porn your personality. There are people being killed and it's people's hobby to get a boner over the killer or digging through their personal life.
One time I was at a bonfire and a friend of a friend, looking like he was up all night, said he was up all night watching tornado siren videos on youtube
Tether cars.
Is that the one where they race on circular tracks? Those speeds are absolutely insane, over 200mph. I wonder what the G forces are on those cars.
Yeah those! They sound amazing as well
pick up artistry, penis enhancement, prejac training
Most of those are more of kinks than hobbies
You are right, but gooning is a kink rather than a hobby as well and you didn't mention it to the poster of the most voted comment.
I don't know that this even counts, but one of the most strange but wildly interesting things I used to do years back was randomly exploring defunct teleporters in Habbo Hotel.
For those who don't know about teleporters/teles in Habbo Hotel, there are probably tens of thousands of pairs of teleports that exist in the game, each of them connecting only to its pair. Since trading furniture is pretty much a currency in Habbo, a lot of individual teleporters get traded off or lost throughout the years, and often end up being parked in random rooms and vast furniture junkyards.
So I would often lay down several random teles from my inventory, or enter my own furniture junkyard, and try every tele in there until I got a live one. This would Bill & Ted me to fuck knows where. If I'm unlucky, it's just a dead end room. If I'm lucky, it's a room with even more teles. That's where the rabbit hole begins. Pretty soon you're ten teles deep into the weirdest, most liminal Back Rooms spaces you can imagine. Sometimes you even find a back door into other players' private rooms and get to explore like a cat burglar. The sky was the limit.
I haven't logged in for a decade or more, but I still miss doing that sometimes.
I included the best pic I could find online of what a tele goldmine looked like, except there would typically be a wide variety of styles and not all portapotties like these.
Holy shit, this sounds like an absolute blast!
I’d watch this YouTube channel
This sounds fun.