• Hikermick@lemmy.world
    2·
    17 days ago

    I started photographing aquatic insects. Not really big into it but every once in a while, mostly spring time

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    18 days ago

    For a bit of maybe context, she was a paleontologist…but

    Friend of mine from university was always ready to scoop up roadkill into her trunk when she passed it by so that she could render it down to the bones so she would have a skeleton to study/draw.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    I read that as “weirdest holiday” and was going to say National Talk Like a Pirate Day - anyway sorry for the interruption, please carry on.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
    2·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
    2·
    18 days ago

    If there’s one thing I learned from being a siren enthusiast, it’s that if it exists, there’s a community and hobby formed around it. Neurodivergence is a helluva drug.

      • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
        1·
        18 days ago

        BNCO Mobil Directo (variant with a Wisconsin gas engine), a Federal Signal model 500-SHTT, and a B&M 20-AR-10.

        Of course, this being a deserted island and all, the latter two wouldn’t be able to function and I’d probably only have limited fuel for the Directo, but they’re my favourites so it’s better than nothing lmao

  • PillowD@lemmy.world
    2·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • ickplant@lemmy.world
    1·
    19 days ago

    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.

      • ickplant@lemmy.world
        1·
        18 days ago

        He uses a special website to keep track because apparently he is not alone in that hobby. But I like your idea! I’ve wanted to get into geocaching but never got around to it.

        • kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          18 days ago

          It’s more commercialised than it used to be, but I do still get a subscription for the summer months and it’s always worth it. I’ve done many great hikes and been to places I’d never have gone too. I also really don’t mind not finding something, there’s a very good reason why someone brought you there and I like to enjoy that more.

          Do build up the difficulty and terrain when you start out, it can be treacherous past 3. As with any puzzle there’re rules you can follow to make it easier. I’d recommend it anyone!

    • Ziggurat@jlai.lu
      1·
      18 days ago

      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

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      19 days ago

      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.

  • konalt@lemmy.world
    1·
    19 days ago

    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.

  • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
    1·
    18 days ago

    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.

    • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      17 days ago

      Oh, yeah. I remember reading the celebratory posts about the first person to contract HIV despite taking the anti-catching-HIV-drugs (yes, I know the word prophylactic, I just think my words are funnier).

      • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
        1·
        18 days ago

        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.

        • Nikls94@lemmy.world
          1·
          18 days ago

          There’s a few who have a kink of spreading those parasites to unknowing people. Back when the internet was a village I made a wrong turn and can’t un-know this now…