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.
Relevant song! https://youtu.be/wOzDRzSRBiY
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 _
Wholesome!
Back when I worked on a school boat we had a German kid in to cruise ship spotting. Every time we encountered a cruise ship he’d run to the chart house with his special notebook and write down all the AIS info and whatnot. We regularly saw what were in my opinion way cooler boats like tallships and navy warships but he didn’t care about anything else.
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.
Isn’t every man a psiren enthusiast unless they have access to wax?
Quick! You can only take 3 sirens to a deserted island with you, which three do you choose!?
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
You know your interest is obscure when it throws Google for a loop:
Yeah, AI has absolutely no clue when it comes to sirens lmao. The Air Raid Sirens Wiki is where you want to go if you want to learn about sirens.
like loud things or fish people?
Loud spinny devices that do loud things.
Sea sirens are loud and can swing in circles, so they still count
Okay, what I mean is the kind of siren that is made of metal and/or fibreglass, contains a mechanical chopper/motor or electronic speaker, and is most often found on wooden poles and rooftops and used for civil defense!
Unfortunately, I’m afraid the sea isn’t too kind to warning sirens lmao
i don’t care what you do with your mermaids, but stuffing them with that stuff, even if its for civil defence, sounds unethical.
Yes?
I started photographing aquatic insects. Not really big into it but every once in a while, mostly spring time
Magnet fishing
Once i watched a video of someone fished up a live(or dead? It just puff and not explode) grenade. Whole bridge have to be closed down for bombsquad.
It starts all harmless…
That game was dope in kindergarden.
CAKE FARTS
DOES THE CAKE FART OR IS THE FART CAUSED BY CAKE? WHY ARE WE YELLING? FUCK YOU.
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.
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.
Was your friend’s last name dahner?
Biologist in university here…I know a person who has a dedicated garage freezer to store their roadkill and animal samples for dissection. That’s…that’s supposed to be the garage fridge filled with sodas for a tactical gaming refresh for the kids, no!
How did she do the rendering?
depends on what you use, I recommend blender, it’s free and open source. when plenty of tutorials
A blender seems like overkill, there won’t be much left to draw.
Do you say “will it rend? That’s the question” everytime you use Blender?
you gotta say “its rending time” before rending all over the place
Honestly never asked. I presumed she just boiled off the flesh and then left the bones out in the sun to dry.
My friends grandpa
breadsbreeds pigeons, he does nothing with them after tho.
Like this?
Oops
To late, I’m into it. Got more bird/bread based stories?
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
To learn more, watch the movie The Cell!
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!
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
Nick Mullen?
Siren enthusiast here, it’s a surprisingly large community that’s really started to blow up these past few years. There are so many models and sounds that there’s always something interesting to find and I find them pleasant to listen to. Sirens are very powerful machines that move a ton of air, and they’re capable of shaking the ground and rumbling your chest when you’re near one. We have an annual Sirencon in Wisconsin every year where we bring our privately owned sirens (usually bought for cheap after they’ve been retired from service) and have a good time firing them up.
I personally enjoy learning the history of the sirens themselves and finding surviving units of rare historical models, especially those from between 1910-1950 when they were still trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. There was a ton of innovation and cool designs. A lot of people associate sirens with air raids, but their original primary purpose was to replace bells, air horns and whistles at fire departments that needed an audible signal to summon volunteer firefighters to the station upon a fire call. Being electric, the siren didn’t need air pressure or steam which could run out, and couldn’t be confused with church bells.
I tested a military handcranked one once, it sure is a very special thing, the slow buildup, the sound and the wrrrrr vibrations.
Hand crank sirens are pretty fun! I’ve got one from China, an LK-100. It’s especially satisfying hearing the pops at low RPMs.
Watching? Does he like to listen to fireworks too?
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.
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 think you should get off social media for a bit and goon instead.
Depending on the social media in question, I’m not sure there’s much difference! I may be misinformed about the state of Tiktok and Instagram though, as I don’t use them myself. It’s just my observations from seeing others on them
It’s more like edging, but to an extreme degree.
The definition has become more nebulous over time.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a65418496/what-is-gooning/
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
“Ball peener”
You try to cover your penis with your balls. There is more, but dont ask…
You must have made that up, there’s not even a definition on Urban Dictionary.
Also, is this a hobby or a kink, because it reminds me of kinks like chastity, plapping and such.
Ok from the name I would have assumed an artist who works specifically with flat sheets of metal and a rounded hammer.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned hobby horsing yet.
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.
I was just scrolling down to see if anybody had mentioned it
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
