What's the weirdest hobby you've heard of?

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

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.

There is/was this guy who would make really intricate linoleum tiles with meticulously cut out texts describing his delusional ideas about conspiracies around resurrecting dead people. It's seriously wild stuff.

He made it his life's mission to spread this idea by distributing those tiles across a large area around Philadelphia but eventually covering a large part of the east coast. He covered the back of the tiles in tar and found an ingenious way of depositing them on busy roads, where other cars would then drive over them and firmly imbed them in the asphalt.

While that in and of itself would probably be classified more as a mental illness than a hobby, it did sprout a community of people who went to spot these tiles on the streets to document and map them. It is also believed that some copycats have emerged over the years.

There's an amazing documentary about it called "Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles". I highly recommend it.

My friends grandpa ~~breads~~ breeds pigeons, he does nothing with them after tho.

Like this?
- Oops

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.

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!
Was your friend's last name dahner?
How did she do the rendering?
- depends on what you use, I recommend blender, it's free and open source. when plenty of tutorials
- Honestly never asked. I presumed she just boiled off the flesh and then left the bones out in the sun to dry.

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.

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
like loud things or fish people?
- Loud spinny devices that do loud things.
- Yes?
Isn't every man a psiren enthusiast unless they have access to wax?

Bryan Ropar has forgotten more about plastic chairs than you know about anything.

Okay, but who is Vergil?

Magnet fishing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_fishing

It starts all harmless...
- That game was dope in kindergarden.
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.

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

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.
Watching? Does he like to listen to fireworks too?
Nick Mullen?

People who watch airplanes land and take off

Eh, not that wild, folks used to do train and ship spotting, so planes are okay too.
chicago used to have a lake front airport such that you could go to a beach. Sun, swim, and watch the small aircraft take off and land.
- Toronto still has that. Nudist beach at that.

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.

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).
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.

Extreme Ironing

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.

I have been under the impression (for a very long time) that habbo was defunct and I guess never decided to revisit that thought. Apparently it's still very much alive! I might need to actually check it out as I don't think I've ever played it
But you've got my interest piqued!
- It was a crappy NFT thing for a while, they only brought back the Hotel fairly recently.
I’d watch this YouTube channel
Holy shit, this sounds like an absolute blast!
This sounds fun.

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
- This is EVE we're talking about. This is honestly one of the more benign if not weird habits.
  This is the game where to join a corp you nearly needed a resume so people could make sure you weren't a spy because months to years infiltration processes happen in this game. Or just rampant piracy.
“If you blow me up, you’ll crash back to desktop.”
What does that mean?
- The game would attempt to render the thousands of corpses all at once, which presumably would overload the game engine and cause it to crash.
- He had so many individual pieces of loot on board, blowing up his ship would overload the players ram and crash the game.
I carried my own corpse around until I got into trouble crossing a Concord border with it.

I met a worm farmer when delivering a package.

I had no idea that was a thing.

People buy earthworm and put it in their garden, it helps with the plant
You can buy worms for fishing at stores. Someone has to breed them to maintain consistent supply.
They are really hard to lassoo though.
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.

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.

A close second would have to be those guys in Mexico that put gunpowder on sledge hammer and slam it on an anvil or steel beam causing ridiculous explosions.
Thank you for reminding me about this classic
- men really love to explode stuff lol
That reminds me of a Dave Barry column I read discussing people who would competitively vacuum up gasoline.

eating shit and carrying shit around in your mouth and putting shit on the couch WHY DOES SHE DO THIS

Guinea pig?
- dogison mcbarkus

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!

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.

"Ball peener"

You try to cover your penis with your balls. There is more, but dont ask...

Ok from the name I would have assumed an artist who works specifically with flat sheets of metal and a rounded hammer.
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.

The telephone pole appreciation society...

https://www.telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org/

You reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of early-ish internet history that is still up: the Traffic Cone Preservation Society

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.

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.

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.
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 ^_
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.
- That’s a bit different hobby, though. Since it involves photography
- Wholesome!

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.
source

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
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.
\
\ Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.
https://walzr.com/IMG_0001
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 😁
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.

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.

He should combine this with geocaching. You get to see a map of where you've been
- 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.

True crime gets really really weird especially when you dive into more rare extreme niches.

Example?
- People who idolize serial killers....there's folks who buy and sell dirt from Dhamer's grave, the dark romance folks being creeps at cons asking writers/actors how they'd fantasize raping someone, the fangirling and marriage proposals sent to killers....
- Yeah, since really gristly crimes are the normal interest here, I'm picturing someone obsessed with, like, shoplifting arrests.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned hobby horsing yet.

I was just scrolling down to see if anybody had mentioned it
It's even an option virtually!
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

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.

Classifying plastic bread bag clips

Serial killers just murder hobbyists so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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.
- We 2007 baybeeeeee!
- And now they're undeniably a hard right winger

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.

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???

the fediverse.

What a silly hobby!

Trainspotting is up there.

I knew someone at school who was into bus spotting because "train spotting was boring"
My American brain refuses to believe this is a real hobby.
- we are real thank you very much
- Railfanning is a massive hobby, especially in the states. You should see the crowds when Union Pacific 4014 (The "Big Boy", the largest steam locomotive in the world) rolls through town during its excursion runs.
- You just need to meet someone sufficiently autistic and you still won't get it, but you will believe it
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).

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

Butterfly collecting because you have to kill one to collect it.

CAKE FARTS

DOES THE CAKE FART OR IS THE FART CAUSED BY CAKE? WHY ARE WE YELLING? FUCK YOU.

Collecting plastic lawn chairs.

Competitive Hobby Horse

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!

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.

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 stalk random people on the Internet

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