• Hikermick@lemmy.world
    2·
    23 hours ago

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

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    23 hours 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.

  • El_Scapacabra@lemmy.zip
    12·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
    24·
    2 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.

  • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
    24·
    2 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
        7·
        2 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

  • Widdershins@lemmy.world
    18·
    2 days ago

    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

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
      12·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 days ago

        I tested a military handcranked one once, it sure is a very special thing, the slow buildup, the sound and the wrrrrr vibrations.

        • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
          3·
          2 days ago

          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.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
    108·
    2 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.

  • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
    21·
    2 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
      2·
      1 day 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
        6·
        2 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
          7·
          2 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…

  • Azal@pawb.socialEnglish
    80·
    3 days ago

    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.

      • Azal@pawb.socialEnglish
        27·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • psx_crab@lemmy.zipEnglish
          11·
          3 days ago

          This is the thing i keep hearing about EVE player, they have the culture of running the game like in real life which sounds interesting, but i swear if i ever try this game i would be bored of it in 5 hours.

          Isn’t there’s also a news channel that report on what happened in EVE?

          • scathliath@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            1 day ago

            Some of us only pop in occasionally to admire the graphics, run a few quests, and improve faction relations. (I can longer train skills, I have reached max on too many, don’t ask.) It can certainly be fun if you’re fond also of overly complicate navigation puzzles that require you to actually mimic doing a probe mission.

          • Azal@pawb.socialEnglish
            4·
            2 days ago

            EVE is one of those games that early on it’s tutorial was essentially ‘Here’s a spaceship, go fuck yourself.’ When they say you can do whatever the hell you want, it’s really not joking. There are people who live in JITA (most populace system) purely doing scams, or running markets. You have people who go into piracy or try to build massive empires.

            I knew a guy who his entire playing of the game was making ammo to sell. There was a corp who’s entire thing was doing PVP but with a bend to “Customer service”, as in “Here is your complimentary missile delivery.” and after blowing you up sending you a request to fill a survey on how the customer service was.

            So it’s a game that really is what you put in it. The reason I had to quit is it’s a massive time sink. It’s definitely not a game of “Oh, I’ve got about 30 minutes, let me hop on.”

            • psx_crab@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              That’s the reason i don’t think i would like the game, it’s a massive space sim that require a lot of time to get into. It just isn’t a game for me, i think i would be confused by the lack of direction the game have, but i always enjoy the story people tell that happened within the game.

            • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca
              6·
              2 days ago

              I feel like EVE is the direction MMOs needed to go. It’s why so many failed.

              It’s what worked for wow when it first came out. The sense of BEING in some other world where things are different is something wow did very very well. The problem is that nobody had any part in building that world, that the story quickly became convoluted and stupid, and that jumping theough the next arbitrary hoop in a fucking Skinner box isn’t escaping this world.

              Whoever finds out how to build an mmo where people can build things and make decisions and just fuck everything up if they’re so inclined and make it accessible is going to make a fortune.

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca
        43·
        3 days ago

        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.

      • Denjin@feddit.uk
        17·
        2 days ago

        He had so many individual pieces of loot on board, blowing up his ship would overload the players ram and crash the game.

        • Ekkosangen@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          I have a friend that I did some EVE work for once. Nothing dangerous or weird, just making tactical warpgate bookmarks; two above, two below, and one just off-grid for every gate in every system in a region. Paid well for something that could be done in a cheap frigate, just tedious as hell. They would then copy the bookmarks and sell them in packs on a per-region basis.

          They eventually had ALL of the tactical bookmarks for all of nullsec. As it turns out, that many individual items is problematic for the game to display in a single inventory. Not because of RAM or anything, but the game itself would refuse to show an inventory with too many items and lock you out of accessing anything. I forget the exact reason but it wouldn’t crash the game or anything. The number is also exceptionally high, to the point you have to be trying to hit it.

          Because EVE Online players are bastards, they also found a way to weaponize it. Luckily, it was considered an unintended exploit so I was one of few (willing) victims to it. To this day, they have to warn people buying their complete bookmark packs that they can unintentionally brick their inventory unless they follow the directions they give to work around it.

    • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      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.

        • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          ugh. I love my city but I so wish I lived in toronto. its so like mine but like with sprinkles. can travel with your dog on train, still has lakefront airport beach with nudity.

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
    53·
    3 days ago

    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.