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| Truly strange hobbies; Fish are a conventional passtime | |
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| Topic Started: Apr 27 2007, 05:45 AM (1,781 Views) | |
| rjnerd | Apr 27 2007, 05:45 AM Post #1 |
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Newbie
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I agree, keeping a salt water tank going is an amazing achievement, but there are a lot of people out there trying... How about the truly strange things -- the sort of hobby where the national association has 300 members, tops. Something that takes a couple of minutes to describe on that first date.... So what are others up to? To prime the pump, here are two of mine -- I build vegetable flinging catapults. (usually pumpkins, but I did fling an upright piano once The piano mover from hell ) I ring churchbells as practiced in the UK, not music, but complex patterns. (see the Dorothy Sayers novel "The Nine Taylors" for an explanation). On this one, when on that first date I said "I have this odd hobby...." the response was "I did that back in grad school". We are still together, and its coming up on 20 years. Anyhow, time to distance yourself from the masses... Oh yea, unrelated: Exactly where are the limericks posted. Right now I read them via the "missed yesterdays", but something tells me that there is another way, possibly one that would involve an archive, so I could really see the ones I missed from long ago... Anyhow, I didn't see an obvious route... A card carrying nerd (really) The New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society; The NERDS. -dp- |
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| Otter | Apr 28 2007, 12:52 AM Post #2 |
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Hi RJ, and welcome! I checked out the NERD link in your sig - are you part of that team? Quite cool if yes... I loved Junkyard Wars when it was on. Piano = damned cool! I personally don't have any hobbies where there are fewer than 300 people involved. Even webcomics number around 9000 - 12000 for artist/writers. Limericks are up for about 2 days and then I yank them. I might build an archive at some point but I doubt it, because just the comic site alone is hellishly bandwidth-intensive and I'm still doing this out of pocket (yay hobbies!  ). I've been thinking about handwriting each of them and printing them up in a small book at some point... my handwriting is probably the most artistic thing I can do, so it would be prettier than a hundred pages of the same two images over and over again.  |
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- Never send a ferret to do a weasel's work. | |
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| an island | Apr 28 2007, 12:57 AM Post #3 |
He Who Wears Boots
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i podcast and stuff... some see that as strange. "pod what?". ummm... damn, i feel normal. |
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| rjnerd | Apr 29 2007, 07:41 AM Post #4 |
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Newbie
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Hi, my name is Jeff, and I am a Nerd. Card carrying even. We (as a team) did 4 shows in the UK. Crash also did one season of the US version (where the format was two captains that did all the shows, and pickup teams new for each show). They are still actively making new episodes in the UK, but the US network that carried it before (TLC) isn't interested. (they apparently only showed the UK version, in order to prime the pump for the US remake, and we in the US only saw the third UK season because we made it to the finals) They had us over last year to do a "special" for the 200th birthday of Isembard Kingdom Brunel, a very famous UK engineer. The show is a HUGE amount of work as a contestant. The morning after our very first build, I woke up and my body asked "Aren't you old enough to know better yet?". Man I was beat... But its also an amazing amount of fun. Where else are you encouraged to cut cars in half, make cement trucks into boats (ok, it was only the mixing drum, but it was still huge)... They ask again, and my response is "which flight did you book me on?". In order to do the most recent build, I had to be in the UK (building no less) on the very day that Susan (my SO) turned 50. (I at least arranged for a surprise party to happen despite my absence - made it particularly surprising for her) Oh yea, its not just nuts like me that like this sort of competition, I now run a scaled back version of the "show" as a corporate team building exercise. Last week I challenged the employees of a Manhattan hedge fund (read they push other peoples money around, and when the toilet plugs, they call the super, rather than dig the plunger out of the closet). They had a blast making machines to play Bocce Ball, Some of them picked up a power tool for the first time in their lives.... -dp- This planet needs a lot more kids who think taking a lawnmower engine apart to see how it works, is a lot more fun that the same time spent playing videogames... |
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| Otter | May 1 2007, 12:12 AM Post #5 |
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My boyfriend used to be the math teacher at a Montessori-method school, so he's very interested in your projects. Lobbing the piano got a big-ol' thumbs-up. |
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- Never send a ferret to do a weasel's work. | |
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| ViciousBits | May 1 2007, 05:23 PM Post #6 |
Super Member
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I was amused a) by the idea of trebuchet-ing a piano and b) by the fact that the actual piano-trebuchet-ing portion of the video takes up little more than a tenth of the overall content.  My hobbies aren't so strange as to be shared by 300 or fewer people nationally, either. I know tons of other people catalog their own books, write online puzzles, and play point-and-click games. I'll be sure to post here when I take up karaoke sky-diving, though. It's on my "to do" list... 
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| rjnerd | May 4 2007, 07:12 AM Post #7 |
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Newbie
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We only had one piano to throw. Its part of the reason the throw was kept short, I had to be sure it went forward. I added all the tech info at the end, because I like knowing this when I see something thrown. I suspect a webcomic artist has the same sort of curiosity when they see a particularly crisply rendered drawing, and wonder how that artist captured the image... |
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| Otter | May 4 2007, 12:29 PM Post #8 |
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I dunno, I'll ask one at the next convention.  I love words, myself. The ones I think are actual art are poetic forms that are ultra-simplified, like haiku, or rediculously complex, like poems such as "Howl" or "The Wasteland." I don't actually enjoy poetry but it is wordcraft as art, and I appreciate it for that. When I see an amazing turn of phrase, it resonates as an honest artistic effort, and there's more time and effort of that type within poetry. So darned boring tho'... Much more fun to chuck a piano five football fields away! |
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- Never send a ferret to do a weasel's work. | |
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| jackie31337 | Sep 28 2008, 09:46 AM Post #9 |
Super Member
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My most obscure hobby is definitely the demoscene. It's a sub-culture within the geek sub-culture. Since I became a mom, I've kind of lost touch with the scene, but I'm starting to get back into it, at least as an observer. I used to be a tracker in a small, unproductive demo group in the USA. If any of you are familiar with the demoscene, you may know me as Ms_Saigon. |
| Sorry, this is my first conspiracy so I'm a little slow. | |
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| Bateau | Oct 2 2008, 07:56 AM Post #10 |
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Junior Member
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Hmmm, lets see... current: coding, breaking security in new and fubar ways, breaking apps, talking to Jackie and her daughter, chatting on IRC, Kingdom of Loathing Getting into: OS design, compiler construction, reverse engineering |
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| jackie31337 | Oct 3 2008, 07:38 AM Post #11 |
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Out of those, the only ones I would call truly strange are talking to me and my daughter. 
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| Sorry, this is my first conspiracy so I'm a little slow. | |
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| Dusty668 | Oct 26 2008, 02:46 AM Post #12 |
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Fury of the Apathist
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Hm, I got nothin, closest I ever was when i was a Geocacher, over 500 finds, but it's just a fancy way of feeding mosquitoes.
Edited by Dusty668, Oct 26 2008, 02:47 AM.
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| If life were meant to be fair, we would never be thirsty and have to pee at the same time. | |
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| WiseWillow | Nov 19 2009, 03:19 AM Post #13 |
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Um... I feel so painfully normal. I embroider, knit, write short stories, and people-fix. It's like people-watching, only you let them cry on you and give them comfort food. That being said, I do intend to catalog my books... right now they're organized by fiction/nonfiction, then by chronological/geographical order (in nonfiction) and genre/author (in fiction). But I really do need to make a list, plus a ton of my YA books are in boxes somewhere. EDIT: Just remembered! I used to have a very strange hobby- I worked at a living history museum for eight years. As in, dressed in costume and pretended to live back then. I was a youth interpreter, but, since you have to be a youth (age 10-18) to do it... I had to leave last year  And no, it was NOT Colonial Williamsburg *Grumble* They're our rivals, the evil moneygrubbing commercially driven publicity hogging inauthentic.... *Grumble* Edited by WiseWillow, Nov 19 2009, 03:22 AM.
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8:10 PM Nov 26
