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?
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 met a worm farmer when delivering a package.
I had no idea that was a thing.
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.
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.
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.
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!
True crime gets really really weird especially when you dive into more rare extreme niches.
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
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.
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.
That reminds me of a Dave Barry column I read discussing people who would competitively vacuum up gasoline.
Thank you for reminding me about this classic
men really love to explode stuff lol
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
Serial killers just murder hobbyists so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
“If you blow me up, you’ll crash back to desktop.”
What does that mean?
He had so many individual pieces of loot on board, blowing up his ship would overload the players ram and crash the game.
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.
Exactly this.
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.
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?
There’s an excellent, albeit 5hr documentary about the history of EVE online, its absolutely incredible
I carried my own corpse around until I got into trouble crossing a Concord border with it.
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’d watch this YouTube channel
Holy shit, this sounds like an absolute blast!
This sounds fun.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Join us. Very cool hobby
liluzibird01
