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.
Holy shit, this sounds like an absolute blast!
I’d watch this YouTube channel
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for reminding me about this classic
men really love to explode stuff lol
Women too! Kari Byron salient years blowing shit up… And she would do it again!
That reminds me of a Dave Barry column I read discussing people who would competitively vacuum up gasoline.
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.
IMG_0001
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX 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.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.
I once had a corrupt .dll system file, after trying for hours to find a copy to download it took ten seconds to find and download one on emule thanks to people sharing the entire system.
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.
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
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
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?
Isn’t every man a psiren enthusiast unless they have access to wax?
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!
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.
Honestly never asked. I presumed she just boiled off the flesh and then left the bones out in the sun to dry.
Was your friend’s last name dahner?
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
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.
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…
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).
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.
Join us. Very cool hobby
liluzibird01
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!
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.
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.
Nick Mullen?
Watching? Does he like to listen to fireworks too?
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.
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.
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.
