• El_Scapacabra@lemmy.zip
    12·
    7 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.

  • Mexigore@lemmy.world
    71·
    6 days ago

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

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 days 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·
    6 days 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.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
    109·
    8 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.

  • Azal@pawb.socialEnglish
    81·
    8 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·
        8 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.

        • Annoyed_🦀 @lemmy.zipEnglish
          11·
          8 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?

          • Azal@pawb.socialEnglish
            4·
            7 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.”

            • Annoyed_🦀 @lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              7 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.

          • scathliath@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            6 days 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.

            • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca
              6·
              7 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·
        8 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·
        8 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·
          7 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.

  • spittingimage@lemmy.world
    64·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
    53·
    8 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.

  • Davy Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
    391·
    8 days ago

    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

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      16·
      8 days ago

      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.

      https://walzr.com/IMG_0001

    • oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
      13·
      8 days ago

      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.

      • Davy Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
        6·
        8 days ago

        Yeah, some people share their entire drives, so the people who share system files are likely to have their private files there as well.

        • quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          5·
          7 days ago

          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.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
      6·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      7 days ago

      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

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • Ziggurat@jlai.lu
      1·
      7 days ago

      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

  • PillowD@lemmy.world
    28·
    8 days ago

    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.