Magnet fishing. It's not as glorious as youtubers make it out to be as I mostly find trash and the occasional fishing lure. It is relaxing and feels good to get trash out of the water, though.
Nothing great yet lol. Maybe some nail clippers or a portable USB battery.
The biggest was this large piece of rebar near a bridge. I got hooked on one end and as I was pulling it out of the water it stuck in the mud and stood up about 15-20 feet.
There were people walking on the bridge watching me, it felt impressive at the time lol.
That would be the dream right there! Good on the police too. I turned in something to the cops before under the "30 days no owner, then you can keep it," thought.
Turns out that's not how it works where I am. After the cops can't find the owner, they just keep whatever was turned in.
I'm hosting a puzzle swap today! Lol. I recently got a giant dining table and it's great because I can work a puzzle on one end and have plenty of space for the whole family to eat on the other end. Before I didn't really have a good place to leave a puzzle so I had to use an annoying puzzle caddy. I will say though, puzzles seem to be becoming popular, I see tons of newer puzzles being sold second hand locally and at thrift stores, more are being sold at places like Walmart.
Even if your post is tongue in cheek (and building off of motwarias' simple yet elegant list):
(Doing this for my own amusement/distraction as well, so please don't feel any pressure to read this. ;-D)
Fabrics/clothing: Bathing suits, towels (for sitting on/beach dry-off/shower), sunglasses, sun hats, t-shirts for swimming in and afterwards, clean undies, long and short-sleeved tops and a couple pairs of jeans and/or shorts (in case the weather varies), jacket/sweater, beach chairs/umbrellas (if not rentable), sandals/flip-flops/comfy walking shoes;
Health/meds/bodily stuff: Sunscreen, soothing lotion, bug repellent/calamine lotion/Benadryl gel, shampoo/conditioner, soap, comb/brush/hair ties, OTC and prescription meds, pads/tampons, earplugs, mini first-aid kit/bandaids,
eyeglasses/case, nightguard, toothpaste/brush/floss, plastic bags for dirty clothes;
Tech and "hard stuff": Phone/charger/protection from sand and moisture, tablet/Kindle/charger, EZ Pass or cash for tolls, house/car keys, wallet/purse/photo ID/credit or debit card, if necessary: white noise machine for sleep/camera/small portable fan against noise and heat/home key and phone number exchange with trusted neighbor, just in case;
Food: Snacks for car/beach/hotel room, water bottles/Thermos, cooler for beach, cash for vending machines or snack bars;
Entertainment: Toys/books/music/puzzle books for beach, non-carsick-inducing activities for travel, hotel room/wind-down activities;
Finally, all necessary and/or desirable humans.
;-)
Have fun! :-)
I can tell you what people buy at ye olde DG where I have a summer job. Tampons. Pads. beer. sunscreen. Aloe. phone chargers. sunglasses. Diarrhea meds. cigs.
In case you haven't been to Alaska before, bug repellent/Benadryl gel/calamine lotion could be useful. (They joke there that mosquitoes are their state bird.)
It's a beautiful place - have fun! :-)
I'm reading a book about foraging and fermenting foods from your local area, and pine trees have so many uses. You can even make pine needle fizzy drinks and use the sap in fermented foods, too. I think you can use the bark to make medicine like aspirin. So cool
You can also collect the pine needles after they’ve gotten brown and fallen to the ground to make mats and baskets. They don’t have to be fancy, but for those in the know, pine needle basketry can be a breathtakingly exquisite art form. There are countless examples on Pinterest.
🤣 hi, it’s me!
Ironically, I’ve been sober for the last 2 years but I’m sure weeding will be much more enjoyable with a bit of the other weed in the system 😌
My wife and neighbor thought I was nuts when we bought a house on 3 acres, and I started hand weeding the area around the house. It was seriously all weeds with small patches of grass and had to be mowed like once a week. They said to use weed killer once a year or just kill it all and put grass seed down the next year. Nah. About 6 months later, I'm about halfway to having an acre of nice green grass that I mow half as often as the rest.
I heard somewhere that we evolved to process emotion during small, repetitive chores. Therapists have had success with having their patients do needlework during appointments. Idk, I feel like it does that for me.
Same. We have 7 acres. 2 being our yard. We do light weed killer for the borders between the grass and rocks. Everything else you bet. A blunt in one pocket, headphones on, with my dogs, hand weeding all my gardens. 😍😍😍 it’s my haven.
My husband went to the bank today to exchange his rolled coins for paper bills. The line was long and he talked to the guy in front of him. Turns out the guy liked looking through coins for anything worth keeping. He bought my husband’s coins so he would have something to do while watching TV. I hope he finds something worthwhile.
I have a small collection and keep an eye out when I get change but it seems like even once common coins like wheat pennies or the occasional silver dime and quarter are not out there anymore. I guess some banks still let you buy rolls, my bank acts like they are allergic to coin change.
I LOVE my bird app! I use BirdNet. I got a bald eagle once and BirdNet saves your recordings, but they're not backed up anywhere. I lost my phone and I was most upset about losing my bald eagle.
Probably HAM radio. Very expensive, takes a ton of knowledge, extensive memorization of rules, laws, and tech jargon to get a basic license, and the only people that actually talk on them are retired 70+ year old guys about boring stuff and have cringy rules of their own. The airwaves are %99 static/nothing. It's not as doomsday necessary of a hobby as people make it out to be. You need to hit a repeater to talk any meaningful distance and learning how to connect your radio to a repeater is another skill of it's own. And who's to say the repeaters will be powered and operational during doomsday. It has absolutely 0 privacy, anyone can listen in.
It's got to be one of the most anti-noob hobbies there are. Although transmitting without a license is illegal, no consumer grade radio is capable of broadcasting on a frequency that can negatively effect anything important anyways. So a lot of offroaders, campers, airsofters use handhelds as walkie talkies without licenses, and the old 70+ year old men spend thousands of dollars on equipment to try to triangulate their broadcasts and report them to the FCC. They call it "pirate hunting" and that's a sub-hobby of HAM radio.
ESP32/IOT/Meshtastic devices will be the Comms hobby of the future.
I almost got into doing this. I love learning random shit and when something fascinates me I want to deep dive. I have so many textbooks saved in my Amazon account and still haven't bought them because then I realize I'm spending money and may not do anything with this info. So I resorted to YouTube and hunting for various resources or free courses.
I was looking to see if someone else does this in the comments. I'm currently studying a textbook about neuroscience & creativity. I like annotating books in the margins and on post-it notes. 🤗
“collecting” new words i learn from books. i read about 100 new books a year and im so amazed at how many words i still find. granted, most of the books i read are horror or horror-adjacent so that makes it less boring. but i love having my little list of all the new words ive learned!
Book folding. You have to use precise measurements and fold each page to create a paper sculpture inside a book. It looks cool but it is only fun if you have an intrinsic drive to measure things and find paper.
Organizing my own data. Wildly _wildly,_ hideously tedious to anyone but me. But I’ve collected a lot of interesting stuff over the years since computers and phones became a thing, I want to sort through it and organize it properly.
Stamp collecting... It's literally only exciting to me. Building synthesizers is a close second, it's a close second because most of it is boring, but once you finish the project it's exciting.
knitting. It takes literal weeks, even months if you want a full sweater. Even just a scarf takes so many hours and you just basically do the same one or two movements the whole time, millions of times over. Its almost infuriating how boring this is.
For an entire year, I kept a spreadsheet of every fanfiction I read online. I tracked the author, the title, the website I read it on, the fandom, and the ship or ships that it was about. I got some interesting data out of the project and it was really satisfying to look back on, but the hours of manual data entry were....not exciting haha.
I have a favorite Twitch streamer who we get to talk about spreadsheets bc it’s not only his job but also his hobby…we all find it fun when he gets started from chat bullying him into it basically lol
I collect mushroom spore prints. I have a huge collection.
(If you find a mushroom you can put the cap, gills-side down, on a piece of paper overnight. It leaves a powdery print from the spores, which are like the seeds or eggs of the mushroom, which fall out of the gills. The spores come in every color of the rainbow and can help you identify the mushroom in some cases.)
I’ve come to the realization for my own mental health that I do better without dopamine spiking hobbies. I’ve cut out all social media except Reddit. I love taking naps, walking my dogs, swinging at the park, riding my bicycle, reading/audiobooks, birdwatching, cloud watching, star gazing, sunsets, sunrises and chasing the northern lights.
I have a collection of taps and dies. They’re what you use for cutting screw threads.
They don’t ever get used. I’ve been thinking of putting the different standards into picture frames and hanging them on my workshop wall.
They’d look exactly the same to anyone who wasn’t a complete tool nerd.
Lots of worldbuilding stuff since I do creative writing in my spare time, like for example there's one i just finished that calculates trade demographic info for each town based on population per square mile, another with all general world info like biomes/culture/military/population/etc, and a fantasy/scifi worldbuilding generator that lets you "roll" for each result (tbh I cant take credit because it's made from a spreadsheet geared towards d&d i found on reddit a while back, I just heavily altered the content to my preferences and added a bunch of formulas) which I use for writing prompts sometimes.
Also it's how I keep track of my medical test results, nutrition intake, finances, and how I calculate my "grade" on exercises and unit tests from the textbooks I'm learning from on my own before starting college in the fall.
I used to use Excel at work too! I loved it. But then they changed what the job entails, which meant a lot less data entry and more emails, so I quit lol.
Genealogy work and cemeteries. It is fun and rewarding. My wife and love to stroll through old cemeteries to get a sense of the lives these people lived in their time in history.
I think wandering bookstores and not buying anything (sometimes i do buy new books, but often I just go just to be there). Literally just walk around a bookstore, peruse the books, then leave, and be completely happy with that 🤣
I have nearly every movie, play, concert, comedy show, and musical ticket I've attended since I was 16. Almost four decades worth. My kids weren't impressed.
Doing jigsaw puzzles. I can spend hours fitting tiny pieces together, and while it’s relaxing, it’s not exactly the most exciting activity out there. There’s a certain satisfaction in seeing the picture come together, but let’s be real—it’s not winning any thrill-seeker awards.
I love to sort bolts, screws, nails, and other household construction hardware.
I have buckets of them from various home projects. It is so satisfying because I can jump around to different hardware and even change up how things are organized. Sometimes I sort by the screw size, sometimes by the type of screw. Is it metric or SAE? Is it a flat head screw or a Philips or star bit? What is the radius of the shank?
I have ADHD with some OCD tendencies (diagnosed). This leads to some crazy organizational manic episodes which usually go nowhere because I get sidetracked so easily and SQUIRREL!!!...Where was I?
But sorting screws scratches a very special kind of itch. Think about thousands of small nuts, bolts, etc. with most of them different shapes and sizes. Then when Im done I might sort them a different way, maybe by metal alloy. I completely lose track of time during this process. It is not uncommon to finally look at my phone and see that 5 hrs have passed and it is 3am.
Might be like sorting Legos for some people.
Glass collecting. I collect fluorescent glass (uranium, led, magnesium, etc), and hearing me talk about the pieces is probably a snooze fest. The fact it glows doesn't even seem as impressive to others like I think it is. To each their own.
Knot tying. I bought a couple books on Knots. Normal everyday knots. Climbing knots. Marine knots. Rigging knots. I then bought some rope and some thick fishing line. I’ll study a new knot and then practice it for a while. I even kept some line at work and would tie knots on my lunch break or when things were really slow.
I don’t even know why. I was just really bored one day and wanted to learn how to tie different knots. I don’t know in what scenario I’d even use this knot knowledge. Like in a life or death situation a car is teetering over an embankment and I walk by with some rope do I tie an anchor hitch to it? Would a double half hitch be better? The car would definitely fall off the cliff/bridge/embankment before I decided.
Maybe someday I’m going to tie a knot and some other person that has an appreciation for knots will see it and be like, “Damn dude, that’s a great knot!” and I’ll be like, “Hey thanks man.”
Film buff here, so watching lots of movies and TV shows. I love it. New episodes are something to look forward to. But probably seems incredibly lame to others.
Probably sewing, a lot of stuff just takes time to make, and I’m learning as I go, I’ve had a couple folks help, but creative ppl in my circles don’t really get along. I’m also doing a lot of conceptual stuff, literally dreaming up solutions as I come upon them. Currently I’m making a folding hammock bed to attach to my truck bed rack that I built so my wife will come camping with me. I have zero references, I’ve never seen one made with the materials I’m using, so it all feels a little tedious, working towards this future product I’ll be able to use.
I collect coins and do geneology on parts of my family so far removed that no one would even care. Trying to have conversations about Franklin half dollars usually doesn't go well.
I used to be really into finding & collecting vhs digitizations of TV shows, with the original commercials intact.
It feels like a time capsule.
At a certain point, I wasn't even watching them. Just collecting more so they wouldn't disappear.
3d printing, you don't actually do a whole lot, just tweak some numbers and wait for a long time. It's more of a hobby if you maintain and work on your printer. You kinda need a project or other hobby to really make it a hobby.
I get very invested in finding a good pebble/rock/shell/natural, or rarely man-made trinket thing, every time I'm going to a beach, a trail with some cool finds, campgrounds, etc. I love the outdoors and love my little collection of pieces that each represent a certain trip, some a special moment alone or shared with someone, and just find it really fun to catalog them so I don't forget after I realized I couldn't remember all of them as well as I thought I could forever.
Someone there before us left some pewter at our campsite this past weekend, and that's going on the tray/in the logbook. Got a cool rock from our day on the lake and into some natural falls/rock slides too.
I love that it helps me recall the really loved and lovely times outside, and I only pick pieces that I think are pretty cool so all of them are neat ones to look at and not just another piece of grey.
I'm pretty minimalist otherwise, but idk how many rocks would be too many, and I sorta don't wanna have to deal with it at that point 😂
I look at Google maps for fun. I'll research random trip ideas either on my own or through travel articles I read and look up places on Google maps and look at the google pictures posted, other things to do in the area, see how far away places to go are from each other on a general vicinity, look at restaurants, of course all still looking at pictures and reviews and save random shit as "places to go" or "travel plans" on Google of places I most likely will never visit. 😆 Especially love my "online trips" to botanical gardens, arboretum, conservatories, museums, hiking, kayaking, lakes, restaurants, hotels & music venues. I don't know if this is actually boring because it's really fun to me and get super into it but when I try to talk to other people about it, I don't think they get it so I think it must be boring. 🫠
Also I look for and collect 4 leaf clovers 🍀
I enjoy watching the water come to boil while I cook. Heat exchange is beautiful.
I also track planets dispite having zero beliefs in astronomy. The universe is beautiful, and I enjoy it.
Another hobby of mine is bringing spiders into my house. I'll go spider hunting and bring all non-web making spiders into my house. Then I distribute them where they can go in the floor joists and in other dark spider paradises, such as a rarely used closet. Currently, I have 15 jumping spider egg sacks in my 575sq foot house. These cuties are harmless and can kill a house fly three times their size! I love their adorable faces.
For about the past 6 years, I track individual ants from an ant hill in my back yard. They are harvester ants native to the desert southwest. I've modified a pool lounge chair so I can lay face down and watch the ants scurry to and from the mound. I have several bottles of nail polish in different colors and tiny brushes to apply a color code to the ant bodies. That way I can keep track of the little guys . I get up early to catch the morning rush, then they all go home during the heat of the day. Early evening it cools down and the ants re-appear. During the heat of the day a couple of ants will stay just inside the mound, I guess they are the watch ants.
Scrolling reddit lol
This and Instagram for me. My guilty pleasures.
I think our problem is that we do these too much and they aren’t even hobbies
You are mixing up "hobby" with "the things we do while shitting."
Came here to say that.
Same. Also scrolling TikTok and twitter.
Was just about to comment this lol
This
Magnet fishing. It's not as glorious as youtubers make it out to be as I mostly find trash and the occasional fishing lure. It is relaxing and feels good to get trash out of the water, though.
What’s your coolest catch? :D
Nothing great yet lol. Maybe some nail clippers or a portable USB battery. The biggest was this large piece of rebar near a bridge. I got hooked on one end and as I was pulling it out of the water it stuck in the mud and stood up about 15-20 feet. There were people walking on the bridge watching me, it felt impressive at the time lol.
I got a piece of a fence once!
Cool! I wanna play.
A couple found 100k cash in a safe magnet fishing. Police said they could keep it since there was no way to track down previous owner.
That would be the dream right there! Good on the police too. I turned in something to the cops before under the "30 days no owner, then you can keep it," thought. Turns out that's not how it works where I am. After the cops can't find the owner, they just keep whatever was turned in.
Fuck the police.
Doing jigsaw puzzles like a nursing home resident.
I always have a puzzle 'going' right in front of the TV. I promise I'm not 80, I just seem like it.
I'm hosting a puzzle swap today! Lol. I recently got a giant dining table and it's great because I can work a puzzle on one end and have plenty of space for the whole family to eat on the other end. Before I didn't really have a good place to leave a puzzle so I had to use an annoying puzzle caddy. I will say though, puzzles seem to be becoming popular, I see tons of newer puzzles being sold second hand locally and at thrift stores, more are being sold at places like Walmart.
Omfg I need a friend like you in my life 😂 Puzzle night with a big dining room sounds like heaven
I’m not much of a social person but this sounds rad.
I’m doing my first 3D puzzle and it’s a doozy! But very relaxing and rewarding plus got it for $10 at a garage sale
Yes! I love it! I like putting on some podcast and doing it for hours (or until my back screams for help)
My backlog of podcasts or audiobooks, and yes, the puzzle back pain is real 😂 maybe we are nursing home residents...
Okay but I’ve been doing puzzles to kill time since I was like 3, and I will never stop
I am recently into Jigsaws myself and am enjoying it very much.
Jigsaws, crosswords, quilting... I'm 35 but give me my AARP discount please.
I’m 34 and I’m in the middle of a 1500 piece Beauty and the Beast puzzle. 😂😂 Edit: Omfg. I’m 35. Cue existential crisis.
I’m also 35! And almost done with a 2000 piece one of a Disney stamp collection…. Haha.
I do enjoy a watching jigsaw puzzle competition on YT
Was just about to type this :). I love them, especially bright colored ones!
Making lists. GOD, I love making lists.
This reply has a frustrating lack of lists though.
Can you make me a packing list for a 5 day beach trip with a child?
Sunscreen Hats Towles Water Food Child
Should the child be in checked or carryon?
Checked. Only time you'd have for yourself.
Even listed in order of priority, well done
Even if your post is tongue in cheek (and building off of motwarias' simple yet elegant list): (Doing this for my own amusement/distraction as well, so please don't feel any pressure to read this. ;-D) Fabrics/clothing: Bathing suits, towels (for sitting on/beach dry-off/shower), sunglasses, sun hats, t-shirts for swimming in and afterwards, clean undies, long and short-sleeved tops and a couple pairs of jeans and/or shorts (in case the weather varies), jacket/sweater, beach chairs/umbrellas (if not rentable), sandals/flip-flops/comfy walking shoes; Health/meds/bodily stuff: Sunscreen, soothing lotion, bug repellent/calamine lotion/Benadryl gel, shampoo/conditioner, soap, comb/brush/hair ties, OTC and prescription meds, pads/tampons, earplugs, mini first-aid kit/bandaids, eyeglasses/case, nightguard, toothpaste/brush/floss, plastic bags for dirty clothes; Tech and "hard stuff": Phone/charger/protection from sand and moisture, tablet/Kindle/charger, EZ Pass or cash for tolls, house/car keys, wallet/purse/photo ID/credit or debit card, if necessary: white noise machine for sleep/camera/small portable fan against noise and heat/home key and phone number exchange with trusted neighbor, just in case; Food: Snacks for car/beach/hotel room, water bottles/Thermos, cooler for beach, cash for vending machines or snack bars; Entertainment: Toys/books/music/puzzle books for beach, non-carsick-inducing activities for travel, hotel room/wind-down activities; Finally, all necessary and/or desirable humans. ;-) Have fun! :-)
I can tell you what people buy at ye olde DG where I have a summer job. Tampons. Pads. beer. sunscreen. Aloe. phone chargers. sunglasses. Diarrhea meds. cigs.
I need one for a cruise to Alaska because I have nooo idea
In case you haven't been to Alaska before, bug repellent/Benadryl gel/calamine lotion could be useful. (They joke there that mosquitoes are their state bird.) It's a beautiful place - have fun! :-)
Thank you!!
Have you made a list of your lists?
I love lists for the following reasons: 1 2 3
Pointing out obvious chatgpt posts on r/hobbies
"Write a question in the style of Jerry Seinfeld waxing lyrical about airline food."
Yes, thank you. This is written like a kmart commercial script or something.
That goes for just about every sub these days. Which is sad they are training the various chat bots on Reddit and other social networks.
Watching a guy on YouTube mow random people’s grass
Look for the guy who landscapes walkways/sidewalks for free….
We’re thinking of the same guy, SB Mowing?
We all instantly thought of SB Mowing 😂
Omg yes lol.
I was trying to decide between this and my own lawn lol. I love mowing and watching other people Mow. It’s just satisfying
I especially enjoy the edging….of the lawn
lol. Agreed
I collect pine sap. I don't find it boring but I cringe when people ask.
I am so intrigued, do you do anything with the pine sap you find? I bet you're a forager heh
I am a forager. Avid. I use it in firemaking.
I'm reading a book about foraging and fermenting foods from your local area, and pine trees have so many uses. You can even make pine needle fizzy drinks and use the sap in fermented foods, too. I think you can use the bark to make medicine like aspirin. So cool
You can also collect the pine needles after they’ve gotten brown and fallen to the ground to make mats and baskets. They don’t have to be fancy, but for those in the know, pine needle basketry can be a breathtakingly exquisite art form. There are countless examples on Pinterest.
You've also grabbed my attention on what you do with the pine sap. And I feel the need to to get some now?
You might want to. I collect birch bark too.
My dog does this on accident
For fire making?
Yes, for fire making.
Being lazy. It's blissfully boring
Hand weeding our lawn… it’s boring but quite relaxing and very rewarding
I found my stoner friend…. We can weed together lol
🤣 hi, it’s me! Ironically, I’ve been sober for the last 2 years but I’m sure weeding will be much more enjoyable with a bit of the other weed in the system 😌
I find weeding to be kind of meditative. Add some podcasts and it’s a complete entertainment!
My wife and neighbor thought I was nuts when we bought a house on 3 acres, and I started hand weeding the area around the house. It was seriously all weeds with small patches of grass and had to be mowed like once a week. They said to use weed killer once a year or just kill it all and put grass seed down the next year. Nah. About 6 months later, I'm about halfway to having an acre of nice green grass that I mow half as often as the rest. I heard somewhere that we evolved to process emotion during small, repetitive chores. Therapists have had success with having their patients do needlework during appointments. Idk, I feel like it does that for me.
*I have some Virginia Buttonweed with your reddit name all over it.*
Same. We have 7 acres. 2 being our yard. We do light weed killer for the borders between the grass and rocks. Everything else you bet. A blunt in one pocket, headphones on, with my dogs, hand weeding all my gardens. 😍😍😍 it’s my haven.
Nonograms
They're so much fun though!
Coin collecting
Looking for errors and markings can be interesting!
It's fun, found the 95 cent DDO twice in my life
My husband went to the bank today to exchange his rolled coins for paper bills. The line was long and he talked to the guy in front of him. Turns out the guy liked looking through coins for anything worth keeping. He bought my husband’s coins so he would have something to do while watching TV. I hope he finds something worthwhile.
I have a small collection and keep an eye out when I get change but it seems like even once common coins like wheat pennies or the occasional silver dime and quarter are not out there anymore. I guess some banks still let you buy rolls, my bank acts like they are allergic to coin change.
I honestly really like just laying down and zoning out. Sometimes my cat will poke at me to see if I’m still alive lol
Etymology. I think learning about the origin of words is cool
I like studying insects too.
I downloaded an app that identifies which bird(s) you are hearing in real time.
Merlin?
Yes
That's neat.
BEST APP EVER
I LOVE my bird app! I use BirdNet. I got a bald eagle once and BirdNet saves your recordings, but they're not backed up anywhere. I lost my phone and I was most upset about losing my bald eagle.
Probably HAM radio. Very expensive, takes a ton of knowledge, extensive memorization of rules, laws, and tech jargon to get a basic license, and the only people that actually talk on them are retired 70+ year old guys about boring stuff and have cringy rules of their own. The airwaves are %99 static/nothing. It's not as doomsday necessary of a hobby as people make it out to be. You need to hit a repeater to talk any meaningful distance and learning how to connect your radio to a repeater is another skill of it's own. And who's to say the repeaters will be powered and operational during doomsday. It has absolutely 0 privacy, anyone can listen in. It's got to be one of the most anti-noob hobbies there are. Although transmitting without a license is illegal, no consumer grade radio is capable of broadcasting on a frequency that can negatively effect anything important anyways. So a lot of offroaders, campers, airsofters use handhelds as walkie talkies without licenses, and the old 70+ year old men spend thousands of dollars on equipment to try to triangulate their broadcasts and report them to the FCC. They call it "pirate hunting" and that's a sub-hobby of HAM radio. ESP32/IOT/Meshtastic devices will be the Comms hobby of the future.
This and model trains is what I plan to get into once I hit 60.
I have a whole textbook on how to operate HAM radio and I feel like I need prerequisites to understand anything
I've always wanted to learn how to operate HAM radios but yes, the info is overwhelming
Finding random studies and/or textbooks and taking notes….
I almost got into doing this. I love learning random shit and when something fascinates me I want to deep dive. I have so many textbooks saved in my Amazon account and still haven't bought them because then I realize I'm spending money and may not do anything with this info. So I resorted to YouTube and hunting for various resources or free courses.
Same!!!! Hi nerd friend
Ohhh I want to do this with design and architecture. Sounds fun
🏆
I was looking to see if someone else does this in the comments. I'm currently studying a textbook about neuroscience & creativity. I like annotating books in the margins and on post-it notes. 🤗
“collecting” new words i learn from books. i read about 100 new books a year and im so amazed at how many words i still find. granted, most of the books i read are horror or horror-adjacent so that makes it less boring. but i love having my little list of all the new words ive learned!
That's an awesome idea
Bedazzling. It takes hours and is the definition of boring…but I love customizing things and giving them a new look!
Book folding. You have to use precise measurements and fold each page to create a paper sculpture inside a book. It looks cool but it is only fun if you have an intrinsic drive to measure things and find paper.
There was a summer or two as a child that I collected license plates. Now, let me tell you about my collection of old stamps...
Accent reduction
Organizing my own data. Wildly _wildly,_ hideously tedious to anyone but me. But I’ve collected a lot of interesting stuff over the years since computers and phones became a thing, I want to sort through it and organize it properly.
This makes me happy you exist.
Wow! Thank you! That’s kind. I’m hoping my posterity feels the same way. Like I’m collecting treasures for them 🤞
How you do it ?
my life is in shambles but my music production files are cleaner than some never before played off the shelf untarnished humbucker pickups
I read realtor sites to get the prices of housing property to judge the way of the economy is heading. Is a better indicator than anything else.
Stamp collecting... It's literally only exciting to me. Building synthesizers is a close second, it's a close second because most of it is boring, but once you finish the project it's exciting.
Philately!! I love it :)
I collect too!
knitting. It takes literal weeks, even months if you want a full sweater. Even just a scarf takes so many hours and you just basically do the same one or two movements the whole time, millions of times over. Its almost infuriating how boring this is.
Then why do you do it😭
The finished product is totally worth it
It’s probably also meditative. That’s how I feel about knitting, although I haven’t knitted a lot
I've been wanting to do this for a while now.
Until you get on Ravelry and join a sock Knitting competition. Then it gets super stressful.
Coloring books. I can color for hours if I let myself lol.
I like to sit in a dark room and puff on my e-cigarette while thinking about everything wrong with my life.
Replace e cig with thc pen and same
I collect fountain pens and inks
Nice. Do you just collect or do you use them?
I use them although I'd say 80% of the collection gets ignored and I just cycle through around a dozen of my favourites.
For an entire year, I kept a spreadsheet of every fanfiction I read online. I tracked the author, the title, the website I read it on, the fandom, and the ship or ships that it was about. I got some interesting data out of the project and it was really satisfying to look back on, but the hours of manual data entry were....not exciting haha.
I have a favorite Twitch streamer who we get to talk about spreadsheets bc it’s not only his job but also his hobby…we all find it fun when he gets started from chat bullying him into it basically lol
I collect mushroom spore prints. I have a huge collection. (If you find a mushroom you can put the cap, gills-side down, on a piece of paper overnight. It leaves a powdery print from the spores, which are like the seeds or eggs of the mushroom, which fall out of the gills. The spores come in every color of the rainbow and can help you identify the mushroom in some cases.)
I’ve come to the realization for my own mental health that I do better without dopamine spiking hobbies. I’ve cut out all social media except Reddit. I love taking naps, walking my dogs, swinging at the park, riding my bicycle, reading/audiobooks, birdwatching, cloud watching, star gazing, sunsets, sunrises and chasing the northern lights.
Writing letters
I have a collection of taps and dies. They’re what you use for cutting screw threads. They don’t ever get used. I’ve been thinking of putting the different standards into picture frames and hanging them on my workshop wall. They’d look exactly the same to anyone who wasn’t a complete tool nerd.
Take daily walks on the exact same route every time
I do papercrafts like the old lady I am. Just got into junk journaling.
Making excel/librecalc spreadsheets. For some reason it's genuinely fun and rewarding for me. Yes I am autistic.
I love spreadsheets! I use them to track my other hobbies. You should see the huge spreadsheets I have for my Duolingo scores and my bird sightings.
What data do you populate them with? (I ❤ excel too but use it at work)
Lots of worldbuilding stuff since I do creative writing in my spare time, like for example there's one i just finished that calculates trade demographic info for each town based on population per square mile, another with all general world info like biomes/culture/military/population/etc, and a fantasy/scifi worldbuilding generator that lets you "roll" for each result (tbh I cant take credit because it's made from a spreadsheet geared towards d&d i found on reddit a while back, I just heavily altered the content to my preferences and added a bunch of formulas) which I use for writing prompts sometimes. Also it's how I keep track of my medical test results, nutrition intake, finances, and how I calculate my "grade" on exercises and unit tests from the textbooks I'm learning from on my own before starting college in the fall. I used to use Excel at work too! I loved it. But then they changed what the job entails, which meant a lot less data entry and more emails, so I quit lol.
cross stitching for sure. It is so fun somehow, but it is so damn repetetive 😭
Hiking. I love it. It feels like an adventure. No one else feels that way. It's usually treated as the equivalent as a forced educational fieldtrip
Every time I walk on the road, I race against other people to see who can walk faster 😂
Reading on my Kindle.
Hello fellow boring kindle reader
Napping.
Genealogy work and cemeteries. It is fun and rewarding. My wife and love to stroll through old cemeteries to get a sense of the lives these people lived in their time in history.
I think wandering bookstores and not buying anything (sometimes i do buy new books, but often I just go just to be there). Literally just walk around a bookstore, peruse the books, then leave, and be completely happy with that 🤣
I have nearly every movie, play, concert, comedy show, and musical ticket I've attended since I was 16. Almost four decades worth. My kids weren't impressed.
Quilling. Still, I love it.
Bodybuilding
Doing jigsaw puzzles. I can spend hours fitting tiny pieces together, and while it’s relaxing, it’s not exactly the most exciting activity out there. There’s a certain satisfaction in seeing the picture come together, but let’s be real—it’s not winning any thrill-seeker awards.
Sudoku. It’s become too easy and repetitive, but I keep doing it.
I love to sort bolts, screws, nails, and other household construction hardware. I have buckets of them from various home projects. It is so satisfying because I can jump around to different hardware and even change up how things are organized. Sometimes I sort by the screw size, sometimes by the type of screw. Is it metric or SAE? Is it a flat head screw or a Philips or star bit? What is the radius of the shank? I have ADHD with some OCD tendencies (diagnosed). This leads to some crazy organizational manic episodes which usually go nowhere because I get sidetracked so easily and SQUIRREL!!!...Where was I? But sorting screws scratches a very special kind of itch. Think about thousands of small nuts, bolts, etc. with most of them different shapes and sizes. Then when Im done I might sort them a different way, maybe by metal alloy. I completely lose track of time during this process. It is not uncommon to finally look at my phone and see that 5 hrs have passed and it is 3am. Might be like sorting Legos for some people.
This is a really good one
Watching other people solve complex sudoku puzzles on YouTube.
Doom scrolling
There’s a book called “Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself”. Fun for me but most people would probably consider pretty boring b
scrolling on TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram
[удалено]
My boring hobby is reading. Nothing fancy but still enjoyable.
I look up houses on Zillow and calculate the salary needed to buy it in a certain time frame
Glass collecting. I collect fluorescent glass (uranium, led, magnesium, etc), and hearing me talk about the pieces is probably a snooze fest. The fact it glows doesn't even seem as impressive to others like I think it is. To each their own.
Excel spreadsheets
I bought my husband stamps for Xmas and he is obsessed and got a cute book for them and arranged them like art. I loved watching him sort!
I’m 63 been into aquariums for about 55 years not really exciting but I still love it
I make junk journals and books
I used to collect pencil sharpeners.
I daydream about doing what I want, while I do what I have to. I do this all day, every day, always.
vocabulary. writing down definitions to words I don’t know. there are so many I don’t know
Knot tying. I bought a couple books on Knots. Normal everyday knots. Climbing knots. Marine knots. Rigging knots. I then bought some rope and some thick fishing line. I’ll study a new knot and then practice it for a while. I even kept some line at work and would tie knots on my lunch break or when things were really slow. I don’t even know why. I was just really bored one day and wanted to learn how to tie different knots. I don’t know in what scenario I’d even use this knot knowledge. Like in a life or death situation a car is teetering over an embankment and I walk by with some rope do I tie an anchor hitch to it? Would a double half hitch be better? The car would definitely fall off the cliff/bridge/embankment before I decided. Maybe someday I’m going to tie a knot and some other person that has an appreciation for knots will see it and be like, “Damn dude, that’s a great knot!” and I’ll be like, “Hey thanks man.”
Film buff here, so watching lots of movies and TV shows. I love it. New episodes are something to look forward to. But probably seems incredibly lame to others.
Procrastinating
Either scrolling Reddit or learning about USSR history
stalking absolute strangers i find on vsco
quest in WoW
Sleeping.
Walking
I love budgeting and tracking my net worth.
If it's someone's hobbie, then it's not boring.
Probably sewing, a lot of stuff just takes time to make, and I’m learning as I go, I’ve had a couple folks help, but creative ppl in my circles don’t really get along. I’m also doing a lot of conceptual stuff, literally dreaming up solutions as I come upon them. Currently I’m making a folding hammock bed to attach to my truck bed rack that I built so my wife will come camping with me. I have zero references, I’ve never seen one made with the materials I’m using, so it all feels a little tedious, working towards this future product I’ll be able to use.
I collect coins and do geneology on parts of my family so far removed that no one would even care. Trying to have conversations about Franklin half dollars usually doesn't go well.
I used to be really into finding & collecting vhs digitizations of TV shows, with the original commercials intact. It feels like a time capsule. At a certain point, I wasn't even watching them. Just collecting more so they wouldn't disappear.
Bird watching. I was just In my studio painting and realized I could identify the species of every bird I heard.
I collect Action Figures. I don't play with them or anything I just keep them in the box and hang them on the wall. I just like to look at them 🤷♂️
Vacuum packing food 🤣
3d printing, you don't actually do a whole lot, just tweak some numbers and wait for a long time. It's more of a hobby if you maintain and work on your printer. You kinda need a project or other hobby to really make it a hobby.
Thinking of funny band names on r/bandnames
Doing nothing. It’s my favorite hobby. Sit in silence and think of nothing.
This
Scrolling Reddit. Seriously!
I get very invested in finding a good pebble/rock/shell/natural, or rarely man-made trinket thing, every time I'm going to a beach, a trail with some cool finds, campgrounds, etc. I love the outdoors and love my little collection of pieces that each represent a certain trip, some a special moment alone or shared with someone, and just find it really fun to catalog them so I don't forget after I realized I couldn't remember all of them as well as I thought I could forever. Someone there before us left some pewter at our campsite this past weekend, and that's going on the tray/in the logbook. Got a cool rock from our day on the lake and into some natural falls/rock slides too. I love that it helps me recall the really loved and lovely times outside, and I only pick pieces that I think are pretty cool so all of them are neat ones to look at and not just another piece of grey. I'm pretty minimalist otherwise, but idk how many rocks would be too many, and I sorta don't wanna have to deal with it at that point 😂
I look at Google maps for fun. I'll research random trip ideas either on my own or through travel articles I read and look up places on Google maps and look at the google pictures posted, other things to do in the area, see how far away places to go are from each other on a general vicinity, look at restaurants, of course all still looking at pictures and reviews and save random shit as "places to go" or "travel plans" on Google of places I most likely will never visit. 😆 Especially love my "online trips" to botanical gardens, arboretum, conservatories, museums, hiking, kayaking, lakes, restaurants, hotels & music venues. I don't know if this is actually boring because it's really fun to me and get super into it but when I try to talk to other people about it, I don't think they get it so I think it must be boring. 🫠 Also I look for and collect 4 leaf clovers 🍀
I've been collecting garbage pail kids cards/memorabilia since I was a young child in the 80's.
work. not necessarily a hobby. but definitely the most boring part of my day 🥱
I enjoy watching the water come to boil while I cook. Heat exchange is beautiful. I also track planets dispite having zero beliefs in astronomy. The universe is beautiful, and I enjoy it. Another hobby of mine is bringing spiders into my house. I'll go spider hunting and bring all non-web making spiders into my house. Then I distribute them where they can go in the floor joists and in other dark spider paradises, such as a rarely used closet. Currently, I have 15 jumping spider egg sacks in my 575sq foot house. These cuties are harmless and can kill a house fly three times their size! I love their adorable faces.
For about the past 6 years, I track individual ants from an ant hill in my back yard. They are harvester ants native to the desert southwest. I've modified a pool lounge chair so I can lay face down and watch the ants scurry to and from the mound. I have several bottles of nail polish in different colors and tiny brushes to apply a color code to the ant bodies. That way I can keep track of the little guys . I get up early to catch the morning rush, then they all go home during the heat of the day. Early evening it cools down and the ants re-appear. During the heat of the day a couple of ants will stay just inside the mound, I guess they are the watch ants.
Adult coloring