Whats a hobby/craft that you wouldn't expect that has an incredibly high ceiling either monetarily or in sheer skill?

Stern@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 243 points –

For example, I'm sure the average joe doesn't know just how expensive calligraphy pens can be, or how deep the rabbit hole goes on video game speedruns.

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Keyboards are generally known about, but the ergo part of it is a rabbit hole within the rabbit hole. Some people literally design, 3D print, wire up, solder and program one-off keyboards because they don't like the ones made by other people.

It's infectious too. I REALLY want to get good with one! and don't get me started on the absolute craziest style: chorded keyboards! Insane!

I wonder if someone could outperform a Stenographer with a chorded?

Steno machines are also "chorded", and they type in a form of shorthand where sounds, words, and phrases can be represented by just a few characters. My guess is that given equal skill levels, a steno machine would still be faster.

Stenographers usually use something pretty similar so I doubt it. The ones I've seen (to be fair, live captioners, not stenographers) use something that's closer to a piano than a normal keyboard, and it types full words rather than letters, but also has a regular typing functionality. Pretty cool to watch honestly.

No way. Stenographers can transcribe speech live. Some have been timed at close to 400 wpm. While the top chorded typing is closer to 250wpm. Good, but nowhere close to a stenotype. Both are pretty ridiculously fast though. A pretty fast typist can barely approach 100.

I switched to colemak-DH a while ago and it's been great. Much more comfortable than QWERTY even on a standard keyboard.

Have you tried one? I’ve been pretty curious about them

Not yet but I am seriously considering building a badass ergo keyboard at some point once I see a good enough design to copy.

Oh my gosh, I searched it and it looks hard to use but once you get good, you can type faster than the fastest typist using a regular keyboard.

Interesting!

Oh hey, you called? https://imgur.com/a/INk7FzQ

that is a fantastic build. and the wax lacing! It's such a lost art, but it works so damn well! Next PC build I do I'm lacing all of my cabling.

You're very brave showing your wiring.

Just built a simple 3x3 macropad and I spent several hours trying to keep every last bit of the wiring clean and I still have a rats nest....

Have run across a community for that a lot since coming on Lemmy. It is pretty crazy and I had no idea.

They were/are one of the largest enthusiast groups on Reddit, so it makes sense they have a large presence on Lemmy too.

I did exactly this! It was super fun! Ergodox keyboard is very expensive. I spent about $40 on my custom one. It works great too :)

How did you spend only $40 on a custom ergo? When I built mine, I 3d printed the cases myself, but it's still $30 for cheap key switches, $20 for cheap keycaps, $20 for a pro micro, and at least $40 for PCBs,unless you handwire.

Or did you reuse existing switches and keycaps?

Sorry, forgot to mention, I handwired and reused key caps. I have a lot of extra sets from liking keyboards for a while lol.

I also used a pi pico which took some extra tlc but saved a good chunk of money (1 pico is 7 dollars and only one is necessary).

The DIY fallacy. “You can do this yourself for just $20. You only need some string, a plastic bottle cap. And $5k of equipment and materials that have accumulated in your garage from around a decade of on and off hobbyist hoarding. Then you too can own a solar powered battery 3D printed fusion ferromagnetic screwdriver.”

I get it, but to be fair, the keycaps I already had were only about $20 on Amazon. So if you want to be pedantic I spent $60 total. Still beats the $300 plus for the ergodox. Also, if you really want to get into it, it took me around 25 hours to fully complete since I opted to hand wire. So factor in whatever your hourly rate is times 25 hours to get the opportunity cost of the diy job. Maybe you’re right and it just makes sense to buy the darn thing. At least I had fun though.

Most people don't even own a soldering iron to wire it all. That's another $20 right there. Just, it's fine to say DIY is about the fun. And by all means, anyone who wants to have fun tinkering with some tech, go ahead, it's a blast. But it's never about the money. It's disingenuous to tell people, “Oh I did this $300 at retail machine for $10”. No, you didn't, you are just doing creative accounting and failing to report previous expenses. Because if it could be done for $10, big manufacturers would be doing it for $7, because they have the advantage of economics of scale.

The nice thing is that it’s possible to find your “endgame” where you are satisfied without spending a TON. I’m happy with my Drop ALT, stock key caps, and Zeal Zilent v2s. Mind you that was my 3rd or 4th board of varying “depth” in the scene. 🤣

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Maybe not as expensive as the others, but crochet/knitting/sewing all start off fairly cheap, and then the next thing you know you're offering to service old men behind a Joann's fabric because you need this particular fabric and you need an entire bolt of it, and it's the one fabric in the entire fucking store that isn't on their amazing buy one get 73 free sale for the week.

Nothing like spending $100 and 80 hours on a pair of socks for yourself because they don't sell the ones you want.

got socks?

Those are gorgeous though. I don't have the skill to do anything like that yet. I'm mainly stuck on sleep masks and warshrags. Haha. That cabling looks amazing

I feel like there's a collision of fetishes here about to start paying for your yarn habit.

Do you have a link to this pattern? I like the heel here and I don't love the one I currently use.

Pattern? No, I never use patterns. The heal is a standard "afterthought heal". You can find instructions on YouTube and other sites. It is my favorite heal and the easiest to darn when the time comes.

When doing socks I do a test swatch to figure out my stitches per in for rows and columns. Then the rest is all math. Once I finished the first I just started cabling the top of the foot. When I got to the ankle I started cabling all the way around. I kept going until they were as high as I wanted them.

When I learned to knit my instructor was pissed by the end of the fist days lessons because I had knitted several things with no patterns. "How do you know what to do?" "Math."

Thank you so much for the name of it! I'm a beginner and only knit the same socks over and over again. I have been experimenting with different sock patterns without a guide, but not the heel construction.

Wow, these look amazing! Great job :)

I just started crocheting this week 🥲

It's a wonderful habit! Don't listen to me. Haha. Fiber crafts are seriously awesome. I'm a total novice at crochet, an intermediate knitter (Portuguese style), and I sew half way well. It's so much fun, and so worth it. ... Just read your coupons carefully.

After one project I'm already feeling that about the coupons 🙃 But it's really fun and I enjoy it a lot! I can't wait to dive deeper into it

Its so good. I'd recommend you get cotton yarn. It tends to fray less than acrylic and easier to get your hook in and see stitches. Also, amigurumi for making toys is really cool.

There's so many options for amigurumi I don't know where to start! I just need to pick something and go with it haha

The problem is not the price of the yarn, the problem is that none of us have self control and will hoard thousands of dolars in yarn in a closet and not use it because "it's too pretty I need the perfect project for it".

...and then we go out and buy more yarn

Yep! Especially buying like ethically sourced yarn and stuff. It's why I buy acrylic yarn because buying yarn from local dyers is difficult as.

Same boat. I'm poor as fuck. I hate that I make so many decisions to buy things I know aren't the option ethically, and that applies so hard to yarn. Really anything in the textiles industry. I try not to buy animal fiber at all unless it's thrifted.

3D printing! You can start out cheap but you can get STUPID expensive, and it’s the biggest most meandering rabbit hole I know of

It's expensive, but it's also expensive in lots of different avenues. It's not like you can just go "well I'll never buy a big pre-built proprietary printer then I'll just make it myself! Open source forever!" Because that's the road to leads to sourcing and building your own voron from scratch and spending a thousand dollars on parts

Because that's the road to leads to sourcing and building your own voron from scratch and spending a thousand dollars on parts

Looks at my 2.4 sitting on my workbench.

Can confirm, that's exactly how it happened. 😬

I've been amazed at how cheap it's become since I built my first few printers. I spent thousands building printers that aren't half as good as a $300 printer today.

And getting consistent prints at a decent speed can be challenging! (Slow and good vs fast and unreliable is a common choice.)

I can highly recommend the Klipper firmware if you haven't already, I can print at much higher speeds than marlin firmware and the print quality is actually better

I just bought an elegoo neptune 4 pro and thought about buying more filament already. Hopefully it will only be filament and not more machines or something

But I NEED all the different filament colors @___@

3D printing really isn't expensive, especially since you can create a lot of stuff for cents. I'm considering a new extruder for my Ender 3 (Looking at the LDO orbiter v2) and that's €70, which sounds expensive for the printer, but compared to any other hobby that's peanuts

It can get expensive - especially if you start looking into high-end / commercial quality printers.

...or if you burn through 3 reels of TPU just to get one goddamn wrist rest to print. 😩

A bambu x1 Carbon is like €1000 right? That sounds expensive, but with the amount of money spent on my car, I could have had multiple of those

Yeah, €70 is not much for an upgrade for a hobby. That's the price of a mid-range chain for a mountain bike and chains are not upgrades, they're consumables, which you buy at least once a year, lol.

3D printing can be expensive, but I disagree that it is stupid expensive.

Gymnastics. The skill part is obvious but monetarily its more than i expected. I thought it would be like going to a regular gym but its usually much more expensive to use the gyms and thats if you can find a time slot where adult males can train.

Magic: the gathering.

There's several different styles of play known as "formats".

The Cheapest being "Standard". Which is the latest 3-5 sets released. The deck of 75 card deck can cost upwards of £500.

Then the most popular format, modern, which is the last 20ish years of release. The average deck there can be upwards of £1,500.

Then there's legacy and vintage where decks are in the high 4 figures and some even in the 5 figures.

My roommate is big into magic, but he refuses to spend a lot of money on it. He makes counterfeit cards of whatever he wants and gets a deck custom printed for $40. He's also part of a discord group that makes cool fake cards or changes artwork on existing ones.

They're not allowed to have the official back but since he uses sleeves no one can tell. He's really up front about it and talks about how he couldn't get into the hobby or make the decks he likes if he had to pay for real cards.

There's nothing wrong with proxying. It only becomes an issue if you're playing in a tournament, or your opponent insist on using real cardboard since they probably spent a lot and so everyone should as well.

Don't forget commander, which a lot of places claim is now the most popular format. Pre-constructed commander decks can cost as little as $20-40 and competitive commander decks can easily go into the thousands.

The game also has a very high skill ceiling. I think that's one of the main reasons why magic has such a broad age range to its player base. There's plenty of weird lines of play, from strange card / rule interactions to weird deck themes no one else would think of.

Isn’t “pauper” cheaper than standard?

Also don’t forget that when the meta changes that expensive deck’s value can change (usually for the worse)

I quit playing in 1996. It wasn't too rare to have a $2000 to $3000 deck even back then. And that's when every card store had a Black Lotus for sale without having to notify their insurance company.

I always felt like Modern was cheaper in the long run than Standard. Spending hundreds of dollars every few months on a new set didn’t speak to me. Whereas I could buy a few cards here and there to upgrade me modern decks.

I'd assume a lot of people sell/trade as the next set rotation is coming around no? I'm not sure how card economy works in magic but in yugioh today's meta is tomorrow's budget, surely there's people that want to buy in play in non rotating formats

I feel like games workshop table top games(e.g. Warhammer 40k) would fit in to this description if an individual had never heard of table top wargaming, or their reputation.

They're made of plastic? It can't cost that much right!?!?

but the rules, they can't be too complicated? It's just game !?!?

Oh you wanted to understand the story? Well let me show you a library on the first ten thousand years after the dawn of time to get you started

I am still amazed about how much money you can spend on making coffee at home. 300€ for a manual grinder - "that's the cheao chinese stuff" wtf

I've got a £1000 espresso machine and that the cheap one. We also have all the pour over shite - scales, grinder, gooseneck kettle, Hario... It adds up quickly.

And when you invite a bunch people over and tell them yeah we're into coffee and they ask you for coffee and you're like... Ok I am incapable of making coffee for more than 2 people in under 15 minutes, I need to pull out the senseo pad machine.

Absolutely.. someone at work was like, grab a coffee, see you in 5. Dude, it takes at least 15 minutes to make a coffee in this house.

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Love coffee as a hobby for this reason. You can start with $20 to get simple pour over equipment or even nicer venas but you can go far and high with it eventually or stop at the $20

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Rock climbing. To start out you basically just need $150 worth of shoes and some $5 chalk. Trad climbing or big wall climbing can be 5 figures and a dozen years worth of experience. And the skill ceiling is probably obvious, but it's become an Olympic sport for a reason.

Bouldering here in the Netherlands can start pretty easily:

  • € 10-15 entry
  • € 5 to rent shoes, although you can bring any clean sport shoes yourself

And that's it!

You can look into buying shoes and memberships if you're really into it, but even then € 150 for shoes and € 40-60 a month for a membership is cheaper than my idea of an expensive hobby, like Magic the Gathering or PC building and gaming.

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Warhammer 40k

Comparably, Gunpla also goes hard on costs (though imo its more for associated materials like paint then the models themselves, which can be pricy but tend not to be.) and the quality of some of what folks put out there is staggering, as shown in the 10th Gunpla Builders World Cup

I appreciate that link, thanks. I have built a few, haven't even painted though. I just like building stuff I don't need glue for.

Those builds remind me of a guy I worked with that back in the day would be a model builder for cars that the model companies hired to build the model for the box covers before they mostly started using photos of real cars. He was just so talented. Even bashed some kits so they could be molded to create new models for some companies. One of them was when they wanted an old woody station wagon so he basically took 10 different kits and created it for their mold.

I don't think the average Joe would know how expensive Warhammer 40k or model trains are.

Is it cheaper if you 3d print your own minis?

Short answer is probably not, it depends.

If you have a printer set up and ready to go, it certainly can be. But for me to get a printer and all the fixings (printer, cure/wash station, resin, tent and ventilation for fumes) I was out about 700 Cad. And then you gotta get stls, some are easy others are way harder. Some of those are free and some are paid. And then I myself am paying for lychee pro, so that's around a Netflix sub down the drain. Once that's all clear there is the insane time investment. I can easily spend 30-60 min processing a job and prepping the printer for the next print. Finding, prepping an stl to print if everything is good can take as short as an hour, but can take much longer if things are hard to find, or if it's a complex object to support. And then if you fail that print, all that time and resin (not too terrible, my large prints are like 5 bucks, small minis are under a dollar) is wasted.

After all that, there is still things I plan to buy. I lack the patience to try printing void dragon c'tan, and there's only one source that I could hope to buy a decent imotekh stl, and it'd be more expensive than buying the model (I regret buying it. That is the first and last time I ever get a finecast model).

For me the fun is in the journey not the product. I've had a lot of fun printing my necrons. I don't plan on playing in anything official, just friends so that angle isn't an issue. I went into it wanting to take up 3d printing as its own hobby and I do not regret going this route, but building a single 2k army like I plan to is not worth it. Past that I imagine the savings will roll in, but I don't really care for another army. Ethics wise I'm happy to vote with my wallet by diverting money to printing VS. paying for overpriced models.

I feel like learning how to 3d print is a skill that could be very useful. Maybe I'm trying to justify it 😅

I'm not sure if that's viable for 40k. You might not be welcomed to play with fake minis. You could surely do that with friends though.

My understanding is that you're only allowed to play what you own, no stand ins.

So literally pay to win?

Well, more pay to play.

But if you want to participate in a battle with a large army, you need to have that army.

It is a bit more complicated than that. Basically, people you play with won't care so long as you've painted it to a reasonable standard and there isn't some massive size difference that'd give some notable advantage or disadvantage compared to official minis. The same is true of official ones where people are picky about unpainted plastic but its likely more a thing with printed ones. Independent game stores also won't really give a shit since you're likely buying paints and stuff from them anyway.

GW stores are the ones that will have a problem with it, along with tournaments they host. I have heard stories of people getting shit for using forgeworld stuff (which is GW's speciality site basically, they sell the really big models and some more niche like, regiment-specific stuff) in stores because it isn't something the stores themselves will specifically sell. This is because of corporate policy though, no one wants to lose their job.

Probably more well known but with the whole 'live edge' fad from a couple years ago now, some people don't realize you can spend upwards of 20-30k on a single piece of some types of raw lumber.

I feel like woodworking is one of those traditional “this hobby is expensive” things, but I was shocked by just how hard it is to do some things (like hollow out a bowl-shaped divot in a piece of wood) without the proper tools. And the proper tool is sometimes a single hook knife that’s $89 dollars.

You can get 8 foot of pine from any hardware store for $10, but if you want to do anything other than cross cut that pine to different lengths, you’re going to need to drop some cash.

Of course, the skill ceiling for woodworking is enormous.

Woodworking can get crazy expensive, but like most hobbies, you can get into it gradually for relatively low cost. I started with a cordless drill and a circular saw, then gradually bought used tools and restored them. If I were to buy everything new in my shop, it would easily be $15-20k, but I've spent maybe $2k over 5 years. The most I've spent on any one tool was a $400 miter saw a few months ago on sale, almost everything else has been stuff that's older than me or inexpensive tools that work just as well as pricier options.

Good hardwood is fucking expensive though. I found a local mill where I can get cherry for $4/bdft or walnut for $5.50/bdft (bdft = board foot, volumetric measurement equivalent to 12"x12"x1"). Somewhere like Woodcraft charges $15-18/bdft for walnut, which is $60+ for a 6" wide, 8ft long, 1" thick board.

ETA: It does annoy me when every woodworking video comment section is bombarded with complaints about how expensive tools are. Yes, Sawstop and Powermatic are obscenely expensive. A DeWalt job site table saw is more than enough for most hobbyists starting out. So is a used saw you can get for $100 or less. It's very easy to blow through $20k outfitting a shop, but it's also very easy to outfit a shop with old, quality tools for a fraction of that price. This is what I've spent over five years

  • 6" Jet jointer from 1973: $240

  • 12" Parks planer from 1943-1986 (no idea on exact date): $200. Used a 13" Woodtek lunchbox planer for a few years before this. I got that for free because they don't make linkage gears for it anymore, and I was able to 3D print replacements.

  • DeWalt job site table saw, new in 2018: $325

  • Wen drill press, new in 2019: $70

  • Wen scroll saw, new in 2019: $60

  • harbor freight miter saw, used: $80 (fuck this thing, would never cut square no matter how much I tried to tune it)

  • DeWalt compound sliding miter saw, new 2023: $400

  • Harbor freight lathe, new 2020: $150-200 (don't remember exactly)

  • shaper from 1978 + $2k in tooling: $40 at auction

  • 7-10 various hand planes, all used from eBay or marketplace: $80

  • knockoff 14" delta bandsaw from late 80s: $40

  • harbor freight dust collector, new 2023 (gift): ~$250-300

  • slow speed bench grinder, new 2021: $90

  • various hand saws, 2016-2023: probably $100

  • various chisels, new 2016-2023: ~$120

All in, $2,100 over 5 years. I sold ~$1,500 worth of random projects in that time, and gained a ton of enjoyment from it.

Even if you do go big and spend a lot of money on tools, as long as you have disposable income and you're not forgoing your/your family's basic needs, there's nothing wrong with spending money on things you enjoy. It's ok to enjoy things.

I hear you on lumber prices. Woodcraft near me ended up having a sale on some exotics around the holidays and I bought as much of it as I could afford. I justified it by making basically everyone I knew salt boxes as gifts.

Otherwise, it’s hard to get ahold of gorgeous lumber without having a huge bankroll.

It's hard man. I was living in Alaska when I really got into woodworking, and I had one overpriced option for a really limited selection of hardwood. I managed to get some old maple flooring from a guy that was contracted to replace a basketball court, and got some old redwood from a water tower that was taken down, but otherwise I just used pine for everything for the first few years.

Best advice I can offer is to find a local mill. Facebook groups are good for finding local people that just do it on the side and/or don't have a website. Ideally, find someone with a kiln, or be prepared to wait for months to years for it to dry. You can also find some good deals at auctions and sometimes on FB marketplace

The only wood I buy at Woodcraft nowadays is for small lathe projects when they have blanks on sale

I’ve never gone to a mill or even a lumberyard (only some speciality stores from time to time), but I think I’m going to take your advice and look around.

I tend to use the ol’ pine and plywood for most of my projects, but I want to get more into making furniture and getting a source now ain’t a bad idea.

They're generally a great experience. It's way different than Lowe's/HD, and generally better selection for cheaper than places like Woodcraft or Rockler. There's typically a wide range in widths/thicknesses, so have a rough idea of what you need and be ready to mentally adapt your build if they don't have as many wide boards as you need. Some places will have a minimum purchase requirement, but the few I've gone to don't. Typically, I spend $200-400 for a trip, which covers a few projects for me.

Added bonus of going to a mill instead of a distributor, sometimes they'll have waste you can take for free/really cheap! Great for small projects or lathe stuff

There's a YouTube channel I saw a while back where the guy films the process of cutting slabs. When you take into consideration the sheer size of trees that have to be used to make a slab, and then the size of the equipment that has to be used, and the weight, it's easy to see how the cost of even a clean grained slab can be through the roof, not to mention something that has artistic or desirable figuring in the grain.

Warhammer 40k. I heard about the game years ago and thought it sounded pretty cool. Didn't realize that unlike D&D, it's not something generally played without minis. And it's a massive war game. So you need a lot of minis. And it's a massive war game. So you need to know how to strategize or you're gonna suck. High cost and high skill.

I just read the lore instead. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Wargaming is something I've always wanted to try but don't want to spend the time and money to actually try it. It's just way too high of a barrier.

There's a cool game called Moonbreakers that has great model painting tools. I hope someday Warhammer 40k gets a tabletop accurate video game with model painting and everything. I can see why they wouldn't, because it may take away from tabletop, but I'd bet it'd work the other way. It'd create a way for people to try it before committing that much to it, instead of seeing the barrier and backing out.

I'll do the reverse - I think most people would expect homebrewing beer to be quite hard to get started with, but for $50 you can get everything you need to start making a really quite good beer, and save money at the same time (homebrewed beer is usually much cheaper than store bought)

If you want to get started search for "brew in a bag" and buy a kit beer mix. You'll need a handful of equipment like a brew bag and fermenter, but that stuff is really cheap.

Then you can indeed go down a massive rabbit hole of refinements, but it just amazed me that the first beer you make will already be a good one.

From my experience, it's not that much cheaper, especially after considering time cost. One issue with it though is that you get a lot of the same type of beer, which isn't totally bad but also somewhat puts a stopper on trying new beer. It's great if you've got plenty of people to share it with though, but I don't have enough that enjoy beer.

Sim racing. An entry level wheel cost 100, an okay one 300 and the most expensive I've seen is 100,000

https://www.f1authentics.com/products/red-bull-simulator-championship-edition

If you can buy a decent car for the cost of your sim racing rig, it's time to evaluate.

I know people with real race cars, it's lots of breaking down and hitting things for big money.

A full sim rig with VR and motion is probably cheaper with the same brain chemicals, and you can just do it whenever.

Maybe it is well known, but home brewing. You start out with a couple of buckets and a stockpot, next thing you know you're spec-ing out a 10hL brewery with your mates. There is always "just one more" thing that you need to buy to make the perfect beer.

At least with brewing beer, it’s offset by the price of beer. It costs about half the cost of a commercial corny keg to brew 5 gallons.

If you’re disciplined and brew frequently (and drink unhealthy amounts of beer,) you can pretty easily break even or save money. I calculated something like 10 brews to break even on my set up and didn’t buy anything extra until after 10 brews. You can get great deals on used stuff too since people frequently get sober and drop out of the hobby and liquidate all their equipment. This is the dark side of the hobby.

Kinda dorky but I have a spread sheet tracking all of my brewing expenses. I also calculate how much that beer would have cost of I bought it and subtract my brewing expenses from it. The goal is to keep that number from being negative. Right now I’m pretty close to 0 because I upgraded my temperature control abilities to brew lagers.

It costs about half the cost of a commercial corny keg to brew 5 gallons.

PSA: This is only true if you value your labor at $0.

Also only true if you were going to spend that money on that keg anyway.

Similar to "I saved 50% on these leggings!" That's only true if you were already going to buy the leggings anyway.

If it was a purely cost saving venture, that would be a fair point. But it’s a hobby, I don’t view it that way. The process is fun and once you get past just making kits, the creative aspect is pretty rewarding.

If I’m going to look at literally any of my hobbies in terms of whether it’s worth my time, there’s very few things that are worth doing. Should I not brew beer or build furniture or make bread because in my day job I get paid more than it would cost to just buy things? What would I fill my time with?

Only if you're trying to sell it, otherwise you just are paying your time to enjoy something you like doing

Do you think you drink more to keep that number from going negative?

At first, definitely but I learned some restraint in order to not die. I have a lot of beer drinking friends and family though which helps.

You sound like you were far more restrained than I. I still went out to sessions at the assorted local craft places to see what was new (this was in the early 00s) while brewing an ever increasing amount. I has massive crates of bottles I was giving out and eventually keykegs. Finally I gave up and got a job at an actual brewery. No regrets, but also, so many regrets.

I priced a 220v hookup in my garage so I can boil water faster... so tempting, but so expensive.

Skydiver here.

It's not just money, it's not just skill that makes you a successful jumper.

It's a certain type of attitude and the ability to think when you've aimed yourself at a planet. Not everyone can do it. To be blunt, there is a large part of the population that shouldn't do it, because they have terrible decision making ability.

As far as money, I went through the student program in the mid 90's and it cost me about $1200, if I recall correctly. My first rig, used, was $4000. My second rig, new, was just over $8000. I have 4500 jumps most of which I paid ~ $20 each for. I don't want to do that math.

$103,200, including gear and training. You're welcome.

The best decision I can think of to make when someone asks me if I would like to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and plumet toward the ground at high speeds would be to say "No thanks."

Former skydiver here. The best response I ever heard to the "why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane" question was, "you should see the planes we jump out of."

Do you really need a good plane when you are all skydivers? It doesn't even need to land for you to do what you came for.

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Model trains. Sure, you can have a lot of fun with a 100 dollar toy train, but those brass engines are very shiny and very expensive.

Seen a couple basement setups in my time though tbh never saw an especially impressive one. Most tend to just emulate rural routes and small towns. Always thought more fanastic scenery (Surely there has to be at least one person out there who does D&D figure stuff and trains.) would be great, but I suppose that it would detract from the star of the show.

Surpringly not, no model train manufacturer does fantasy stuff. Best you can get is custom stuff.

Playing music has basically no skill ceiling.

And you can get by without a lot of equipment. Though a used audio interface and an old laptop at least is nice to have.

True. But also equally true if you do buy equipment and indulge in every temptation. There is absolutely egregiously expensive gear in all shapes and forms.

The last synth on my "really really want" list is hovering around $15k right now. I'll probably never get one :(

Ah yeah the gear goblins are real I swear. They keep telling me I absolutely need a 6-string fretless to get good and I think they might actually be right you know, it just makes so much sense. Why waste time limiting myself to 4-strings. But they also think I'm too dumb and will have to get a 5 string before, I really need to take baby steps after all... Ahh well, it's not like I needed that 5k anyway.

Amateur astronomy, especially astrophotography. Sure, budget setups can be had but nothing beats your own permanent observatory.

I wanted, but saw that you start with a simple dobsonian, then upgrade to a newton on a equatorial mount, then a schmit-cassegrain, then a bigger mount (thousands of $), then motor drive, then goto, then 48MP CCD, then a Meade 12", then then then and you spent a fortune on it, and you can use it only on some cloudless nights :-/

Bro stop bullshitting us. A casual would not know this much detail 🤣🤣😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅

Coffee, particularly espresso.

Meh, the coffee machinery is more of a show-off between people who can afford it.

You can get very decent espresso with a $150 portafilter. It’s the beans that make the difference. And even while good beans cost some money, they are totally affordable to normies.

Also the grinder is important, probably more so than the machine.

But even then it’s important to have a grinder, not some random scrambler. Is totally affordable.

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Aquariums. It's shocking how much money you can spend on fish and how easily you can kill them all if you don't know what you're doing. Even worse, if you're really into it, you can't have just one aquarium.

We had one for years. I cleaned it one day just like I had done a hundred times before. The next day the water turned cloudy and all our fish died. Sold the tank and cabinet a few days later. Having an aquarium is a 2nd job.

We had all the fish die in our aquarium once when I was a kid. Was random and unexplainable at first. Then I found out someone had run a powerful ozone machine to combat mold in the house and no one thought about the fish tank.

As much as I'd love to have a nice live coral aquarium to look at in my living room, fuck everything about taking care of one.

Racing drones.

It turns out when you crash your $500 drone into a brick wall at 50mph, shit breaks and you get to spend more money if you want to fly it into another wall

This has both, really. People also have no idea how hard it is to pilot the quick, expensive little bastards. You're gonna spend a good chunk of time in the simulator before you can do anything with a real one. But hey, at least you can fix them, unlike DJI stuff where at the smallest little thing it's bricked.

Oh definitely. DJI is good for photography and some types of video, but that's about it. I'd avoid DJI for just about everything else.

I feel like a lot of people might think miniature building/painting could be easy - or at least quick.

It isn't.

From my understanding it's also expensive as hell.

As an alternative, the game Moonbreakers has a really impressive model painting tool. You paint your figures that you play the game with (though there are defaults you can choose from also). It's an under-appreciated game with top tier voice-acting also. The story is told in audio form you can play whenever in the game, so you can just chill out painting while listening to the game's story too.

Woodworking and collecting old tech. Both my hobbies / crafts, both started very cheap and very little, today in my workshop there's upwards 60k only in machines, not counting the tools, if you want to have a working computer from the 60s or even 50s, you'll pay. And pay and pay. My advice: collect old cars. Or yachts. Cheaper :)

Woodworking is as expensive as you want it to be. Other than a good table saw (which some people would argue isnt necessary for true hand tool fanatics) equipment just makes things easier and there's almost always another way.

Model railroads.

They fit both the signifigant monetary input and high skill criteria at the top end of the hobby.

If you don't want you child to do drugs, get it into model trains, it will never have enough money for drugs.

Just sold off half of my other hobby to fund this one. I'm starting to think model trains are the best worst decision I've made.

Oh and the small ones aren't any cheaper.

Mechanical watches. Most people don’t understand just how expensive they can get, outside of the ones with diamonds all over them, nor why they’re so expensive. Most people also don’t understand how expensive it is to be allowed to buy certain models, depending on the model and the dealer you’re buying from. Also, watch repairs and regular servicing of mechanical watches is something most people don’t consider, and the price of tools if you want to do it yourself can be very expensive and require a lot of skill.

Fancy watches are just jewelry, so just like all jewelry there's no cap on how much money someone will sell it to you for.

Welding.

The thing is, it's a skill that pays for itself if you have enough projects in mind. I've paid for my equipment a hundred times over by building things that would have cost a hell of a lot of money to have done.

What kind of things have you built?

For my jeeps: cargo rack, front and back bumpers, pull out drawers, rock rails, body work, frame repair. Built a boat trailer, fix broken equipment, I've lost count of the things, frankly.

I think welding is a life skill like woodworking/carpentry/plumbing/electrical, they all pay for themselves as hobbies if you decide you aren't spending your life in front of a TV.

Hobby CNC

You can get a little table top router and some simple software for a couple hundred bucks. You can go deep into it. Building a custom machine, writing your own post processor, dialing in you CNC to insane levels of accuracy and precision, adding a 4th axis, engineering parts and projects, it goes on. It basically combines robotics, design engineering, and manufacturing engineering all in one hobby.

4th axis? X, Y, & Z with rotation along one of the axis?

Or are you milling time cubes?

Yes, rotation. It'll allow you to do diagonals instead of just straight down. Although milling time cubes sounds awesome

5D milling is where it's at. No, it's not a joke.

To piggyback off this, hobby machining in general. You can buy a small lathe pretty cheap but add some decent tooling and oh you need a very fancy tool you don't have? Hand over more cash. You want to make a part that won't fit in your small beginner lathe? Time to fork out for a bigger more expensive one. Oh a mill would be better for that part? Those kidneys could get a basic mill. Oh you need more fancy tooling for the mill now...

Hifi Audio (headphones in my case) very easy to spend thousands on gear, upgrades, the latest processor or driver technology.

What are your thoughts on the new Sony walk man? I feel like this thing can’t possibly have an audience.

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-NW-WM1AM2-Hi-Res-Walkman-Digital/dp/B0B354TW13/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=57671389324&hvadid=557394894227&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9028681&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=b&hvrand=8382113551511815585&hvtargid=kwd-297382790618&hydadcr=26072_13467081&keywords=new+sony+walkman&qid=1692381134&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.765d4786-5719-48b9-b588-eab9385652d5

It certainly hearkens back to the nostalgia of having a dedicated audio player like the legendary walkman. The sad truth is that it's an expensive lesson in obsoletion. If you think support for android OS lifecycle was bad... wait until you have a bug in your player.

They are high quality and often perform very well, but at the end of the day, you have a sealed battery device that has a limited lifespan based on OS and firmware updates. I'd sooner recommend a good portable DAC Amp and using whatever source you prefer.

My OTG setup is my cellphone as a media player. It runs PowerAMP and generally gets used with bluetooth on a FiiO BTR7 portable amp. 200$ for a fantastic balanced THXAAA series amp stage that works with any source, wired or wireless, vs over 1000$ more for a comparable DAP. The choice is pretty clear.

Other high end DAPs have suffered similar fates and have poor resale values/audiences. Remember the Pono? I didn't think so 😆

I have a pretty cheap audio setup, moondrop Arias and akg k371 both using usb c to 3.5mm adapters. Chose this because it was the cheapest yet decent audio setup recommended by the community. Things from here only gets exponentially expensive with actual DACs, professional studio monitors, etc. Sooner or later you've sunk thousands of dollars into it.

Sooner or later you’ve sunk thousands of dollars into it.

Yep. Though I will argue that, at least for me, it's so, so worth it. Music is a gift that never stops giving. If there's one thing in my home that will ALWAYS put a smile on my face, it's my dac/amp stack and my favorite cans. That's priceless, imo. Very few other items that I own can do this.

Oh, didn't we all? I certainly did, and that with "cheap" stuff. I was not trying to go beyond mid-fi ever, mostly because i cannot justify it for my old ears, and still managed to sink quite a few grand.

Having this said, the purchases I consider best were actually cheapest: most enjoyment i got from a pair of Adam T5V as a desktop set up, cannot beat it at that price point in my view; and noname "sleeping headband" from Amazon, like 20 quid or so, that helped me listen to numerous audiobooks in bed with comfort. The latter one though is also the least sexy accessory you can probably get, so choose your spouse wisely! ) The court is still in session for the most recent purchase of Bathys to have OTG music. Sound quality is certainly there for a pair of wireless cans, just not sure yet about long term enjoyment and overall value for money.

k371s were my previous pair - and if it were not for their lousy snapping headband, I could certainly recommend it as well.

Improv theater. Most theaters, even in smaller areas, require 3 or 4 classes before you can audition for a team. The classes usually run around $200-$300 a pop. Once you're on a team, you're required to pay for a coach and sometimes a practice venue. Smaller markets are easier to get onto a team than bigger markets, but there's generally a lower ceiling. Those that are really serious usually move to New York, Chicago, or LA for a chance to do it professionally, which very few people get to do.

This sounds like a cult. Just pay a few hundred dollars and you too could be the next Tina fey.

aggressive style roller blades
high skill AND price barriers 💀

Apparently fur-suits are ~$15,000. You could buy a car for that and still have enough money left over to drive for a year.

That's about the most expensive fursuit you can buy, it goes much lower than that. Still low car money though

I just ordered a second one a couple months from a top-tier maker and it was pretty expensive.

The first one I got back in 2008 was $1450. I don't think it's possible to get a descent one for under $3000 these days

Modular synths, eurorack is where you find the most accessible modules than the other formats. Sometimes you go and spend 600€ in a module without batting an eye.

Also you have to count the case, patch cables, etc.

It gets expensive quickly if you can't fight the GAS (gear acquisition syndrome)

Also it is a musical instrument so you need to practice many hours to play it affectively.

It is really cool, I do enjoy myself playing with my modular, but would love to have more time to spend with it.

From what I've seen, modulars tend to attract people that love to tinker but aren't necessarily very musical. They spend 30k and years on their setup but when they actually play something it's just space soup. There are exceptions of course, some respected producers do use them, but that's just my casual observation.

Absolutely. I love audio design, synthesis and making music, but I have rarely released anything. It took a long time for me to realize and accept that I do this for my own entertainment and not to be a successful musician. Its just a hobby.

And there's nothing wrong with that! Music has also always remained something I did for fun, I have a different creative field as my day job and I don't want to do the same with music nu-hu.

Mountain biking.

You can get started homebrewing cider or mead for like $50, especially if what you're brewing isn't carbonated so you can just store it in whatever. You can also buy home garage versions of fully automated brewing and canning lines that will run you into the tens of thousands, not accounting for consumables. It escalates fast.

I imagine the ceiling here is a full production facility rivaling that of Coors or Budweiser.

There have got to be a few microbreweries where a home setup just got out of hand. Or, Rather, there were. Lots of microbreweries go out of business.

Camping. Whether it's at a campsite, where a family might spend tens or hundreds of thousands on an RV and all the gadgets in it, or deep in the woods, where an ultralight backpacker might spend thousands of dollars upgrading perfectly good gear they already had because it could save a few ounces.

To be clear, camping is actually really accessible, and few people go THAT extreme with it. Just... no matter what budget you set for it, there are ways to spend it. :P

Amateur astronomy, you can start with a modest Dobsonian then it get can very expensive very fast and you need to understand celestial coordinates, ccds, optics and such.

Telescopes

Telescopes don't really get too crazy until one wants to get into astrophotography (assuming we want an APO at that point, not before). At that point staying in the four digits is an accomplishment in itself...

But I did learn something when I bought a binoviewer for my telescope, I had to buy double the eyepieces and that was a bit hit that I didn't fully think out

Astronomy as someone wrote, but some other hobby can have high ceiling, like RC stuff, radio control ; sure as long as you stay on the road you start with a 1/16 brushless car for a few hundreds and can upgrade to 1/6 2 strokes behemoths for a couple thousands. Some people are in rock crawlers and it can become expensive too even for a hobby. When you go in RC planes, first the radio goes from a simple 2ch one to a computerized 16ch one, then the plane can go bigger and bigger, brushless powered, nitro powered, gas powered, turbine powered! And you basically have an RC jet costing thousands of $$$, you can see some crash on youtube, it's scary :-/

Mechanical watches. I guess I grew up with quartz watches and only learned about the existence of automatic watches a few years ago. Marvelous things they are, and of course, high watch brands like Rolex, etc, are tens of thousands of dollars, with certain pieces going for millions. Insane.

Randonneuring.

Randonneuring

long-distance unsupported endurance cycling. This style of riding is non-competitive in nature, and self-sufficiency is paramount. When riders participate in randonneuring events, they are part of a long tradition that goes back to the beginning of the sport of cycling in France and Italy.