What hobby seems fascinating to most people but is actually boring if you dive into it?

eric@014450.xyz to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 81 points –
44

Well, my current hobby is working on a set of custom Mandalorian armour.

Now, not only does this include things like sewing, leather working, and in some cases metalworking, as well as painting, it also includes, and is almost, from a time perspective dominated by sanding.

If you ever end up looking into costuming and prop making as a hobby, what you’re really picking up is a sanding hobby.

Same thing with wood working.

Funnily enough down the line I want to learn some woodworking for my costume - make a legit wood stock for my blaster props.

Have you looked into 3D printing? You could just print a blaster out in pieces.

And still spend hours sanding

We're just discussing which flavor of sanding you want to do

Most definitely but I think it's a lot more straight forward to shape complicated parts than with wood.

Sure, 3D printed part’s definitely have their place, but my goal is eventually “better than screen accurate” - metal armour, wood stocks, metal blaster fittings, etc.

Get a 3d printer.

Most of my current run of hard costume parts and props are 3D printed. You still need to fill the print lines and sand to get a good looking prop.

Additionally my eventual goal is to have zero 3D printed parts because I want it to be “better than screen accurate”, to have the costume really be made out of metal and wood and the like.

Flying. Sure, it sounds great and it’s awesome being able to control a vehicle climbing through the air, so far above everything. However, especially in metro areas, you’re spending most of your attention on navigating, communicating, planning. When I did it, the instructors said their classes were full of engineers, not just because you need the income to afford it, but you need the math, the attention to detail, the technical perspective.

Hopefully it’s a different experience out away from what people and hopefully GPS changed the experience

Tangentially related, flying model aircraft. If there is no purpose for it to be in the air you just kind of fly back and forth and then ???? I went to a model airshow yesterday with 50lb+ jet models doing flips and shit and while all of the time, money, and engineering was impressive, if you've seen one model make a pass and do a loop you've seen them all.

I love flying in small planes, so when I was younger I thought I'd like to get my pilot's license. Then I thought about what you just said, and I decided it's more fun to be able to just look out the window and enjoy the view.

It’s still worth seeing for yourself. It’s quite a feeling being able to take flight under your own control

One of the paths I sort of regret not going down was flying float planes. I live in an urban area with crowded airways so it was always on your toes, but not too far up north are a lot of lakes with limited road access. Flying a float plane would let me commute to cheap lakefront property, while also spending more time is less congested airspace. I might have had more time with the challenges of flight rather than tedium of communication, coordination, planning

Personally, I am a crappy driver who's had a lot of wrecks, so I figure being a passenger is the way for me

That hasn't been my experience at all. Sure, in controlled airspace you're in contact with the tower and other planes, but it's still all visual flight rules and flying by feel. The technical stuff is just to enable the flying stuff safely.

Well, I thought tunnel excavation would be exciting, but...

I did that for some time but switched to connecting metal plates together. It's riveting

Anything with ADHD. My hobby is getting really into a hobby and then dropping it for another hobby.

It seems more likely that there would be hobbies that sound boring but are actually exciting.

I don’t know. For example, astrophotography seems interesting when you see amazing pictures of distant galaxies and stuff. But the actual process of taking thousands of photos and processing them seems super boring to me. Actually, any kind of photo post processing I find super boring. For years I used Lightroom in my photos. Now, I can’t do that shit anymore.

Yep, I was into regular photography, well the boring and hard branch of photography called bird photography and even I struggled with astrophotography.

It really feels like you can either not buy much equipment and struggle with moving the camera a tenth of a millimeter every 3 minutes or you buy an eq mount and hook up your camera to your laptop and come back after a 7 hours nap to a neat pile of pictures that don't really show anything but after 4 hours of automated processing and some manual retouching show something about 80% good as Hubble. Which is nice, but it's not exactly something unique. And the extra annoying thing is the only way you get better is by investing more money.

At least in bird photography once you've got the 600mm f/4 for 10k you're set for life.

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It depends on what you like, and how you do it.

Once you start to get serious, a lot of it is almost automated. You connect a video camera to your telescope, set the telescope to track whatever you're trying to image, and batch process the frames into a final image. There's still lots to do, but the boring parts are not too bad.

I find the setting up and tweaking interesting too though, so I might be biased :D

The process may be boring, but I assume the end result or discovering anything interesting would be exciting.

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Somebody did that thread a little bit ago, this, presumably, is the follow-up thread in response to it.

Thanks! Somehow despite lemming 10 hours a day, I missed that.

That question was already asked a couple of days ago and I'm assuming this is the follow-up question.

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All hobbies, I have a limited threshold of attention and I can never concentrate or have fun on a single thing.

Are you me??? Everything is always boring or takes too much effort and I get tired.

Roleplaying. Everyone has a "reason" they roleplay and it becomes a tug of war regarding a roleplay's purpose because they almost never mix their intended themes well even if the two things fit together good.

Example: Person A wants to roleplay so they can get a good visual on how a bank robbery scene for their book would play out. Person B wants to roleplay because they have it out for Borrower-sized people. Every time Person A tries to get the subject to change to how a bank robbery might play out, Person B is trying to insert random Minish Cap sized people revealing themselves to be in the bank, and vice versa.

Don't tell this to the people I roleplay with, but it's a darn chore.

I add: reading the rulebooks/ description of the ttrpg world. The rules are dry to read and the flauvor is often vague. Often i read and can't remember the stuff seconds later 😆

What is also boring af are discussions with players, who are no historians, but say "this fantasy setting is sooo authentic middle age!".

I found sailing to be terrifically boring. It's expensive. It's slow compared to powered. The mechanics aren't that interesting once you have the basics down.

Maybe someday I'll try a type of sailboat intended more for speed/racing. Big boats are just a step above sitting on the beach getting sunburned and drunk.

Being crushed in a submarine near the Titanic ::: spoiler Billionaire's Hobby if you didn't heard about it, a few months ago, a lot of people were trying to find survivors of a submarine that went to explore the neighborhood of the shipwreck of the Titanic. Such a stupid waste of resources. :::

I dunno, it sounds like their last hours were thrilling suspense of will-it-won’t-it.

Imagine how much action they fit into the final few milliseconds!