Asklemmy

Have you tried playing table tennis? It starts tame, but as soon as you get a bit competitive and learn about custom rackets...

I just drained my bank account last weekend for a new racket and box, a few new balls,...

It’s a toss up between cooking and home networking for me.

Cooking because it started off as just finding neat recipes and giving them a shot to now experimenting with new techniques and harder to procure ingredients. My pantry looks like a mini spice market and keeping them fresh is its own hassle. Plus needing all the gear gets expensive!

I also got really into home networking during the start of the pandemic. I went from having a simple off the shelf mesh network to a full network rack in my basement serving some high end access points and cat6 drops in every room. Now I have a pretty secure iot stack that’s separate from my main vlan and one devoted to my work computer.

Oh boy, where do I even start. I guess we should first have a minute of silence for my wallet...

• Fixing old computers

  In high school, I agreed to take the decommisioned PCs home. They were in various states of not working, I diagnosed the problems, bought parts, upgraded and fixed them all. I now had a ton of relatively old but reliable computers. What's the logical next step?

• Home server room (homelab).

  I live in a flat with a giant basement, so it's full of these old PCs and servers. I needed a server rack, switches, cabling, the whole nine yards.

• Photography

  New lenses and filters constantly bought. Sometimes a new camera body. This is my most expensive hobby by far, but I take care of the lenses so they at least hold value, unlike the PCs :)

Amateur Radio, Data Hoarding, Pc Gaming, and my car.

Lego , need I say more?

Music production. And IT in general.

But specifically the music production; started off as "I'll by FL Studio and muck around with it" to "I need ALL THE VSTs!". I've sunk like $2500 into it in the last two months (which is a hell of a lot of money to me), and I keep buying shit for it.

Am I any good at it? Fuck no. But it's not stopping me from keeping at it and buying shit I probably don't need :P

And the IT stuff consists of rack-mount servers and Pi's. I've sunk around $25k into it all over the last 12 years.

I make a cross between dioramas and video games. It started out as a test to see if I could make something and now I am all in. It's all I want to work on. I have spent so much money on old lcd screens

Homebrewing. If you want to brew something like IPA the cost of hops gets way higher.

Dog training/sports.

Here I am thinking "I need to get more active and it'll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link" (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)

Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I'll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25...? k...

Rally Novice acquired...fun but... Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? ...sure whatever

Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let's do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that's not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment... I'm officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I'm more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol

We're having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They've spent a literal fortune on that dog. It's absolutely mind boggling.

Audio equipment. Started as someone who collected a bunch of budget king IEMs and have been slowly creeping my way up in cost ;-;

Getting back into PC gaming after buying my friends old 300 euro gaming PC. I'm looking to upgrade and every little bit faster is only a little bit extra, so a 100 euro upgrade turned to a 120 euro upgrade, then a 150 euro upgrade to... i don't want to say how much i spent...

Tabletop Roleplaying Games.
I bought Mutant Year Zero in 2015 thinking "Ah, this will give me countless hours of play! I can make my own adventures and stuff!"
Now, my shelf is buckling after trying a hundred different games and supplements, and getting addicted to pretty books.
Currently, my favorite game of all time is Delta Green. Investigative horror mystery. Amazingly horrific scenarios (adventures) with True Detective season one level of masterful writing.

Check out Glass Cannon Podcast playing it on Spotify if you want!

Any art medium that requires canvases. A small one at WalMart is no problem, but as you move to larger works and need better canvas material it gets expensive fast.

Oh! And Arduino programming. A simple kit to get going isn't too bad. Then you're trolling Adafruit for parts, then you go big and start importing from China directly. Now you're building a garage addition for the electronics lab... Or is that just me? At least it's also able house my first motorcycle... First...

I started getting invested in a TCG (Digimon) for the first time ever a couple months ago (magic, YGO, pokemon etc. never did it for me before).

One of the selling points (at least currently) is that most decks are fairly affordable (less than 50 bucks affordable) and viable and even the very competitive decks shouldn't set you back much (with less than 100 bucks you can easily make a top tier tournament-viable deck) .

Problem is I really started digging lots of different decks and discovering new favorite digimon and how they play and now I'm several hundreds of dollars of investment in both in cards and accessories (not even counting merch...).

I regret nothing though. It has helped me get out of the house (I work remote) and interact with people which has been very good for my mental health, and it gave me a way to revive some of my childhood nostalgia.

1. Videogames. It has not been super expensive as I enjoy indie games the most, but still.

2. Pen and paper organization. This is recent. Due to a couple of mental disorders, I have problems remembering things and keeping organized. I was using a to-do list for my phone, but it was becoming less and less effective with time.

So I found a weekly planner online and I bought it telling myself that it was expensive, but it would be enough for a year and I wouldn't need anything else.

The planner has been great, by the way. Yet, when it arrived, I liked it so much that I had this classic feeling of not wanting to ruin it with my handwriting. I needed a good mechanical pencil! Erasable, yet stylized.

Then I thought the pages looked clean, but monotone. Stickers! What about my own creations? Thermal printer with sticker rolls! And so on and so on.

I am productive ...and addicted to stationery items.

Cycling. I started with a bike that was given to me by my uncle. Now I have a road bike, full equipment x3, a direct drive trainer for the rainy days and a subscription to use that.

Magnet fishing.

I bought a kit that included a reasonably sized 360° magnet, rope, grappling hook and protective cover for about £120 thinking that it would be good enough to keep me satisfied for a while.

After my first trip out and having to carry a load of scrap metal about a mile back to the car, I bought a cart for £80 so I could cart it all back instead. After having to use my car to pull my magnet out of the harbour on Saturday I've bought a cheap winch and a tow rope to anchor it to things for £25 for when it gets stuck somewhere I can't use my car.

And of course I wanted a bigger magnet almost immediately, but I've managed to hold off on that so far. Saying that it's fairly likely I will get an upgrade from Bondi magnets when the site launches as long as the price is competitive with Magnetar (I suspect it's a partnership and the magnets will be identical, but we'll see)

Homebrewing. I have made many a beer over 8 or 9 years. They get better with each batch, but along with it is another new piece of equipment to make the process easier or more efficient.

I bought a vinyl copy of Beggars' Banquet by the Rolling Stones for 50p despite not having a record player. Fast forward six years and I now have a full stereo system, a collection worth over £10k and regularly order limited edition albums from small bands costing me large amounts each time. Send help.

Only because no one has said it yet, headphones. You can get a really great set of headphones for $200 or so, but if you want it to sound a little better you're looking at $500-$700. But music can sound a bit better if you get better equipment for around $1200. Then you hear a $2000 set-up, and you chase that, until you hear a $5000 kit. And it just keeps going.

I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you've got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you've got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least -- or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.

I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you're the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.

Hiking.

I like to repair and restore broken vintage audio gear.

"Wow, this 60's Sansui amp and those 70's AR speakers are practically free! I already have all the tools I need to repair them, it'll be fun and cheap. When I get these restored, I won't need anything else ever again!"

How little did I know.

Ketamine

My wife and I started playing Disc Golf as an "inexpensive" and more accessible option to traditional golf with a started set of cheap discs off Amazon. Carts bags, and DOZENS of discs later...$$$

Was violist (played the viola) for years. It's similar to a violin just a bit bigger and deeper. Have a true love for it... But it's expensive to maintain after a while because it's good to keep up private lessons, the maintenance of the instrument, and then having to buy sheet music/music books for only playing one song, one passage.. I miss it.. not the most expensive hobby, but got that way for me cause I am a mom of four and married.. SOOOO yeah

Coffee.

I started with cheap pre group coffee from the supermarket for less than £3 a bag and a chemex I picked up for £20. I now have four grinders, a bunch of pour over gear and an espresso machine (marax), worth several thousand. Plus a £80 a month fresh coffee bean habit.

I started knitting for my kids when we were living in colorado.

so I ended up processing wool from raw fleece -> hat

raw merino fleece, raw alpaca fleece, Scouring soap, dye, dyeing classes with natalie redding, spinning wheel, drum carder, hackle, table loom, warping thing for yarn

Math

ended up going to school for math education (with pell grant $500 per 6 month term) I can't pass the exit exam. tried 5 times out of those I had to pay out of pocket for 4 of them $480.

and surprise, I got dxed with ADHD. That's why I couldn't pass the tests. now I pay $50 a month for it (doc + meds)

Not sure if you’d call it a hobby or more of a collection but I collect mechanical wrist watches and that can get expensive fast.

I started with a mechanical under $100, with a decent movement and a display back case so I could see the gears and rotor inside, and that could’ve been it. But once you get the bug, you want to get different types of movements, different case sizes, maybe some complications, sooner or later you’re going to start wanting some hand finishing, and then it gets really expensive. I wanna get into mechanical watch repair too but that gets really expensive and takes a lot of skill and time so I’m going to hold off a few years I think. Plus once I go there, there’s no coming back. I’ll be buying broken stuff on eBay constantly and there goes all my paycheques

None of my hobbies are inexpensive (bikes, guitars and parenting)

Every time a friend tries to get me to take up snowboarding or some other gear based hobby I'm like, "are you fucking insane?"

knitting/crochet. Yarn is expensive as hell.