Ask Lemmy

A weird hobby of mine used to be collecting pictures of camgirls balancing shoes on their heads. I misclicked the [ x ] on a camgirl popup ad, and discovered that it wasn't a big link to some site, but an actual chat room with a live girl. For anyone unaware, you can talk to them for free, while they try and lure you into paying for whatever acts you want to see. I told the first one I don't believe they are real because I didnt, and to balance a shoe on her head so I can see its not just a collection of prescripted gifs or something. She did it. Screenshot. Did it to a few more for the lols. I had a few thousand over a year or two before I finally lost interest.

Also telling them how cool it was they keep tarantulas as pets, because I just saw it go behind that poster on the wall.

I dont feel proud of myself now, they were at a point in their lives where taking their clothes off for a few quid on the Internet was a good idea, and I was just fucking with them. Was fun though.

The fire alarm collecting community is larger than you might expect. I first got one recommended to me on New Year's of a guy setting off all 20 or so of his linked fire alarms when the clock struck midnight. He needed hearing protection the next room over.

the fediverse.

Butterfly collecting because you have to kill one to collect it.

True crime gets really really weird especially when you dive into more rare extreme niches.

Bryan Ropar has forgotten more about plastic chairs than you know about anything.

I don’t remember his name, but there was a guy who collected sex dolls. He had like over a hundred of them. I think his wife left him because of it. I wanna say I saw him on My Strange Addiction, but I don’t remember.

Edit: I looked it up and it’s not the guy from My Strange Addiction. He “married” a doll, but I think he just had the one. I don’t know where I saw about the other guy.

Gooning.

pick up artistry, penis enhancement, prejac training

Competitive Hobby Horse

Real estate. Apparently you buy like a house and then find people that need a place to live and let them live there for a fee that not only covers the price of the house but also whatever extra due to something called the "market". Then you wind up with a free house and extra money! It's crazy!

Memorising door colours of every house and flat in a small Scottish town of about 30,000.

Yes, the hobby-ist was on the spectrum.

I stalk random people on the Internet

I like watching people on the internet. 15y ago, I was using Shareaza, Kazaa, Emule as my music sources. For those who aren't familiar with those software: it's p2p file download. You install Shareaza on your computer, and give access to specific folder to the Shareaza network. Anyone using Shareaza can then download the files located on your shared folder. But, in the mid 00', even more than today, people weren't that tech savy and what happened, way too often, was that a user would give access to the "My Documents" folder or even worse, their whole computer. I was looking for those thoses and I was reading their MSN messenger history, looking at their pictures, their resume, their schoolwork... I was really enjoying learning everything about their life through their My Documents folder.

Fast forward to 2018. All those p2p software disappeared. But I found an alternative: 4shared. 4shared allows you to upload pictures and share them (like img). When you download the app, you can setup the app to automatically upload all your pictures (from your phone). But a lot of users don't know that, and they end up with all they smartphone pictures on the net, with a public settings. I enjoy going to 4shared, looking for those non savy users, and learn everything about their lifes.

And I don't even need that. I have hobbies, friends, I don't have issues meeting women or people, but I like stalking on those strangers on 4shared.

source

In Eve Online, when a capsule was destroyed, a frozen corpse was left behind.

I knew someone who would go around collecting corpses. A battle is going, he'd be out there scooping them up. He's running a hauler, and this was the day that when your ship got destroyed, every bit of loot went out in individual units, so when a pirate would try to shake him down he'd respond with "If you blow me up, you'll crash back to desktop."

That was how he played the game, gathering corpses.

I don't know that this even counts, but one of the most strange but wildly interesting things I used to do years back was randomly exploring defunct teleporters in Habbo Hotel.

For those who don't know about teleporters/teles in Habbo Hotel, there are probably tens of thousands of pairs of teleports that exist in the game, each of them connecting only to its pair. Since trading furniture is pretty much a currency in Habbo, a lot of individual teleporters get traded off or lost throughout the years, and often end up being parked in random rooms and vast furniture junkyards.

So I would often lay down several random teles from my inventory, or enter my own furniture junkyard, and try every tele in there until I got a live one. This would Bill & Ted me to fuck knows where. If I'm unlucky, it's just a dead end room. If I'm lucky, it's a room with even more teles. That's where the rabbit hole begins. Pretty soon you're ten teles deep into the weirdest, most liminal Back Rooms spaces you can imagine. Sometimes you even find a back door into other players' private rooms and get to explore like a cat burglar. The sky was the limit.

I haven't logged in for a decade or more, but I still miss doing that sometimes.

I included the best pic I could find online of what a tele goldmine looked like, except there would typically be a wide variety of styles and not all portapotties like these.

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