Asklemmy

Data hoarding and self-hosting every service under the sun.

Reloading.

I thought, I can buy a Hornady press, use range brass, and same some cash!

And, well, kind of. But mostly no. Yes, buying primers, bullets, and powder, and using range brass is indeed cheaper than buying boxes or cases of ammunition on a per bullet basis. Sure, a set of dies can get expensive ($200+ for match-grade dies if you do, e.g. long range shooting competitions). Oh, and you need to clean your brass, preferably in a wet tumbler, and then dry your brass, and also get a trim station to trim to length, and possibly a primer pocket swager if you've picked up military brass with crimped primer pockets... And a scale, you gotta have a good scale so that you know exactly how much powder you're using (seriously; you need a good scale, you cannot skip this), and you need a chronography to measure speeds to develop the most accurate loads...

...And then you start getting into progressive reloading presses that are intended for really high volume shooting that start at around $2000, and top out at around $10k, plus things like annealing stations so that your neck tension is always consistent after you've crimped the case, and powder tricklers for when volumetric powder dispensers aren't accurate enough...

But the real expense hits when you're shooting 10x as much because now ammunition is "cheap".

BRB, gonna spend $400 on 8# of Varget powder and $300 on 1000 Hornady ELD-M .224 bullets.

Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.

Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I'm at the lower end for music production hardware.

Now I'm considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don't quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.

I'm just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
...and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we're distracted from spending money.

Pc gaming. I started off with a refurbished HP omen, but now I'm wanting something more. I'm aiming for a custom built and that has led me to the discovery of companies like Digital Storm, System 76, and Falcon Northwest.

Torrenting and data hoarding are also hobbies of mine. Every so often I'll buy an external hard drive once I max out the storage on a current one. One hard drive failed a while back and now I'm looking for data recovery companies, but their services are a bit pricey.

My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I'll probably ever need.

D&D. When I got back into it as an adult it was mostly because I could get into it for $0. I was dead broke at the time. I ~~pirated the books~~ downloaded the free basic rules 😉 on my trash find laptop and was good to go.

But man once I had money it turns out I really like collecting books and the D&D ones are not cheap. I do not want to think about how much I've spent.

Literally any hobby I have seriously messed with.

Although- racecars was never cheap.

My homelab started off pretty cheap. But, at this point, I am quite certain I have a few thousand bucks worth of hardware. Shit- I have two thousand bucks in just HDDs, SSDs/NVMes...

3d printing.

Started out with a cheap printer, mostly to supply my friends with miniatures and terrain. They loved the stuff I printed for them, so gave me money for my effort, which went into upgrading my printer and buying more supplies and buying a new printer so I could print better, bigger things for them.

Then, so enamored by what 3d printing could do, they bought their own 3d printers.

and now no one talks to me cause I no longer have any use and i'm stuck with a printer I havent even removed from the box and assembled for 3 years, and another printer that only stays around because every 2-3 months something comes up where I can design and print a part to fix something around the house.

I’m not sure it can get worse than bird watching. Completely free to start. Then you are like “man I wish I could see that bird over there” so you buy some binoculars. Then you think “dang this bird is moving too fast I still can’t identify it, maybe I should try photographing it”. Two months later you’ve spent 10k because bird photography is apparently the most intense kind of photography. Turns out photographing very tiny things that move very fast from very far away is very difficult and the lenses you need start at thousands of dollars and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. That isn’t including the camera body, which you probably want very fast autofocus on, along with bird eye tracking, which hardly comes on any cameras at all.

Yeah…

Vinyl records... 25 years ago you could hardly buy them . I listen to punk and they never gave up on the format and so it was cheap and collectible because print runs were small.. from 2010 onwards, they came back in fashion and the major labels started clogging up the pressing plants and then pre-orders became a thing and the price started creeping up...now, in my country a vinyl that used to be $20 is now pushing $55 and mainstream artists are pushing $70 ...my desire has really waned.. I'm priced out of finding new artists because I can't buy everything all the time like I used to.

Started out with a raspberry pi several years ago. Got my feet wet with entry level, beginner friendly NAS prebuilds. Hunted for recycled computer parts. Now searching for and actively acquiring enterprise gear that is making a massive dent in my wallet.

Probably gardening.

A few seed packets and some dirt turns into building nice cedar raised gardens, filling them all with great quality soil, expensive liquid fertilizers, various irrigation systems, and so on. And I can't just haul all that dirt in my sedan... But hey, I have 20+ tomato plants, and about as many different pepper plants every year.

It's honestly nowheer near as expensive as some of my other hobbies, but on the "a lot more money than I expected" scale it's up there.

3D modelling. It's impossible to get into 3D modelling and not get eventually sucked into 3D Printing... Which as other people have explained on the thread, is it's own money sinker.

I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money

Music production. Started with a old pc and a pirated version of ableton. Now I bought my first top tier laptop and a license of ableton… and oh whats that around the corner? Is that a modular synth?

I started music when I was like 7/8, my parents encouraged me to do so. And here we are, 20 years later, my dad told me cocaine would’ve probably been way cheaper.

Gaming. It used to be an MMO for like $15 a month. Now it's a new game for $70, the game has DLC for $20-$30 or skins or some battle pass.

I've had amazing luck with hobbys that should be expensive, but weren't.

Me & some friends have a small computer museum. We collect minicomputers & workstations. (Stuff used in science & academia.) We have computers dating back to the early 60s. But we started in the mid 90s, when NO ONE was interested. So we got everything for free. (Well... for the cost of renting large trucks.)

I'm a photographer. My DSLR is old, from just when DSLR's were getting "good enough" at a reasonable price. I bought it used when it was already "obsolete". And then someone gave me an exotic industrial camera they had at work which was "broken". It was too broken for industrial use, but works fine for studio use. I had to build some hardware & write all the software to use it, but... the results are fantastic. It blows away my DSLR. (But uses the same lenses!)

My library has probably cost a lot, but that's spread out over 40 years, so I don't notice it. (Also, I worked in a used bookstore for a bit, and that's a good way to get a lot of books CHEEEEEEEAP. Employee discount? Yes. Discount on books in the back that are slightly damaged and unsellable? YES.) And I've occasionally sold a rare book, so that offsets things.

Etc.

(Note: my home computer collection spans ten full-height racks. A few of those are on loan from the museum, but most are mine. Spent close to nothing on that. Somehow.)

Amongst all my hobbies (am kind of a serial hobbyist…) I think fishing is the one that turns out the most expensive compared to my initial assumption.

Started with trout fishing into fly fishing the lure then carp… daaamn now I’m looking into a bassboat or a kayak…

Knitting. Only handdyed yarns, which are costly. And of course you need ALL colours. And only the most luscious fibres and yarns.

I've resorted to dyeing yarn myself - which opened up another deep, deep rabbit hole.

And a business.

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.

Arma 3. I updated my router, computer and bought the dlcs so I could run a server.

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,...

I had a recipe blog prior to the pandemic. I put well over five grand into it over four years and didn't make a cent.
If I hadn't decided that I hate website with ads and third party cookies on them I probably could have made a few bucks during the pandemic.

No other ham radio nerds here besides me? It always starts with a $35 Baofeng hand-held...

Lego , need I say more?

Running. Not as expensive as a lot of the things posted about here, but my shoes cost ~$150 and I have replaced them a couple times a year. I'm planning to get in to trail running soon (as opposed to running circles in my neighborhood, so now I want to add a running vest and a GPS watch, which is not cheap.

Considering that in theory all you need to run is your body and an open space, I feel like I have spent a lot of money.

EDIT: I forgot the ~$140 bone conducting headphones I bought! I for sure feel safer with them than my old headphones though, since I have been doing almost all of my running till now on the road.

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.

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

Probs low hanging fruit for this thread, but vinyl collecting.

Started around 2011 by going to charity shops and second hand stores to find bargains. I used to be able to spend £10 a week and get 3/4 new (to me) records. Some were great ,some were trash, but that was the fun!

Then I started getting specific records, building towards band discographies... next thing I know, I'm dropping £25 per record for two bootleg records that were definitely not worth the price. Was a watershed moment and one that made me take a step back.

Ticked over for a year or two, next thing I know vinyl records are now in Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury's. Every new release comes on vinyl, and they're now £25+. Charity shops are now just full of junk vinyl, and all the second hand stores now charge £25+ because their pressings are "original"... all the fun is now gone.

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

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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!

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 :)

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)