Blacksmithing/bladesmithing.

I spent must of my youth fascinated by knives, still am, and this got me into classical metal working. By the time I was 18 I had built a pretty decent working forge in my mom’s backyard.

Shortly after 9/11 I took a week long class in bladesmithing in Arkansas. Outside of Blade Forums and the occasional knife show, I’d never really interacted with other knife people. Not a whole lot going on in my large northern city.

The way those bastards talked openly about anyone that wasn’t white or Christian turned my stomach. I pretty much kept to myself, it hung out with the one chill hippy from Oregon, or the eternally gob-struck British blacksmiths apprentice (You sell GUNS in a GROCERY STORE?!)

I learned a lot on that trip. Nowadays I don’t bring up my knife hobby because I sure as shit don’t want to be mistaken for one of those ignorant cretins.

Why a plastic fork?

Warhammer 40k. I like to paint little green guys and then move them around a battlefield.

A good half of the poeple in this hobby are almost entirely irredeemable

Offroading.

Like, I just want to spend too much money breaking my truck to go play in the mud or camping in the middle of nowhere on the weekend, not throw massive alcohol fueled frat parties in the desert and annihilate the environment in my jacked-up, curb princess of a Ram covered in a thousand miniature suns and “Don’t tread on me Please tread on me, daddy” stickers

Not as bad, but people interested in Ancient Greece / Rome / classical studies tend to be somewhat conservative. It’s (to some extent) the only part of academia which is overtly conservative.

But yeah, you can do a lot worse, that’s relatively mild

Airsoft.

It’s so fun but also run mostly by straight up Nazis.

“Well, I like Immigrant Song.”

I like shooting and having guns.

Cryptography.

Amateur Radio.

The first video I found on Baofeng Radio guides is on a youtube channel run by some right winger that sounds like a SovCit, who makes “jokes” about people who wear mask and have this “gay humor”.

Like bruh

(I mean, I guess it makes sense. Right-wing “anarchists” are skeptical of “government control” and are the type of people to want to use radios instead of smartphones. Buts its ironic that encryption is illegal… But I assume they probably just ignore the “no encryption” rule anyways since they are a SovCit.)

Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it… There’s this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.

Nowadays I’m so, so glad when someone I’m talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don’t need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don’t suffer enough in the industry, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).

Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.

Try being into permaculture and hydroponics

Old school games enjoyer: “The games were better in the past… modern games are garbage”

🚨

Anytime someone starts dropping Warhammer lore, or shows a love of Boomer Shooters, I know I’m going to despise that person or they’ll be my best friend, no middle ground, and I don’t even like Warhammer.