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 have been trying to get into 3D printing! It sounds so cool! Can’t you connect your printers to the cloud so that other can print using your setup? Maybe you can charge for their usage based on your costs.
Hey, there are some fun 3D printing projects you could get into if you look around. Sometimes it’s the perfect tool to launch into a new hobby! I’m working on a hydroponic tower currently, as well as some Mandalorian armor for Halloween.
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)
I don’t know, I didn’t pull the object out with it. I’m guessing it got caught on something large and got wedged in so I couldn’t just overcome the force of the magnet to get it off. Could have been something huge and magnetic, or could’ve just been stuck between rocks. I was just happy to not lose my magnet
On the other hand, I recently started doing the other kind of magic with cards. That sounds really cheap, all you need is a $5 deck of Bicycle cards, some YouTube tutorials, and you’re all set. Turns out, that can be a money sink as well if you decide to go deep (or wide) enough. Still far less than MTG though.
There are endless ways to play magic cheaply. Starter decks, pauper as a format, online. I could make a dandan deck for Magic less than one trick on theory11
I started to really get into it back in 2015 with a Sony A6000 and a kit lens. Then you buy more, higher quality lenses. Then you buy better camera bodies with full frame sensor, then lenses that are full frame compatible. Then the various odds and end accessories. Then trips around the world to take pictures of things.
I have taken a break from photography recently, on account that having a kid doesn’t allow me a lot of opportunity to edit my photos anymore. They say the best camera you have is the one that is on you. That has proven to be true while I try to be as present as possible around my daughter. I can quickly take out my phone, capture the moment and it will take care of most of the post processing edits that I can share with family later.
I picked up photography back in May which just started by getting an old point and shoot digicam to take convincing liminal space photos, then I got another… then another… then some film old cameras, a cheap DSLR a set of lens, etc. Etc. It’s become a full on addiction at this point lol
Photography ended up becoming a really expensive hobby for me. I started with a phone, and then realized I enjoyed doing wildlife photography, and you need a real camera with a decent zoom lens for that.
For me it’s photography. I originally bought a camera and lens second hand. Now over the past two years its become rather a lot of money. I bought a Nikon Z8 last month and it was definitely worth the money.
Instant (analog) photography and collecting pins and buttons. Turns out film is expensive and buying pins are expensive. Started out with friends giving me pins to stick on my bag and now I have close to hundred pins on my pin wall. At least they look pretty rad.
Oooh right - I totally forgot about that expansion! I should finally unbox it and prepare it to be played just in case…
My board game group usually buys games more often than we have time to meet and play, so it just comes with this hobby I guess. A friend told me all the time about the stack of three games he had bought and never played and that we still need to play them and then informed me today, that he has just bought Council of Shadows…
The stack of shame of never-played games is real... Everyone ends up defaulting to the same selection of tried and true games of the group because nobody wants to learn a new thing when you can just get to playing immediately, it's very unfortunate
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.
They’re generally said to deliver the sound-quality of medium-grade studio headphones for the price of low-grade ones. But that also means, aside from the sound quality, these are really basic headphones.
You should also mind that they’re open-back. So, they have no noise cancelling, neither active nor passive. You have to use these in a silent room.
If you’re wondering, because it doesn’t sound like I’ve actually spent much money yet, yeah, I’m generally quite frugal. I’m mostly just intimidated by all the options to spend money.
But well, my setup is:
Laptop running Linux (that already rules out buying most VST plugins, as those are often Windows-only).
Headphones: Sennheiser HD 560S (←only real money, I’ve spent so far)
For a DAW, I’ve been dabbling with LMMS. Felt more approachable to me than Ardour. I also enjoy dicking around with Surge-XT as one quite powerful VST/LV2 plugin.
I’m a traditionally trained musician, so I also enjoy creating electronic music via sheet music. And me being a programmer/weirdo, I like Lilypond for that (basically LaTeX for sheet music), despite it not being built for that…
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.
Same. I started with the Akai MPC mini 2 and Ableton Live lite. Now I have a Yamaha P 515, a couple of Genelec 8341, a Sabaj a20d 2022 DAC, A MacBook Pro 2021 with Ableton Suite, Pianoteq 8 and Spitfire’s BBC Orchestra on it and I only sold 2 songs on Bandcamp for a total of 10 euros…But boy is it fun!
Man server racks are so overpriced. I wanted one for my home server but after seeing the cost for a couple pieces of metal, I said fuck that and just put it in a regular pc case. In retrospect I wish I had put it in a NUC and gotten an external drive bay for the NAS
I think the only cure for gear acquisition syndrome is experience. After a few years of buying everything in sight, I noticed that I really only used my FabFilter and Universal Audio plugins, with occasional instances of Soothe2 and MH Thump. When I changed computers, I didn’t reinstall 70% of my plugins.
After a few years of composing, I noticed I only really used my samples from East-West, ProjectSAM, and Cinesamples.
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