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
Farming - family has been doing it for ~5 generations. I’d say we have put in about $10 M dollars over time (adjusted for inflation).
What’s that dear? It’s a way of life/occupation . . . are you sure? Seems like it must be a hobby given the return we’ve made on it over the years. Well, if you’re sure.
My wife said that farming is technically an occupation and not a hobby. I still have my doubts given how much we have thrown away on it over the years, but I don’t like to disagree with her (she’s usually right).
This is something that’s really hard for me. I’m against corn subsidies because I’m tired of everything having corn/corn syrup because it’s so cheap. I think the subsidies should be based on something else that promotes variety, and also favors sustainable farming instead of monocropping with petroleum based fertilizer. I know it needs subsidized, because people are price sensitive, but it needs to be done differently.
Yeah this is one of those things I’ve just accepted will require someone really skilled in drafting political policy to fix, but with the ongoing trend of people leaving the farming trade such a farm subsidy reform is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve
The initial investment for espresso is pretty steep, but I think it’s well worth it. There’s something so satisfying about making your own coffee drinks yourself. And if you think about it, you’ll probably drink coffee for the rest of your life, so you’ll end up breaking even eventually.
Music production. You start with pirated FL Studio and sone freeware plugins and the next thing you know is you’re planing your hone studio with room treatment, expensive monitors, an expensive interface, aonther evrn more expensive interface, that one vintage compressor you absolutely need, a tape machine, and then you want I synthesizer, just a small, versaitle one, and next thing you know is you’re buying the second euro rack for your mod synth because there wasn’t enough space in the first one, because you need that one filter, and since you got lots of free slots now, why not buy some more fx. Fx can’t hurt, right? And maybe one oscillator, you always wanted a fifth one…
Hiking. You start out with what you got. Then on the first few hikes you find out what gear you absolute have to bring with you. Then when you have a fine little gear stash, you begin adding things from the never ending “nice to have” list. Then you go to outdoor stores just to have a look around… HA!
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
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…$$$
This is not the first post where I feel it but I love it so much that we have a lot of people on Lemmy that can talk about things not related to computers!
Yes but that’s only good. I’m a computer guy too, but I couldn’t talk much about anything else, and I want to read about other topics too, besides this
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.
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.
I can appreciate the appeal of physical copies, but if it’s hindering your enjoyment then why not just listen to digital copies? The vinyl records are probably being scribed from a digital version, anyway.
Not OP, but I generally do listen to most of my music via streaming these days but it sucks: it’s not immersive, sound quality is garbage and I miss the ritual of examining the art and liner notes while listening. When you listen to an LP you’re more invested in it because you paid for it and also because you’re in proximity to the record being payed and you’re physically interacting with it. you end up listening to the songs in the context and sequence that they’re supposed to be listened to.
I know that a lot of this is intangible, but there is value in it
I have 1500 LPs from my collecting days but have bought only a handful of records in the last few years for this reason. Last time I mail ordered 2 LPs it came to $75.
You start off with just your computer and a free copy of Virtual DJ Home; next thing you know you’re spending $1300 on just a single turntable, and as we know you need at least two, plus a mixer, plus the $400 software needed to run it all.
Or you could go the vinyl route as a DJ and end up spending $70 on a single record as you’ve stated. Either way, you’re spending thousands.
It’s this very bready one that takes like, three hours minimum to be ready. Like a half hour to mix and then two hours to rise and then another hour to rise in the pan. It smells yeasty as fuck but when it’s cooked it is the best pizza anywhere.
I may or may not have eaten two slices before taking that photo. They were delicious. It’s Detroit-style pizza, so literally everything about making it is expensive, but so so worth it.
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!”
Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I’ve spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don’t account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it’s not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone’s interested in my book-style illustration: pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli
Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don’t want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:
The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It’s good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it’s not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you’re going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it’s still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it’s truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren’t opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline – in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
Caran d’ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don’t include a strong white)
Caran d’ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
A ruler, to help you sketch.
I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!
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