My son does the homebrewing and I build all his equipment. I turned an old freezer into a kegerator, I found an old water cooler and use it to transfer hot or cold into a variety of coils depending on where I need it. I welded up his brewer tree from scrap iron. A couple of weeks ago he took 1st,2nd, 3rd out of about 50 beers. I find myself wanting to get more involved in it. Great hobby.
Ha! I have a 50 qt aluminum tamale pot ($40 at the local Hispanic grocery) with a spigot that I use for a boiler. I also use a all copper/stainless plate chiller that I got from a biodiesel site for $60, and put garden hose fittings on it.
People get all pissy (exactly what I was talking about in the OP) about aluminum pots, but I’ve never had an issue with it.
One of my favorite things about homebrewing is the sort of low-cash improvisation that you see- I get a huge kick out of making it work with hardware store stuff and repurposing other items for brewing. I’m actually trying to figure out a way to rig my home-built PID controller (originally built for my Bradley smoker) into my brewing rig, but I think that may need a pump and some sort of electric heating element.
Possibly also because you do it professionally? I get that sometimes with people into amateur theatre. They get really obnoxious about what they do, as if they are trying to compete with me or something. 
I remember this one guy, a friend of a friend, who was just really aggressive about how he could’ve become a professional but didn’t. He pretty much ended up ridiculing my life. I didn’t even say anything, just let him run on and on…
They also often get very fanatical about theatrical superstitions, or really obscure details in plays or nutty traditions.
Now that I’m sort of looking at a different path myself people often suggest that I could always do am dram. I just nod, but truthfully: never, not in a million years.
There was definitely some of that. I often got suggestions on how to improve our beers, which I always took seriously (to their faces, anyway).
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People get all pissy (exactly what I was talking about in the OP) about aluminum pots, but I’ve never had an issue with it.
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Dear god, are people still arguing over that? I’m so glad I abandoned all homebrewing fora 4 years ago or so. What are they getting pissy about, that you’ll get Alzheimer’s or that you’ll scorch your beer and never be able to make American Light Lager? Because I remember both of those and neither is true.
The way I heard it (about academia, but applies to so much else): the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.
In Dungeons and Dragons groups, Editions Wars is the big thing. Lots of folks feel they need to choose a certain specific version of the game and hold it up as a sacred text, against which all other versions are heresy. It makes for extremely boring conversations.
That’s pretty much it- I think the argument has moved more to whether or not the aluminum oxide layer is enough to protect your beer (and brain) from the dreaded aluminum or not.
There’s also the extract / partial mash / all-grain feud; some a-holes claim you can’t make good beer without going all-grain. This is of course patently untrue for the vast majority of styles, because unless you’re really good at it, the likelihood of making funky beer is a lot higher with all-grain if only because of the greater complexity.
There’s also the dry vs. liquid yeast crowd, and the starter-size crowd.
I made a light lager using Briess pilsen extract, about 1/2 lb of carapils, and 1/2 lb of crystal 10, roughly 20 ibu of Sterling hops and dried 34/70 yeast fermented at 48 degrees, and aged at about 35, and it was GOOD. Good enough to where my Bud Light/Coors Light drinking friends wanted to learn how to homebrew to make beer like it.
Yet somehow, I broke several commandments- aluminum pot, extract, dried yeast, etc… It should have been godawful swill, according to the enthusiast wisdom, but it wasn’t.
Indeed. I have seen at least one vehement claim that the bridge pieces on a Telecaster make the tone *so *much better if they’re brass instead of nickel.
Another over-the-top hobby is audiophilia. Ask the people who spend hundredson a set of wires. Or thousands. Imagine spending more on 1.5m of cable than what my car is worth.
And some careers.
It’s an old joke that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
^ Snipped from larger post.
Here’s the thing, that was true,once upon a time, sort of. When I started homebrewing your choices for extract were light, medium, or dark, and that was if you were lucky. Much of the extract available was canned syrup and the beers made with it were not really memorable in any good way. So all-grain was the only way to make a real Pilsener or Stout or what have you.
Now, I can go to the LHBS and pick up Marris Otter extract, or wheat DME, etc. Even though I have an all-grain rig, I usually make an extract batch while I’m mashing and lautering the grain and it’s hard to tell the difference anymore.
Ending this hijack, it goes back to people braying the stuff they were told 10 years ago, like I said in my first post.
The audio/hifi filed is absolutely notorious for this, and there are companies who pander very expensively to this crowd with rather expensive cables of one type or another, or extremely expensive capacitors for speaker crossover networks.
Few, if any at all will actually pick up differences in double blind tests, and often the differences in sound are described in terms that would probably be better used in a recipe book, none of them can subjectively discern or describe the differences, and none can actually work out how to rank subjectively the real merits of one technical approach vs some other technical approach - at least not on a technical manner.
Many of these types will argue that the subtle differences cannot be picked up and measured by instruments, or will argue some sort of level of technical limitation. The reality is that if instruments that can detect differences of less than 1 part in 100 million will easily outperform the human ear, and almost always the hifi snobs resort to some technical limitation is utterly irrelevant because it only begins to have the slightest effect well outside the range of human hearing, by factors of around a few million.
The problem with hifi is simple, its very complex and takes many years of working in the field, and it also takes a lot of education - so the hifi buff resorts to the shortcut, but you cannot shortcut the knowledge that takes an entire career to acquire.
In gardening, there are the people who have artistic training, and are so much more expert in design principles and palette*, which makes them vastly superior to the common herd who just go out and have fun planting things.
*apparently all these artistic sensibilities were insufficient to allow them to make even a half-assed living doing painting or sculpture, so some of them gravitate to garden design.
My stuff is better than your stuff.
I think that the more you obsess on a small field, the more important it seems to you. Instead of gaining perspective, you’re losing it. Of course, there’s an xkcd for this phenomenon.
I don’t know if the amount a person cares about a topic has an inverse relationship to its importance - lots of people care about environmentalism, donating food to starving African nations, etc. - it’s more that when the matters are so petty, the caring seems out of place and we notice it.
What, a model railroader who didn’t mention the definite old-school term for such hobbyist nitpicking mentality?
“Rivet Counter”
I believe Rivet Counter has been used in model railroading since at least the 1950s, if not before…
My neighbor when I wasa kid, about 1957 maybe had a little house built for his trains. Maybe 400 sg ft. At night after work he would wear his engineer suit and hit the railroad. I loved watching him. I bet he was a rivet counter.
One of the oddest manifestations of this I’ve seen was on a flight simulator forum focused on a particular WW1 flight sim.
Occasionally a new player would post asking what ‘realism’ settings others used and would give them the best game (this was offline only - the sim didn’t have an online mode). Most posts would be along the lines of “x,y and z are the basics - other than that, just set it up in a way that gives you the most enjoyment.”
One guy would occasionally show up and start insulting anyone who didn’t play with all the ‘realism’ setting turned up to maximum difficulty, use head-tracking hardwear to look around and play the campaign with a “Dead-is-dead” attitude (that is if, you’re shot down & killed in-game you have to consider that character dead and start over rather than just have another go at the mission).
His opinion was that if you didn’t play the game his way you were short-changing yourself, undermining your masculinity and disrespecting the real pilots who flew in WW1 :rolleyes:. The way this guy typed you could picture him starting to froth at the mouth and shout at his screen as he got near the end of his rant.
He eventually got himself banned for it.
Hey, I resemble that remark. 
I enjoy the geekery, but try to avoid the arrogance. It’s fun to compare notes, not “win” some silly online discussion.
I started playing Wizardry 8, a 12-year-old game, recently. Combat can drag like a sonofabitch sometimes, so I went looking online for a fix, and sure enough I found an old thread where someone offered a simple file that greatly sped up combat, simply by speeding up certain combat animations.
The dude you described came in and started mocking anyone who used this mod as part of the “have it now generation” and unwilling to wait for anything and unable to appreciate the finer pleasures in life and blah blah blah.
It was kind of funny.
My theory is that nobody really cares about how good their stuff is on any absolute scale. They just want it to be better than *your *stuff.