A recent purchase has led me down the internet tubes to one of the strangest places I’ve encountered - the subculture of men that are really into shaving.
I bought myself a safety razor a couple weeks ago, and have been on line looking for information on the different blades (there’s literally dozens), soap/foam (Gillette Foamy isn’t ideal when using a safety razor, evidently) and technique (the head of the razor is shaped much differently than the Sensor Excel I’ve been using for 20 years, and the angle is way different). Anyways, there are a ton of sites, message boards and online communities that are devoted to all things shaving. I read a post by a guy who shaves 3 times per day, with different razors and blades every time. The same guy also has a rotation system for blades so he won’t use one for more than three shaves. Another guy had an elaborate rating system for double edged blades, with weighted points for closeness, flexibility, etc. I’m surprised, but not surprised, if you know what I mean. I know it takes all kinds, but that amount of dedicated attention to shaving seems awfully strange to me. Anyways.
What weird sub-cultures have you stumbled upon recently?
My daughter has recently gotten into Minecraft, and apparently there’s a whole thing where you go on YouTube and watch other people play the game. You don’t play along or anything, you just watch. I guess the point is their humorous commentary, and I suppose it’s not that much weirder than watching professional sports, but I had no idea. I thought video games were pretty much all about playing.
A friend of mine is into dressing her cats in little doll outfits. Apparently, there is a whole community of people who do this. She bought a modified baby carriage with mesh across the top to wheel her dressed-up cats around in.
The cats are very tolerant of all this and appear to enjoy the attention - mine would find it a kind of abuse.
For every hobby or leisure activity, there’s almost always an internet subculture that take it WAY too far, usually based on theoretical considerations of performance that have little to no real world bearing on anything.
For a really pointless one, go to bobistheoilguy’s forums and you’ll find a bunch of people who nitpick motor oil. As if you can actually drive a car for 10 years and tell a difference in performance based on whether you used Pennzoil Platinum, Mobil 1 or AMSOil.
Cycling/mountain bike enthusiasts will get all wonky about things like the weight of a water bottle cage, or grips or other things like that, despite the fact that it would just be easier and save more weight to take a dump before cycling.
There are some homebrewers who basically spend thousands of dollars to buy industrial temp controllers and pumps so they can reproduce a lot of the features of commercial breweries in their garages.
If you drive it for ten years, then tear it apart at check the wear and pitting on the bearings you certainly can tell if there is a quality difference.
You might be able to discern a difference between Mobil 1 and some value oil like Walmart’s Supertech if you were to tear down an engine after a decade of regular correct oil changes.
But I seriously doubt that it would be very obvious at all if someone had used one brand of top tier synthetic versus another, and that’s my point. These BITOG dorks quibble about that kind of thing incessantly- medieval monks debating angels on the heads of pins have nothing on these guys.
It’s essentially Sayre’s Law at work, since there’s no way to tell on a reasonably well maintained engine whether you did it any microscopic harm using an oil with non-optimal viscosity for a couple of oil changes or not.
Historical re-enactors will get all broiled over things like the kind of thread used to make garments, hollow- vs flat-grinding of bladed weapons, species of wood used in making tools, whether or not it’s appropriate to eat “red delicious” apples since they didn’t exist back then, and so on.
The ones that leave me mystified are Civil War re-enactors. No matter how you play it, it always ends the same - the North wins.
At least with food and drink snobs, there actually usually is a difference between different types of product. Even an uncultured swine like myself can tell the difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a $200 bottle, even if I don’t think the $200 bottle is worth the price. While I don’t share their convictions, I can easily see how someone could get very involved in all the different aspects of wine. I think it does get a little crazy when you start getting into the super high end, but I guess the super-rich need something to spend their money on.
The things that are really stupid are the ones where you literally cannot tell the difference (as in - if we conduct a blind test, you can’t reliably tell which is the overpriced cable and which is the coat hanger). I think a lot (though probably not all) of the audiophile stuff is like this.
Collectors in general can seem weird and obsessive to anybody not interested in their hobby. Doesn’t matter if it is stamps, coins, knives, or cereal premiums, the serious collector will manage to make it off-putting to an outsider.
