Used to be? Hah. I’ve already got you beat, then.
Not that I wear costumes or go to conventions, though.
No you’re not.
You’re a student of JRRT and his mythos. Much more respectable.
Just like me.
I went to conventions, so we may have to declare this one a draw.
Police scanner guys
I’m a radio guy. I really enjoy amateur radio and listening to the local police. Hams are generally good folks but the scanfans…whoa. There’s some…er, intellectually unfortunate individuals who take it really seriously. I’ve seen scanfans pretend to talk into a scanner (they’re receive only), working as guards wearing scanners with cop-style remote speakers on their lapels, and heard stories of them racing to accident and crime scenes to ‘lend a hand’. By and large, a bunch of pinheads.
I did not even consider this a Hobby where I kept bad company. In fact, I consider this a Hobby where I keep gret company. 
Jim
Went to conventions, worked as AV staff at some of them, and have a fursuit. It’s a very unimpressive one by the standards of the fandom, but I do have one.
Really, furries aren’t that scary, especially the ones of us actually staffing the cons. If you have it together enough to meaningfully contribute and have the desire to do so, you’re probably not one of the scary folk.
And yes, I say this as an unrepentant anthropomorphic fan: there are some scary fuckin’ people in the fandom. However, just like the more conventional fandoms like sci-fi or religion, they are the exception, not the rule.
I’ve worked comic cons.
For free. (By helping these guys set up their booth, I got a button that said “pro” and which allowed me to get in every day, not only the 3 days it’s open to the general public)
Same as dwv1970, my tastes in music apparently don’t fit my looks and line of work. Kind of funny, being in a car with three coworkers a few months back, it was pretty late and I offered the two CDs I had on me as “wake up music” (they’re legal: I own the originals but I prefer to mp3 my CDs so I can travel with just a couple instead of 200). I ask do they want the high or the low dose of wakeup, the boss chooses high and almost hits his head against the car’s ceiling when Rammstein blared out… I did say it was wake-up music!
Nobody into Cosplay? 
I’m in the SCA, but I’m told this can apply to other reenactment & combat LARP groups - Stick Jocks and the Faerie People, man, they give me the willies. But mostly Stick Jocks.
I’ve found the Dune threads/bits of thread on this board to be mostly OK. Umm, except that one a few months ago just slagging off the whole idea, but otherwise, it seems OK - feel free to start a CS thread sometime.
I’m a gamer but I spend about as much time watching X-Play as I do gaming these days. X-Play is probably the only reason I pay for digital cable. It’s a great show overall, decent game reviews with some fairly witty satire and humor. I wonder where Morgan keeps going though. She’s not there half the time now.
Anyway, I’m not so sure your stereotypical gamer these days is like the OP describes. Now gaming is more mainstream, everyone from 5 year old boys to football players to rock stars are gaming.
Many’s the time I’ve wondered why it is that so many people with an interest outside the traditional work-sports-eating-drinking-sex nexxus, that might conceivably lead them to become interesting, diverse, stimulating people, instead let it TOTALLY DOMINATE THEIR FRIGGN LIFE.
I’ve hung at various times with jazz musicians, classical musicians, recordheads, nostalgiacs, collectors and fandoms of various stripes, RPGeeks, compuweenies, the religious left…and with the exception of the last 3 groups, what was most remarkable about each was their isolation. Few had any serious engagement – even the ironic, just-for-laughs kind – with any mainstreams of the culture. (The geeks were great company at ball games, but hey, it was college, they were smart and funny folk, and none of us were really fans.)
People who collect things – and in some sense everything collected, great art, music, literature, gets “reified” (=turned into a Thing) –tend to be the most limited people in my experience. (And I’m one of them!) Too many –not a majority necessarily, but an inescapable subgroup – are limited, graceless, boring, unhygienic, misanthropic, emotionally handicapped, closed. And a good number of the remainder have something slightly desperate and sad clinging to them like the sheen on a bargain-basement raincoat.
What’s worse - if worse there could be :rolleyes: - is that collector communities are as sex-segregated as anything you will find outside junior high school. I am only slightly more likely to find a potential female life partner amidst a group of 78 fiends that I would be to find one at Off-Track Betting or a 25c peepshow. And that depresses the heck out of me.
What I wouldn’t give, I sometimes think, to find a cadre of enthusiasts that were capable of a decent conversation about, I dunno, 5 or 6 topics over a few pleasant hours. All right, four, even, with the occasional discursion into a few more. People who had a little more in common with the general run of humanity who can appreciate fresh stringbeans or trail biking or the NCAA tourney without being totally obsessed or even knowing a whole lot. People who don’t use their interests as a place to hide out from life.
Is that too much to ask?
Similar problem here in Canada. Shooters, especially hadgun shooters, are immediately assumed to be emotionally disturbed ticking time bombs just waiting to pick the right school to decimate. To be fair, the level of discussion on the only Canadian gun board seems to suggest a higher nut concentration than the American boards. However, the folks I meet at my range all appear to be well adjusted, ordinary adults, like a golf club, only with a bit younger set. I have yet to see a mall-ninja-wannabe all decked out in tacticool gear. Maybe it’s because the range I go to has comparatively more expensive membership fees. But mention your hobby to Jane Q. Public, and all of a sudden, their kids can’t play with your kids anymore :rolleyes:
It’s gotten to the point where I see even pre-releases as an opportunity for personal growth through exercising patience and forbearance. If it weren’t for the playgroup I host at my home I’m not sure I’d be playing at all anymore.
Enjoy,
Steven
It is not too much to ask.
Is that not what the Dope is? I would guess over half of us has at least one fringe interest/Hobby. Go to a Dopefest and the conversations are all over the place. Personally, I obsess on Baseball, specifically the Yankees. However, this is excepted behavior by the mainstream. My lesser interest in old fashion Dice & Paper Role-playing is the oddball Hobby. My interests are all over the place. I am an environmentalist and met my wife through the local group I am now a lifetime member. She does not like baseball much and D&D at all. No problem. I talk music, sports, politics, science, carpentry, sailing, etc. with anyone that wants. Oh yeah, I am also a computer geek by trade. Again, a now socially acceptable interest as people is just happy to know someone they can ask for tech help from. Therefore, the Dope fits your bill pretty well while having an eclectic group of hobbyist.
Jim
I find it’s best to just keep your mouth shut about guns. It’s almost in the same category as religion and politics. Even if people you casually know don’t seem to have a negative view, who knows what they will blab to all their friends about your guns, which puts you at risk for a bad impression from them, or worse yet theft depending on how unsavory the friends of friends are.
Count me in with a lot of these. Let’s see, D&D, Magic, sewing, video games, anime, comic books, Star Trek, Star Wars, have stuffed animals, LOTR. Add for me writing erotic fiction (as well as regular fic, but it’s the erotic part that brings out the weirdos) and painting D&D miniatures. (I don’t play with them. I just paint them.) And the Dope.
The one that I am currently a little ashamed of is I just joined the dance classes in the SCA. I’m not a member yet, and most of the people are really nice anyway, but some of them are really weird.
People who spend hours shut away inspecting and cataloguing little pieces of glue-backed paper are called stamp collectors; people who do the same with women’s lingerie are call perverts. Go figure.
People who do the same with the Yankees are clinically insane.
So which do you collect, the stamps or the lingerie or both?
Clinically Insane, wow, that is a step up to many things I have been called by Yankee Haters, Thank you.
Jim
Yo. Not as bad as the furry thing. The cosplay outliers like <DoNotGoogle>ManFaye or Sailor Bubba</DoNotGoogle> seem to be a lot less common than the furry outliers. I haven’t had anyone give me weird looks when I mention a costume I’m working on. That said, it does seem odd that, chatting with some of my cosplay friends, a surprising number of our conversations end with someone signing off, “No sweat, no pain, no cosplay!”
As much mileage as I get out of the “I’m better now.” and “Please don’t spit on me.”, robertliguori is mostly right. Many furries are pretty decent people. Some of them are really great people. Some of the contributors are as broken as the worst of them (some of the artists come immediately to mind), but they’re generally exceptions. The problem is that the outliers (in my experience) are more common than outliers in other fandoms, and (in everyone’s experience) the outliers are way out there. Those two come together to make the furries the Untouchables of the Internet.