…that people outside of the hobby would probably know nothing about.
This was once a Reddit thread that generated many interesting stories so I thought I would try it here.
My hobby is something called primitive flight shooting. It is an archery event where we attempt to break world records in distance shooting, simply who can shoot the furthest. I recently proposed that we drop the all natural string requirement and allow modern string materials to be used as quality natural linen is getting harder to find. The argument is that the new string material will be lighter and faster and not be fair to past record holders. My argument is that competition has been so limited that past records are not really all that important anyway due to lack of participation. The string material restriction has been a significant contributor to lack of participation. The sport has been hanging on by threads for decades and the lack of competition has not really pushed myself or others as much as it should have. I would rather see more competition and not worry about past records being broken. We could put a freeze on those records and start over or even keep the class as it is and open a new class that allowed for modern strings. Sometimes I feel people want to keep the number of competitors down to protect their own records.
I’m am artist. A maker of things. An upcycler. Way, way before it became a ‘thing’.
I used to swipe pallets behind stores and build things. Now its a race to who sees them and gets them first. I saw a near fist fight over 3 small pallets behind a Sears store recently. Stoopid wannabees!
My girlfriends son is a new found pallet artist LOL.
Link to the Reddit thread, pls and thx?
My biggest hobby right now is breeding African soft-furred rats, and they’re too new/unknown to have generated much controversy (yet). Maybe arguing about names of coat colors, since those aren’t standardized yet.
But that’s an offshoot hobby from owning a ball python, and holy mother of all the gods. You want debates & in-fighting, this is the arena for you!
Put it this way: I’m in about a dozen or so Facebook groups for b.p. owners. (There’s probably hundreds. Seriously.) In several cases, not only is there an ABC Ball Python group … not only is there a “Fuck ABC Ball Python Group” group … but there’s also a “Fuck that Fuck ABC Ball Python Group group” group.
The biggest “controversy” is keeping the snakes in tubs/racks vs. keeping in tanks/vivariums. My pet name for those myriad iterations of the same arguments is Chumbawumba. (Because the “tub thumpers” come out in droves. Like Bible thumpers, get it?)
You’d think the second biggest argument would be around feeding frozen vs live … but no. It’s definitely centered around whether or not ball pythons can/want to/should have opportunities to climb. Which really is an offshoot of tubs vs tanks. Because shallow plastic sweater boxes are space efficient & easier to control temperature and humidity, but you ain’t fitting branches in there.
The Reddit thread was from some time ago:
Here you go. Here’s just a taste:
Beekeeping; one of the major current arguments is the ‘natural’ vs conventionally managed, and the effects on varroa mite. Basically this mite was recently accidentally introduced, and spread dramatically. Within something crazy like 5 years of the first UK record, basically every hive in the mainland UK has it to some level. As well as weakening bees directly, it acts as a virus vector, so it’s a pretty big issue.
The ‘natural’ beekeepers insist that treating hives with anti-varroa stuff (which is not 100% effective, it’s very hard to find something that will kill the mites but not the bees) is maintaining an unstable situation and is preventing bees from developing their own defences. The conventional beekeepers say that’s a load of codswallop, treatment is all that’s keeping many hives alive while people look at intentionally breeding bees who can deal with the mites, which is much more likely to find a solution and the guys deliberately not treating are simply maintaining reservoirs of the mites, which then reinfect everyone else’s bees.
Then the native British bee keepers start piping up, pointing out that the native subspecies, (which is probably extinct as a pure form) is a lot better at coping with varroa than the Italian subspecies and hybrids that most beekeepers actually have, so claim we should just all switch to those even though they may not really exist and if they do there’s hardly any and it’d be really impractical to do.
The collective noun for beekeepers should probably be ‘argument’.
I wouldn’t say it’s recent, as the incident took place a couple of years ago… My hobby is beading. I mostly do necklaces, but I follow various groups that do everything from everyday jewelry to elaborate pieces that could be classified as chest plates. One bead supplier runs a very active Facebook page that used to have weekly contests; group members could submit photos of their design, other group members would vote, and the winner got a gift certificate to the bead supplier’s store.
Yeah, you see where this is going… Someone eventually published a picture of what was supposedly her own work, and a small group of people showed up with very convincing evidence that not only was she passing off someone else’s design as her own creation, but that this wasn’t the first time she had been caught doing so. An argument that would go on to involve several sites (Reddit, etc.) erupted about whether or not the submitter in question had made enough changes for the design to be considered hers; eventually, the bead supplier removed all the questionable posts, put up some vague statement about some difficulties with the contest, and stopped offering the weekly contests.
My hobby is RV camping - specifically the towed trailer type (not motorhome).
In the past decade 4 trends are intersecting to form a dangerous combination.
- Light trucks are becoming much more powerful than their ancestors.
- Truck manufacturers are increasing the “tow rating” of their light trucks, often in a sort of arms race. A half ton pickup a few decades ago might be limited to 6000 lbs. Today they’re pushing 11,000 lbs.
- Lightweight materials are allowing trailer manufacturers to construct lighter (or longer) RVs.
- A new group of inexperienced retirees entering the field.
These newbies frequently end up buying a much longer trailer than they should, thinking it can be towed by their new half-ton pickup since the numbers seem OK at first glance. And RV dealers are about as ethical as heroin dealers, they’re not going to stop a sale with facts. In the past, a really long trailer would be heavier and the truck would advertise less towing ability so these combos wouldn’t be considered.
The problem is they are still subject to wind and sway effects on the road. Perhaps more so due to the lighter weights. And they don’t realize or understand the concept of dynamic instability. Once a gust or (more often) the enormous bow wave from a passing semi shoves their trailer, they may not have enough truck and suspension stiffness to regain control.
Here’s dash cam video of what happens when the vehicle can’t control the sway while passing a semi. Once the “system” becomes dynamically unstable, no driver can recover.
I can’t prove an increased accident rate though, but it’s the subject of heated discussion, since no guy likes being told his truck isn’t big enough. Some edge cases can be corrected by a very expensive type of hitch (~$4000) but most won’t even consider spending this.
Short paragraph on light vs heavy duty pickups.
A light duty (half ton) pickup truck is often little more than a large car. These are designated by a number beginning with 15 (either 150 or 1500). Heavy duty pickups start with either 25 or 35 (250/350 or 2500/3500). If you look underneath one of these, it will resemble a locomotive more than a car. The differences are enormous. And newbies may not realize this since they’re so similar on the outside.
Example: The Ram 1500 Quad Cab Hemi with 10,500 lb. tow package has an actual legal load of 900 lbs. (subtract actual weight from GVWR). This is 50 lbs. less than a Toyota Camry. A 10,000 lb trailer should put a minimum of 1200 lbs tongue weight on the rear hitch. Someone who tries this combo may believe they’re OK, but they’re already 300 lbs over the legal and warranteed limit, and this is before adding passengers and stuff in the bed.
Let’s see, controversies in the gardening world…
One that continues to crop up (sorry) around the country is the right to grow vegetables in your front yard, something opposed by homeowners’ associations and some municipalities. One couple in Florida was recently victorious in their ongoing fight to raise peppers and other veggies in their front yard, thanks to a new law.
There has been limited outrage (so far) about an unprececented restriction on what you can do with your own home-raised sweet corn. A conventional hybrid (not GMO) called Amaize is sold under an agreement that you can only use the corn you raise yourself; you can’t sell it to someone else or at a roadside stand, and you’re forbidden from distributing or selling seed or plants to anyone. No thanks.
And there’s the ongoing disbelief/outrage among fig tree growers about outlandish prices being asked for cuttings of rare figs. It’s tricky because someone can claim to have found a previously unknown heirloom variety, which might or might not be the same as one previously grown under different names. And should you pinch fig plants or let them grow naturally? Figgers are a contentious bunch.
You strengthen my intention to plant artichokes in the front yard (though in Oregon, it may be illegal not to landscape with edibles).
Radio Reference has been hacked. I mean, whoops, sorry, there’s been a security incident:
In the world of scale modeling, the big drama last year was that Hobbico went bankrupt. They own Revell, and until an investment company bought out all of their old tooling there was a very real possibility that a lot of very popular brands like Revell, Monogram, and Snaptite were going to disappear. Hobbico was also the official North American distributor of a number of large brands like Hasegawa and Italeri, so that supply chain dried up for awhile.
There’s also the constant debate that basically boils down to accuracy vs. artistic license. You’ll get this when people talk about weathering a kit, since what a lot of people think looks good is actually way over-done from a realism perspective. Another one is scribing panel lines. On one hand, aircraft panel lines scribed to a realistically scaled width would literally be microscopic, but OTOH some modelers insist that if you can see them in a photo scaled to the same size as the kit then you should be able to see them on the finished model.
Finally there’s the ongoing lament about how the internet is killing the local hobby shop, vs. the internet is the best thing to ever happen to the hobby and these stores need to adapt to the times.
We’ve already had a thread about the big upset in the world of knitting/crochet/spinning/fiber arts. Ravelry, a primary sale and sharing site for the hobby/cottage industry declared that it would no longer allow any posts in support of President Trump or promotional merchandise. Most of us were very much in favor of this, but it got ugly.
There is also of course the great divide between those who only purchase yarn made of natural fibers by small artisan shops and those who think retail acrylic yarn is perfectly all right (or who just can’t afford $50 per skein.) Never the two shall meet, which is a crying shame, because the skills are the same either way, and they have a great deal to teach one another. For those of us who are wool-lergic it is especially unfortunate, because neither side likes cotton yarn, and llama/silk is painfully expensive.
This thread is amazing. Obligatory xkcd: xkcd: Crazy Straws
In the world of scuba diving, there are a variety of gear configurations that loosely correlate with certification agencies. This is oversimplifying a bit, but essentially there’s the DIR school (which stands for–I shit you not–“doing it right”), which insists on a particular type of bouyancy control device, regulator hose configuration, even exactly where on your harness you mount each accessory, and then there’s everyone else, among whom are dive-and-let-dive folks and people who are equally dogmatic about their own setup. I kind of like the DIR setup myself; I find the backplate and wing more comfortable than the jacket style BCD that most beginners use, and I really like the streamlining and control of the long hose primary donate regulator setup (basically, everyone dives with a second mouthpiece to give to their buddy in case the buddy runs out of air; on this setup, you’d give your buddy the one in your mouth and take the extra one yourself instead of giving the extra one to your buddy. It’s quicker, but some people don’t like looping the hose around their neck. There are people in each camp who will tell you you will DIE if you do it the other way.) But there are also things about the DIR philosophy I think are stupid, like we’re supposed to use depth gauges and bottom timers with tables, instead of computers that are cheap, reliable, serve all three functions, and record this information in case of an accident, like an airplane’s black box. Also they strongly advocate diving with oxygen-enriched air or other mixed gases every time (they like to say “air is for tires!”) which on some dives can add a significant safety margin but on other dives is really just a needless additional expense. I find the snobbery at all extremes tiresome, but I do kind of get sucked into these debates; after all, it could theoretically be life or death for someone, eventually.
In the world of the ukulele there are the perpetual controversies about using a strap or a pick. (I use both, which makes me punk AF.)
But the uke has become way more popular in the past decade or so, since they’re cheap and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to get good enough to play a few songs in a strumming circle. So there are people who think this is a good thing–the more the merrier–and those who think that this undermines serious players (especially those creating original music) and makes it hard for them to get taken seriously. I’m in the first camp, even as a serious and frequently gigging player, though I see where those in the second camp are coming from; the uke is still trying to win back the respect it lost thanks to Tiny Fucking Tim.
That said, I was there for a boozy late-night post-festival strum earlier this year with two of the best players in the world, Jake Shimabukuro and Andrew Molina, and they had the time of their lives playing Elvis songs and “Sweet Caroline” and even the dreaded “Wagon Wheel”*. I think the resulting videos shut up a lot of people who thought they were getting too good to play along with the common folk.
- This song is so overplayed in song circles and open mics that they often have unofficial “NO WAGON WHEEL” policies. On that particular night, it turned out that Jake had somehow never heard the song, so he wanted to do it.
My hobby is fountain pens. There doesn’t seem to be much actual drama, but of course there are some deeply-felt disagreements between some people about various aspects of pens, inks and papers. Also, there are disagreements about the relative merits of the folks who do youtube videos that are about pens. That’s about it, as far as I can see.
I just went to my first pen show here in San Francisco, and it was quite an interesting experience. But no drama to speak of.
Larping - black Drow face paint, yea or nea.
In the world of table top role playing games (like Dungeons & Dragons) controversies relating to diversity, representation, and creating an atmosphere free from sexual harassment at conventions and game stores has been raging these last few years. This has yielded some positive results such as conventions instituting specific rules against harassment and banning individuals who have been involved in doxxing, harassment, or accused of sexual assault.