There is a group of people who play a variant called Old School, where only cards that were printed way back in 93/94 are legal. Basically, what if we had competitive Magic, but they stopped making cards 15 years ago?
I’m not currently active, but I used to sing in a barbershop chorus & quartet, part of the Barbershop Harmony Society (formerly the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America). They were an all-male organization for a long time, but finally started to allow women as full members last year. Each chapter gets to decide whether to allow women. I believe my local chapter does. I’m not sure whether this was a controversial thing but I imagine the competitions are very different now.
Stamp collecting. Big squabbles between people who don’t remove the backing envelope paper (i.e. the ‘stage’) from the stamps and people who use a solvent to remove the stage (i.e. ‘soakers’). Reddit Philatelisers group comments got het up again last weekend. Stagers threw down the challenge to meet up in person and resolve the issue pwnce and for all. People flew in to Chicago from all over the world. Agreement was made that it would only be knives and blunt instruments. But when we got there Jackie T of the Soakers pulled out glock and all of the other Soakers followed suit. Bullets flew and we scattered. But we had anticipated this kind of trechery so we had prepared a steel net that was hanging over the intersection four storeys up. At night you couldn’t see it. Jerry cut the stays and the net fell, enveloping the Soakers who flailed about and shot blindly into the night. We waited behind poles and trees until their ammo was spent then walked in from all sides and opened them up. Grisly, but they asked for it.
In amateur astronomy (another former hobby of mine) - there is a popular message board called Cloudy Nights. In 2016, one unruly user was banned for life. He got upset, got onto a hacking forum and solicited people to hack the Cloudy Nights site. A massive DDoS attack ensued, which disabled the Cloudy Nights forum as well as the business web site of the company that owned the forum (an online telescope shop named Astronomics).
The amazing thing is, last year, this guy was arrested by the FBI and sentenced to more than 2 years in prison for violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
So, keep that in mind if you ever get upset at the mods here…
I’m an equestrian, specifically Dressage. A few weeks ago, a big name trainer was arrested for shooting a client twice in the chest. BNT is in jail. Client is in hospital. In the world of hunter jumpers, BNT (think Olympic team coach) who has been in the business for over 50 years, was added to the Safe Sport list for sexual misconduct with minors.
More specifically, earlier this year a person tangentially related to D&D (‘consultant’ for the Players Handbook) was credibly accused of sexual abuse, harassment, etc. Wizards of the Coast (D&D’s publisher), after consulting with other people in the same section, decided to just remove the consultants section from the credits in the book since they couldn’t only remove his name. This had some people, of course, up in arms about how “unfair” it was despite the people in question being cool with it. Also, conspiracy theories abound about one of the lead writers/creators being sent out into the wilderness for having reached out to the guy in the first place, well before the allegations came out.
More directly hobby-related, Wizards of the Coast released their new rules for organized play and, as usual, a number of people are wondering what drugs they were taking. Each season lately seems to swing between extremes in how character advancement and treasure is awarded and my local game store has finally had enough and is bowing out of Adventurer’s League altogether and creating their own “AL-Lite” style rules.
Finally, in the world of miniatures painting, one of the big companies put out a new line of paints called Contrast that do a fairly decent job of simulating highlights and shadows with a single coat; useful for painting stuff quickly. You wouldn’t think that would be drama-worthy but topics abound ranging from claims that the paint company is strong-arming smaller stores in carrying large expensive displays, claims that professional painters on YouTube are getting paid off to shill for these paints and, of course, the debate on whether they’re actually as good as claimed or all hype. It got to where the mini painting Facebook group I’m in has banned any discussion of the topic beyond “Here’s a thing I painted with Contrast paints”.
I would disagree with that for the current season, because the swings seem to be happening between each iteration of preview rules that they’ve released instead of waiting season-to-season. And they haven’t finalized next season’s rules even though it starts in less than a month.
In the disc golf community where lost/stray discs are common, a lot of players put their names and phone numbers on all of their discs in hopes that when found by someone they will make their way back to their owner.
A lot of players cross the line from “it would be nice if someone returned my disc” to “if someone finds my disc and doesn’t return it to me that’s straight up theft of property!”
It drives some of them batty that a scuba diver might go to a pond on a public course, retrieve a couple dozen discs from the bottom, not call the numbers, and take them to a place like play-it-again-sports to make a few bucks.
Mountain bikers are split about whether to allow e-bikes on trails. The arguments against seem to be that it will increase trail use which is a bad thing for people who currently use the trails, and the people that e-bikes will bring in may be a hazard because the bikes can go faster than their skills can keep up with.
I think they just don’t want to be passed by someone who is getting electrical assist.
I guess as far as conventional hobbies go with communities, etc… mine is homebrewing. And there’s not much drama there- as far as I can tell, there’s a sort of philosophical divide between the older-school all-grain types who have false bottoms, sparging arms, etc… and people using the newer BIAB-style appliances like the Grainfather, Brewer’s Edge, etc… I wouldn’t call it drama though; homebrewing has a very strong streak of “do/brew what makes you happy” as one of its core values. And another is that good beer is good beer, regardless of how you got there.
I play a lot of video games, but I’m not really active in the various online communities, etc… so I don’t know what the drama du jour is.
In PC gaming, it’s the Epic game store. Not a day goes by without another story of how players harassed some dev for going Epic exclusive or how some dev made some petty tweets about it or how Epic offered a dev an exclusive agreement and, when turned down, refused to carry their game at all, yadda yadda.
I should have waited to mention Dungeons & Dragons because, as of this morning, the latest drama is another article saying that Gary Gygax (co-creator of the game back in the 70s) wasn’t all that and stole credit from the real creators. The fact that the author has had a bug up her butt about Gygax for years means there’s plenty of room for people to say the claims made are overwrought and biased and other people who belong to Team Dave Arneson and this shows what a hack Gygax was. It’s not a new argument but new wood on the fire for those who take sides.
Dunno if this is ‘drama’, but in the world of Transformers collecting (the toys, not the electrical devices) there’s a bit of stir over Hasbro’s new online store, Hasbro Pulse, and it’s decision to start offering crowdfunded products. As in, the official, decades-old established company has designed a product and asks for a pile of preorders before they’ll commit to putting it into production. These are expensive, big-ticket items that they’re not selling at normal retail, so the obvious goal is to ensure they’ll make a profit on the limited online sales. As best I can tell they’ve never done anything like this until recently.
Hasbro previously successfully sold a Star Wars sandbarge this way, and their first (and currently only) Transformers offering is a gigantic 19lb 27" monstrosity representing their transforming planet character Unicron. It’ll be the biggest Transformers toy ever sold, of a character who’s never gotten a really accurate representation before.
They put this thing up for sale for $575, giving the fandom a month and a half for 8000 people to enter preorders or it’ll never be produced. There has been a certain amount of fan discussion over whether they’re insane, in part because the time limit seems awfully short. Even dedicated fans out there might find it hard to scrape up that much loose cash that quickly.
On a lesser but possibly related note, high-end Transformers toys in general have been experiencing skyrocketing prices, such that a line that had just a year or two ago been selling things for $100-$150 has recently put up orders for a comparably-sized product that they want near $500 for. For those of us not physically composed of money this is kind of a big deal, in part because the rising prices make the unofficial products produced by third party companies (which flagrantly break intellectual property laws) look much more reasonably priced by comparison.
(Note for any mods: all the links here are not intended to be advertisements; the people on this board are way too mature and refined to buy Transformers anyway. They’re merely meant as cites for the varying and sometimes insane prices.)
Aside from the species splits themselves, there’s the controversy over which global bird list to use, Clements/eBird, HBW, or IOC (especially since the latter splits species more and gives you a lot more lifers), and whether or not to include species you’ve only heard but not seen.
I do obstacle course racing. It’s pretty social, as far as hobbies go. People race together, train together, carpool together, share hotel rooms together, etc.
Yesterday, one guy posted on Facebook that he was in a relationship with the very same woman that his bff was enamored with last month. I texted a friend of mine about it, and as we were talking, we began to realize how “incestuous” the hobby is. Once you scratch the surface and form deeper friendships with people, you begin to realize just how many of the people at a race have hooked up with other people. And it’s not just dating, it’s secrets. People who take a break from their spouse and mess around with other people, then come back to their spouse and never tell. People who mess around with friend’s spouses. People who publicly present as hetero but fool around with their own sex behind closed doors. Threesomes. You name it. It’s a dirty, dirty hobby in more ways than one.
Car hobbyists do nothing but fight amongst themselves.
Are dual clutch transmissions better than manuals?
Are “stance bros” respectable enthusiasts or are they just ruining cars?
Are turbos better than naturally aspirated cars?
If you want to race crappy cars, should you take yourself seriously or just have fun decorating your car with a ridiculous theme and wearing a silly matching outfit?
Are aircooledPorschesworth the money?
Should we preserve old cars in stock condition or restomod them them with modern engines, transmissions, brakes, and suspensions?
Oh, sure but those are still in the realm of philosophical disagreements rather than the fervid arguments you get in other hobby realms.
And yeah, Jophiel, I’d heard about the Epic Games store stuff, but thought it had mostly died down by now. (and thought it was kind of stupid to begin with)
