Asklemmy

Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I'm in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I'll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and "private cloud!" Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and "cloud" services is a massive genuine benefit!

I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially "donating" it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I'm consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.

Homebrewing. I have made many a beer over 8 or 9 years. They get better with each batch, but along with it is another new piece of equipment to make the process easier or more efficient.

ITT: Everybody's current/longest hobby.

Mine is boardgames. You start free by playing somebody else's collection, then you get the urge to start your own...

Arma 3. I updated my router, computer and bought the dlcs so I could run a server.

Tabletop Roleplaying Games.
I bought Mutant Year Zero in 2015 thinking "Ah, this will give me countless hours of play! I can make my own adventures and stuff!"
Now, my shelf is buckling after trying a hundred different games and supplements, and getting addicted to pretty books.
Currently, my favorite game of all time is Delta Green. Investigative horror mystery. Amazingly horrific scenarios (adventures) with True Detective season one level of masterful writing.

Check out Glass Cannon Podcast playing it on Spotify if you want!

Not sure if you’d call it a hobby or more of a collection but I collect mechanical wrist watches and that can get expensive fast.

I started with a mechanical under $100, with a decent movement and a display back case so I could see the gears and rotor inside, and that could’ve been it. But once you get the bug, you want to get different types of movements, different case sizes, maybe some complications, sooner or later you’re going to start wanting some hand finishing, and then it gets really expensive. I wanna get into mechanical watch repair too but that gets really expensive and takes a lot of skill and time so I’m going to hold off a few years I think. Plus once I go there, there’s no coming back. I’ll be buying broken stuff on eBay constantly and there goes all my paycheques

Amateur Radio, Data Hoarding, Pc Gaming, and my car.

Coffee.

I started with cheap pre group coffee from the supermarket for less than £3 a bag and a chemex I picked up for £20. I now have four grinders, a bunch of pour over gear and an espresso machine (marax), worth several thousand. Plus a £80 a month fresh coffee bean habit.

keyboards, F-ing keyboards

None of my hobbies are inexpensive (bikes, guitars and parenting)

Every time a friend tries to get me to take up snowboarding or some other gear based hobby I'm like, "are you fucking insane?"

Lego , need I say more?

Ketamine

Cycling. I started with a bike that was given to me by my uncle. Now I have a road bike, full equipment x3, a direct drive trainer for the rainy days and a subscription to use that.

knitting/crochet. Yarn is expensive as hell.

I bought a vinyl copy of Beggars' Banquet by the Rolling Stones for 50p despite not having a record player. Fast forward six years and I now have a full stereo system, a collection worth over £10k and regularly order limited edition albums from small bands costing me large amounts each time. Send help.

Bonsai

Literally any hobby I have seriously messed with.

Although- racecars was never cheap.

My homelab started off pretty cheap. But, at this point, I am quite certain I have a few thousand bucks worth of hardware. Shit- I have two thousand bucks in just HDDs, SSDs/NVMes...

I had a recipe blog prior to the pandemic. I put well over five grand into it over four years and didn't make a cent.
If I hadn't decided that I hate website with ads and third party cookies on them I probably could have made a few bucks during the pandemic.

Any art medium that requires canvases. A small one at WalMart is no problem, but as you move to larger works and need better canvas material it gets expensive fast.

Oh! And Arduino programming. A simple kit to get going isn't too bad. Then you're trolling Adafruit for parts, then you go big and start importing from China directly. Now you're building a garage addition for the electronics lab... Or is that just me? At least it's also able house my first motorcycle... First...

Art.

Gave up on buying and maintaining copics and just bought CSP. May have to switch to Krita at some point, but digital art is far more accessible than other mediums. Want a marker texture? The brushes for that are free, only real barrier is a graphics tabler.

Beekeeping. It gets expensive very fast and doesn't seem to ease year on year

I started knitting for my kids when we were living in colorado.

so I ended up processing wool from raw fleece -> hat

raw merino fleece, raw alpaca fleece, Scouring soap, dye, dyeing classes with natalie redding, spinning wheel, drum carder, hackle, table loom, warping thing for yarn

Math

ended up going to school for math education (with pell grant $500 per 6 month term) I can't pass the exit exam. tried 5 times out of those I had to pay out of pocket for 4 of them $480.

Simple, I read. And with the internet I never have to worry about buying books.

I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you've got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you've got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least -- or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.

I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you're the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.

Magnet fishing.

I bought a kit that included a reasonably sized 360° magnet, rope, grappling hook and protective cover for about £120 thinking that it would be good enough to keep me satisfied for a while.

After my first trip out and having to carry a load of scrap metal about a mile back to the car, I bought a cart for £80 so I could cart it all back instead. After having to use my car to pull my magnet out of the harbour on Saturday I've bought a cheap winch and a tow rope to anchor it to things for £25 for when it gets stuck somewhere I can't use my car.

And of course I wanted a bigger magnet almost immediately, but I've managed to hold off on that so far. Saying that it's fairly likely I will get an upgrade from Bondi magnets when the site launches as long as the price is competitive with Magnetar (I suspect it's a partnership and the magnets will be identical, but we'll see)

Dog training/sports.

Here I am thinking "I need to get more active and it'll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link" (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)

Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I'll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25...? k...

Rally Novice acquired...fun but... Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? ...sure whatever

Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let's do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that's not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment... I'm officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I'm more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol

We're having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They've spent a literal fortune on that dog. It's absolutely mind boggling.

My wife and I started playing Disc Golf as an "inexpensive" and more accessible option to traditional golf with a started set of cheap discs off Amazon. Carts bags, and DOZENS of discs later...$$$

Used to homebrew. At first I thought it'd be cheaper than buying my own beer but it quickly ratcheted-up with grain mills, larger and larger pots and burners, finding places to store the fermenting/aging beer, finding time to brew, finding time to bottle/keg, the clean-up and mess...and, in certain cases, you go through the whole process to find an entire batch has been ruined.

Electronics repair and projects

Bumping uglies with my SO. We now have multiple children.

Fishing. Who would have thought it was so easy to get addicted to buying various baits and lures.

Instant (analog) photography and collecting pins and buttons. Turns out film is expensive and buying pins are expensive. Started out with friends giving me pins to stick on my bag and now I have close to hundred pins on my pin wall. At least they look pretty rad.

Hobby electronics started cheep, with a crappy soldering iron (a good precision one was the best purchase ever) and some cheep parts, ended up with a room stuffed with a thousand dollars worth or parts and a few thousand more in test equipment.

Every. Single. One.