I don't know that this even counts, but one of the most strange but wildly interesting things I used to do years back was randomly exploring defunct teleporters in Habbo Hotel.

For those who don't know about teleporters/teles in Habbo Hotel, there are probably tens of thousands of pairs of teleports that exist in the game, each of them connecting only to its pair. Since trading furniture is pretty much a currency in Habbo, a lot of individual teleporters get traded off or lost throughout the years, and often end up being parked in random rooms and vast furniture junkyards.

So I would often lay down several random teles from my inventory, or enter my own furniture junkyard, and try every tele in there until I got a live one. This would Bill & Ted me to fuck knows where. If I'm unlucky, it's just a dead end room. If I'm lucky, it's a room with even more teles. That's where the rabbit hole begins. Pretty soon you're ten teles deep into the weirdest, most liminal Back Rooms spaces you can imagine. Sometimes you even find a back door into other players' private rooms and get to explore like a cat burglar. The sky was the limit.

I haven't logged in for a decade or more, but I still miss doing that sometimes.

I included the best pic I could find online of what a tele goldmine looked like, except there would typically be a wide variety of styles and not all portapotties like these.

In Eve Online, when a capsule was destroyed, a frozen corpse was left behind.

I knew someone who would go around collecting corpses. A battle is going, he'd be out there scooping them up. He's running a hauler, and this was the day that when your ship got destroyed, every bit of loot went out in individual units, so when a pirate would try to shake him down he'd respond with "If you blow me up, you'll crash back to desktop."

That was how he played the game, gathering corpses.

Memorising door colours of every house and flat in a small Scottish town of about 30,000.

Yes, the hobby-ist was on the spectrum.

Anvil firing

You get 2 anvils

Pack some gunpowder between them

Light a fuze

Run

The top one shoots off into the air

And you try not to looney tunes yourself.

I stalk random people on the Internet

I like watching people on the internet. 15y ago, I was using Shareaza, Kazaa, Emule as my music sources. For those who aren't familiar with those software: it's p2p file download. You install Shareaza on your computer, and give access to specific folder to the Shareaza network. Anyone using Shareaza can then download the files located on your shared folder. But, in the mid 00', even more than today, people weren't that tech savy and what happened, way too often, was that a user would give access to the "My Documents" folder or even worse, their whole computer. I was looking for those thoses and I was reading their MSN messenger history, looking at their pictures, their resume, their schoolwork... I was really enjoying learning everything about their life through their My Documents folder.

Fast forward to 2018. All those p2p software disappeared. But I found an alternative: 4shared. 4shared allows you to upload pictures and share them (like img). When you download the app, you can setup the app to automatically upload all your pictures (from your phone). But a lot of users don't know that, and they end up with all they smartphone pictures on the net, with a public settings. I enjoy going to 4shared, looking for those non savy users, and learn everything about their lifes.

And I don't even need that. I have hobbies, friends, I don't have issues meeting women or people, but I like stalking on those strangers on 4shared.

source

I'm surprised no one has mentioned hobby horsing yet.

Trainspotting (a now largely obsolete English hobby). Back when trains were a thing, nerds would gather at at the front end of the platform to write down the numbers of the engines. Exciting stuff. If you ever saw a movie called 'The Station Agent' with Peter Dinklage you kind of get the idea. Now a slang for a pointless, useless activity (which is where the movie about Scottish heroin addicts gets its name from).

A close second is commenting on the internet.

For a bit of maybe context, she was a paleontologist...but

Friend of mine from university was always ready to scoop up roadkill into her trunk when she passed it by so that she could render it down to the bones so she would have a skeleton to study/draw.

If there's one thing I learned from being a siren enthusiast, it's that if it exists, there's a community and hobby formed around it. Neurodivergence is a helluva drug.

Counting counties aka keeping track of every county you visit. My husband has this hobby, and sometimes on road trips we drive way out of the way for him to grab a new county.

Classifying plastic bread bag clips

I dunno if it's really a hobby, but one time I heard about bug collectors. They're not people who go around catching insects, instead they're people who go around catching STDs. On purpose.

That I've heard of? I'm gonna count that guy who commissioned fanart of women buying way too much Wonderbread and destroying rainforests.

Thinking about that guy, he's probably having the time of his life with AI image generators.

The fire alarm collecting community is larger than you might expect. I first got one recommended to me on New Year's of a guy setting off all 20 or so of his linked fire alarms when the clock struck midnight. He needed hearing protection the next room over.

One time I was at a bonfire and a friend of a friend, looking like he was up all night, said he was up all night watching tornado siren videos on youtube

I used to raise mystery snails and sell them on eBay and Aquabid. Margins were too thin. After shipping in their special bags, and worse if I had to add a hot or cold pack, only netted me about $5 a sale. Still, never met another that did that for kicks and the same couple of sellers were still active after 10 years last I checked Aquabid.

I don't remember the name, but the being hanged by chains attached to your skin thing is really weird

A weird hobby of mine used to be collecting pictures of camgirls balancing shoes on their heads. I misclicked the [ x ] on a camgirl popup ad, and discovered that it wasn't a big link to some site, but an actual chat room with a live girl. For anyone unaware, you can talk to them for free, while they try and lure you into paying for whatever acts you want to see. I told the first one I don't believe they are real because I didnt, and to balance a shoe on her head so I can see its not just a collection of prescripted gifs or something. She did it. Screenshot. Did it to a few more for the lols. I had a few thousand over a year or two before I finally lost interest.

Also telling them how cool it was they keep tarantulas as pets, because I just saw it go behind that poster on the wall.

I dont feel proud of myself now, they were at a point in their lives where taking their clothes off for a few quid on the Internet was a good idea, and I was just fucking with them. Was fun though.

The telephone pole appreciation society...

https://www.telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org/

Frog jerking. I made the cover of toad load weekly once.

the fediverse.

I met a worm farmer when delivering a package.

I had no idea that was a thing.

There is/was this guy who would make really intricate linoleum tiles with meticulously cut out texts describing his delusional ideas about conspiracies around resurrecting dead people. It's seriously wild stuff.

He made it his life's mission to spread this idea by distributing those tiles across a large area around Philadelphia but eventually covering a large part of the east coast. He covered the back of the tiles in tar and found an ingenious way of depositing them on busy roads, where other cars would then drive over them and firmly imbed them in the asphalt.

While that in and of itself would probably be classified more as a mental illness than a hobby, it did sprout a community of people who went to spot these tiles on the streets to document and map them. It is also believed that some copycats have emerged over the years.

There's an amazing documentary about it called "Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles". I highly recommend it.

Serial killers just murder hobbyists so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Trainspotting is up there.