For example, I’m sure the average joe doesn’t know just how expensive calligraphy pens can be, or how deep the rabbit hole goes on video game speedruns.
3D printing! You can start out cheap but you can get STUPID expensive, and it’s the biggest most meandering rabbit hole I know of
I’ve been amazed at how cheap it’s become since I built my first few printers. I spent thousands building printers that aren’t half as good as a $300 printer today.
I just bought an elegoo neptune 4 pro and thought about buying more filament already. Hopefully it will only be filament and not more machines or something
And getting consistent prints at a decent speed can be challenging! (Slow and good vs fast and unreliable is a common choice.)
But I NEED all the different filament colors @___@
3D printing can be expensive, but I disagree that it is stupid expensive.
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DSLRs start at like $400-500. Bought a Nikon D5300 years ago and the part that makes the biggest difference is the lens.
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But there is a low entry point with this one. I bought a used Canon Powershot that has a 50x optical zoom. Only stores JPG. Can’t swap out the lense. But it was $200 and now I can zoom in on birds. Since it’s digital I don’t have to pay for film or prints.
That phenomenon is known as GAS, Gear Aqcuisition Syndrome. I sold all my shit and just have a 1" sensor compact now. I take a lot more pictures ironically.
What is challenging in photography? Point and shoot.
What is challenging in art? Just put a pencil on paper and move it around.
What is challenging in photography?
To get the shoot you want it to be in the best possible quality.
My semi professional advice would be to point and shoot.
I have some pictures of my kids that I love, you should absolutely listen to me.
Some people prefer accidental strokes of luck, others enjoy planned projects. 😎
composition
Gymnastics. The skill part is obvious but monetarily its more than i expected. I thought it would be like going to a regular gym but its usually much more expensive to use the gyms and thats if you can find a time slot where adult males can train.
Magic: the gathering.
There’s several different styles of play known as “formats”.
The Cheapest being “Standard”. Which is the latest 3-5 sets released. The deck of 75 card deck can cost upwards of £500.
Then the most popular format, modern, which is the last 20ish years of release. The average deck there can be upwards of £1,500.
Then there’s legacy and vintage where decks are in the high 4 figures and some even in the 5 figures.
Don’t forget commander, which a lot of places claim is now the most popular format. Pre-constructed commander decks can cost as little as $20-40 and competitive commander decks can easily go into the thousands.
The game also has a very high skill ceiling. I think that’s one of the main reasons why magic has such a broad age range to its player base. There’s plenty of weird lines of play, from strange card / rule interactions to weird deck themes no one else would think of.
Isn’t “pauper” cheaper than standard?
Also don’t forget that when the meta changes that expensive deck’s value can change (usually for the worse)
I quit playing in 1996. It wasn’t too rare to have a $2000 to $3000 deck even back then. And that’s when every card store had a Black Lotus for sale without having to notify their insurance company.
I always felt like Modern was cheaper in the long run than Standard. Spending hundreds of dollars every few months on a new set didn’t speak to me. Whereas I could buy a few cards here and there to upgrade me modern decks.
Warhammer 40k
Comparably, Gunpla also goes hard on costs (though imo its more for associated materials like paint then the models themselves, which can be pricy but tend not to be.) and the quality of some of what folks put out there is staggering, as shown in the 10th Gunpla Builders World Cup
I appreciate that link, thanks. I have built a few, haven’t even painted though. I just like building stuff I don’t need glue for.
Those builds remind me of a guy I worked with that back in the day would be a model builder for cars that the model companies hired to build the model for the box covers before they mostly started using photos of real cars. He was just so talented. Even bashed some kits so they could be molded to create new models for some companies. One of them was when they wanted an old woody station wagon so he basically took 10 different kits and created it for their mold.
I am still amazed about how much money you can spend on making coffee at home. 300€ for a manual grinder - “that’s the cheao chinese stuff” wtf
I’ve got a £1000 espresso machine and that the cheap one. We also have all the pour over shite - scales, grinder, gooseneck kettle, Hario… It adds up quickly.
And when you invite a bunch people over and tell them yeah we’re into coffee and they ask you for coffee and you’re like… Ok I am incapable of making coffee for more than 2 people in under 15 minutes, I need to pull out the senseo pad machine.
Absolutely… someone at work was like, grab a coffee, see you in 5. Dude, it takes at least 15 minutes to make a coffee in this house.
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We have a ROK and my husband once did 3 espressos for guests in a row, it did break his soul a little bit.
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Thank you xD
You know what the most painful part is? When your guests try the coffee and are like “aaah wow yeah that’s… nice! It’s really, uhm, intense” because they are so used to their crap coffee and don’t get the flowery berry fresh aroma of specialty coffee and you’re just smiling and dying inside. I mean I would have hated this kind of coffee 10 years ago myself so I get it but man…
This is why I still have a senseo pad machine. I’m not wasting my time, energy and coffee to make fancy hand filter coffee or manual espressos for people who really don’t care (unless they ask for it, in that case, waste away).
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Love coffee as a hobby for this reason. You can start with $20 to get simple pour over equipment or even nicer venas but you can go far and high with it eventually or stop at the $20
Model trains. Sure, you can have a lot of fun with a 100 dollar toy train, but those brass engines are very shiny and very expensive.
Seen a couple basement setups in my time though tbh never saw an especially impressive one. Most tend to just emulate rural routes and small towns. Always thought more fanastic scenery (Surely there has to be at least one person out there who does D&D figure stuff and trains.) would be great, but I suppose that it would detract from the star of the show.
Surpringly not, no model train manufacturer does fantasy stuff. Best you can get is custom stuff.
Probably more well known but with the whole ‘live edge’ fad from a couple years ago now, some people don’t realize you can spend upwards of 20-30k on a single piece of some types of raw lumber.
There’s a YouTube channel I saw a while back where the guy films the process of cutting slabs. When you take into consideration the sheer size of trees that have to be used to make a slab, and then the size of the equipment that has to be used, and the weight, it’s easy to see how the cost of even a clean grained slab can be through the roof, not to mention something that has artistic or desirable figuring in the grain.
Rock climbing. To start out you basically just need $150 worth of shoes and some $5 chalk. Trad climbing or big wall climbing can be 5 figures and a dozen years worth of experience. And the skill ceiling is probably obvious, but it’s become an Olympic sport for a reason.
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“ice climbing” “screwed” Oh youuu
I’ll do the reverse - I think most people would expect homebrewing beer to be quite hard to get started with, but for $50 you can get everything you need to start making a really quite good beer, and save money at the same time (homebrewed beer is usually much cheaper than store bought)
If you want to get started search for “brew in a bag” and buy a kit beer mix. You’ll need a handful of equipment like a brew bag and fermenter, but that stuff is really cheap.
Then you can indeed go down a massive rabbit hole of refinements, but it just amazed me that the first beer you make will already be a good one.
Sim racing. An entry level wheel cost 100, an okay one 300 and the most expensive I’ve seen is 100,000
https://www.f1authentics.com/products/red-bull-simulator-championship-edition
Same thing with flight sims
If you can buy a decent car for the cost of your sim racing rig, it’s time to evaluate.
I know people with real race cars, it’s lots of breaking down and hitting things for big money.
A full sim rig with VR and motion is probably cheaper with the same brain chemicals, and you can just do it whenever.
Skydiver here.
It’s not just money, it’s not just skill that makes you a successful jumper.
It’s a certain type of attitude and the ability to think when you’ve aimed yourself at a planet. Not everyone can do it. To be blunt, there is a large part of the population that shouldn’t do it, because they have terrible decision making ability.
As far as money, I went through the student program in the mid 90’s and it cost me about $1200, if I recall correctly. My first rig, used, was $4000. My second rig, new, was just over $8000. I have 4500 jumps most of which I paid ~ $20 each for. I don’t want to do that math.
$103,200, including gear and training. You’re welcome.
used rig
😮😮😮
Woodworking and collecting old tech. Both my hobbies / crafts, both started very cheap and very little, today in my workshop there’s upwards 60k only in machines, not counting the tools, if you want to have a working computer from the 60s or even 50s, you’ll pay. And pay and pay. My advice: collect old cars. Or yachts. Cheaper :)
Woodworking is as expensive as you want it to be. Other than a good table saw (which some people would argue isnt necessary for true hand tool fanatics) equipment just makes things easier and there’s almost always another way.
Aquariums. It’s shocking how much money you can spend on fish and how easily you can kill them all if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even worse, if you’re really into it, you can’t have just one aquarium.
We had one for years. I cleaned it one day just like I had done a hundred times before. The next day the water turned cloudy and all our fish died. Sold the tank and cabinet a few days later. Having an aquarium is a 2nd job.
We had all the fish die in our aquarium once when I was a kid. Was random and unexplainable at first. Then I found out someone had run a powerful ozone machine to combat mold in the house and no one thought about the fish tank.
Playing music has basically no skill ceiling.
And you can get by without a lot of equipment. Though a used audio interface and an old laptop at least is nice to have.
True. But also equally true if you do buy equipment and indulge in every temptation. There is absolutely egregiously expensive gear in all shapes and forms.
Oh you don’t need to tell me that 😔
