Hobbies and passions you don't like/understand but put up with for your friends and family - Self inclusion permitted

[Monika H.]

Hallo, hallo!!!

Kiwis, we have all had that dad who spent the Sunday watching and ranting about football, or that aunt who won't shut up about Bingo or horse races. And yet, we put up with their sperging because we loved them and/or did not want to argue.
Being social beings, we still do now, maybe with our friends, coworkers and partners; who spend minutes talking about hobbies we couldn't give a single damn about yet we still listen and make questions because we love/like them enough.

So Kiwis, what are your stories?
What are the hobbies and passions you don't like or understand but endure the sperging of?
You can include yourself as well, and your relatives/loved ones reactions to your hobby sperging.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

Scrapbooking.

They have entire stores where you can buy goofy stickers and shit just for scrapbooking.

And what do you do with one of them once they're finished?

Why put it on a bookcase of course to never be touched again until you move.

 

[dunbrine47]

Being stuck in an basement all day sperging about comic books/vidya/ etc. Most of it is counter-sperging to our one friend who holds some very specific/strange opinions when it comes to these things (and has for years and is never going to change no matter how much you reeeee at him).

 

[RG 448]

When I was a kid, my next door neighbor would constantly try to get me into “sounding”, whatever that is. I was never very musical so I always declined his frequent offers to try it out at his place, but he was damn persistent.

 

[The Shadow]

I have friends that want to sincerely talk about Star Wars or comic book movies and not just ironically shit on them. So there's that.

 

[Coleman Francis]

Cards. My family loves playing Gin Rummy and Bourré, which I enjoy but they're so competitive that I can't keep up with them.

 

[Clones of Alex Jones]

My family watches MSNBC and CNN 24/7 on the Anti-Trump train. Not well since I'm going insane from it.

 

[The Shadow]

Cards. My family loves playing Gin Rummy and Bourré, which I enjoy but they're so competitive that I can't keep up with them.

I used to have a roommate that liked Five Card Stud, and I liked taking his money.

 

[BeanBidan]

My older sister is a wannabe "actress"/lady gaga and she flaunts about how talented she is, and how the C-list movies she's in are the best.
I know she'll never make it so it's whatever.

 

[Coldgrip]

My friends and I have similar hobbies and interests, and the occasional odd thing that we don't share interests in, like one friend really being into space opera stuff, I have no strong feelings on so things like that don't really bug me.

Now my family on the other hand knows damn well that if they bring up shit I don't feel like hearing about for the umpteenth time, like how my sister's autistic kid is so smart or gifted, they will get a smack to the back of their head for it.

Seriously, violence works.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

There are trainspergs, we know them, we giggle at them. Such as my ex's old man. He was a trainsperg par excellence and had been all his life. I'm pretty sure his entire career and family (he was a lawyer also) was secondary to his main passion in life, which was the collection and assembly of increasingly excessive model railway layouts.

I tried to get into this and understand for the sake of familial harmony but the barriers to entry in railway modelling are enormous. You need space, carpentry skills to put together the baseboards and scenery, huge disposable income (even entry-level OO/HO scale models are not cheap, and at O scale you can spend thousands on a single locomotive), endless time, endless patience, an autistic level of research into exactly what was where (and yes, you WILL be sneered at by your fellow trainspergs if you put a type of loco or carriage on a recreation of a line that it was never run on in real life), and, for truly advanced trainspergs, the ability to design custom electronic circuits and programming for the signals.

Then there are track bashers. I only met one of these once when I was at university. They will go on endless tours of the railway network to try and get into a particularly unusual or odd bit of rolling stock, like a BR Mark 1 carriage or behind a Deutsche Bahn class 103 for the continental track basher. (Allegedly Deutsche Bahn digs out its older locomotives when trainspergs are in town to attract them.) Steam engines give them erections and make them declare that things are "dreadful" or "hellfire" (both compliments) and they thrash about and proclaim, "MY LORDS!" when particularly, erm, excited. (Contrary to popular belief, going into a tunnel at 100mph while in a carriage behind a Class 47 doesn't make them spunk their pants, but it might as well.) If they were actually to pull the whistle on a steam loco they would probably die there and then, their life complete.

I don't know what it is about railways that attracts spergs that other forms of transport don't. Yeah, there's planespergs but they just gather in small groups at the borders of Air Force bases and tick off the fast jets as they come and go. They don't have conventions too much, and the hardcore ones engage in the comparatively harmless hobby of playing endless hours of IL-2 Sturmovik or MS Flight Simulator X or suchlike. There are carspergs, but that's understandable considering a fancy or fast car is generally an adult toy if that makes sense, or a status symbol. There are bus spotters but they're considered :autistic: even by railway enthusiasts. And boat spotting requires going to a harbourside or wharf and most of the really big boats spend their time out at sea away from the autism.

But trainspergs, they are serious and numerous. They have conventions. They give courses on how to model their layouts in ever more autismal detail. They go on heritage railway rides. They buy old bits of signalling and trackside paraphernalia. They artificially weather their models to make them look like they might have looked at the time. Railway companies and operators will actively engage with them and cater to them. This does not happen with busspergs, boatspergs, or planespergs.

Any ideas anyone?

 

[Night Terror]

magic the gathering
i try my best to ask questions and be interested but its very hard to not tune out when my friends are giving me another 3 hour lecture about how red-black decks are this and blue-green decks are that and shit

 

[Prince Jello]

One of my friends was really into origami two or three years ago, and while I admired her talent, she gave me all sorts of paper cranes, flowers, stars and whatnot. I kept them for some time but never knew where to put them, and ultimately they just collected dust until I had enough. Thankfully, my friend quit origami last year in favor of knitting and crochet. She made me pretty chill hats, scarves and shawls (I give her friendship bracelets in return so I guess we're good).

 

[Nekromantik]

I had a friend that was really in to Insane Clown Posse, key word here is had. He would seriously flip his shit if you even said you didn't care for the music.

 

[Xetzyr]

magic the gathering
i try my best to ask questions and be interested but its very hard to not tune out when my friends are giving me another 3 hour lecture about how red-black decks are this and blue-green decks are that and shit

This, when I was younger I had some "friends" who were into the game, so I wound up buying a bunch of useless paper shit with pretty pictures and had to endure "playing" the game with them... and it was like... constant bickering about the "rules" and how I apparently just didn't understand them (spoilers: I did), so every game basically devolved into them always winning because the "rules" were pretty much whatever the hell they wanted them to be from one minute to the next.

Actually "friends" probably isn't the best word... more like girlfriend's younger brother and then his friends (who were like spastic losers). Her brother was mostly alright though, we did a lot of computer shit and what not... he was really into Sega though, which I hated with a passion.

I had a friend that was really in to Insane Clown Posse, key word here is had. He would seriously flip his shit if you even said you didn't care for the music.

Their latest stuff isn't actually all that bad... not sure what the fuck happened exactly, but they went from shit to shine pretty abruptly.

 

[Monika H.]

Cars and motor shows.
My sister-in-law is obsessed with them, and even has a couple of personalized sport cars she practically worships.
Being the only man in the house with her and my wife, she constantly tries to hook me up with her passion with mechanics, and so drags me and my wife to motor shows or when she does maintenance on her cars she insists for me to look on and explain me everything she doing, how the components she's using are top quality, etc.
The only part I honestly like of her passion is when she takes me for a ride around the countryside, which is something I find really relaxing.

 

[Bugaboo]

A good friend of mine loves World of Warcraft and lately, I've been trying to get into it for him,

I like Runescape better

 

[Ted_Breakfast]

My ex was the type of gal who was only ever into one thing at a time, but holy hell that one thing was all she could think about for at least a month, a kind of Wind in the Willows syndrome. Sometimes it would be a benign or interesting obsession, like gardening, poetry or exotic cooking. Just as often, though, it'd be something expensive (print making), painful (bizarre starch-based potato vegenism) or obnoxious (GOD DAMN CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY).

 

[drtoboggan]

Asian porn.

 

[Nekromantik]

Their latest stuff isn't actually all that bad... not sure what the fuck happened exactly, but they went from shit to shine pretty abruptly.

I never said that the music was crap, just that it wasn't my thing. Me saying that certainly didn't warrant throwing a PS1 controller on the ground so hard one of the buttons broke. The guy was like this with everything. Mavel comics (this was in the 90s before the movies came out), JRPGs, anime, table top games like WOD, if you didn't love it as much as him he would throw an autisic chimp fit. This was a problem because it was a chimp fit with chimp strength, the guy could have played football the way he was built.

The WOD thing was a problem too. I mean I love my table top stuff, but he wanted to play every day. Everyday at school, I made a new character, I want to do this in the game, you better show up this weekend because I have plans for the game. We just stopped telling him when we played.