I’m a photography nerd.
There’s a bunch of rare and expensive cameras, of course, so I could probably just say “oh, probably anything from Leica”.
But the real snobs go for turbo rare lenses. As a Nikon fan, I hope that I shall one day be allowed to the same airspace as the hallowed Nikkor 13mm f/5.6. The first ultrawide non-fisheye lens. 350 of these were made, each individually blessed by priests as they left the factory, or so the story goes. They cost an arm and leg - wait, in this economy, an arm and leg would probably be cheaper.
A 1959 Gibson Les Paul in to a Marshall Plexi.
Username checks out… kinda :D
As an old and broken skateboarder, I would love nothing more than a pump track within driving distance.
There are some great parks, but nothing with enough flow that I can just carve around to work up a sweat without have to push or climb a ramp to drop in all the time.
I have a backyard that i don’t use and i often think about how hard it could be to build one. The more i think about it, the more i realise that the answer is: very.
An extended mini ramp w some features I could build myself.
A pump track that would be any fun and not be totaly dangerous sounds like a massive project.
I’ve started collecting 1:24 and 1:18 scale models of my favorite movie cars and I guess you could say my holy grail would be a 1:18 sized, 1985, Cumberland Grey, V8 Vantage Aston Martin, from 007’s The Living Daylights (and recently, No Time To Die). That and the 1:18 Chevy Nova from Death Proof, without breaking my bank account.
As someone who has started rewriting an old Summer Camp Island fanfiction I started around 2019 and never got very far with, I’m gonna have to say concentration and not getting writers block as the combo that would be the holy grail IMO. I’m sure a lot of writers in general could probably agree with that.
I definitely wanna get back into fanfic writing to a degree, but concentration and writers block have been my enemy.
Wenonah Itasca canoe in Kevlar, a canoe that you can transport your life and another person and their life at a blazing clip and the boat barely weighs over 50 pounds for bring 19.5 feet.
I have the hull in a heavier layup so I am happy but I dream of having the kevlar ultralight version.
Atari Falcon
The America’s Cup.
The Alpha Lotus
The legendary spray and pray.
In amateur radio, making an Earth-Moon-Earth contact. That means bouncing your signal off of the moon, basically using it as a satellite. You generally need a big antenna array to do it. Also you need a very high quality amplifier to receive since the signal you get back from the mood is very weak. You can hear an echo of yourself delayed about 2.6 seconds, since the moon is about 1.3 light seconds away.
EME Moonbounces do look like fun. Here’s a guy, I think pinging a friend off the moon.
That’s dope
Dude that sounds amazing and would be crazy to demo to someone.
3 other cool nerds to play board games with consistently.
Meanwhile, I keep ending up in rooms with board game nerds, and I only kind of like board games.
I was going to say Glory to Rome but your answer is better.
Are you calling yourself cool? That’s so not cool.
Self confidence is in fact very cool. And I’ll convince you over a game of Agricola.
I like your moxie. Very cool of you to be so graceful towards an unkind comment
Oooh, hey!! I have that game but haven’t played it yet. It looks freaking dope. Any suggestions? If I can’t convince my family to play I was just going to try it solo
It’s the “revised edition” if that matters
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organize a “games night” and see if people are interested: “Hey, on Friday night I’m inviting people over to play Agricola. Do you want to come?”
Board Games, in particular Euros that take can take over 2 hours to play are not something that get pulled out on a whim during social gatherings. -
find a board game meetup near you (try meetup.com for example). It’s easier to turn board gamers into friends than friends into board gamers.
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It’s a fantastic game. If you’re playing with less experienced gamers I would probably leave the occupation/improvement cards out at first.
And seconding what Cile said. You show up to a gaming meetup with Agricola and I can pretty much guarantee someone is going to want to play. It’s a classic for a reason. Way easier to convince someone that already likes board games.
Maybe he already has one cool nerd and is looking for a few more.
Cool is what you make it, dude.
Well, my hobby is searching for historical religious artifacts, so…
Your Holy Grail is the Holy Grail
The Lost Ark of the Covenant actually 😁
Are you sure?
So being the UK?
Sad lol.
For example, in the headphone world, the Sennheiser HE-1 headphones are said to be like the pinnacle of headphones and most expensive, costing $59000 for a pair.
Edit: added image
The irony with those is that once you’re at a stage of life where you can afford those, you probably can’t hear anything over 14kHz anyway. At least there’s that sweet midrange!
Out of curiosity, what would you plug those into to get the best use of them? I couldn’t imagine the headphone jack on my motherboard would be able to take full advantage of them.
They’re super special electrostatic headphones, so they have to be run with a special type of amplifier, and the one they come with come is absolutely insane, and is a huge part of the cost. Honestly, I bet you could cost cut the whole thing down to under $20k, but you’re paying a LOT of money for stuff like the fact that the amplifier case is made of marble and has one of the coolest boot sequences imaginable, where all the tubes and knobs rise out of it and retract back in so the whole thing is seamless. It’s very much one of those things that get built when engineers are handed a blank check and told “We don’t care what it costs, have fun”
where all the tubes and knobs rise out of it and retract back in
what the fuck
One of my favorite audiophile youtubers, Crinacle, just bought these headphones for 75k. Here’s the video if you wanna watch it
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Cadillac 16 energy imo. I think part of what’s wrong with the world today is all companies suck, have no fun anymore and don’t care if things are actually cool. I know it sounds stupid but everything is black, white, or grey on the road and everything is a shapeless blob. Oh you want nice headphones, or computer case, etc? Enjoy our exciting options of black or grey, and fresh new material of cheapest plastic we can make shiny.
That thing has an inbuilt DAC, as well as S/PDIF and USB inputs, so I’d imagine any device with enough processing power to play lossless audio files and has the proper drivers should be enough.
You’d use a dedicated audio setup with it, yeah. I don’t know if the 59k is the headphones only or if it includes an amplifier, but a hi range amplifier can cost thousands too.
I’m not an audiophile tho, ain’t got the money, and even if I did my setup would at most cost €1000. So if anyone wants to post some real numbers go ahead.
I had the pleasure of using some at Sennheiser’s booth at CES a few years back. They sound VERY nice, but I don’t think they’re worth $59k. Maybe 8k or something, although I know a lot of the cost is in the tubes and accessories.
Woodworking: An entire log of American Chestnut.
About a century ago, the species was all but wiped out by a blight that came from Japanese chestnut. Some three billion trees died. The blight actually survives in the forest living on but not damaging oak trees, so American chestnuts are struggling to reclaim their historic habitats. The species is critically endangered and efforts to rehabilitate the population are underway, including trying to breed large surviving individuals or to genetically engineer blight resistant trees. Logging is of course completely out of the question.
American Chestnut is an excellent lumber, with many of the properties of white oak in a faster growing tree. It is straight grained, hard and strong, easy to saw and split, rot resistant due to tannins. A fantastic choice for indoor and outdoor furniture, structural timber, even telephone poles. Reclaimed chestnut timber from old buildings is highly prized, and what woodworker wouldn’t love access to a few hundred board feet of freshly kiln dried American chestnut…if it was possible to ethically source.
A couple more things about American Chestnuts:
-Chestnut forests used to cover a shitton of the northeast before being reduced to basically nothing
-“Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire” is about the tradition of eating American Chestnuts in the winter…
-… Because for some, it was a treat. And for others, it was practically a staple food! They were an extremely abundant resource
-Seriously, look at the size of the original American Chestnut forest:
Farmers used to just let their critters loose into the forests to eat the chestnuts off the forest floor because there were just so many. Now I think every American chestnut tree alive has a name.
If I could time travel, I’d go see the chestnut forests first. I only learned about them a few years ago but I think about it a weird amount (maybe because I have a huge elm tree in my yard)
Like can you imagine entire states covered in them? I don’t think they were quite the size of redwoods but they were ancient and well-established forests. And it makes me sad that most people don’t even know what we lost because some rich asshole just HAD to have foreign trees on their estates.
Christ, it’s ALWAYS the fucking rich assholes!
because some rich asshole just HAD to have foreign trees on their estates.
Blight would have happened at some point. Global travel made it inevitable.
This made me immediately sad
This is one thing that I really hope GMOs allow us to counter. We need chestnut trees back. Natural and farmed ones. Perhaps we will find a gene for blight resistance someday.
What is growing there now? It sounds like a pretty shitty situation.
The surviving forests are often oak, hickory, ash, pine. A different blight is working its way through the Eastern Hemlock, which are truly the giant sequoias of the East. Humongous old trees.
Also, corn, wheat, rice, tobacco, towns, cities, suburbs. Probably a third of the US population lives in that green area, to include Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Altoona, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Memphis, Charlotte, Asheville, Atlanta…looks like it misses Colombia and just barely grazes Raleigh.
Stumps and other trees. And of course, a ton it was leveled for housing/infrastructure/etc
Captainaggravated had some great info a few comments down about the remains of the forest if you want to know more!
This is really interesting. A few years ago I bought this American Chestnut salt and pepper set. The guy who made it did tell me that he got the wood from a beam out of a barn built before the Civil War but I didn’t realize why. I just thought it was a really good looking salt Shaker and pepper grinder…
Why can’t they just be grown here instead of japan?
Because the disease has become endemic to American forests.
The American Chestnut was the dominant tree in the ecosystem of the forests of Eastern North America. Per Wikipedia, “it was said that a squirrel could walk from New England to Georgia solely on the branches of American chestnuts.” In the late 19th century, Japanese chestnut trees were imported, and they brought with them Asian Bark Fungus. American Chestnuts are quite susceptible to this fungus, and it largely wiped out the population.
The fungus infects the above ground portion of the tree, killing it. New shoots will emerge from the stump as the below ground portion of the tree isn’t affected by the fungus, but the new growth doesn’t get very far before the fungus kills it off again. We have no hope of eliminating the fungus from the forests.
So we’ve got these zombie tree stumps that will grow enough of a plant to keep the fungus alive and running (it also survives on other species of tree), but not enough to grow large and reproduce. There are some remaining adult trees here and there but the species is considered functionally extinct in the wild as it really isn’t able to thrive because this fungus is among us. So unless we can hybridize or otherwise breed fungus resistant chestnut trees, we ain’t got no American Chestnuts.
American chestnuts are also susceptible to ink disease and the Chinese Gall Wasp.
A lot of problems were caused by importing plants to North America; tumbleweeds aren’t indigenous, they’re Russian, and a massive fucking problem.
An extra upvote for “fungus is among us”.
I am untethered, and my rage knows no bounds
We should engineer a virus to attack the fungus. I’m certain it won’t lead to a Last Of Us scenario.
American chestnuts will die here, but I have a magnificent large Chinese chestnut tree in my yard. It’s not the same, but at least we get to harvest some 10-15 gallons of chestnuts every fall.
Thanks, now I want one too. Is there any feasible way to start trying to grown some of these myself, while obviously attempting to prevent infection of my crop?
This would be an excellent question to ask The American Chestnut Foundation.
