Dead Hobbies

First World Problems - the issue for us nerds/geeks/otaku in the First World (and while I am by no means "woke", even I can feel how pretentious typing "First World" out feels) is not so much being able to find something to occupy our free time outside of work, but in trying to only follow enough hobbies that our free time and money allows. Here I am, the far side of the generally accepted middle age mark, and digging through past hobbies trying to get them sold off to make space in our home. For newer hobbies? Possibly, but just having some extra space would be nice at this point. If you have not figured it out, this post has no real point, and will have little structure. This one is more of a stream of consciousness exercise as I reminisce about two hobbies I used to follow voraciously, enough to be called lifestyles, but now hardly ever think about... except when I am trying to rid myself of a garage worth of paraphernalia.

Before I really dig into this too deep, am I trying to warn you away from trying new things? No, but I am trying to warn you against getting so deep into a hobby it becomes hard to get out of it when you lose interest. I am reminded of an episode of The Cosby Show from the '80s - no, I am not getting into an argument on whether Bill Cosby was a sexual predator or whether he should be "cancelled" and forgotten - where young Theo announces he is going to take flying lessons and get his pilot's license. Mom and Dad Huxtable then proceed to pull all of his other failed hobbies out of the basement (a guitar is one, but I am fuzzy on the rest) and tell Theo that he can go do this... but there is no room in the basement for a Cessna. No, I do not have any aircraft gathering dust anywhere in my life, nor a pilot's license, but as I said, about a garage worth of stuff that is going to take a long time and lots of headache to divest myself of. And before I forget it, the lesson of that Cosby Show episode, at least for the part involving Theo, was that having hobbies and other interests is good, but better to dip your toes into the water and see if you like it before diving all the way in.

But back to me getting rid of stuff - do I deal with eBay or go straight to the specialty online forums or social media BST (buy, sell, trade) groups? Going to eBay puts my items in front of a much wider audience, but only for paintball stuff and not the medieval armored combat items, those items are just too specific to the hobby for me to post on eBay. The downsides to eBay is that it seems like unless you are selling brand new stuff (why did this become a thing? I thought eBay was supposed to be the internet's version of a global garage sale, not everyone's cheap online storefront) no one wants to pay what you are asking and no one wants to pay for shipping. And you have to pay eBay fees to list it and PayPal fees to transfer funds, and heaven forfend you attach either fee to the sale, that's just not done! Also, all of the protections for both eBay and PayPal are buyer focused - if a buyer rips off a seller, well that is just too bad. Forums and BST social media groups are not much better, but at least it is a more concentrated audience and if someone rips you off, you can generally shame them off the site. Get your money back? Oh no, that just is not possible, but at least you can inconvenience them, so there is that.

I used to eat, breathe, and live paintball. That was my life for almost three decades, and then, roughly five years ago, my knees gave out and that was that. Well, I was also having more issues with just going out and playing, but I am blaming me leaving the hobby more on my knees than issues in the sport. That is my story and I am sticking to it. Though, on a completely unrelated note, I think paintball's downfall is also some of its greatest technological achievements. When I started playing paintball in the late '90s, high rates of fire were just not reliably achievable - markers (they are not "guns", they are "markers" as you are "marking" each other... even all these years later and I am attempting to be politically correct about it *sigh*) were mostly mechanical as electronics just were not small or reliable enough (or widely enough available), but more importantly, hoppers could not feed fast enough and gas regulators were either unreliable or too bulky to be of a benefit. Those last two seem like easy things to fix, especially if you have no experience with the sport or technology, but trust me, they were big issues when I started. Of course, even paintball players today will acknowledge the hopper feeding issue, but the regulator issue still flies under the radar. 

Without getting into the weeds on these technical issues (what you are not seeing is the three paragraphs I just deleted because I went overboard explaining all of this), these issues did not get resolved until about the mid 2000s. Once they did, a slew of affordable options hit the market and suddenly everyone could plunk down not a lot of cash and go compete, equipment wise, with the highest level of competitors in the sport. This was great, because a bunch of people flooded into the sport. This was also bad, because a bunch of people flooded into the sport. I know, I sound like the grumpy old man railing at "kids these days!", but there is some truth to it - when I started playing, you were restricted on rate of fire (had to, or you would chop paint and goo your marker up to the point it would not function) so it was harder to be an asshole to other players. Now there is nothing holding anyone back, and much easier to be an asshole to all and sundry. No skill needed, just mommy's credit card, or a decent part time job and no other bills.

Huh. Guess I forgot to not be judgemental about the sport. Oh well. The sad thing is, if a friend or coworker or even my daughter expressed interest in going to a field (which is not nearby, the liberals in my county have decided that paintball is evil and shall not happen in our county, because reasons), I would go with them and play some recreational paintball, with only some slight reservations.  So I have several thousands of dollars worth of paintball gear literally moldering away, just waiting for me to pull it out, clean it up and sell it off. There is not enough interest locally to offload all, or even a majority, of my old gear, so it will have to be online to strangers in different parts of the country. Will they try to rip me off? Will the post office or UPS destroy, lose, or misdeliver the packages? Online sales, Anxiety be thy name!

At least for paintball I can generally sell stuff online, as most of the equipment is pretty small. There are some exceptions, like my 88 cubic feet SCUBA tank and gear bag, but the vast majority of stuff is able to be shipped without much issue. My other former hobby is a different story. The wife and I used to participate in medieval recreation, through the Society for Creative Anachronism. We even met in the Society, at a local fighter practice, where I hit her in the butt with my sword and she told me to put on my big girl panties and hit her harder. Yes, we have had a strange relationship since then, but it works for us. Anyway, much of what we have to sell out of that hobby will only be desired by non-locals, medieval recreators being thin on the ground. Of course, while most of my fighting armor is gone, I still have some heavy pieces as well as shields and weapon accessories (the rattan may still be good, but the sword hilts, pommels, basket hilts, rubber axe heads, all of those are definitely good), while the wife has enough square yardage of fabric to cover our small, urban property (2/3rds of an acre) a couple of times. Most of our clothes (what we called "garb") has already gone, loaned out to friends in the Society, never to return. Ah well, at least it is getting used and I did not have to work at getting rid of it.

In the short time that I have been writing this blog, I got curious and started looking into paintball and what they have been up to in my absence. If I did not have a ton of other projects and hobbies occupying my time and money, I would get back into the sport. And if my knees did not hurt as much. Hell, if I was willing to give up my other hobbies and switch to a part time "real" job, I could almost convince myself to run a paintball field (in a nearby county, remember, because of NIMBY and idiot snowflakes in my county of residence). I would not make a huge profit or fortune, but I could make a profit off of one. Why? As I was ranting and grumbling about earlier, paintball saw a huge increase in reliable rate of fire about 15 years ago and it just got worse over the next 10 years, which is when I stepped out. However, while I was away, the industry has swung back away from focusing on rate of fire to the detriment of everything else, as well as the tournament series and "big game" scenarios that fed into it, and started focusing more on the recreational (or "rec") player - the person who goes once or twice a year to their local field, rents all their equipment (also why rec players are also referred to as "rentals"), plays for a few hours, and goes home. If you run a paintball store, you cannot compete, as the online retailers have you beat on price, even with shipping and now every online retailer charging sales tax too. I have friends who went not broke, but definitely out of business, running paintball stores with no attached fields (and some with), and even the few fields I know that run a store on the side have doubled into an online retailer just to make ends meet. But you could show a profit just running a field, off of field fees, rental fees, and most importantly, selling paint... if the land was cheap and there was a lack of competition and a high enough population density and... Like I said, not a huge profit, but a profit nonetheless, and you would be participating in something you enjoy.

Still, I am not going to do it. I am still going to sell my paintball gear - maybe not all of it, maybe keep my favorite pieces to hang on the wall as a shrine to something I used to love doing - because even looking at articles and watching videos of all the things I have missed over the past five years, and kind of wanting to go back in because of that, I still do not want it enough. I would have to give up something else that is occupying my time and money, and some of those hobbies were only possible because I gave up paintball in the first place. We all waffle on our life decisions, but this I am not going back on - I am out of paintball. It was fun while it lasted, and had its share of downs as well, but I have moved on.

Same with the SCA - it was sure fun, but I do not want to live that lifestyle again. The SCA more so than paintball was almost a full on lifestyle choice, it was always very hard to just "dip your toe in" and only do one or two aspects of the hobby, if you joined you were almost guaranteed to be dragged fully into the Society. I tried just fighting, the heavy armored combat I talked of earlier, but soon it was more garb, then more camping equipment, followed by better and more period correct armor and weapons, oh hey, I am going to try out this archery stuff, then more period correct camping equipment, then a job that was more conducive to letting you leave state for a week so you could go to "war", followed by moving to a bigger place so you could have a shop to work on all of this plus just enough land to practice your archery too, and then... Yes, it grew quite rapidly from "hobby" to lifestyle. Not that I did all of that personally, but I saw it happen to many others, some of who got out but many who are still participating. I have to admit that I am far less tempted to join back into the SCA than paintball, but I do have this former coworker who runs the local Amtgard chapter (boffer LARP - not quite medieval recreation, but adjacent to it and tabletop RPGs, my current major hobby time investment) and would love to have me join up. Alack and alas, that shall not be. The wife has a coworker she dragged to a local Renaissance Festival who enjoyed it so much they would love to join the SCA or something similar, and we are working on getting him into Amtgard, which means I may have to go to a local practice (? event? I am unsure exactly what they do) just to get him to go. Beyond that, I am not getting into that lifestyle, either.

At the end of it all, my time and money are finite, and while there are many things out there I would love to do, even beyond paintball and the SCA, I just do not have the resources to pursue all hobbies. Even if I won the lottery and retired to never work again, eventually I would run out of time and have to pick which hobbies to follow, especially as a lot of hobbies happen on weekends as you need other people to play with and, for the most part, they have jobs they have to go to Monday through Friday, and you can only do one hobby at a time. I have pondered about making a LARP that is similar to Star Wars, but legally distinct so I do not get sued or have to pay the Mouse licensing fees, that would allow me to combine boffer swords, role playing, and almost-paintball with Nerf guns (not the dart guns, I feel they do not have the range I am looking for, but the Hyper foam ball system does and its safety equipment requirements are a lot lower than paintball's). But that is another blog post and hobby/lifestyle I just do not want to ponder on today. 

Hope all single-digit worth of you readers out there (who am I kidding? no one reads these posts except when I paste pertinent ones to Facebook or Reddit hobby groups) have enough time and money for your hobbies of choice. Have fun, and happy hobbying! (yes, just made that a verb, though I do not think I can or should make those decisions for the English language as a whole, use at your own peril)