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.

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.

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.

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.