Super subjective, but for my handtool woodworking, my grail is a pistol grip Stanley 610 drill. Do t know why, but ever since I saw one, I’ve wanted it!
For me with gaming (both playing and dev), a Steam Deck. Never wanted anything more in my life, seeing people have them and barely use them hurts. But I’m on long-term sick leave and live paycheck to paycheck, not able to save anything and it doesn’t look like that’ll change anytime soon. And it’s more than just wanting a cool thing, all I have is a shitty laptop from 2010 that barely plays 1080p video, and a TV I found outside that gets so warm that it’s hard to sit in front of for longer than two hours at a time. The laptop has no battery so it has to be used with the charger connected all the time and it’s too heavy to comfortably use anywhere but at a desk. I also have back and knee problems and having something like a Steam Deck would allow me to play and develop in bed or on my sofa and save me some pain.
Astronomy, something like this https://www.telescopesplus.com/products/meade-16-inch-lx200-acf-f-10-advanced-coma-free-telescope
Initially, I was like “not even a space telescope? The thing is probably pretty cheap”
A server rack with a few A100s
No it isn’t crypto
Well, what is it then?
Selfhosting, as well as occasional LLM/GenAI model hosting for when I’m looking for inspiration in my artistic ventures.
Currently I do all this on a several generations old gaming rig and would very much like to have a dedicated server for it that I can put not in my living room
Black Lotus. You gotta shell out bank or win some vintage tournament to acquire one these days.
My hobby is (or rather was) collecting Seiko watches.
I stopped buying watches, but my holy Grail would be “The” Pogue. The original 6139-6005 yellow face automatic chronograph worn by Col. William Pogue on the Skylab mission.
Other than the NASA issued Omegas, this was his personal watch that he just took with him into space, as NASA didn’t want the Astronauts to take their Speedmasters home and so they couldn’t train as much with them.
This also was the first automatic chronograph in space, as no one had tried before if they would work without gravity (surprise, they did, as momentum is still very much a thing in space).
Here is a very nice write up by a very knowledgeable guy:
https://www.plus9time.com/blog/2017/12/24/the-true-seiko-pogue-chronograph-6139-6005
Mmm love a good space watch. Personal grail for me would be an Omega Skywalker X-33.
Heard also gshocks were one of the few space rated watches for astronauts
To clarify, would you consider this specific individual watch the holy grail, or one of that make, model and spec?
Well, the ultimate holy Grail would be this individual watch
Second would be a “true Pogue” of the same spec and very close in serial number, although that would have to compete with a few other nice Seikos… There are so many out there. A platinum first Grand Seiko. A Seiko Spacewalk. A working and complete Seiko TV Watch (as seen in James Bond - Octopussy) 😉.
I do own a fine 6139-6002 yellow dial. However, that’s a later “rest of the world” model, with a more golden dial and different wording. Still nice, though. 😊
I like collecting games, nothing crazy like graded games (graded anything is a scam) or like I have to have every game ever made for a specific console, I just like having a big shelf of games.
I really want a like new, in box green Halo edition original Xbox. People want stupid money for them but I just want to have one. I’ve got a good condition boxed regular black console and a boxed Halo 3 Xbox 360 but I reeeeally want the green OG.
Here’s what people are trying to sell a NIB version for
Hell yeah. If I had space and money this is what I’d be doing. I have some PS1 games (and of course my fav Halo 1-3) from my childhood that are stored away somewhere at my mother’s… might have been thrown away by now it’s been so long :^(
unattended bag of chips
Proper.
An original, genuine copy of ‘Akalabeth: World of Doom’.
An original production Semmerling LM4.
I guess an Eleiko barbell:
Pretty much the Rolls Royce of barbells.
My dude. $1,200 is not all that much if it’s something that is going to be part of the rest of your life.
I’m curious as to what makes it so nice? My gut reaction is to say “It’s literally a rod of metal with some checkering”, but I’ve been in enough hobbies to know that there are some very fine details that make a world of difference.
It’s springy but also very very tough. Weightlifting bars are designed to be dropped from overhead with weight (bumper plates) on them, and Eleikos are rigorously tested. Also, the collars (the things on the ends) that the plates go onto rotate very smoothly.
They use these barbells in the Olympics and other high level weightlifting competitions.
In the typewriter community, the “holy grail” differs from person to person, but for me it was a 1930s Royal P equipped with a rare typeface called Vogue. Very, very rarely they’ll pop up from people who don’t know how significant that is, and that’s the only way to get one at a reasonable price - because those who do know what it is will ask thousands of dollars for it.
Eventually I found one for a comparatively cheap price (sub 1k), and the only reason someone else didn’t snap it up before I saw it was because the guy refused to ship it. Local pickup only. So I took the chance to drive the 10 hours round trip to snag it, and it sits proudly as the crown jewel of my collection:
Hells to the yeah
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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:
What is growing there now? It sounds like a pretty shitty situation.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Christ, it’s ALWAYS the fucking rich assholes!
This made me immediately sad
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…
A workshop 😅
There it is! The holy grail for all my hobbies… space
