> It’s driven in part by the belief that new gear will improve one’s art or performance, e.g. I don’t sound like Jimi Hendrix because I don’t have the same effects pedal he used.
Bit tangent, but I think one should just embrace it and say “my hobby is collecting guitar gear, and my niche is things that Jimi Hendrix used or things that make sounds like he did”
There’s no shame in a hobby collecting and being honest with yourself might bring some clarity to your life.
Though I do think there can be another aspect at play; I often find myself collecting things that I think "might be useful". Eg: I have a ton of empty yogurt containers, for use in hypothetical future art projects. I do use them sometimes, but at this point I have plenty. I still feel the urge to keep saving them, though — for some imagined future. I wouldn't say "I enjoy collecting yogurt containers," though.
I'm no hoarder, but I do feel a certain pull/compulsion in that direction from time to time, and I could see the same being true elsewhere. It's not always easy to know whether I'm scratching an itch or worrying at it.
It's purely acquisitive and about the buying and getting and just seems quite sad and empty. Those afflicted become slaves to the companies pumping out items purely for this class of consumer. For example, "limited editions" and such are not rare because the product warrants it, it's just designed scarcity to press the buttons of the collectors and extract the most money from them. Or it's bidding wars on vintage items like wine where huge price inflation happens just for the collection kudos not the virtues of the item itself.
For example, I like fountain pens, but I can't really read r/fountainpens because it's mostly people building huge collections of pens and getting excited about buying a new pattern or colour of pen they already own. Nothing makes me sadder than seeing their full collections of 100s of fantastic tools that will sit idle for the vast majority of their life until the owner passes and a relative has to liquidate things they don't understand.
It looks like a dysfunction to me - a stimulation seeking addiction which is not satisfied by the next acquisition and will never fill the emptiness, the need, the dream, of the collector. I know people will be super defensive about their collecting but I would love for that money and energy to be redirected towards higher degrees of self-actualisation. It feels like a failure to scale the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and get stuck in a loop down the bottom. Instead of creating novelty or growing, there is something safe, comfortable and unchallenging to just acquire.
There are differences as well. Magnitude is the obvious one, unless you actually filled your entire kitchen with yogurt containers or something lol. :) The other big one I can think of is that an actual hoarder will have genuine, severe anxiety at the mere thought of getting rid of anything from their hoard. This is another assumption, of course, but my guess is that if you had to get rid of some, or maybe even most of your accumulation of yogurt containers for some reason, you'd be able to do that, and the thought wouldn't fill you with dread or anything.
1) "Save _all_ the things!" Yeah, save them, use them, etc.
2) Use it or lose it: I have a space under the sink for washed/clean plastic containers. If that gets too junky, it's time to throw them out in the trash, offer them "free" on craigslist/facebook marketplace, your neighborhood group, whatever.
3) Regularize: we've ended up with strict "use cases" after saving "_all_ the things!". Sour cream containers become waste-grease-buckets for the freezer. Glass spaghetti jars become candy/cookie containers. Peanut-butter-jars become nail/screw holders in the garage.
4) Limit the flow: Once you "run out of space", keep only one or two "on hand" if it's a particular type of jar that you know you will "flow through". Basically you should reach a steady-state of using the stuff you're saving rather than growing your "cache" unbounded. Unless it's a really useful/valuable/unique type of box/jar/product, get rid of it! Even if it's awesome (but unique), probably get rid of it, b/c it'll end up being "the odd one out" unless you have a really specific need for it.
5) re-Regularize: is there a certain type/brand of spaghetti-jars that are soooo awesome, because they fit on a shelf, have the right size opening, etc. etc.? Start consolidating around one particular type (as you "flow through" them) and getting rid of the oddball ones.
6) Front-door, back-door: Put things by the front door if they're going to be given away, sold, donated, etc. Put things by the back door if they're destined for the trash. Make those decisions and then take action on them as you can.
There's a lot of value in saving some of this "stuff" from the waste-stream, and lots of pleasure to have all your other "stuff" organized in solid plastic containers (that you ended up kindof paying "nothing" for)... just don't fall victim to the "save everything", instead know that you can just "stretch out your hand" and grab the things you need _when_ you need them, not _if_ you need them. :-)
Buying artificially scarce dead trees isn't really the same.
A person with GAS does not enjoy collecting; they do end up collecting, but it's a side effect.
I do. About any collecting hobby. I view that more as an addiction than a hobby tbh.
That's something I noticed with a lot of people in my circle and 3d printers. They don't 3d print for their hobby. Most of them have 3d printing or even 3d printers as their hobby.
Personally I like to use my printer to enable my other hobbies, but along the way I've picked up 3d design and printing as secondary hobbies.
I decided to install arch once. Didn't have any issues per se, but spent far too much time going through all the window manager options, file browser options etc etc etc.
I eventually decided that I needed an os to do stuff, not be the stuff to do.
My woodworking setup for my garage, however. Someday it will see use other than for organizing my woodworking setup in my garage. I just need that one more tool. And to build a place to put it.
I used to do a lot of DIY software when I first got started, that I now deeply question the value of. I think without the imaginary payoffs, I would have only done about a quarter of it for fun. I don't use any of that code now, nor do I write anything similar on a regular basis, and my entire approach to coding is completely different, so it kind of feels like I was throwing time and money away.
I have a similar litmus test: assuming you’re going to fail, how do you want to spend your time?
My point is: you didn't do anything wrong. The mere fact you're thinking about it reveals you've grown wiser for the experience. Kudos, friend. Thanks for sharing.
1. Doing the thing
2. Talking about doing the thing
3. Getting into the gear for doing the thing (collecting, building, customizing)
4. Talking about the gear for doing the thing
Very often, the first group is the smallest!
So what they do is the other 3, and wait for a random bolt of lightning, or a favorable judgment from the inscrutable supreme authority, or even declare that the "doing" is in fact the "talking etc".
It's an interesting bit of psychology for sure.
All of the above is fine, learning the history of and techniques in restoring things is cool.
You can work on a project, or you can work on a tool to make that project easier. A work-station, a jig, a library, a pod orchestration framework. Sometimes the new thing you've made will make the target project easier; sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and forget the project you were supposed to be working on as you start designing a new language to write a library in to write a database with that would suit your new project a lot better than SQLite.
Open any wood-working magazine, and half the projects are workbenches and shop organization.
I always thought old hand tools were kind of crap to use though until I cleaned up an old block plane and sharpened the blade. With a sharpened blade it made incredibly satisfying curls of wood on my next woodworking project, where I would have normally used my loud and unpleasant belt sander. I think I get it now why some people really love collecting old tools.
GAS is a form of delusion. You are asking people to “just” self-recognize and somehow self-fix their deeply rooted psychological problems.
Source: I wanted a set of the Volca electronic instruments, but the secondhand market was not significantly cheaper than new.
I feel like myself and my friends are aware of this.
GAS is the syndrome, and we talk about it to help keep ourselves in check and not lose sight of what we’re actually doing.
Sadly, the realization that you are not going to be a rockstar but a gear collector is likely to trigger a midlife crisis.
It's a hobby. There's no wrong way to do it. Have a budget and do what makes you happy. If that's accumulating gadgets, accumulate with joy. It's not an illness.
Another reason for what the article calls Gear Acquisition Syndrome, if not for Gear Fabrication Syndrome, is the nature of the learning curve for some things. For example, I'm learning electronics, slowly. Slowly because I have children and a stressful full-time job. A while ago I bought an oscilloscope. I don't really need an oscilloscope and it's possible I never will. I'm just hooking up 555 timers and trying to get my head round the mysteries of inductance at this stage. The machine is occasionally marginally useful, but mostly I get it out for the sake of fiddling with it.
Does this mean I just bought it for the thrill of owning it? I certainly felt that thrill when it arrived, but I bought it to learn how to use it, as part of the larger project of "learning electronics". My slow progress means it may be a long time before I'm doing things that really require it, but if and when that time comes I'll be ready, with the device and the knowledge to use it correctly (and not blow it up! [1]). I don't know how far I'll get in learning and applying this stuff, but learning the tools is a major part of it, and rewarding in itself.
Of course, just buying an oscilloscope in the course of learning electronics is not getting you in psychiatry. I mean, it is part of the basic toolkit, plus, you are actually using it. But if you start buying 5 different soldering irons with 10 different types of solder, every kind of pliers known to man, some very specific tool for some obscure use case you don't have, etc... it can negatively impact your quality of life, for example because of the clutter.
Which is a long way from 'throwing some disposable income at a hobby'.
If your 'gear acquisition' is getting you in debt, or excessively cluttering your home, you may have a problem. But otherwise, if you can afford it, and it's giving you some satisfaction to collect and fiddle with it, then why not?
Spending, say, $25k on hobby gear might seem excessive. But people don't get shamed for spending far more than that replacing/upgrading cars when they've got a perfectly decent one already.
And if you're buying quality gear, whether it's tools or musical instruments/equipment, it's likely to have a lifetime of several decades, it's not like you're buying junk that'll end up on a mountain of e-waste in a couple of years time.
An Oscilloscope is a pretty reasonable thing even for a beginner, it's totally unnecessary but it does make things easier, it's something you'll probably actually use.
I had GAS/GFS pretty bad when I first got into electronics. Most of the stuff I regret buying was all pretty simple though. Cables can be a real big offender. I hate nonstandard cables with obscure connectors because they take up so much space for one function!
Digital electronics is far easier and requires less parts, but analog can still be really light on parts.
Electronics GAS seems to come in the form of "Big ideas" driven by bulk discounts. It's easy to imagine yourself doing ten projects over the next few years, all using some common set of parts.
But then some new and better thing comes out, and your pile of XT60 extension cords you made is forgotten.
The problem got so bad for me that I pretty much just chose to stop messing with random parts and instead explore the limits of what can be done with extremely common stuff.
Like, one time I bought some RCA jacks because it seemed like a good idea to use for switch inputs and the like.
But 2.1mm power jacks are even more common, and I can use resistors to protect against accidentally plugging in a wall wart to a sensor port.
Everyone likes lab power supplies, but can I redesign my circuit to run on a USB-C breakout trigger module? I've already got phone chargers laying around.
0.1" headers aren't perfect. It's easy to mis-connect something. It's easy to come up with some new unified standard for using JST connectors that will make all your stuff compatible... but then you have a project that doesn't work well with it...
When I first saw a commercial install made of random Amazon modules, I thought "They shoulda made a PCB" and I had all these ideas.... but then I realized that when the random Amazon modules breaks, I can swap it in a few minutes, and fix it later if I want.
With a custom board, I can't fix it at all until I've first discovered how it works, which will probably take an hour just to find out what pin does what when the documentation is gone....
Now I mostly start every project with an ESP32 module and go from there!
I have learned about Mini-PV connectors, which are compatible with P=2.54mm headers and do not loosen up over time: https://www.mattmillman.com/info/crimpconnectors/dupont-and-...
> When I first saw a commercial install made of random Amazon modules, I thought "They shoulda made a PCB" and I had all these ideas.... but then I realized that when the random Amazon modules breaks, I can swap it in a few minutes, and fix it later if I want.
I can see this, and I've definitely created custom circuit boards for devices that I only need one of & would be straightforward to build with random modules.
But at the same time, for a commercial product or a product where quantities of > 10 exist, making a circuit board makes a lot of sense, introduces a lot of reliability and saves significant cost. It's really not hard anymore to make a PCB, and there's so much opportunity for error & poor connections when assembling things from Amazon crap.
I find a good circuit simulator helps in speeding up the hassle in 'probing' electronics - there's many out there, I do like this one though https://www.falstad.com/circuit/
Oh, thank you for asking. It is a fantasy planet system from the role playing world of Critical Role. It has a tiny brass cold cast planet with continents in the center of it. Two moons “orbit” around that on slanted orbits. A smaller red one and a bigger greyish one, these are realised as two semi-precious stone beads. The mechanism has two pairs of brass bevel gears and three pairs of brass reducing gears to achieve the cannonical 1:6 speed ratio between the moons.
Better shown in a video: https://youtu.be/zOOXRaQLdMs?si=cDCp2T-kjUETtRzj
> Can we follow your progress online?
Oh thank you. Not much of a progress is expected anymore. I have finished it yesterday, boxed it up and now I am on my way to the london comiccon to gift it away.
The next project is going to be a real world orrery of the Gallilean moons if I can manage it. Will try to get better at uploading progress reports periodically. I guess that youtube channel is the best one to follow if this is of interest to anyone.
D'oh!!
It's a huge money drain, but fun even if it doesn't ultimately get you anywhere ;)
I think it might be the fact that anything decorative or artistic needs post processing anyway, so a few layer lines aren't a big deal, and that I enjoy CAD design and trying to make functions parts work without relying on precision.
I would like to quiet the fan and steppers a bit though!
GAS/GFS sounds like a regular Tuesday on ADHD. I want to play a racing sim. Better learn intricate details of electronics, physics and car mechanics so I can build my own brake pedal. Is the brake pedal working? No. Have I spent even a single minute playing a racing sim since starting this project? Also no. But I have taught myself how to build my own 3D printer from scratch and I also never will do that ever again.
For example I like blacksmithing. Built a simple sword just grinding the metal, then decided to study how to get a proper forge and whatnot. Studied a lot, learning the chemistry of steel, found where to buy the stuff. Never bought it, never made any forged item.
Then I decided to go for armor making, using rings. Started making one, got stuck because the rings were too rigid and I wasn't strong enough... and that is it, it ended there.
So music then? Spent years learning how to compose music with a teacher that actually taught famous musicians, made my own cables to attach a keyboard to my computer, bought software, learned how to use trackers, became "friends" (as in... I don't talk much to them, but when I do they actually listen and give me small favors) Siren (musician from Unreal series) and Virt (musician from a lot of newer indie games, like Shovel Knight). How much music I made? 0. People at the church asked me if I can play my keyboard in public while people sing hymns. I replied I actually, never tried that.
Dumped a ton of money in magic the gathering cards. Made a point when moving country, of bringing them with me, half of my airplane baggage limit was MTG cards. Last time I played? Several months ago, almost a year I suppose.
The list keeps going and it is driving me nuts, I feel like I am wasting my life. I am not studying hard enough to improve my job performance, I am not studying the bible as I should either, I keep promising myself I will do it and then I don't. And again keeping with the theme of GAS, I actually spent a lot of money buying access to theology online classes and seminars, and didn't watch any of it.
You shouldn't do anything. It's your life and you live it like you want. All morals, shoulds and shouldn'ts and musts and mustn'ts are a pile of horseshit. You are only responsible to yourself and you are going to be the person judging yourself in the end. When somebody tells you you should go to church, it's about the same importance as if they asked you to play CoD with them.
And if you are bothered that you did not finish something... circle back to it. You have decades of life to purse your happiness. Relax, enjoy the detour and circle back with more knowledge and savings.
It's not that she hates what I'm doing or nags about it, it's just that she'll ask the hard questions. The ones I avoid like the plague.
"What are you going to use it for? .. Ok, cool, so how long will you need? .. So, have you been making progress? Why not? Why are doing something else and wasting time while there is still work to do? .. You are switching around a lot and it seems you are avoiding finishing what you started.. Have you considered therapy?" At this point I'm like, damn girl, you're right. What am I doing.
After a while I learned to ask myself those questions and get some discipline into my (hobby) life.
I have a project that I worked on for a few months, then one and a half years later I worked on it during a national holiday, noticed a pretty big flaw, threw 25% of the code out to rewrite it and then suddenly it was usable!
Anything that is half-finished is also half-done!
They do have trouble holding down jobs and not hyper-focusing on their leaky faucets for two weeks straight without eating or sleeping much and talking about it non-stop while somehow not fixing it.
Yet, myself, no ADHD in sight. Other things, sure, but no ADHD and I have a knack of disappearing into black holes and emerging with "stuff"/"knowledge". I dislike synth music, but have programmed a modular software synth because I wanted to know how it works. Never touched it again. I know it now, there is no pay off in using it. That's boring and I'm no musician.
I'm not completely convinced this is an "ADHD" thing. I think this is a personality thing. INTP or something like that? You are just a "tinkerer". Getting stuff done is boring. Learning how stuff works is where the fun is at.
Look, hobbies are for your enjoyment. If buying gear or trying to build it yourself gives you joy, more power to you.
I for one like to buy power tools just as much as the next guy. And often times it's hard to justify falling for a good sales offer when you don't really have a specific need for that tool at that point in time. But on the flip side, there have been quite a few moments where I was tinkinering about with some home improvement projects and a tool I might have bought a long time ago and never really needed since came in handy just at that very moment. And so I was glad I had it. Especially since I don't live very close to the next DIY store. So, yeah, is that a good justification for spending money on power tools? Probably not - but it's what I like, and so I do it.
The acquisition of gear (be it buying or building) is not a means to an end - it is part of the hobby.
If you enjoy building and painting miniatures then it's not wrong. It's a different hobby from wargaming though.
> Look, hobbies are for your enjoyment. If buying gear or trying to build it yourself gives you joy, more power to you.
Sure. But a lot of people find themselves accumulating a closet full of junk that was supposed to help with a fun part that they never actually get around to. Which is really just another form of consumerism; while I'm open to the idea that some kinds of collecting can be good hobbies, there's definitely a kind of pseudo-hobby of buying things that all too often ends up as an addiction-like behaviour that doesn't actually bring people much joy or satisfaction.
> The acquisition of gear (be it buying or building) is not a means to an end - it is part of the hobby.
If it brings you joy, yes. If it just quiets the cravings for a while, no.
See, and here I disagree, and I think at least a non-trivial number of players would too.
> If it brings you joy, yes. If it just quiets the cravings for a while, no.
Too hard to reliably distinguish between the two.
For Warhammer, specifically, that's maybe why I've heard the term 'plastic crack' ... That is, buying large amounts of miniatures that never get painted.
(Always paint your bases!)
I'm not sure that anyone is proposing that.
> A good counter example could perhaps be table top wargaming, e.g. Warhammer and the likes. Surely, people who call that their hobby like to play the (various different) games. But a lot of people love building and painting their miniature armies just as much.
That sounds perfectly reasonable if the split between crafting and playing is somewhere near the middle. However, in the case that they hardly ever actually engage in a game, I'd maintain that their hobby is not 'wargaming' and is actually model making.
If you're going to bother, then one of the biggest things is to rigidly attach the pedals to the seat so that they cannot move in relation to the seat even against the full power of legs.
And of course car pedals swing on a pivot that is above the pedals not below, although the gas pedal has an extra linkage so that IT does pivot on the bottom.
Clutch and brake (not break) require full leg power and knee bend, only gas is purely ankle bend, calf power.
And if such details don't matter, then you're right back to the off the shelf one.
As for pedal mounting location, many pedals can be top or bottom mounted if your racing chassis allows for it. However, floor mounted pedals offer the same performance as top mounted, match the majority of purpose built racing cars, and are simpler to mount in a sim racing chassis.
It is indeed what I’ve always seen on production road cars, but I don’t see why it’s necessarily true for all cars.
Granted, the DS is perhaps the weirdest production car ever made in large numbers.
"GFS" describes the hobby vs the gear, but hobbyists will also find themselves somewhere along the "doing" vs "discussing" axis as well.
I'm also old enough (40+ years experience as a dev) to actually objectively measure the impact this trait has had on my career.
I'll summarize in one simple sentence: any negative feeling / worry /guilt you may have because you discover you have that "penchant": discard it with utmost prejudice.
I have had an amazing career in tech. (not over yet). Most of it has been self-propelled by the things I've learnt because of GFS-type propensities.
On the other hand, teaching others stuff that doesn't (by itself) stimulate you anymore gives you an opportunity to check the quality of your understanding and is also fun in itself.
Another way to finish is to build a birthday gift and thus impose a deadline on yourself.
Or perhaps I’m just coping and telling myself that to deny that I have really bad attention and impulsivity issues
Never heard of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) or Gear Fabrication Syndrome (GFS), but I think it would be better to replace Gear with Gadget. From I saw with a quick search, GAS is heavily related to musicians, but I think this applies to all areas (photography, computing, astronomy...).
A little bit off topic... Is it only me that finds the scrolling area of this page annoying? What's the point of having all this screen estate and allowing scrolling only if the mouse is over the middle section?
I think you can compare most collections to fashion. Some people collect based on color or fabric. Others on quality of manufacture. Or on quality of fit. Then we have brands and finally pure hysteria—something you won’t wear, but only desire to own.
This explains keb collectors and someone who owns Jimi’s actual fx pedal. The DIYer could just be an aficionado of manufacture or perfect fit.
My2c
I think that building frameworks is just a lot more fun than doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is usually a soul-sucking grind of boring enterprise tickets.
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As for actual gear fabrication, I used to make gears, mostly bevel gears, but also some spur and helical gears, as well as gear like objects. Since bouncing out of the field (due to long covid) it is only lack of budget that has kept me from trying to build/acquire gear to be able to make gears myself at home. I really want a pocketNC.
I'm convinced I could find a way to Power Skiving[1] straight bevel gears, which should be impossible(because the pitch of the gear teeth varies continuously across the distance from the central axis), with sufficient budget and time.
It's fun to tinker, and that's the reward in itself.
... was disappointed :-)
That being said traditional GAS, as in people that buy a ton of stuff in the hunt for the perfect tone falls often into two categories (or any mix of the two):
1. People whose motivation for the hobby is coupled to these purchases
2. People who don't completely understand all the contributing factors
A good example is Hifi-Heads who will spend upwards of 400 Euros for a simple cable and tell you they can hear what the best measuring equipment known to humanity can't measure, yet they fail to do even the most basic acoustic treatment to their listening space.
Guitar players can be similar, only there one big variable are the players themselves. Also they often fail to understand that every guitar tone they want to imitate is typically a recording of a guitar tone. That means the whole microfone/mixing desk/effects/recording media/mastering chain is part of that sound. So even if you you traveled back in time and had the possibility to sit with Hendrix in the studio, it probably wouldn't sound like it did on the record. And if he gave you the chance to play his guitar and his amp it would still not sound like him, because the magic (or the lack thereof) is in the fingers.
That being said, it is good and useful to have goals for certain sounds, but the way to achive them rarely is a very specific set of (typically obscenely expensive) gear — the trick is to understand your instrument, yourself and the whole signal chain intricately, or on the recording side of things: To work with people who have both that understanding and an appreciation for the sound you are aiming for (just like Hendrix obviously did).
On the Synth end of things I know people who are more into "collecting" these things than using them. These are the people who spend more time researching their next synth or module than they spend on actually learning how to use what they got.
I don't want to judge, it is all about the dopamine in the end, but as someone who enjoys the act of making music — a hobby that arguably needs a ton of stuff, depending on what you do — I always think a too crazy focus on gear takes away from that. And I say that as someone who constructs some of these circuits.
For sure there are gains to be made by having proper material as opposed to entry level, but those quickly become marginal.
The biggest gains by far are usually found in working on your driving style. Have a look at telemetry of someone who's slightly faster and work out the differences methodologically.
Shameless self-promotion: if you're racing in iRacing, have a look at https://garage61.net, we have over 125 million laps of telemetry to learn from.
In the last two years I have completely moved my desktop configuration into Ansible making it near perfectly reproducible on another machine. My thinking was it would make me more productive in the long run.
But rather then spending some of my free time working on some of the other actual software ideas I have accumulated over the years, instead that time goes into endless tinkering with the playbook and trying to add even more to it.
For GFS, making gear instead of music etc can still be the product. Additionally, if one understands how something works, it could make them better at applying that gear.
[insert a string of like 100 sobbing emojis.]
I last made a Throttle for a HOTAS setup. Key was I had a functional end to end prototype using Arduino, ultrasonic sensor, and drawer slide in 3 hours and started using it immediately.
Every piece of the prototype was eventually replaced and my "final" version is a mess of wires and incomplete, but I got use out of the early versions as a proof of concept early and never bought the off the shelf alternative.
But I've got all the parts for Mu-Tron III clone that have been sitting in the boxes they came in for a year now and haven't had the time to start. I could have had a commercial one to play through in that amount of time.
I hear it’s also big in outdoor hobbies—backpackers often make their own tents and packs too.
