F1 fans seem like a pretty fun crowd though. I may be wrong. I don’t really watch… People doing things.
With F1 fans it’s like a like football/soccer there is a fine line between a fan and a asshole.
Most of the time, I’ve found more enjoyment in stuff when I interact with other fans. It can be fun to talk about things together. I’ve not run into much of the toxicity that I think often must people just assume there is.
I’ve got a coworker who loves Formula 1. She’s seen me nerd out about my special interests with our students (mainly astronomy) and has told me often how much she wished she had someone to nerd out about Formula 1 with. I feel for her, but if most fans are bad news then maybe she’s dodging a bullet?
Definitely dodged a bullet.
not interacting with people in general:
A few days ago some dude I follow did a live stream of a big ultra bike race. Every now and then I went to tune in. To figure out what’s going on, of course I checked the live chat.
Man was this an awful place. Half the people are not even able to read the pinned messages, and the other half is backseating a dude that rides 2000k in 3 days and gives everyone shit for the smallest mistake.
I know a few people who are really into mountain bikes and rock climbing they are extremely big assholes and gatekeepers.
I don’t understand what a fanbase is. Probably why I just enjoy stuff and don’t really care about who else likes it though.
In the long long ago, in the before time, when a new manga, or anime became popular it wasn’t long before the fanbase formed. These weren’t your fanbases of today, these were communities to soak up everything there was to their favorite sgow. There was competition and cringe yes, but it had honor, there were boundaries. It was like this for decades.
Then Rick showed us how much he loves Szechuan Sauce and McDonald’s thought Rick and Morty was any other fanbase. They were wrong. Now a fanbase is just another segment of the population which can be marketed to and have wealth extracted. Another thing that can be packaged up into a product or video to maximize how much of your money or attention they get.
We’re Rick and Morty or McDonald’s to blame? No, they were only doing what everyone had been doing for decades. No, the world is different. The shows are different. The whole business is different. We the fans are different. We have to take our favorite thing as far as it will go to get as much as we can, boundaries be damned.
Now I follow the same path you do I…
…don’t really care who else likes it though.
Skoolies for me. A few years ago I bought a used school bus and started converting it into a motorhome. I made an account at the main forum (skoolie.net) because there were people there that actually knew useful stuff, primarily about metalworking (which I’d never done before) and the mechanical aspects of bus ownership (which I still don’t know shit about).
Surprisingly (or maybe not) skooliers heavily tend towards being right-wing, trump-loving, gun-toting, immigrant-hating wankers. There are exceptions but they always end up being driven away. The thought of going to one of the annual skoolie gatherings is nightmare fuel for me.
skooliers heavily tend towards being right-wing, trump-loving, gun-toting, immigrant-hating wankers.
Years ago my dad bought an old school bus because he wanted to convert it into a motor home with private bathroom and a garage in the back for his motorcycle for trips to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Apart from the fact that he never got around to doing any work on the bus and eventually gave up and unloaded it on someone, your description would have been completely accurate.
Your dad did the right thing. I got mine 95% done at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and arthritis basically everywhere, just for the honor of paying $100 a month to park it at a U-haul lot. I know how to weld and rivet now, just as useless as the bus.
all the people i have known in metalwork or maker spacers were all far-left and kept injecting their politics and insecurity about being ‘authentic’ and ‘cool’ into everything. it’s a major turn off.
i have no idea how heating up pieces of metal to merge them together or other stuff like that has anything to do with politics, but people can’t help themselves. Also these spaces in my experience… were all well-off white people desperately trying to ‘signal’ they were not like ‘white people’.
anyways, i take those kinda classes and hobby things at adult education centers and libraries and such… because no politics. a lot older crowd though but a lot less massive insecurity and injection of identity insecurity into everything. turns out the really cool people are the boring uncool ones.
It was so weird to study in STEM and meet other Star Trek fans in the cantina. Now there is something wrong with Wesley Crusher and I’m supposed to hate him and project that on the child actor, too? And when Jeri Ryan is nice enough to come all the way to a European convention, they yell “strip”? (At least they were disgusted as well about the latter, just reported others doing it.)
No thanks, I’ll hang out with decent people.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but that’s probably a good thing for me.
I don’t like fan bases at all. They always manage to make things weird that doesn’t need to be weird. Fan fiction is culprit number one. Make your own thing, instead of making someone else’s thing, but worse.
I can enjoy the things i like without needing to flaunt it obnoxiously.
Guitar/Metal, spider-man and Donald Duck comics, Harry potter-books, sports(just sports in general, exceptional achievements are exiting to watch).
Fan fiction is culprit number one. Make your own thing, instead of making someone else’s thing, but worse.
You have to walk before you can run. Like, I eventually made my own thing, but I couldn’t have if I didn’t learn from masters first
Sure. But why publish it for everyone else to suffer?
MMA. I’ve been training for 4 years and I really enjoy it. But I’ve only ever watched 2 UFC fights on TV and never really interacted with the fans.
I watch a lot of the pay per views or whatever they are now and that’s it. No websites, no TV reality show, no merch, no fans.
RuPaul’s Drag Race for me… For a show about dudes with fake boobies in dresses, people sure love to send death threats over the tiniest most imagined slights. P.s. I am talking about the fans, not homophobes on the outside.
Warhammer/Warhammer 40k
Love the games an the lore but I wouldn’t touch the fandom with a 10 foot pole. Some of the absolute worst degenerates in there…
A lot of it is either power scaling or gooning for stories. For tech it’s a lot of gatekeeping and trolls. Not worth it most of the time.
lemmy.world/c/formula1 is small enough that we occasionally acknowledge a race happened.
Tfw you realise the country you’re living in has its own fandom for something and they’re ridiculously welcoming
