Ask Lemmy

I'm a photography nerd.

There's a bunch of rare and expensive cameras, of course, so I could probably just say "oh, probably anything from Leica".

But the real snobs go for turbo rare lenses. As a Nikon fan, I hope that I shall one day be allowed to the same airspace as the hallowed Nikkor 13mm f/5.6. The first ultrawide non-fisheye lens. 350 of these were made, each individually blessed by priests as they left the factory, or so the story goes. They cost an arm and leg - wait, in this economy, an arm and leg would probably be cheaper.

A 1959 Gibson Les Paul in to a Marshall Plexi.

As an old and broken skateboarder, I would love nothing more than a pump track within driving distance.

There are some great parks, but nothing with enough flow that I can just carve around to work up a sweat without have to push or climb a ramp to drop in all the time.

I've started collecting 1:24 and 1:18 scale models of my favorite movie cars and I guess you could say my holy grail would be a 1:18 sized, 1985, Cumberland Grey, V8 Vantage Aston Martin, from 007's The Living Daylights (and recently, No Time To Die). That and the 1:18 Chevy Nova from Death Proof, without breaking my bank account.

As someone who has started rewriting an old Summer Camp Island fanfiction I started around 2019 and never got very far with, I'm gonna have to say concentration and not getting writers block as the combo that would be the holy grail IMO. I'm sure a lot of writers in general could probably agree with that.

I definitely wanna get back into fanfic writing to a degree, but concentration and writers block have been my enemy.

Wenonah Itasca canoe in Kevlar, a canoe that you can transport your life and another person and their life at a blazing clip and the boat barely weighs over 50 pounds for bring 19.5 feet.

I have the hull in a heavier layup so I am happy but I dream of having the kevlar ultralight version.

Atari Falcon

The America's Cup.

The Alpha Lotus

The legendary spray and pray.

In amateur radio, making an Earth-Moon-Earth contact. That means bouncing your signal off of the moon, basically using it as a satellite. You generally need a big antenna array to do it. Also you need a very high quality amplifier to receive since the signal you get back from the mood is very weak. You can hear an echo of yourself delayed about 2.6 seconds, since the moon is about 1.3 light seconds away.

3 other cool nerds to play board games with consistently.

Well, my hobby is searching for historical religious artifacts, so...

For example, in the headphone world, the Sennheiser HE-1 headphones are said to be like the pinnacle of headphones and most expensive, costing $59000 for a pair.

Edit: added image

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.

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:

Any serious guitarists will let you know their holy grail.

It's not any guitar; it's another guitar.

TTRPGs. A cleared schedule

I don't care what the other nerds say. This is the Holy Grail for me: