[Raion]

So this is just a fun little one. If you're in a relationship, have that person chime in on your hobby.

I'm lucky my girlfriend was willing to do this, so I'll quote what she wrote to me when I asked:

Call me Suzu (not my real name), I'm 20 and have been dating Raion/Kaz for about 6 months. He's fucking messy as hell with his hobby, but I dont harp on him, we dont live together yet and he keeps it confined to his office so its all good. He spends too much of his money on his hobby, but looking over the site and stuff this is really important to him, so its important to me too! 

I'm more of an artist than a nerd for this stuff, but I do like the design of some of the computers, especially the big bright purple blob computer. I also spend too much on cosplay, pokemon and art supplies, so i guess we are even there. 

She does spend wayy too much on Pokemon stuff. She's got every edition of Satoshi's hat from the anime, a billion plushies, every game ever released that has to do with pokemon, a copy of Pokemon Box Ruby and Sapphire, and some Pokemon tamagotchis, more than one of which I had to solder for her to fix it. 

So I guess I lucked out with a non-normie girlfriend.

[Nichosen]

Wife’s not super happy about the purple and the teal one standing as a conversation piece in the living room
Can’t see why

[jan-jaap]

He's fucking messy as hell with his hobby [...] we dont live together yet and he keeps it confined to his office so its all good. He spends too much of his money on his hobby, but looking over the site and stuff this is really important to him, so its important to me too! 

I don't think my wife can be bothered to chime in here, but after 14 years of marriage I hope I know a little bit how she feels and the 'pain points' are in line with the above. Basically, she doesn't care about my computers, and that's fine with me -- it's my hobby after all, and she has her own. From the above (money / space / time) only the time I spend sometimes causes a little friction. I don't buy any more systems, sometimes I buy parts, but sell them as well so effectively it doesn't cost much if anything. I have a place for my systems, so I don't bother anybody. This is very important when you've got a family with kids.

In the end I think if you love your partner, you simply have to respect her (him?) a little. I respect that she has her interests, and vice versa. I respect that she doesn't like the living room looking like a server room, she has to deal with the fact that I'm simply not the kind to spend my evenings like a vegetable in front of the TV. I need to create / repair / improve things. Sometimes I tell her she's lucky it's "only" computers, because if I had focused on e.g. old cars it would cost more money, more space and I would be covered in oil all the time

Fun fact: I have recently been messing around with home automation. Right now it's mostly living room stuff -- "Hey Siri, switch on the TV", you know. But all my SGI systems are on a couple of large APC PDUs, so I can remotely power them on and off using SNMP or SSH. I was fantasizing out loud about how cool it would be to be able to integrate that with my Homey and do "Hey Siri, switch on the SGI Crimson" and her reply was "Cool, then I can do Hey Siri, switch off all SGIs"

[biigD]

My wife understands. In fact, while we were dating she went with me on a 2+ hour car ride to buy an Indigo2. So she got an early taste of the insanity. We're currently living in NYC so space is at a premium and I don't think she'd be a fan of me bringing home more hardware. But once we're back in the burbs with more space I'm sure she won't mind me expanding the collection a bit.

My other hobby is flying, and she's cool with that as well. I think she's a little nervous about little airplanes, but supportive nonetheless.

[kaigan]

My wife is supportive of my vintage computing hobby on the whole, especially since I use it as a platform both for learning and sharing knowledge with others. It's definitely not a hobby she has any significant interest in, but she's happy that it makes me happy.

Cost can occasionally be a concern for her, but I make sure that we discuss any significant purchases in advance, and that goes for her, too. After all, we're spending more on going to see three concerts later in the year for her favorite band than I spent on my Tezro.

In short, we both have our obsessions and we're okay with that.

[Trippynet]

My wife is happy enough with my hobby - although she did set a rule of no more than two SGIs "on display" in my man-cave. The O2 is therefore in the cupboard. Saying that though, she didn't mind me buying the Indigo2 and Fuel a few years back.

Thing is though, I got lucky when we were fairly freshly together. The University she was working at agreed to sell a motion tracking system to her fairly cheaply when she moved to a different university - but on condition that she got their second motion tracking system working properly first (it was in parts and hadn't been used for years). No problem thought my wife, with the help of myself she had got one of them working properly with Matlab and Windows XP. This was until she found out the second one was much older and had an ISA controller card (her system has a PCI controller so was straightforward).

Long story short, my sizeable collection of old parts meant we were able to build something up that could run XP/Matlab and supported the ISA card of the tracking system, hence she was able take the other system for her research. If you've been able to help someone out due to all your hoarded spare bits - that person can't complain about your hoarding any more (well, so long as they're tidily hoarded and out of sight in my cupboard of course).