nothing says ‘weekend’ like the hobby weekender thread 😀

1) Grocery store sales and themed events in online games are alerting me to the fact that Halloween is approaching. What are your thoughts on the event, either the commercial aspect or its historical origins?

Halloween is a purely commercial powered American tradtion that unfortunately is starting to grow over here as well.

That’s not to say that our current tradtions aren’t as commercialised to heck, but at least they are ours.
The only problem is that our ‘Saint Nicolas’ (who appears to be the source of the ‘Santa Clause’ story) is considered to be ‘racist’ because he has helpers called ‘Black Pete’. A small minority of *Beeps* has been consistently ruining the biggest event for children with their whining. It’s gotten to the point I can’t watch the big tv event where he arrives by steamboat.

OTOH … we still have our traditional ‘pepernoten’ & ‘taai taai’ and they’re in shops already.

As kids we had ‘Saint Martin’ on 11-11 which involved taking a lantern with a candle to watch a guy ride a horse around a huge fire. I doubt the kids use candles, because it is ‘dangerous’ like so many things.
It’s not huge, but it was kind of fun to watch a big ol’ fire

2) What is one hobby product or accessory that you thought was gimmicky or a waste of time up until the point where you actually owned one and discovered how useful it was?

A figure holder

I never drank enough to collect corks to use and blue tac is something I never saw in shops.
I recently bought the one GW advertised and it’s been pretty useful.

3) As humantity moves out to colonise space in generations to come do you think the idea of national identity or traditions will still be relevant or will they all fall by the wayside?

I think we need a gigantic paradigm shift before that happens.
A future like 2300 AD with earth’s nations intact as we colonize is more likely than a global ‘Federation’
We’re too tribal to shift to let go of our basic instincts, although some of us in the west have at least dropped the more idiotic aspects of that.
Heck, you only need to look at current conflicts in Africa and other parts of the world to see how difficult it is to let go of this ‘us vs them’ idea. And then there is a certain religious cult (and the political parties who oppose that cult) who seem to thrive on fueling this sort of behaviour. That’s all I’m going to say about this, because it’d get too political for this thread.

I’d rather talk about fun stuff instead.

Remember ‘Saint Nicolas’ ?
The stories about him are usually pretty happy kid-friendly stuff.

However there was a horror movie that cast him as an evil bishop who kidnaps and murders children whenever there is a full moon on 5th of December (the day he died). The movie is pretty average, but the idea is great.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1167675/

I mean look at this poster :