The Rabbit Hole Is the Point: Why We Built Harpoon Hobby

Like many great ideas, Harpoon Hobby began with us being deeply unserious in a video game.

Long before this website existed, britinpixels and skelet0rftw spent plenty of nights playing Fortnite with a friend.Whenever we found a harpoon gun, completing the actual objective became significantly less important than seeing how much chaos three friends could create with it. Somewhere between the laughter, bad decisions, and probably losing matches we could have won, the harpoon became part of our identity as a group. We named our Discord server Harpoon Labs—a name that sounded appropriately official for a place where very little official business was taking place.

We didn’t know it then, but that ridiculous little name would eventually become the foundation for something much bigger.

From Harpoon Labs to Harpoon Hobby

Harpoon Hobby didn’t begin as a business plan. It began as a shared space for us—first to play, then to create, experiment, learn, collect, and follow whatever new rabbit hole caught our attention.

Over time, “Harpoon Labs” became “Harpoon Hobby.” The new name fit what we were becoming. We didn’t want to build a website about only gaming, LEGO, model building, food, technology, or any single category. We wanted somewhere all of those interests could exist together—because that is how they exist in our actual lives.

britinpixels gravitates toward baking, coloring, writing, and cozy video games. skelet0rftw can happily disappear into electronics, RC cars, music, DJing, and figuring out how practically anything works. Together, we play Overwatch and other games, build LEGO sets and models, draw, paint, collect trading cards and figures, try new restaurants, cook, travel, and periodically convince ourselves that we definitely have room for one more project.

Sometimes one of us leads the way. Sometimes we are both complete beginners. Sometimes the project turns out exactly as we imagined. Sometimes it absolutely does not. All of it belongs here.

We Refuse to Pick Just One Thing

There is a strange pressure to choose one defining interest and build your identity around it. You are a gamer. A baker. A collector. A builder. A traveler. A tech person. A creative person. Pick a lane. Find your niche. Stay on brand.

But why?

We don’t stop being curious about one subject simply because we already enjoy another. Building a model can lead to learning about engineering. A video game can spark an interest in history, art, or storytelling. A trip can introduce us to a new food, a local hobby shop, an unfamiliar community, or a project we never knew existed. The rabbit hole is the point.

Harpoon Hobby is for people who would rather follow their curiosity than turn themselves into a perfectly labeled product. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t need an aesthetic hobby room, the most expensive equipment, or a finished project worthy of display. You only need enough curiosity to begin.

Hobbies Make the Mundane Parts of Life Worth Doing

Life contains a lot of things we simply have to do.

We work. We clean. We pay bills. We answer emails. We make appointments. We try to take care of our homes, relationships, responsibilities, and health. Then we wake up and do many of those same things again. Hobbies give us something on the other side of the mundane.

They give us a project waiting on the table, a recipe we want to try, a game we want to finish, a collection we want to organize, or a place we want to visit. They give us reasons to keep learning long after we leave school and opportunities to make something that did not exist before we touched it.

For us, there is something powerful about looking at a finished project and knowing, we made that. We learned how to do that. We had a hand in bringing that into the world. But hobbies are about more than completed projects. They create connections. They give complete strangers something to talk about. They allow people with different backgrounds, personalities, and experiences to share knowledge, trade recommendations, compete a little, laugh at their mistakes, and experience joy together. That feeling is what we ultimately want Harpoon Hobby to create.

We Are Not Waiting Until We Have It All Figured Out

If we had waited until we were perfectly disciplined, consistently productive, completely organized, and qualified to speak about every subject that interested us, Harpoon Hobby would never have existed.

We struggle with starting. We struggle with finishing. We get distracted by new ideas, worry about money and space, lose momentum, and occasionally let projects sit untouched for much longer than we intended. We know what it is like to want to create something meaningful while still struggling to do the basic things we know we need to do for ourselves. That struggle is part of why it has taken us so long to commit to this.

Around 2019 and 2020, the idea became clearer: we wanted our hobbies, creativity, and eventual businesses to become a larger part of how we supported ourselves. We imagined creating our own products, sharing our experiences online, and someday opening a hobby store where people could discover something new and find others who cared about it too.

That dream is still evolving, and we are still learning how to build it. Rather than returning one day with a flawless business and pretending we always knew what we were doing, we want to invite people into the process.

Harpoon Hobby will include the successful builds, honest reviews, beginner questions, unfinished experiments, accidental discoveries, failed attempts, and lessons that only become obvious after we have already done something the difficult way. We aren’t presenting ourselves as the final authority on every hobby we try. We are opening the workbench and saying, “Come figure it out with us.”

Food and Travel Are Part of the Adventure

You will also see plenty of cooking, baking, restaurant visits, and travel through Packed & Stuffed, our food-and-travel corner of Harpoon Hobby.

That isn’t a side project awkwardly attached to everything else. Food and travel help sustain us between the playing, building, and creating.

Cooking and baking are hobbies. Travel is a hobby. Trying a new restaurant can introduce us to a recipe, culture, technique, or ingredient we want to understand. Visiting a new city gives us a reason to find its game stores, collectible shops, creative spaces, local makers, and unexpected points of interest. We travel to find more hobbies, more food, more people, and more stories worth sharing.

This September, that journey will take us to Universal Studios. Before then, you can expect restaurant visits, recipes, gaming content, model projects, trading-card content, builds, experiments, and whatever else finds its way onto our workbench.

The variety isn’t a lack of direction. The variety is the direction.

This Is Not Supposed to Be a One-Way Conversation

We don’t want Harpoon Hobby to become another website where we publish our opinions and everyone else quietly consumes them.

We want you to have a say.

Tell us what we should build next. Recommend the game we are overlooking. Share the technique that would make our project easier. Warn us when we are about to make an expensive mistake. Vote in our polls. Tell us about the restaurant we need to visit, the recipe we should attempt, the hobby store worth planning a road trip around, or the interest you wish more people understood.

If you know more than we do, bring that knowledge with you. If you know absolutely nothing yet, bring your questions. If you are excited, intimidated, curious, rusty, obsessed, or simply looking for people who understand why a tiny plastic piece, a perfectly painted model, a difficult game victory, or a recipe that finally works can make an entire week better; you belong here.

There is no entrance exam. There is no required label. You do not have to turn a hobby into a side hustle or prove that you are serious enough to participate. You are allowed to enjoy things simply because they bring you joy.

Pull Up a Chair

If Harpoon Hobby becomes everything we hope it will be, it will be a place where everyone is welcome to participate in the love of hobbies and make real human connections filled with joy, creativity, love, curiosity, and a little healthy competition.

It will be part workbench, part game table, part kitchen counter, part road map, and part gathering place. We are only at the beginning, which means this is the perfect time to join us.

More importantly, introduce yourself in the comments: What hobby keeps you going through the mundane parts of life—and what rabbit hole should we follow next?

Welcome to Harpoon Hobby. Bring your ideas with you.