Discuss your stupid special interests here

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I am fascinated by different fonts and collect pages from magazines or copies of books in interesting fonts. It is very hard to pick one, but if I could only ever use one it would probably be Albertus. It is such a satisfying and pleasing font that is makes me smile, irrespective of what the words are saying. I have a particular fascination with the Ampersand and that is usually the first symbol I look for. I collect ampersands.

My partner burst out laughing when watching "The middle" a while ago and Brick asked a young girl he liked if she would like to come in and see his favourite font; I don't repeat words under my breath like him, but share a lot of his other interests and charcteristics!

I don't have any stupid interests right now.

My stupid interest is Runescape. My total level currently is 2481 and only two quests remain for me to get a quest cape. I have been playing this game for about 6 years. Right at this moment I am fishing at the Fishing Guild and shortly off to the Cooking Guild. My current goal is to collect strange rocks. Don't ask .. I might explain (horror).

I'm going to be posting a post later about I've started seriously considered I'm Aspie. I don't know but this special interest field made my eyes light up.
One of the things that stood out to me when I was doing research because I always assumed special interests were stuff about trains or excessive gaming etc was about boring people with special interests. I paused and realised I have no concept of boring people. I don't know how people's bored faces look in relation to me. Actually in general, I've assumed someone was bored when they weren't when they were talking to someone else. I assume everyone is interested in what I'm talking about That can't be possible. The law of averages dictate I've bored people by going on as I do. I can't tell genuinely.

I am definitely diagnosed ADHD and from what I've gathered, it can change things in an Aspie way. I have a lot of little obsessions that take me over.

So currently special interests is discovering all I can about Aspergers to the point of obsession. I'm not eating and I'm staying up till 7am researching. I'll be doing something else online, and before I know it, aspergers and ADHD websites pop up. Now it's symptoms of BOTH ADHD and Aspergers which is surprisingly difficult.
I was obsessed for more than a year about getting the perfect backpack with wheels. Right size, right shape. I didn't realise till I got a boyfriend in Sep and my sister said good you can bore him instead of us for a change about f*cking backpacks.

Other ones: retrofuturism. I did get into steampunk for a while but got annoyed as it seems to be overtaken by people who I believe are not fully getting it. It's all about stupid corsets now and Goths. So I'm ignoring them and moving into dieselpunk though the fascination with the Nazis and war amongst some bothers me and makes me uncomfortable. If we are going to do war, I prefer taking influence from the Spanish Civil war where at least they were more anarchist and not about purifying the race by killing undesirables. Sure there was killing going on but not in that sense. Properly speaking I want decopunk where the punk is influenced by the Art Deco style, the geometries, the Egyptian and Assyrian influences, the jazz, the zeppelins not so much the zoot suits but the actual style of the posters, the architecture, the movie Metropolis. Looking into it makes me happy. Sorting out what is dieselpunk from dieselpulp to decopunk is important for me. Many just lump it all together. It's not right.

I also enjoy the atomicpunk from the 60s to 70s white jumpsuits but there my obsession is finding the perfect white digital wristwatch that looks smooth and adheres to the aesthetics not any old cheap ass Casio. Casios are 80s. Or Baby Gs. I'm up to more than 10 watches. I don't have more because I'm kinda broke but if I feel upset, looking up white female digital watches soothes me. I can also adapt to funky retrofuturistic watches in general. White looks cooler and will go with the white jumpsuit I hope to acquire some day. Too bad it gets so dirty so quickly. But so clean when you first get it.

I stop at the 80s. The 80s are bad. That's when the sociopaths take over. It's uncomfortable and sharp and ugly. It's also a harbinger of events around the world. If you look at the 70s, the middle classes in various parts of the globe enjoyed similar things some were richer, some were poorer and yes lots of people were not middle class at all and just dirt poor but I feel there was more optimism on a worldwide level. And lots of the events that were viewed badly in the West like oil crises etc were about the world finding a more equal balance after years of abuse and exploitation. There was more optimism after colonial independence, people going to the moon, civil rights in the US. Things were more equal. Like the world was at a turning point. Unfortunately it was but for the worse. If someone is super rich, someone else is super poor.
In summary, I don't like cyberpunk. Bunch of punks .

There's also squidpunk which I think started as a joke but I don't care, for me it relates to Cthulhu through his racist messenger Lovecraft and all the eldritch things that lie beneath the sea and everything to do with cephalopods. I have a strong feeling that I'll head in that direction in a few months. I've already started acquiring octopus jewelery. Oh and my snake jewellery but that's to do with my classical priestesses of death side obessesion.
I could continue with history and my interest in Genghis Khan or Temujin and Quetzalcoatl and the whole era of Genghis and all the civilisations that have since disappeared like Kwarezm but my fingers hurt from typing.

Maybe one day I'll merge all of these into one super beast. That's a thought.

While I understand that exotic special interests can bore other people or seem pointless, I would never literally think that they are stupid. All interests serve a need at the time; the trick is to learn to replace things that have become an obsession but no longer serve a useful purpose with new ones that actually enrich one's life. I have been doing a big clear-out of these over the last year or so, as I have come to understand myself much better in recent years.

As to listing them just so people know what I'm like by them, once I have decided just how much of a risk I want to take of "outing" my AS by posting personal information on a website that the general public can read and compare to things they see elsewhere, I will complete a full profile and create a blog and maybe an introductory thread.

I don't know if it's a special interest but I can't stop watching Downfall parodies:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjHzWtuK-RY[/youtube]

One more:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrHmcpRAZNs[/youtube]

I'm obsessed with the cartoon show Invader Zim, especially Zim in particular
<----- My avatar is Zim, my screen name is Zim, everything is Zim-related
I have a sexy Zim desktop background, a psycho Zim slideshow screensaver...
My room has Zim stuff all over. Yeah i'm obsessed

I also like 'dangerous things', it's been a childhood to adult thing and I still haven't grown out of it.
I like fire, I love blowing stuff up, I like weapons, and I love guns
I'm actually a gun collector and firearms enthusiast, a handloader and planning to become a gunsmith. I have a pretty impressive collection. and I'm almost a walking encyclopedia of knowledge about firearms.

In addition to 'dangerous things' I like 'dangerous activities'
normal forms of heart-pounding fun like roller coasters and rock climbing doesn't excite me. I think shoplifting and driving at reckless speeds on the freeway to be exciting. I have criminal fantasies and thoughts.
It's another child-to-adult thing that i never grew out of. I don't have much balls though so either than speeding I haven't done very much in the area and while I know there's serious consequences since i'm not a 12 year old anymore (even though i'm only about as mature as a 12 year old), I'm frustrated by my lack of 'fun' in this. Aspergers and the need to adhere to rules tie me down. Not that it's a bad thing, I'm just sad and bored all the time.

there are "special interests", and there are "microcosmic obsessions", and i think that they are somewhat related, with the difference being that a special interest seeks to further it's understanding in a microcosmic way, and a microcosmic obsession is at a plateau of development, and seeks to satisfy a need for prolonged and unchanging perception of a single line of attention for extended periods of time.

tonight, i set up a route in google earth. i pinned a place marker in the main street of brisbane, and i pinned another place marker outside my house near katoomba. i asked google earth to plot the route from marker 1 yo marker 2, and i saved the route, and i edited it and set the altitude to 200 meters, and i set the tour speed to be 230 mph (368 kph). the length of the route was 501 miles (801.6 km).

it took 2 hours and 10 minutes for the tour to play, and i watched it every second of the way.

i have driven from brisbane to sydney many times, and i have driven from sydney to my home many times, so i knew where i was at all times during the tour. even though i was watching it from 200 meters altitude, i could imagine the corresponding ground view because i remember every bend and all the houses and other peripheral scenery from my previous real driving trips.

i find my ground level imagination that is generated by my fixation on the played tour (at 200 m) to be quite exciting, and i can not look away because there is nothing more interesting for me to see.

i know from experience, that the average attention span of people who look at tours i have played for them is about 30 seconds.

I am interested in movies and TV shows. So I cut out and collect articles of old TV guides. I have a very special sorting system for the articles, don´t know if other persons would understand it but I never show my collection to anyone. It´s just fun for me and I can do it for hours.
Of course I am always happy when the day comes when I can buy a new TV guide and read it. Fortunately today is this day again.

I currently enjoy looking up different cults and religions to see if they require you to wear special underwear and stuff like that.

That is my special interest right now. The only religion I have found that requires special underwear is Mormonism and Freemasonry.

My favorite is Mormonism.

I have had many special interests in the past, ranging from Pokémon through pessimist philosophy to the mechanics of suicide by hanging. Sometimes I wish that I still had special interests. I am very sluggish and disinterested. I think it's my mind's way of fighting back against external control. The only way to win the game is not to play.

Animals, taxonomy, similarities and differences between species along with behavior and how they communicate.
Scientific lectures with special focus on astrophysics.
Psychology is a massive one... why people are the way they are.
Dogs. Pretty much everything about them is fascinating.
Bonsai trees have recently caught my attention lately and I went out to find one today but couldn't So I'm stuck researching still.
Nutrition and it's effects has historically been a big one for me.
Quotations and poetry. I'm obsessed with them.
The TV shows Criminal Minds and Supernatural.
Makeup- it can viewed as an art IMO. So many ways to change a single person with just pigment. Kinda cool.


Now that I think about it, I'm really into cause and effect type things. Anything I can work with and make it become personalized/unique draws my attention. Minus painting/sketching. I find it interesting but I'm not exceptional at it and I am jealous of anyone with those gifts.

1) More or less useful/respectable but unusual in focus
- Computer science, AI, robots, programming. That's also my job. Lucky me for that
- Beer and home brewing (I do brew regularly but I have way much more useless theoretical knowledge than practical skills)
- More generally neuropharmacology, ethnobotanics, medications and drugs (again, mostly from a theoretical and scientific point of view ; I didn't try many things)

2) More useless
- Roleplaying game universes, especially the Exalted universe
- Translating song lyrics and books I like
- Cataloguing stuff; usually related to my other interests (Exalted spells, beer styles, AI systems, etc.) and putting them into nice charts
- Questions of semantics, meaning and vocabulary
- Various details about history (it comes and goes ; a few years ago I spent two months on American history. When I was younger it was the cold war, then history of Japan, then history of computing and computers. Now I am getting into the history of brewing in Europe.)
- Systems to represent the world. I am fascinated by the comprehensive systems people have put together to account for their experience of life and the world, whatever their nature (scientific, psychological, magical, astrological, religious, philosophical, economic, etc.).

My particularly nerdy ones:

Word etymologies and the way words reflect how we see the world and the way word meanings affect our perspectives (a.k.a. Sapir-Whorf Theory). This has been an interest of mine for years.

Lately I've been OBSESSED with learning Khuzdul, which is the fictional language of the dwarves in Tolkien's work. Tolkien didn't include much on it, but he set a pattern of declensions and tenses based off other languages and it's possible to (re)construct it based on that pattern. There are a few projects doing that right now and I find it all completely fascinating.

Also, Tuvan throat-singing has been an interest lately. Random, I know! Haha.