random or humorous obsessions anyone?

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I spent the last 10 years repairing laserjet printers of all sorts of models.

Period clothing. I become intrigued by this after working in a costume shop that was set up to rent for plays and activities that used a great deal of period costuming. I originally started learning about the clothing styles in order to perform my job better (that's how it almost always starts..lol), and ended up completely enthralled by it. Same with antique china when I worked in a china shop...

Buying books ( cheap ones, usually paper-back ones ), feeling the smell of their pages. I can tell just about any type of paper that the printer companies use. I love the smell of books! Then I constantly check my library if all the books are aligned, sorted by size, printer brand and color.

I love small things, such as key-chains, marbles and metalic silvery stuffs. It almost makes me cry ( like when getting into a melt down ) when I find a new cool one small thing. Just love them, treat them like my babies. They make me feel safer.

I think I'm a freak!

My weirdest obsession was probably the Appalachian Trail.

I've never set foot on it. I don't even hike. But for some reason, when I found out that people actually hike the whole thing, from end to end, in one long trip, I became completely fascinated. I went to Borders and bought every book they had on the subject, and then proceeded to neglect my house and kids while I read them all back-to-back. I went online and read thru-hiker journals, I bought and studied trail guides and equipment lists. I made a hypothetical list of stuff I would need if I were to hike it myself. And I managed to work the Appalachian Trail into almost every conversation. I can still hear my husband saying, "Oh my God, would you shut up about the Appalachian Trail already!"

After a few months, the obsession burned itself out, but I still retain a lot of random facts about it.

Other obsessions have been:

Tarot (that has turned into a long-term interest, going on 6 years now, and a large collection of decks)
Wicca
Veganism
Paleo Diet (the opposite of veganism, LOL)
Feng Shui

My current obsession is Asperger's!

What a bizarre thread! Time to add my own eclecticism:
Rapsberry Pis: I have 4. I had to give away 3 previous ones to not embarrassingly own 7. (The new owners quickly lost interest; weren't Linux geeks).

What makes Raspberry Pis so fascinating, and enjoyable to me is the modularity. There are so many possible cases: anything by Argon40 is great. So many possible storage media: MicroSD card, a USB-attached SSD, and now NVMe stick. So many fun accessories: wifi USB dongles, bluetooth dongles (the onboard wifi/bluetooth sucks), realtime battery accessory, etc. All sorts of fun self-hosting-related networking can be done: unbound DNS, nginx, wireguard, Heimdall, etc. If you can imagine it, you can almost certainly do it.

The Raspberry Pi hits that sweet spot of inviting tinkering, almost like playing LEGO (say, 10 minutes to assemble a new kit), but not getting too fussy and fiddly with no real payoff (as is the case with, say, microcontroller projects).

Speaking of Lego, I have an ongoing obsession with the history of Lego Space. There's the iconic 1978-88 Classic Space theme with its brightly-coloured, visorless astronauts and several different colour schemes. That's the version of Space referenced by Benny in the Lego Movie.

From '88 to '97, there's a period where a new faction of astronauts would be introduced every year or so, for a total of 11 different factions. After that, things got a bit more sporadic, with 5 more sub-themes that all involved aliens. In addition, the Lego Town/City theme also made space-themed sets on 7 different occasions, usually focused on realistic present-day space travel. I find the set designs, colour schemes and spacesuit designs endlessly fascinating. I don't collect them, though, I mainly have more recent Lego.

My flashbacks consists of random humourous scenarios that I'd end up laughing out loud for no apparent reason.

Not an obsession.
But definitely random.

Instead of trauma bouncing around my head that kept me up at night, I get music and comedy. And I'm far from an optimistic person. It's just my head.

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Thanks for the strange and cute obsessions, I enjoyed reading up.

Don't know if this qualifies, but when I was younger(age10-16) falling asleep was a big issue.
Not knowing how else to sooth myself, I started reading a comic book I had at hand and re-reading it, and re-reading it, ... until sleep caught up with me. this went along for a few months and when I was about 11 years I knew every page, fully by heart and whenever I went to bed I 'read' the full comic in my mind's eye and fell into first a lucid dreaming state and next sleep...

I used to have a strange obsession with burps when I was a kid. It was like a fascination and I'd keep rewinding a scene on a video that had a burp in. And sometimes I'd interrogate other children about the last time they burped (mostly my sister and close cousins, not my classmates). I still have a bit of a fascination now, though not as intense. But I can't stand fake burps or obnoxious people who think burping is a skill. I like real, natural burps that really do sound real and requires no muscles or breathing (anybody can create a fake burp using breath and muscles, I don't get what's so impressive about that).

It's an embarrassing sort of obsession to have, which is why I don't tell people about it. I even feel embarrassed to discuss here...please don't judge me.

I really detest the sound of phonograph records surface noise and mistracking distortion.