Discuss your stupid special interests here

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I think everyone has or has had stupid special interests. Discuss them here so you won't have to drive people crazy. I hope my stupid special interest won't scare people away.


My stupid special interest right now is Yvette Horner. She is a French accordion player who someone on yahoo answers introduced me to.

I genuinely enjoy some of her music, but most of her music is not my style. Even the stuff I enjoy isn't my usual style. I usually hate French accordion music.

I'm mostly obsessed with her persona. I like to speculate about possible disorders she might have. At first I thought that she might have ASD, but then I discovered Scizotypal Personality Disorder.

A lot of people with SPD have ASD-like body language. SPD would also explain her eccentric appearance. This might also be an attention-seeking act. Or she might be the way she is because she is in her early 90s now.

I don't know much about her because all her interviews are in French. I'm definitely not fluent in French and Google Translate doesn't help me much.

I'm probably too enthusiastic about many things involving tires, speed & balance: rally, ice racing, BMX, mountain bikes, 4x4s etc...
Arachnology passes the time, as does studying arthropodia & cephalopodia, among other unique species.
My Palm Pilot is faster than yours, by about 4-700MHZ. It also runs Java. Long live QWERTYphones!
Fair trade organic local roasted steam expelled bean juice
Bizarre '80s cars
German, Swiss, Czech, British, Swedish & Russian military trucks are quite amazing.

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"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

My current stupid special interest is the whole Tolkien universe mythology. Including the geography, history and languages. Of course I'm not alone in this. But still, putting so much study into something that i'll never get a grade or credit in

My latest obsession began with an online article about composting. Now I have a thermal composter outside and a self-made worm farm / worm tower indoors. I learned all there is to know about the various species of compost worms, and briefly thought about starting a little eBay business selling worms to anglers and fellow composting enthusiasts. But then I got sidetracked by the idea of creating indoor biotopes.

For this purpose, I ordered large planters and filled each with an arrangment of several plants. Basically living floral arrangements that look very "zen". For example, I put a large banana plant in the middle that almost grows up to the ceiling in the summer, and surrounded it with calatheas, spider plants and cyperus (which makes for excellent cat grass btw). Since I propagated existing plants through cuttings, the entire project was quite inexpensive, much unlike some of my previous obsessions.

I then added two different types of worms and covered the soil between the plants with dried leaves, sand and bits of limestone (both plants and worms love their mineral supplements). In the resulting little ecosphere, compost worms feed on the top layer and soil worms process their wastes, so that my planters produce their own fertilizer. I initially watered the planters with "compost tea", water filtered through my worm tower, in order to add a rich mixture of soil bacteria. Now all I have to do (other than watering) is to occasionally put some apple peels or used teabags on the soil to keep the worms happy.

I even have some centipedes in my little ecosystems who feed on the worms. I assume they moved in when I briefly put the planters outside during the summer. I first thought of ways to get rid of them, but then decided that this might actually be a good thing. If the worm population grows too fast, they eventually start to feed on the plant roots, and predators are a natural solution to this problem. Plus it keeps the cats entertained when they occasionally hear something scurrying through the undergrowth

This is how it always goes. I read something and the next thing I know, there is stuff all over my apartment. In this case it's worms. It could be worse I suppose. Like the time I decided to become an anime enthusiast (at age 30something, because growing up is overrated) and spent all my money on expensive PVC anime figures that I later sold on eBay at a loss.

Once in awhile I will fixate on sports figures biographies which is really bizarre as I don't have an interest in sports themselves per se. It is more the psychology behind the athletes that is mesmerizing and in particular the difficult training regimens and perseverance and goals achieved that is fascinating to me. I have enjoyed these from time to time and cycle back to them for comfort and inspiration, especially gymnasts stories. I myself do not identify with or feel star-struck but rather have intrigue surrounding the memoirs that discuss the thoughts and feelings about what they learn about themselves in their process and journey...
Human spirit and mental health and balance can be studied in this extreme.

Double post by err. My apologies

I don't think I have any interests I personally consider stupid as I enjoy all of my fascinations/passions. I probably have ones that are not very useful such as a growing fascination with 1930s/40/50s movies and musicals alongside a large amount of appreciation for Norman Wisdom flicks.

Mostly though I am into health and fitness related stuff, needle crafts and playing piano, all of which could be useful in one way or another.

i do not believe any "special" interest is stupid.

i have

1. life long interests
2. short term interests
and
3. transient interests.

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1. an example of a life long interest is my immersion in my world of mathematical structures that i have built to produce and manipulate fractals. i always wanted to burrow one level deeper into the substructure of indefinite concepts i had (superficially indescribable) and build a mental scaffold that would allow me to go even deeper without the tunnel collapsing in behind me (as in forgetting how i came to such a deep conclusion and thus becoming bogged in backward presumption). i did not even know what fractals were until i was told that the patterns i produced as a by product (and visual verification mechanism) of my ideas were fractals.

2. a short term interest of mine may seem absurd to others if they have no idea how the interest developed. for example, a few months ago i became interested in wheelbarrows of the 1830's-1840's time period. when my girlfriend's mother asked me on the phone "so mark, what are you up to?", i told her only that i was researching wheelbarrows of the mid 1800's. i left it at that. she said "oh.. ha ha........ that's wonderful mark...err tammy's coming now".

there was a reason however behind my "madness". the reason was that a few days earlier, i was interested in old australian newspapers from the 1800's. i was just curious to see what they reported on and how they worded their reports. i found a site with photo's of each page of each edition of the sydney morning herald covering most of the 1800's, and i spent about 3 days reading them, and i found some of the most interesting articles were to do with court proceedings and sentences.

i read that a person was found guilty in 1837 of stealing a wheelbarrow, and he was sentenced to 6 months hard labour in leg chains to help build a road. i wondered then exactly what the wheelbarrow looked like, and what condition it was in when stolem, and how hard it would have been to replicate. i know that modern wheelbarrows have a steel bucket and pneumatic tyres etc, but i imagined wheelbarrows of that era to have wooden wheels and wooden squared off buckets, and i imagined them to be harder to use than modern ones.......so the journey began. i never found out much about wheelbarrows of the 1830's-1840's, but that did not diminish my interest. i just had to give up on it due to lack of data.

as far as my girlfriends mother was concerned, my interest in mid 1800's wheelbarrows was just a brain jerk anomaly of an autistic mind because she did not know that it had a practical genesis, and i kind of found that amusing.


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3. a transient interest is an interest that consumes me for only the time that it is in my field of view when i am otherwise waiting for something else to happen.

example. i am waiting in a waiting room with a ceiling fan on. i will determine the diameter of the fan, and then i will determine it's RPM by fluttering my eye lids in synch with it's revolutionary period. i can visually lock onto one blade on ceiling fans by fluttering my eye lids in symphony with it's rotational period which i instinctively can tune into (with no knowledge of how). i can also keep a separate chronological eye on the time elapsing and therefore calculate how fast that blade would travel if it rolled along a road at that rate, and then i calculate how much distance the fan would travel in a year if it was a wheel rolling along a path.


another example may be if i am waiting for a bus (has not happened recently) and i notice a building made of bricks. i wonder how much the building weighs, and so i start to count the bricks. but i count them in a series of batches of them that i fit into my mind (like a tetris model), and i have to imagine the face of the building not facing me being similar, and i cut out the windows from my mental batch count and.....well whatever. the bus usually came long before i was ready to consider a final weight. i never got around to considering the weight of concrete and mortar and reebar (sp?) and glass etc

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what ever captures my attention that is in front of where my eyes are pointed will generally spark an interrogative line of consideration in my brain.

whether or not any other human existed would not affect the intensity of my curiosity. i want to "know " only because "I" want to know. not because i want to "teach" others about what i found. i am not very co-operative in respect to deep aspects of my being. one my curiosity has been slaked, the matter is over. i need not pick up my piccolo and do a pied piper down the streets tooting the knowledge i have found.

i know that the way i am is completely cut off from humanity, but at least i can still breathe the same air and eat good food and sleep warm.

I was totally and completely absorbed into the Twilight world. I knew it better than Stephanie Meyer did. And this wasn't when I was a teenage girl, I was 25 and married. Of course, Given the state of that marriage (even before I found out he was cheating and left) maybe that explains some things...

I'm collecting dolls right now. Sometimes I think it's stupid to be as old as I am and to be so obsessed with dolls. I start to feel self-conscious about it. I follow a lot of doll blogs and watch videos on YouTube to learn how to make things for my dolls because I really don't have money. I get some of them from thrift stores I go to all the time. I started a blog about them that no one reads but it keeps me from boring people to tears talking about it.

mines sonic, obviously

i was first introduced 4 years ago in 2009 (going on 5 in september) when my (now ex) friend introduced me to a big book of sonic characters and i LOVED the artwork, and once i saw how many characters there were, i was hooked, and even MORE hooked when i figured out they ALL had a backstory, likes, dislikes, personalities, and traits. i started collecting photos and drawing obsessivly from the begining, adopted a character whom i will call myself for 3 years (Mephiles the Dark)

being involved in sonic makes me feel like im apart of something else, and when i have sonic to talk about, there leaves hope that i can make friends again, that i wont have to know any social rules and ill have sonic to talk about.

i also have a bunch of fan characters i always think about, and everyday theyre doing something new, it keeps me entertained and makes me feel less lonely.

Battleships of World War Two.

Some folks are into "fantasy football".

Im into fantasy naval battles between ships that never meet in world war two.

Even designed my own game- with dice and tables and so forth. You can move markers representing ships. Have them maneuver around, try to cross each others bows with guns blazing. Get close enough to use torpedoes, and so forth.

Havent indulged much in the last few years. But have a scenario in mind: a merchant convoy being escorted by the USS Colorado getting attacked by the Bismark. The Bismark was newer, bigger, and faster, than the Colorado. But the colorado was well built, and had bigger main guns. The Bismark's speed advantage would have been offset by the fact that it would have to sail around the colorado to attack the convoy. Ill play it out sometime. Should be interesting.

I just have an obsession with men, basically. I love flirting with them. Only thing is, it can sometimes land myself in trouble, and then I come out feeling like a fool. Especially when lies get involved.