How did you discover your special interest?

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One of my main special interests is the Chernobyl accident. I found out about it when I saw a show on TV. I was immediately curious and I wanted to learn everything. That was a year ago, and it's still a really strong interest of mine.

How did you discover your special interest(s)?

I am fascinated by countries, cultures, languages and capital cities.

Never had holidays as a kid. As a teenager I saw others go off on holidays to places that sounded mystical and magical. My imagination made these places something other worldly and it wasn't until I was 21 that I went on a plane and went abroad. 21 years of dreaming of going to all these places made me fascinated by the planet outside of my own boring little world and it remains with me. Everywhere abroad is basically amazing and I need to know everything about it.

I've had many, but i'll take IT-Security:

Was back in 1998. While working as a systems manager for the municipality, i was subscribing to the NT-security mailing list because i had started seeing suspicious traffic in my IIS logs and hunting down and reporting wannabe hackers who ran vulnerability scanners against everything. I learned a lot by reading about security, not doing pointless policies, but patching systems and disabling services to reduce the attack surface.

I actually tried a commercial security scanner myself and i thought: "This sucks SO much" and fired up visual studio and wrote my own, which was faster and more helpful for the average tech guy since it also gave recommendations of actions to take (registry keys, patches etc), a thing that was unheard off at the time. I talked to Russ Cooper on the list and he allowed me to post it on the list with a description and a DL link.

Suddenly i had downloads for it coming in from all over the world, i was amazed that i could write something that helped people secure their systems, i did check the IP addresses and there were downloads from Ft Mead Maryland and other interesting places One guy from the UK contacted me and wanted to strike up a business deal, he had a scanner for Sun Solaris, but none for Windows. Didn't work out though.

After that i wrote other security tools and also got into crypto as well, a few years later i discovered Project Honeynet and got sucked into Forensics. Now i've attended several SANS training courses and work with IT-security since 2009.

Seeing a documentary on television when I was younger and getting to actually see the places in person.

If it is my 'special interest', mine is computers. My first experience was when I was 8 years old - we had one computer for the whole school and I would be rewarded each day for finishing my work early, by being allowed to play games on the computer. It was kept outside the classroom in a quiet space where I could relax on my own and didn't have to interact with people. Absolute heaven for me! By the time I was 10 I was at a different school where we used computers in some lessons. When I moved to secondary school at 11, we had school computer rooms and they were open for an hour each day after school, so I used to have to wait impatiently every day for the end of school!

I was always interested in space and then I saw Star Wars at the cinema and just knew it was the best thing I'd ever seen.

Also, like you I am interested in the Chernobyl nuclear accident, although this isn't a special interest for me. Like you this started with watching a film about it. Then I went on to read "The Truth About Chernobyl" by Grigori Medvedev which was totally amazing. After that I learned about how various different reactor set-ups work which was cool too. I also visited a decommissioned reactor in the UK (Bradwell).

Here's the book I really liked...

Well my "main" special interest, computers was there at least since i was six. We had this pentium 2 Machine back then and i rarely got allowed to use it because i would change settings (My computer-idiot parents had a 1600x1200 monitor, still they used their desktop at 800x600 and would punish me if i fixed their error) all the time

Other special interests that come, stay for awhile, and go away after a year or two often "just come by randomly". For example my interest with modern gasoline engines came pretty normal with 15 and my first moped. The only "not so normal" thing was probably that when other kids get their first moped, they drive. The second week of me owning that bike instead i had disassembled the engine down to the last screw. Or my last special interest with e-cigs. I tried a sh***y cig-a-like from a gas station on my work route. It was overall bad in price-to-performance but somehow against all my odds, it worked. From then i started reading into the thing, got my first kit of vapegear and then i completely obsessed over the whole vaping thing for over a year. Thats how it usually goes for me. These interests stay wih me, and spark up again regularly, like a waveform between "normal interest" and "obsessing over them".

Smaller but still strong interests often arise out of nowhere. I find a thing, it seems interesting, and *click* im spending weeks-months finding everything out about it. And as fast as it came, its then gone and boring again. All sorts of nuclear disasters (especially chernobyl), 2nd world war fighter planes, turbojet engines, lucid dreaming, rockets and space travel, firearms, specific events of history, all these things (and lot more, to much to list here) had me obsessing over them for a specific amount of time. So i collect alot of knowledge about so much topics, that people called me "Mr. Know-it-all" in the past...

I really want to visit the town of Pripyat one day...

Peace
TK

Last edited by Tiankay on 04 Aug 2016, 10:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've had a series of special interests, including tropical fish, coin collecting and computers. But my longest lasting special interest has been photography. Way back in high school, around '87, I took a photography class to fulfill an arts requirement. I wasn't all that great then, artistically, but I was passionate! I used to stay after school to play in the school darkroom on my own.

For about 14 years, from my junior year in college and into adulthood, there was a long spell where I didn't do much of anything other than typical snapshots. But starting around 2007, I began getting back into shooting in a big way. My interest got another shot in the arm in 2010, when I returned to my film roots. I still shoot digital, too, but I'm most passionate about old school methods.

Classical music. Was introduced to Mozart and to Schuberts WandererPhantasie at 3years and fell instantly in love! Best story!
Well, I was well prepared by dads jazz-records and mom teaching me songs and I did hear music as a concrete language.
I still have my Wandererphantasie with Adrian Aeshbacher- and it is playable - partly

One of my special interests is forums. That one started when I was looking at a website for a magazine I used to read. I found that they had a forum, and became instantly hooked.

Another special interest is autism. That one started from being diagnosed with Asperger's and reading books about it.

That books looks good! I'll have to get it sometime (once I finish reading another Chernobyl book I just started haha)

I remember some of my friends were roleplaying as sonic characters in grade 7. I wasnt inicially interested in sonic and when they invited me to their sonic game i turned it down because i already had a special interest at the time. It was when i saw my friend drawing Shadow the Hedgehog and i thought "i can draw that better" (kinda narcassistic but im kinda vain when it comes to my sh***y drawings)

Then when i started drawing the sonic characters i couldnt stop, i remember my friend had a big book she made with all the sonic characters in there. I just loved all the characters and started researching the backstory and watching the anime. I officially became a fan on september 25 2009

I started getting interested in anthropology when our class went on a field trip to a museum in 6th grade.

When I was a kid in the 1960's we had a local TV weatherman that was funny. It was not like it is today, the TV weathermen had to draw the maps on a chalk board. This guy had a cartoon charactor he would draw, he would "dress" him for the weather. It turns out he was funny because he was drunk on the air often and he finally slipped and said something really bad on the air.

Wikipedia article Tex Antoine

I have a history of commonly autistic problems with eating. Long, varied, boring.
My main special interest directly makes food and eating something interesting, aesthetically beautiful, enjoyable to make, takes focus and a high degree of skill and precision which I enjoy, has a long and rich history, and I feel like I'm contributing something making this for others.
I got into it when I was chronically ill and eating became very difficult for me. Turning it into a special interest probably kept me alive.

Special interests come natural to me. I don't seek them out and try to think of something to get into. They just... appear.