How Did You Come Across Your Special Interest?

Post Reply New Topic

There are a lot of threads out there asking what your special interests are, but I want to know, as a matter of curiosity, how you came about them.

I fell in love with Star Trek about a year and a half ago when a friend of mine who was obsessed with it started talking about it. I wanted to participate knowledgeably in the conversation so I went home that evening and found the original series. I sat through the first five episodes, and the more I watched, the more fascinated I became. I had never been very interested in sci fi films, too many exploding starships and weird aliens for my taste, but this was different. Even though it was made thirty years before I was born and the special effects were laughable, I recognised that the underlying struggle to understand one's own humanity was a very important aspect of the show. Needless to say, I became officially hooked about two days later, and have since gone on to watch The Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise (still waiting on Deep Space Nine), and am going to my first Trek Con in the summer (basically it's a big room in a Las Vegas hotel where geeks dress up as their favourite characters and get to meet the actors from the shows) and I'm super excited about it.

Anyway, now that I've bored you all to tears about the origins of my special interest, I'd like to hear how some of yours got started.

I am into astronomy and photographing the night sky.

How did I come about this interest?
- Realising that most of the public have a mental awareness of an area confined to a small sphere which only comes about 2 metres from the surface of the Earth, and realising that we are so tiny in comparison to the rest of the universe
- The fascination that you're looking back in time when you look at distant galaxies, and being able to do this with your own eyes. I look at the andromeda galaxy and I see it today as it was over 2 million years ago. I find that mind-boggling and it reminds me just how insignificant our Earthly sense of scale is, so helps me wind down after a stressful day.
- The peace and quiet of it all.
- I enjoy the jokes about Astrologers
- The factual nature of it ; very compatible with many aspie traits.
- Going to public outreach events, and seeing younger people look through the scopes, they see the rings of Saturn with their own eyes, then go "wow".

From a lot of wrong information.
Don't know if I been on the other side.
4Hero

I built and used my own multi-track recording machines to record music.

How I got to do that.........well, like a lot of other kids in the early 1960s, I wanted to be in a band (or "beat group" as we called them back then), so I formed a few bands, but couldn't get the other kids to do things my way, and I started to notice that in some respects, with the right technology, I could probably do a "better" job on my own - at least more in keeping with my vision of good music, and obviously the sound would be a lot tighter because I knew exactly what I was after. Really, I could hear lots of timing errors in what the other kids were playing, and I thought we generally sounded crap.

So not having much cash, it was logical for me to make the recording gear myself, and I found myself using it mostly on my own. But I never completely lost respect for the collective approach to music, and I did some sessions with / for other musicians and remained in a band. The solo stuff was really much too nerdy, as I was focussing on the recording quality (which was never all that great) instead of the artistic merit of the music.



I also got quite sucked into photography...........ended up taking lots of test photos of rulers, to estimate the focus and depth of field of the camera, set up darkroom......the obsession was always to maximise resolution and clarity. The special interest began because I wasn't happy with the performance of my cheap camera..

So many of my special interests have been born out of the desire to squeeze higher performance out of cheap equipment, which was ultimately a huge waste of time, because eventually there was affordable gear that did a better job than my home-made, home-modified devices. Even when I bought better gear, I'd always be taking it apart and altering it to get a better result.

I'm obsessed with bus-drivers (NOT FirstGroup), which began on a hot August day in 2007. I was first getting a certain bus and had the same driver on it every morning, and one day I stepped off the bus and said to myself, ''I think I fancy him.'' Then as a few months went by I took notice of some of the other drivers in the same company, until one day I came home and happily said, ''I'm obsessed with bus-drivers now!'' Then as time went on, different bus-drivers came and went (they don't keep the same ones on the same buses for very long ), and now I'm obsessed with a new lot. The bus-driver who first started off all this had got moved and now I haven't seen him for 4 years.

Star Trek has been an interest of mine in the past - I've seen every single episode of every single series, and all of the movies. I was introduced to Star Trek because my mom was a trekkie, so I grew up with a lot of Star Trek.

I was introduced to my primary interest, music, in elementary school with music class. Getting to play instruments is what really got me interested. When I got my first real instrument at 10 - a bass - playing that became my primary interest for a long time, but I've since branched out into many instruments. Bass is still the primary instrument, though.

Oh god yes there was the Daleks. That started on the 28th December 1963 when I first saw them on TV. Before too long I was making models of them. Couldn't believe how inaccurate those Marx plastic toy Daleks were.

My primary interest is child development. That interest started back when I was around 4 years old. My mum was studying to become a nurse and I used to look through her textbooks at all of the pictures. Also, she showed me that movie "The Miracle of Life" which really fascinated me.

I've always loved traveling ever since I was younger. My family would always take trips together from when I was a baby and my whole life. I love exploring new cultures.

I've loved reading ever since I was a toddler. My parents always made sure I had a lot of books and they always read to me. I was quiet and I liked playing by myself and reading was a solitary activity that I always enjoyed. I developed a love for the Little House series when I was younger and it became an obsession. I would read all of the books from the ages of 8-20 years old. I read them so much they started falling apart and I must have watched the whole series more than 10 times.

I've always been interested in psychology. It started off with doing personality quizzes to find out stuff about myself and then I started asking questions to my mum and teachers about psychology. I was also very interested in it because I had a lot of therapists growing up. When I started taking psychology in school I really enjoyed myself.

I've always loved Internet surfing. I got the Internet when I was in grade 7 and I loved to explore my favourite websites and gather new information. I loved researching interests and topics that I got caught up in. Maybe because I've always been so shy, the Internet is my place of solitude where I can talk to people and be myself.

I have an obsession with The Sims 2. I love creating new families and play with them. I love creating parents and wondering what their children will look like. I can get caught up in that game for hours on end. I think I'm interested in learning about personalities and genes.

Then there is techno/dance music. I've always liked techno music my whole life. I love dancing to it and it helps me get through the day by giving me energy. Also, techno music helps bring out my emotions especially trance.

You can probably see a pattern that my main interests have to do with humanity. Even though I don't like jumping into society, I like to be an observer.

I've had various interests within the same general interest in mechanical things since I was 2. I progressed from dump trucks and big machinery to bikes, then ATV's, then motorcycles, then to cars.

I have also had a penchant for computers and electronics since I was young. I was about 5 when I first started using my parents computer.

My special interest is certain movies that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have collaborated on (Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd, and Edward Scissorhands). It all started in January of 2010. I had been without a special interest for months and I was feeling desperate. Then I remembered that several days earlier I had seen a glimpse of the movie Edward Scissorhands on TV, so I decided to watch it. I fell in love with the movie and found Edward to be absolutely adorable, so I decided to watch other movies that Burton and Depp had done together. I have watched all of them and none of them disappointed me, though I do favor some over others.

A summer of my youth was spent in a Mac lab where everyone was excited about this silly little RPG. I was never very good at it, but the ability to have an entire scifi universe wrapped up on a screen like that planted seeds in my mind. At the time, of course, I had another, totally different special interest.

I came across my special interests by reading about the music and the decade of the 60s. That's how I came across the special interests that I call my true special interests.

I came across Flushed Away and the Punk Rock movement when I hit rock bottom in 2007 and I started to resurface back to being the person that I am today in the July of 2009 and I was back in true form by Mid September that year.

Now I'm spending time on my true special interests again.

Repaste from another topic about the jets:

From a very early age my dad was to blame for my obnoxious aviation fetish, he even brought me a stinky aviator helmet from the Korean War from a military surplus and gave it to me when I was a little. It stunk SO badly my eyes would sting but I would put it on every time I watched my jet vids in the living room in the early 90s or get excited watching CNN coverage of the Gulf War. When we'd get into a car together, back when I was 3 or 4 he would act like we were getting into a tandem seated strike aircraft, like an F-111 or A-6. We had so many bizarre, "aspie" things we'd do that I always enjoyed, he made my early childhood very fun. 3-6 was a ball, nothing but planes, jet videos, flying around with dad when he got home and he would even help me put models together. I remember me and dad's first model airplane, an F-111 Ardvark, he ended up putting the whole thing together and I painted it in a bright disgusting shade of green that he over-painted to a darker, more camo color.

I never stopped loving jets but of course dinosaurs did grip me at that age too and my dad, the obsessive geology and science teacher only increased my interest. I just loved the dinos and we would watch documentaries on PBS that he would tape for me but I think dad would get frustrated with me at times because one of -his- obsessions was geology itself, how the bones became preserved and turned to rock. He would try to teach me this but I would just want to know about t-rex and dimetrodon(not a dinosaur, I know) and their diets/lifestyles.

Also, I saw something incredible when I was 5 years old. We use to live on an old rented farm house so on the way home there were lots of big empty fields, well, one day dad was driving us all home, it was about 5 or 6, sun was setting and the sky was this nice golden shade of orange as the sun set. Suddenly the ground started to shake and the loudest sound you could ever hear came by, like BOOOOOM and probably 50feet over us on the right side of the road an F-15 jet was flying super low. My dad stopped the car and we all got out to watch the guy and we waved and the pilot tipped his wing at us before hitting thrust and ascending thousands of feet back into the sky in a matter of seconds. That was one of those once in a life time things that will always live with me, I'm pretty sure that guy could have lost his wings for what he did but it was awesome.


As for my mecha interest, like Gundam, that interest was actually brought to me by a girl I use to be involved with. She came over to visit me and brought over a dvd for Moble Suit 0083: Stardust memory and I was hooked on UC Gundam ever since. She even brought me my first gunpla model. Tried watching some of the other series outside of UC, like Seed (bleh) but nothing ever struck me like UC.

Well ages 6-11 I was obsessed with the musical cats...I came across it when my advanced 1st grade class did reports on it.....

After that came nicki minaj I just listened to her to look cool...but then I found that I really loved her and have been obsessed since that's been 5 years now

Internet