What is/was your most unusual special interest?

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For me, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. In summer 2010, I stayed in Shanghai for 3 weeks (my family don't live there) and visited all 200+ pavilions; I could recognize all those pavilions as if they were just words. I had to wait in line for 4+ hours to get into many pavilions since there were so many visitors, but that didn't diminish my passion at all. Even after my visit and I went back to school (in a different city far away from Shanghai), I talked about the Expo all the time whether anyone was interested or not (and airports, since it was a secondary special interests at that time), greeted people by "have you been to the Expo", and wrote about the Expo in my homework whether it was appropriate or not since I couldn't stop thinking about it; it was fine for my art class, but I got points off for my geography class since the teacher couldn't understand what I wrote. I was also inseparable from my Expo passports for quite a while and considered them much more important than my real passport. I still regret that I wasn't mature enough to understand the overall message "Better City, Better Life"; what I talked about all the time were technical details such as locations of pavilions, facts about the designs, specific exhibits, and sometimes locations of the entrances to the Expo site and subway routes and stations to those entrances (the Shanghai City was the special interest that preceded the Expo so I would still talk a bit about the Shanghai Metro though less about skyscrapers in Shanghai as my attention shifted to the Expo). Since college, as I matured, I put more emphasis on understanding in my special interests.

Shillelaghs.

When I was nine: salt. Just salt. It didn't last long, luckily. It was the first special interest that really irked my family, and I don't think they could've held out for much longer. I'm not sure, but I think it's one of the main reasons that my mom tossed my encyclopedias in the trash. Well, that and the fact that I was burning my way through S towards a certain topic that she wasn't ready to explain yet.

Denis Istomin

Building multi-track tape recorders in the 1970s and recording myself as a "one-man band," I suppose. I don't know of any other amateur who was doing that at the time. But it wasn't as unusual is it gets for some of us. Some amateurs were using 2 tape recorders to make multi-track recordings, electronics magazines published circuits for building tape recorders and mixers, and rich musicians were already starting to use expensive multi-track machines to do the one-man-band trick - Brian Wilson was creating Beach Boys hits all by himself. The main surprising feature was my determination.

Unlike a lot of what I've read about autistic special interests, mine have always been driven by understandable needs and purposes - I wanted to play in a band, and couldn't find one that sounded very good, and didn't have much money, so I figured if I practised and practised specific songs, I could get a good result on my own instead of having to influence people into playing my preferred way and working hard to get it just how I wanted it. As it turned out, the results were better in many ways but the recording quality wasn't very good, and it wasn't until multi-track music computers were affordable that I managed to get my results on a par with a good band.

My collections were never really eccentric. Some of them weren't really special interests, I just hate throwing anything away. I ended up with about 1000 6-hour videotapes of movies and TV series, but only because I kept everything. Nothing unusual about a collection of movies. It's mostly the size, I'm not welded to archaic formats and prefer to convert everything into modern digital movies. Just like my music collection, the only unusual thing is the size and the proportion of stuff in it that I don't even particularly like.

Circumcision practices around the world.

German helmets. I think they're cute. Schultz makes them cute.

good question. if your asking about atypicality then maybe when i was 2 i would ritualistically pile the clothes in my closet in front of my door way EVERY night for a time, i was really drawn to piles of things but i wouldnt really say its a Special Interest persay. most of my special interest are reasonable, Titanic, Ghosts, Frogs, Coraline (2009 film) and finally Sonic the Hedgehog .

Now that i think of it ONE thing comes to mind. i had a three year long obsession with, October 4th 2007 to December 27th 2010.

it was simply this


i had the Mummy one and i named him Mummy Dude and he was probably my best friend. he had a backstory, bedroom, his own backpack, i made him clothes. i know this sounds like i typical "girl and her doll" but reminder i had him between the ages of 10 and 13. many of my peers no longer had toys and he didnt look like a typical doll. a lot of the dialogue for him was spoken outloud and in public. he and i would have full conversations together.

He was impulsive, a go getter, and liked exploring, often annoyed with my antics. he went through a lot, he would go EVERYWHERE with me. as you can tell by the dates, he was phased out by sonic and was quickly forgotten, there was even a time i made him physically fight with my sonic toy.

i miss him. RIP

good question. if your asking about atypicality then maybe when i was 2 i would ritualistically pile the clothes in my closet in front of my door way EVERY night for a time, i was really drawn to piles of things but i wouldnt really say its a Special Interest persay. most of my special interest are reasonable, Titanic, Ghosts, Frogs, Coraline (2009 film) and finally Sonic the Hedgehog .

Now that i think of it ONE thing comes to mind. i had a three year long obsession with, October 4th 2007 to December 27th 2010.

it was simply this


i had the Mummy one and i named him Mummy Dude and he was probably my best friend. he had a backstory, bedroom, his own backpack, i made him clothes. i know this sounds like i typical "girl and her doll" but reminder i had him between the ages of 10 and 13. many of my peers no longer had toys and he didnt look like a typical doll. a lot of the dialogue for him was spoken outloud and in public. he and i would have full conversations together.

He was impulsive, a go getter, and liked exploring, often annoyed with my antics. he went through a lot, he would go EVERYWHERE with me. as you can tell by the dates, he was phased out by sonic and was quickly forgotten, there was even a time i made him physically fight with my sonic toy.

i miss him. RIP

I got tired of drawing extremely rigid parts combined with springs and hinges, and developed continuous composite structures combining all three functions in one part. The prototype won a world championship, but the NTs are still chipping away at the problem one part at a time. I think they like to keep busy.

For about 6 months I had a special interest in the scene in Star Wars where Alderaan blew up. I think that's pretty weird.

If I recall -- Boxes.
Maybe not just about boxes and hiding stuff. Maybe it's about compartments. Secret compartments. Or just about the concept of hiding. Or hiding in compartments -- which isn't really unusual for children.

I dunno.
Maybe it's just boxes. And not it's extension/connection with another.


If not that, then -- Doodles and Graffiti. Though the former is far from unusual, the latter is more or less unallowed. They're more or less connected too.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Everything involved with crafting Japanese swords.

Propagating plants in ways that are considered to be almost impossible.

When I was about nine - skeletons. My sister made a cardboard one at school and gave it to me. It was not very big and I played with it until it fell apart, to my devastation.

(dutch) homosexual litterature, in middle teen years