What's your current obsession?

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Presently Sequin art! I need to collect every kit and do them all even though my thumb gets a bit sore from pushing all the pins in for 10 hours a day lol.

Also Cross stitching but that has been replaced by the sequin art for the time being unless I don't have a sequin art kit in to complete.

Health and fitness was a runner for a while as well but has gone dormant for the moment.

Other past obsessions include:

Jigsaw Puzzles
Logic Puzzles
Para-pyschology
Psychology
Algebra
Puzzle games
Grand Turismo or GTA
Zelda
Dancing
Horses
Museums
Madonna

And as a child:

Toy Cars (making lines of traffic jams and clearing them systematically but never just randomly driving them around!)
Filling out bank forms even though no one could ever read my handwriting lol.
Pac-man

English actress Helena Bonham Carter
The British Royal Family
England in general

I seem to be less obsessive these days but...

Skinhead Reggae [now of equal status to my ears as ska and rocksteady]
Bonobo's
Feeding the sparrows ouside my flat [it is winter and I want to help/have dumpster bread to spare]
Nasrat Fateh Ali Khan [Qawali singer]
Sobriety [I used to be preoccupied with drugs]

peace j

Modding my Jeep punctuated with thoughts about a woman I have an improbable crush on.

HOLY $#!*

Ok I know I've got some off-the-wall interests, (at least in the minds of the NT's anyways...) I can't believe Zelda has made quite a few of you guys's lists! TOTALLY KEWL!! !! !

It's gotta be retro "The Legend of Zelda" on the 8 bit NES platform too.... I don't have my old console any more, it burned up YEARS ago. Fortunately, there's this concept called "EMULATION" (I'm sure many of you all are fully aware of emulators).

I have NES emulators on my Windows Vista laptop, Android cellphone, dinosaur IBM Pentium II desktop running Linux Ubuntu, and soon I hope to get a Wii game that will enable my daughters Wii to be homebrew channel enabled. (My fiancee just HAD to update to 4.3 and won't let me backdate the machine. GRRRRRR!! !! !) I have so many hacked ROM's of Zelda 1 I get so flustered on which one I want to "work on" I end up playing my guitar... Go figure..... Needless to say emulation was another obsession.. I've got over 700 NES roms, about 350 Sega Genesis roms, and I have no clue as to many SNES, N64, and Playstation roms I have stored on an external hard drive... a bunch....

My other obsessions--

Transformers (old school, nothing past the introduction of the dinobots... Anyone remember Go-Bots???)
teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles (again, only the original)
dinosaurs
spacecraft
aircraft (predominately WWII twin-engine aircraft.... Favorite: Lockheed P-38J Lightning!)
cars/vehicles... V.W. Bug, Barracuda, Charger, Camaro, Morris Minor, and motorcycles
fixing anything and everything that's broken (including myself)
cryptozology
bicycles

Dungeons and Dragons (mainly collecting as I DID game some but mostly collected and read the rule books, created uncounted characters, stat sheets, and scenarios. I guess it was the intensive use of random numbers to create order out of chaos (the dice rolls))

Magic: The Gathering
Pirates CSG by WizKidz games
the spirit world (we are NOT alone!)
old coins

anniversary clocks (man, all those gears! and they MOVE!... that pendulum rotating back and forth... Ahhhhh.. ecstasy!) I collect them when I find them, and I taught myself to fix them too!

quantum physics/mechanics... minor, minor obsession, more of a curiosity
stirling engines
electric scooters
skateboards (yes---quite a few broken bones as my desire to do certain things surpasses my coordination and agility)
radio control cars and aircraft. Currently tinkering with a Kyosho Mini-Z MR-03
computers-- hardware and software
woodworking

quite a bit more, I'm always doing/working on something.

its starting to become posting on wrong planet
then I went 34 years without knowing why I felt so different from everyone else I encountered.

There was a bad stretch there were I didn't have a real obsessive interest things got pretty ugly (and self destructive).

Of course I do kinda miss the period when I was breeding/raising seahorses. The joy of getting to obsess over raising phytoplanktin to feed to the zooplankton that you will then feed to other zooplankton before feeding it to the fry. oooooo i get all tingly

Current: AS, powerline construction/maintenance, researching historical sites to go metal detecting, building salmon spinners

Past: arboriculture, small sawmills, kayak fishing, chainsaw carving, video games/1st person shooters, wooden boat plans

For those who have engineering/tinkering obsessions-----

check out sterling engines! they're fairly easy to build, the concept is simple, but you have to have fairly close tolerances in the seals (not too tight, not too loose) and keep friction to a minimum in order to make them run. You can use common household items to build them, too.

SOOOO COOL!

And once you have a build that works..... It's like watching the ceiling fan........ but with a satisfying loping engine sound too. Nothing too intensive in either frequency or intensity.

Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Grateful Dead, Warren Zevon, pretty much the usual

AS and analyzing my life up to now.

Knitting & crochet
Gemstones
PS3
Cheese
Trollbeads
Origami
Baking

My interests tend to focus on things that have some connection to me and my past. A few years ago, I discovered that comic books had been digitized and put online. I downloaded a number of these and rebuilt my old collection. Many of these I thought I would never see again, because I could not remember enough about them to locate an issue I remembered. By downloading an entire run of a title from the late 70s - mid 80s, I could find the issues I had. Sometimes by looking at the run sequentially until I saw one I remembered. Often, seeing something I have not seen since I was a child triggers memories and impressions I would have otherwise forgotten. This is one interest that can be exhausted, thankfully. (It's interesting that I don't care about other comics from the period. I looked at some I never read/could not afford and just didn't care. I also don't care about current comics, which seem to be obsessed with horror, vampires, zombies, etc. The old days had better storytelling.) Similarly for books, music, etc.

I also get fascinated by translations, comparing different ones to each other. I don't know how English readers even know what some works say. The Dhammapada is a good example. No two English translations are alike. I was fascinated about why a new translation of Camus' "Exile and the Kingdom" story collection was done a few years ago, since none of Camus' philosophical books have needed re-translation. Going word-for-word through the first page or two showed that the new translator followed the old translation almost exactly, but changed a word here and there. Constance Garnett uses the word "garret" which has a precise English meaning at the opening of "Crime and Punishment" - I think all the subsequent translators have used some circumlocution or the definition of "garret" in their translations to say the same thing. I don't know why this interests me.

I remembered going to my mother's office occasionally in the 80s and playing around with her computer and using WordPerfect. I found the old version she had, with the amber letters and almost blank screen (to use the program you had to have a keyboard template because it used function keys). Computer history is the only history I know of where you can immerse yourself like going into a time machine by actually running software. I collected several programs from that period which I could run in a MS-DOS emulator (or, better, a Windows 2000 instance in a virtual machine). I think this is a legit interest, because the MS-DOS era is fading rapidly and these programs are extremely difficult to locate.

WOO HOO DOS!! !! !! Scorched Earth!! LOVE THAT GAME!! !

find yourself an old 386 or 486, keep it handy (make sure that you have a working floppy drive too), you can archive all your old DOS programs on CDR's or USB flash drives so you don't have dozens of shoe boxes stashed with all your programs....

Orca and other cetacean...but mainly Orca! I dedicate a lot of my time to writing the Japanese prime minister begging him to stop the slaughter of whale and dolphins in his country. I also send emails to Dolphin Base in Taiji Japan, these are the people who take dolphins for theme parks during the drive hunts. So while they are murdering these dolphins family members they (trainers who supposedly love dolphins) are dragging out the "pretty" ones to train and ship to theme parks and swim with dolphin parks around the world. I donate to Sea Shepherd and Save Japan Dolphins as often as I can...and as often as my husband lets me LOL. Ric O'Barry and Capt. Paul Watson are my hero's!

I am also very dedicated to putting pressure on theme parks to not keep Orca. They and dolphins are highly intelligent, self aware creatures and we have no right to enslave them for our sick enjoyment. I want to see them all retired to sea pens and those who were stolen from the wild be rehabilitated and hopefully reunited with their families (pods). My main focus is Lolita who is the only Orca kept at Miami Seaquarium in Miami Florida. Her pod has been very well studied and she is the last remaining survivor of the largest and last Orca capture in Washington state (Salish Sea) in 1970. Her Mother is still out there alive and free. They have a very well thought out plan on how to try to reintroduce her to her family and if not possible they are prepared to take care of her in her sea pen. The reason this did not work as well for Keiko (free Willy) is because they did not know where his pod was....still he did very well if you read the real story and not the one that the captive industry wants you to believe. The captive industry wants people to believe that dolphin and Orca can not be rehabilitated which is insane if you consider how intelligent they are. Anyway, as you can see Im am completely obsessed!
If you want any info on captive orca or the study of the orca in the Salish Sea you can go to orcanetwork.org or you can watch the documentary called Lolita Slave to Entertainment. The entire documentary is on youtube in five or six parts....if you do a search on Lolita the killer whale you can find it. I also highly recommend the documentary The Cove if you want to know what is going on in Taiji Japan....just be warned that toward the end when they show the slaughters it is very difficult to watch.

Other that my cetacean's my interests are American Indian languages...especially Choctaw (I wrote a story about a blacksmith who was part Choctaw indian) and my own stories. Ive been an obsessive daydreamer since I was a child and I have been writing since I was about 13. I love my own characters. I also am interested in mythical creatures.....I have written a story about the angel of death who is forced to try and raise a child that strangely does not die when he feeds her his blood but is actually healed by it....and yes I also like vampires . I just downloaded the three seasons of Being Human, a UK series about a Vampire, a Werewolf and a Ghost who all live together. Im on the last series now, I think its an awesome idea, but I wish they would stop changing the vampires personality. Thats one of the reasons I like to write my own stories because I typically find some fault with others writing!