"Socially unacceptable" special interests

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What are they? Maybe one is interesting to ME.

At the moment my dominant special interest is home automation. Lots of smart lights, smart light switches and smart power points. Lots of sensors.

I've been making them act autonomously because if you just your phone or voice to turn on a light, you don't have an automated light, you have a remote control light.

The deeper I go into the rabbit hole the more I feel like I'm only scratching the surface.

I am prone to being 'taken over' by 'special interests'.



In this internet age you can be a "victim" of your own obsessions more easily than in the 20th century thanks to Utube and its algorithms.

I studied anthropology so I know something about both early hominids and about primates. So I have an excuse to be interested in bigfoot/yeti (not quite a believer,but as an interested skeptic). But bigfoot is NOT something that earns a person social cachet. It doesnt make you popular even among friends.

But back in the day you had to find books in the library to feed an obsession. Later you could watch cable TV shows like 'Finding Bigfoot', which would bore your friends.

But now you can get sucked into the rabbit hole of Utube. Utube can turn any interest into a dangerous addiction.

Recently I got so into bigfoot binging on Utube that I began to take my eyes off of the road while driving through wooded areas. Bigfoot creatures supposedly lay "X's" (crossed logs) to mark their territory. So I began to watch for those -not because I thought the local woods would have bigfoots- but to see if Xs could occur naturally just by random accident in ANY wooded area or not (even in local woods near big cities that cant possibly have bigfoots). Then I realized that...bigfoot obsession was affecting my driving safety. So I realized that bigfoot had become heroin. So I needed something to act as methadone treatment to wean myself off of the heroin of bigfoot. So I began to watch vids about the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case- to take my mind off of bigfoots. Murder mysteries- both fictional and real tales of humans killing other humans is more socially acceptable than bigfoot as an interest despite the fact that both involve solving mysteries) And it worked. Ive got my Utubing kind of under control now. Lol!

You will be popular when you capture a live specimen.

Bigfoot: Ever listen to "Coast to Coast" on the radio? On occasion they've had Bigfoot experts on and took calls. That one really famous video ("Patterson video") is a hoax: A zoom-in of the trunk shows what appears to be a belt buckle. Another tip-off it's fake: A lower primate wouldn't have a relatively short torso and long legs, like the Patterson creature does. All lower primates have long torsos and short legs. Something to think about. However, just because the Patterson video is a hoax, doesn't mean that there don't exist some species of giant lower primates out there that have somehow evaded human detection. Maybe they're aliens ... ?

That would be great. To win fame and fortune by capturing a live specimen. But there is a whole community of folks who have a head start on me on that...ranging from respectable academics to flaky reality TV personalities...who have already devoted much of their lives to that quest. And they dont succeed. But they do seem to be able to find evidence, nonetheless.

Ive caught Coast to Coast occasionally. I am glad that they showcase skeptics who DONT believe in bigfoot on the show, as well as showcasing believers. Its a great show.

Yeah...the Patterson film. Its gotta be second only to the Zapruder film in fame and in infamy and ine how much it gets analyzed by experts.

Have heard experts say similar things. That there is a detectable seam around the waist showing that its a gorilla suit. But Ive seen experts demonstrate the opposite. That even Hollywood couldnt fake it at that time.

But Ive heard experts demonstrate that Patterson film creature does indeed have short legs, a long torso, and long arms. Intermediate between humans and apes in proportions, and is similar to other unproven but the more convincing of bigfoot pics.

Indeed to me "Pattie" and other bigfoots do seem to look much like enlarged versions of Lucy, and other australopithecines...the two million plus years old fossil African apes that had branched off from the chimps and were leading to us...creatures that were already upright and bipedal but had shorter legs and longer arms than modern humans but had shorter arms proportionately than do living gorillas and chimps.

There is much to comment upon. Much to praise, and much to criticize about investigators on both sides (both skeptics and believers can be scientific, and both can be unscientific).

Basal apes walked upright though, with knuckle-walking evolving independently in gorillas and in the chimpanzees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graecopithecus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahelanthropus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrorin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle-walking

Humans are the only 'walking ape' left, the other living apes don't give good insight into the proportions of basal apes. With that in mind, even if they've got shorter legs than H. sapiens, it's fair to expect longer legs than chimps.

Well, one of my big special interests is My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and I’m a twenty-two year old male, so obviously most people in my life think it’s strange.

Reproductive organs

Nazi Germany

Those are both in the past.

Idk if this counts as "socially unacceptable", what even is these days, but I have an interest in death in general. I love researching things like euthanasia, capital punishment, true crime in general, funeral rites, and r/morbidquestions.

Ima definitely have to say IQ tests. Not just my own but other peoples' too.

I actually programmed an entire world of about 10 million made up WAIS-IV IQ profiles with different genetics (not going to get into every trait so that I don't get cancelled, but categories of neurological conditions are one of many examples) to look at their IQ score distributions and then had the program calculate the average, standard deviation, etc. of each index score and IQ score of every group and then the entire population until it reflected real life statistics that I read while researching various groups, adding the different stats to the top of the page before everyone's IQ profile. After that, (i get this is ridiculous but) I spent months obsessing over the list just admiring the numbers, I only recently realized how weird it was when I'd do things like that.

Probably far more socially unacceptable than other peoples' interests judging by reactions from whenever I talk about anything even a tiny bit IQ related (even on this forum), but whatever, don't cancel me because I'm just answering the prompt.