How your special interests come to be

Post Reply New Topic

I'm wondering how your special interests come to be...

Do your special interests overlap, or does one end with some time free of a special interest before another one comes along?

Do you ever see your special interests coming, say you see something interesting and know it'll become a special interest?

Can you shape what your next special interest will be?
I'm guessing 'no' to this one, but given how easy it can be to absorb information on a special interest it would be great if we could shape or choose our special interests - if you could choose, what would your next special interest be?

A bit of both...

Mine usually happen as I encounter them... Like something related to me or what I learnt in class or read about on the net or heard from someone etc etc..

No I don't think I could... Unless it has a meaning in it for me... For e.g. Cancer had no meaning to it until my grandfather developed cancer and now its one of my interests..

If I could choose well I'd wish something related to Biology happens because it's what my life has been about since childhood

Not always, but they usually do.



Well, sorta. I've never really thought about it before, so I can't say for sure.



I don't think so, but I haven't really tried.



Right now, if I had to pick, I would probably say computer software programming. There's so many cool things that I could do if I knew a few programming languages, but every time I try to teach myself something I get bored and go back to doing something else.

My major special interests span years, lesser special interests last months.
I can't remember whether there's an overlap with the major special interests...I can't think of what on earth I'd do without a special interest. I see the lesser special interests coming, but the major ones have spanned too long a time to know if I saw them coming.

If I had to choose my next special interest, either;
A. Physics - what I was best at in school, but had zero interest until adult life, and found it a bit too big a subject to tackle by then.
B. Comics - I think I'd make a damn good comic geek, but there's so much mythos with different comics I'd not know where to start.

Most of my special interests can span for years. I even go back to the ones that made me happier in an earlier time in my life. My special interests usually overlap.

When I was 7 in 1977 I watched a documentary on how Disney did their 2D cell animation. After seeing this I wanted to be an animator but a few days later I watched the 7th Voyage of Sinbad for the first time I figured out the stop-motion monsters was a form of animation like 2D cell animation but with puppets and a single frame camera. I figured the puppets could be moved one frame at a time like drawing a cell of animation. Few years later I saw a documentary on Phil Tippet animating the Taun Taun and AT-ATs which blew me away because I was right about how they did and even at 7 I was able to look at something and figure out how it was done. I was hungry for any new information on stop-motion animation buying issues of Cimemagic Magazine. I still have them in a box in my bedroom some of them are older than some of the people who post here.

I very vividly remember how I got into my biggest interest (programming). I think I was about 8 or 9 and was playing around with our family computer when hidden deep in some directory I found a simple game where gorillas throw exploding bananas at each on a roof top. Our of curiosity took a look at the file contents and realized I could edit the game, change the value of gravity and such. Within a few weeks I was starting to write my own simple programs and edit others I found online. If I had done something else that day I have no idea if I would be interested in programming... though I suspect I would.

Do your special interests overlap, or does one end with some time free of a special interest before another one comes along?

Well, yes and no. They do overlap in the sense that I will usually have two or more similarly-themed special interests going on at once. But once I get burned out on them, I tend to experience a bit of "down time" without a special interest, which can last anywhere from several days to several months.

Do you ever see your special interests coming, say you see something interesting and know it'll become a special interest?

Yes. Sometimes when I come across something that catches my eye, it "clicks" with me. In that instant, I just know that it's my new special interest. It's a bit like a "love at first sight" sort of thing.

Can you shape what your next special interest will be?

No. There's absolutely no telling what my next special interest will be. I look into different things in an effort to find something that "clicks" with me, but beyond that, I can't really influence what my next interest will be. My mind chooses what it wants to be obsessed with; I merely hang on for the ride.

If you could choose, what would your next special interest be?

I think it would be fun to be interested in Monty Python or The Mighty Boosh, since my two current special interests are both British television programmes. Or maybe I would choose to become interested in a certain type of vehicle, like Volkswagen Beetles or the double-decker buses in London.

I just find them, sometimes online, like my last one which was making chainmail. or my current one, knitting, which I learned from my sister.

Watching-When I mom used to send me downstairs to watch tv while she homeschooled students.

Reading-I used to tell fake stories to my brother, in 3rd grade I learned to love to read.

Listening-6th grade along came Green Day and the rest is history.

Looking-6th grade also, first liked looking at females.

Two overlap for sure. Participating here practicing English. They are my #1 special interests by now, along with AS.

Usually I don't see them coming. New special interests tend to be the ones I've encountered with before, only their intensity is what varies with time unpredictably. AS is an exception.

In some cases, I can suspect. For example, in the future there is room for improving my computer programming skills and database management skills. I have a good basic understanding of them.

Not everyone is able to easily absorb information. I, for example, can't. I have both learning and memory recall problems, some knowledge I've acquired in the past just fades away seemingly with time.

If I could choose, I would do something that helps me spend less time with work, so I could spend more time with my other special interests, family, and alone.

Mine aren't quite like the classical "pointless" special interests that Aspies are supposed to have. They always seem to be born out of a need to achieve some result or other.

When I was about 10 years old I was walking past my school one evening, and I heard a band rehearsing in there. Then I just thought "that's for me" and I set about making guitars out of bits of wood and rubber bands. I couldn't get enough of my peers interested, so I started messing with domestic tape recorders and realised that with 2 recorders I could play all the instruments myself.......then I noticed that the quality was crap so I started making better tape recorders. I was also jamming with some of the other kids by then, but still recorded alone for the most part. I found out a lot about electronics....I was always messing with the technicalities instead of getting on with practising the actual music.....the goal was always to make a perfect recording. I bought a "proper" recording machine as soon as they became affordable, but still spend most of my "music" time breaking into the circuitry and enhancing its performance. The results I could squeeze out of those machines were often quite amazing, but the problem was that it became an end in itself. I thought it would be better when I moved onto computers, but I disappeared down the same tecnical tunnel there too, it was always 10% artistic creativity and 90% technology.

So the reason for the obsession was normal (in the early 60s it was considered weird if a boy didn't want to play a guitar in a band), but the way I went about it was really strange. In the end, the loneliness really started getting to me, so I stopped hiding away with my machines, and these days I just perform live, with and without other musicians.

I wish I could be as good as you at tinkering with electronics...

Oh, the results weren't always very good.....the recordings were somewhat lo-fi, especially as I had only 4 tracks but wanted 8 instruments, so there was a lot of mixing down and the quality always suffered. I'm kind of proud of the skills, and it did get me some nice music toys before such things could be easily bought, but what I created was always superceded eventually by commercial technology......it was a very stimulating thing for me to do, but I always regretted the time I didn't spend on actual music. I've only written 20 or 30 songs in my whole life.

Can't remember > Alchemy > Magic > Tarot > Astrology > (???) > Wife > Mortgage > Kids

The last three are just my little joke.

I'm interested in things that help me understand things and live better.