What are peoples 'special' interests?

Have I slept in your spare bedroom back in 2001 when I was contracting for a couple of weeks? :c)

Now that dude WAS a Dr Who fan.... 

I think for me special interests are like my safe place, the place I go to to be happy and refuel myself when the outside world becomes too confusing or scary

They are also more intense than ordinary interests and can make me more intensely happy than NT people seem to get about their interests 

I struggle with the concept of special interests. I have an interest in most of the things mentioned here.  How do you know that they are 'special' interests ? How would you differentiate between an NT person with a living room full of Dr Who memorabilia and someone with a special interest ? Hope that makes sense.

They do the rounds, each one obsessively followed until something else interrupts. Then it goes back in the cupboard, but will come out again months or years later. 

I knit for England whether England needs jumpers or not...

Then a lead on my family tree crops up, drop knitting and spend two years glued to my Ancestry account doggedly cracking problems by endlessly cross referencing data and thinking out side the box...

Then hit family tree brick wall, get side tracked by say religion or linguistics or something, decide I absolutely must do another OU qualification. That'll consume my every waking but non working second for a couple of years during which I buy and read ( cause I must collect, not loan from a library) a vast amount of books. Take exam, after which I collapse a bit, then ...

Obessesively watch star trek or start sewing to apparently relax, but the wardrobe will soon be stuffed full of more cookie clothes than I can ever wear... 

Currently, can't stop reading bios written by autistic people and seriously thinking about yet another post grad, this time in Autism..I probably will...

Give me a couple of years though and I'll go back to my pursuit of the perfect pair of crochet socks. Yes, it's possible to cochet rather than knit socks; I've even designed patterns. My last sock binge lasted 18 months. I produced a pair a week while on the bus to work. All my nearest and dearest got socks, whether they wanted or needed them or not, lol

Anything to do with Germany. I love German food, history, football and music. I support Borussia Dortmund and I love German Schlager (pop) music. I listen to it all the time and I watch all the German pop music shows on Youtube. I don't know anyone else who likes it apart from some of my family. Im really into anything to do with the history of East Germany too and have read lots of books about it

I get really interested in learning about other countries. I will get really into one country after another, read books about it, cook dinners from there, and find out about their history and football teams and way of life. At the moment I am really into Switzerland. I would like to live there

I also get really into certain TV comedy shows and watch them over and over on repeat until I know them off by heart. Then I often take a break from them and get into another one. At the moment it is New Girl, I watch it every night before bed and it comforts me. Before that it was Man About The House and before that the US Office 

I also collect football shirts from all over the world and have a wardrobe of them

I love history 

Read into advanced civillilisations, very interested in conciousness transfer.  Must be a thing in our future?

You're a cool guy 

Almost anything if it's weird enough

1. anime / manga
2. science (almost every kind, weirder the better)
3. science fiction (especially some of the quirkier retro stuff)
4. law / politics (but only the controversial / ethically difficult stuff) 
5. quirky Korean / east asian tv dramas.
6. Ancient history
7. video games (especially old ones and under appreciated genres (RTS, visual novel, photorealistic adventure, flight sim, puzzles, detective / mystery games, RPGs (dialogue driven)))
8. sociology / anthropology but only the really weird / taboo stuff, trans humanism and biohacking for instance.
9. Lost media and how standards change over time.
10. cosplay (I don't do it much but I'd like to)

Yeah, i would like yo get some more but.  The mrs isn't a fan

Would love to wild camp but hard to find the time plus, my wife hates camping.  I tend to stick with the same intererests but can flip back between them

I see it now

Yes, I get wholly obsessed with a topic and all associated satellite matters......until I'm not.  Then I'll find a new thing that will TOTALLY grip me.  The duration can vary from a few weeks to a year or more.  It's pretty cool in some ways, but massively selfish in others.  It does make me surprisingly knowledgeable over a wide array of random things.

Autistic experience, your old interest in tarantulas sounds cool.

I tend to be the opposite: I'm very selective about what I get into, but when I do I fully lean into it over a long time, and never entirely putting a full stop on it. There have been one or two exceptions. I suppose trying different diets might have fallen into that intensive-but-short category for me. Hoping for, and briefly thinking I had, the answer to feeling less fatigue, pain, bloating etc. every day of every week, but then realising that any initial benefits were either beginner's luck or a placebo effect. 

I'm not sure if this is typical but I get I obsessed with topics for short durations,maybe a couple of months. The gym has been a mainstay that has floated in and out my life but others have been

Open razors and old fashioned razors

Wild camping 

Bicycle repair and riding

Budgeting, stock market

Does anyone else jump between interests?

Thanks 

I agree with most of this (not so interested in non-TV <i>Doctor Who</i>, except for the DWM comic strip), also that a lot of other interests connect with <i>Doctor Who</i> somehow, with one exception, which is my interest in Judaism, Jewish history etc..

My avatar is a clue :-) Davison was my early childhood Doctor so holds a special place in my heart. Love them all though. McCoy is amazing, they all are!

I come to the conclusion that most people suck haha not all of them but alot.  You must be super smart, thats awesome

Wow....you really like dr who.  Who was your favorite Dr?  Mine was slyvester mccoy

Doctor Who. Since I was no age (I'm almost 45 now). Made the metamorphosis from fan to megafan when it failed to turn up on telly in 1990, and I went looking for answers. Obsessive fact-gathering and acquisition of every episode soon followed. It's a life-long addiction for sure, and it's got a bit of everything: lore, production minutiae, the time capsule representation of every era across many media, and even a bit of archaeology - occasional 'lost' (we have the audio) episode recoveries in dusty old film cans in foreign countries.

Many of my other interests (other cult tv, enjoyment of synth soundtracks, biographies of specific people) can all be traced back to Who as a sort of spiritual epicentre. Other interests have come and gone, or stayed but been a little more peripheral, but Doctor Who and all to do with it remains the key constant. It's been with me through good times and bad - I'll never desert it.