Anyone else have fleeting special interests? Mine's been air traffic control.

[Megamegablahblah]

I have been watching You Tube videos of interactions between Air Traffic Controllers and Pilots on repeat, some funny ones. Also sad ones. I practically feel like I have learnt how to fly a plane. Clearly I haven't!

The ones I like best are where the ATC puts the Pilots through their paces. They are so good at their jobs. They also have some amusing interactions. I also just really like, I mean love, the sound of a voice over a radio frequency.

I'm not sure but I think historical disasters could become a special interest. There's something so all encompassing about learning everything about a past event from perspectives of different people and also through the lens of technologies.

I wonder how the 'smart phone age' will be studied in future centuries, it's been a mixed bag so far 😂

https://www.tiktok.com/@wildhats?_r=1&_t=ZG-9ADKg70I8f3

Be warned-they are quite pro gun and pro using bits of dead animal! And apparently women don’t need hats……But I daren’t look or I’ll get hooked again.

Oh do I ever.
Currently hooked on a German woman who drums along to classic rock tracks - Sena-Drums - she is amazing and teaches drumming in London. I found her through watching those first time of hearing type YouTube vids.

When worked on the Wirral I would eat my lunch on the water front and easily get lost on Marine Tracker for an hour.

And I have no idea where I stumbled across an Italian armourer who restores and then fires rusty old guns from WW2. I don't like guns but his vids are fascinating.

Like extreme ops management? (i assume you are actually some sort of spy..)

Love Cautionary Tales.

I also love suspension bridges.

Ah, OK. I have been to his house on the outskirts of Malaga, but not the one where he lived in Yegen, partly because it's a 2+ hour terrifying bus ride from where we usually stay, through the mountains - the drivers are very skilled, as demonstrated by their ability to do an 18 point turn to turn round a coach in a tiny village on the edge of the mountainside, but they also drive as if their life's ambition is to die in a fireball in a ravine.

I'm also aware that his association with Yegen is resented by many.

@Geneticsbunny No, I am not a spy. There have been 'spy adjacent' moments though.

I'm learning Ukrainian because I really like a band, and wanted to understand their lyrics better.

I've been watching a lot of Ukrainian TV on YouTube as a result and find their culture so refreshing/fascinating. It feels like the arts are taken seriously, and boy, if they've got something to say about a subject, there will be a three hour documentary covering the subject.

I'm used to Europeans being more straight-talking than Brits, but I quite enjoy how direct and enthusiastic they are about subjects of interest, and how much they go into detail. Our media seems quite surface-level by comparison, especially concerning the arts. You get the feeling the "three word slogan" propaganda trope wouldn't fly there.

Yesterday I watched an hour long documentary called "Why is Britain's economy dead?" and thoroughly enjoyed when they got to the bit about Brexit. No punches were pulled!

Literally just become interested in holocaust deniers - how can they do that? Watched a film called Denial, based on a true story court case of a historian David Irving (still alive) who totally denies it all. Excellent film. Rachel Weisz.

Great thread OP btw

The 'Let's roll' chat is made up??

If you had an interest in theme parks have you ever watched the documentary "Class Action Park"? It's hilarious in some parts and completely horrifying in others! About an under- regulated water/amusement park in New Jersey in the 70s-90s.

My husband was fascinated by it, they would literally just chuck some poor teenage employees down new slides or rides to see whether they were safe! 😦

Icelandic volcanoes. It started several years ago when there was an eruption, then several more a few months apart. I'm still waiting for the next one, and it is the first thing I check online every morning.

I’ve been down an Everest rabbit hole for about a year.

I've given up with the volcanoes and the webcams now. It's well over a year since the last eruption before that the oracle that is vedur.is says there was 9 in a 2 year period.

You must be cold

I’m obsessed with Russia. I follow every word Steve Rosenberg says ( BBC correspondent) and am always searching for documentaries.

Oil rigs were a big interest for a while, they fascinate me. There are a couple I’d have probably been able to navigate round I watched that many videos. I like to think I could be earning the big bucks on one but I forget my limits sometimes.
Flight radar is ongoing for years, especially watching military planes.

It’s military bases for me - past, present, uk, international. I spent a very happy afternoon looking up every single base in this list on Google earth. It blows my mind that 80 years ago there were huge airfields in what are now just farmers fields, and if you look carefully on Google you can still sometimes see the outlines of runways etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_Royal_Air_Force_stations

I also pick a foreign town or city on Streetview and “go for a walk around it” on my lunch hour. I like Tijuana and Naples the best I think.

Try Doomsday as another podcast for historic disasters (with snark). Great fun.

As for niche interests - my current hyper fixation is vintage sewing machines.

Its Japanese and Korean culture for me from watching k-dramas on Netflix 😆

I used to watch ski resort webcams, mainly people standing around, because DS went skiing once. I was watching them long after he got back.

I am always looking for my Mastermind specialist subject. At the moment, I am torn between HRT and supermarket mince pies of 2026.

I studied genocide at university, and one of the seminar exercises was to divide into groups, one side to deny the genocide, one to argue for it.

We weren't given any instructions on how to do it, and the denial group immediately found it very easy indeed to come up with the classic DARVO techniques and apply them to the facts. The side arguing for it immediately became very frustrated and upset.

There's an interesting psychology that applies to human behaviours around genocide. The one that interests me (having studied further), is, what appears to me, to be a trend for what I call "inter-genocide denial" - where victim populations of genocide have an observed tendency to deny that other genocides have occurred. I didn't get the opportunity to expand on this, but when doing research across different genocides, it was hard to find scholars belonging to victim populations to contribute because they didn't agree that the other examples were genocide. Perpetrator populations were actually more likely to participate.

Like I say, it hasn't been studied, but the anecdata I gathered from other academics suggested there is something of a trend. Something related to the trauma and not wanting to diminish what happened by accepting that it happened to others.

Oh, I spent WEEKS 'walking' around Naples a few years ago. The street life pouring out of every corner...amazing.

My elder son is an ATC

Crashes how horrible ? Is be worried if I did that.

You might like to check out the uniquely amazing Kalkar Wunderland in Germany:

https://www.dailymail.com/travel/travel_news/article-2966591/Former-nuclear-site-Germany-transformed-theme-park.html