Oh, and I forgot my most infamously displayed niche interest - languages! Don't know if Iain counts that amongst his, but we share a linguistic alma mater.
A few oddities here and there. I have a strong interest in geology, specifically mining and shaping precious metals and crystals. I go out to the tourmaline mines and to the Sierra Nevadas to mine usually, or to the desert mudflats for geode collecting. I have a rock tumbler and I'm highly excited to see my new set of material coming out next week (tumbling takes a month). I also have a huge amount of various grit sandpaper I use for shaping, and am in the hunt for a large scale lapidary saw for smooth splitting. I also collect Halo universe items. I have about a thousand figures, sets, models, et cetera collected over time and I'm interested in building a sand table to set up scenes from the books or games and establish a room concentrated on the hobby.
Some amount of low-tech lapidary work will eventually present itself for description in my WIP. May need to hit you up for some info.
My participation days are behind me, but I love drag racing. I follow the professional teams and attend races at several tracks here in Michigan as often as I can (not often this summer ...).
I like to do photography. Not sure I'd call it a niche interest, because it was an integral part of the skillset I needed to study as a stopmotion animator (maybe that qualifies as a niche interest? But then most people would say the same about writing...) I went through a big phase where I was snapping black and white photos of electrical connections and power lines, mostly aiming the camera up toward the sky to frame interesting visual compositions of electric lines intersecting against cloud formations, and also the strange and baroque connectors that attach them to houses and buildings. I was fascinated by the idea that our super high-tech Internet (as well as all our telephone calls) was carried through these old cables supported on creaking wooden poles used as roosts for birds. For a year or so after that I would strap a tripod with camera attached to the frame of my bike and ride around in the middle of the night looking for interesting configurations of lights against the darkness, and when I found one I'd set up and take long exposure shots for some really intriguing effects. Toward the end this morphed into taking multiple shots, rotating the tripod head slightly between each, and stitching them together into wide panoramic shots, all done using long exposures late at night. Sometimes a car would go by and leave some nice red trails across the image for an added bonus. Currently my computer is messed up and I have to run it in Safe mode, severely reducing its capabilities, and I can't access my own Flickr page (or get sound!) but if you go to Darkmatters (I can at least put the link in here) you can find my albums Power / Lines and Nightscapes.
I suppose cricket counts as a niche interest these days... I'd say I have an interest in the Gundam franchise, but that's actually work, so I'm not sure it counts.
I like to design my own clothes and accessories. I made this choker for myself a number of years back.
I am really into pre-pharaonic Egypt - the gap bridged between nomadic herdsmen to farming on the Nile and the birth of the pantheon based on the female aspects of regeneration is super interesting. But mainly it's finding out the composition of pot-sherds buried in river banks. Edited for spelling: got overexcited and stumbled a bit!
I used to collect a lot of stuff when i was a kid. Had a beanie baby collection of over 100.... Collected all the state coins at least twice over. I was fascinated by rocks and literally built my own "excavating" kit (a pencil case with an old tooth brush, a toothpick as a poker, a mini, battery oporated fan, a plastic spoon as a spade, etc.) And would sit in the dirt around my elementary school and dig up "fossils". Im pretty sure i dug up a a buckshot. It was a wad of iron that looked like it had gone splat on something. I kept it. I found a rock with a shell imprinted on it. Kept it. I was a weird one Then i went through a tech phase. I'd steal tools out of my dads tool box and take things apart and try to put them back together again like i saw my dad do. It got to the point where he bought me my own tool box because he got tired of me taking his stuff. Idk... Im just not that interesting anymore, haha! I dont have any niche hobbies. Pretty average hobbies, id say. I guess doing endurance/obstacle races is a new hobby of mine, but i saw someone on here already that was wearing a t-shirt of one of the races i'd done.
When I was at school, hunting around the library, avoiding homework, I picked up a book on Pitman Shorthand: I certainly don't write like a secretary, but I can read and write a little in it.
I cross stitch. I jokingly call it my "old lady hobby". Pic of my latest finish, my baby's birth announcement. Spoiler: big pic
So THAT'S what it looks like. I've been curious since I read Emergence. The MC Candace Foster Wallace writes her journal in Pitman, and it's translated into regular english but in a staccato, shorthand style that I got used to and started to like after a while.
My niche interests include pro wrestling, volleyball, studying history (especially the Truman through Nixon years), the Cincinnati Bengals and studying about Iowa school district enrollment trends. The last being something I enjoyed covering during my time with the newspapers.
From Wikipedia: "Although written twenty years earlier, Spēcial Education (ISBN 978-1948818513), the long waited for sequel to Threshold, was finally released in September 2019 through Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press."
I've never got fast enough to find out. I was mostly interested in it as a different way of writing (phonetic English).
I was reminiscing about undergrad with some friends from college and i just remembered a "niche" interest of mine lol! Swing dancing. I joined a saturday night group in college and we'd literally go to swing dancing clubs around Pittsburgh. I loved it! Sucks that there are no swing dancing clubs where i live now. I tried to teach my husband, but he basically teased me about it and said it was lame
I've done a lot of beekeeping. I've even been attacked by a bee tornado. Like Sharknado, but Beenado. Those are real. You look up, and there's a hundred foot pillar turning about your head. It follows you too, faster than you can run. When bees are bouncing off your net in full attack, it sounds like it's raining. Don't bend your arms, and stay loose, or they'll sting you in the elbow, right through the suit. If one gets inside, you just have to let it get you. Of course, that makes the others angrier because they can smell the poison. Beenado! (They're not usually like this. It's what happens when you take the nets off a truck after taking hives cross country.) I have funny stories of Californian thieves trying to get onto that truck too, not knowing what was under the nets . . . Good times!
