What is your passion? And why?

Reading Literature.

I have a ~3500 library in my house which is my pride and joy, I've collected them over many years of hunting thrift stores and used book stores/book sales. I try and spend at least an hour 5-6 days a week reading quietly by myself in my library. I also spend ~30-40 minutes/weekday listening to less serious Audiobooks on my morning commute. This allows me to consume somewhere around 50-60 books/year, terribly low but what can you do when a 40 hour/week job steals almost all of ones free time.

How did this start? I had a great uncle that I really looked up to, really smart guy and very well read. He had a personal library, much smaller than what mine is now but it was the first time I really saw a serious collection of books in someone's house and thought 'I want this in my life'. When he died I took almost his entire library and that was the beginning of mine, which I've now increased in size many times over.

I've been collecting and reading like this for ~15 years now. My total count of finished books from my library is around 650. So unless I can retire early (working on it) I will likely die before I can even finish what's in my library and until very recently the books have been coming in faster than I can read them. So many great books, so short is the human lifespan.

Why Literature? I seek a deeper understanding of the human condition. I haven't found anything that delivers that like serious literature. Each book is another piece of the puzzle, another insight, another type of personality, another way of life. Literature focuses on the human, the plot is very much secondary and sometimes non-existent. No matter the age or location humans are humans and we can find things in even the oldest books that speak directly to us today. The use of language becomes a high art, these genius writers crafting pages like they are a fine Italian renaissance painting, I revel in the how the greats use language as a tool of communication and in how deeply they can make us feel. That feeling is what is most important to me, to really FEEL a character, to understand their interior life, their motives, troubles, and passions is to understand oneself. To take what these great books have to offer and apply them to ones own thinking, understanding, and empathy towards our fellow man has enriched my life beyond what I ever thought was possible.

There is a great quote about reading from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

Board games, without a doubt. They're the purest form of machine, a combination of some amount of physical components and the rules to make them work right, stored in the heads of the players and strung together by play. The parts of the machine only move because everyone who's inside is intimately aware of how the whole machine works. All that, and the machine doesn't even make anything, it just outputs a boolean win or lose value to each player, which doesn't even matter much. The machine was instead created because it would be fun to be a moving part in it for a while, that's the only real reason. Machinery for the joy of machinery alone.

Yes I am very autistic, how could you tell?

... Board games are also how I make friends and have fun and stuff. Most good things in my life came from them. They're good 👍

Parenting

I do love young people (also known as children), but even more I love their caretakers.

Everyone trying their best to provide for a young person is a hero in my book.

It is not always easy, and often quite hard to parent a child. Thank you.

I love lizards

They’re goofy and fragile and have big personalities and little cute habits. They know who you are and they like their routine. Honestly the only thing that separates them from a mammal is most of them wont vocalize at you.

I think most people think of them as boring aquarium creatures cause thats how they’re treated. I hate walking into a pet shop and seeing some poor lizard in a too small cage on the wrong substrate without enough heat. You’d be boring too if that was your life. You peer in and they look up at you like they’ve already given up and they’re so young. Most of them die within the first year.

I just love them though. Most days the only good thing that happened to me all day is I got to meet a lizard on the side walk.

First, what is yours @kaffo?

My passion is new experiences.

Rarely do I remain passionate about the same thing for long.

Usually after three years I end up less... passionate. And then I look for something new.

I did have a couple of catastrophic injuries. I used to think those injuries blocked my true passions.

I think it's OK not to have a single passion. Just as long as you live for something more than eat, work, sleep.

Being in water.

Preferably lakes, the sea is ok and pools are a last resort.

While there are lots of ways to be in the water and things you can do, what I love with it, is that I can feel my whole skin at once.

It allows me to get a sense of my physical boundaries like nothing else. It does seem to help with my emotional boundaries as well, as when I get to spend time in water I also seem to manage to take care of myself better.

This year I've taken lessons to learn to swim better and also to freedive. In time I hope to take after Johanna Nordblad as the cold helps tremendously in defining the borders between me and the rest of the world.

My passion is media. That is, the ways we as humans tell stories to each other, and the purposes to which we put those stories. Be it an individually run podcast or video production channel, an author self-publishing, theater and arts production, social media campaigns, corporate, governmental, and non-profit messaging, all the way up to how Hollywood or legacy publishing manages the challenges and efficiencies of scale.

I'm... maybe a touch autistic. People's reasons for their actions were entirely opaque and bizarre to me. In college I found psychology classes that gave me the basics, but it became clear that beyond our biology and neurochemistry it's the stories we inhabit and attempt to enforce on others that really answer why we do what we do.

It's been a thing for decades now, though my understanding and focus continues to shift within the broader sphere. There's a lot to know, and I know I'll never go beyond the surface on such a huge area. But there's always something new to see and delve into.

I'm always consuming media and its surrounding information. The media is just the beginning. What's the surface message? What are the creators assumptions, biases, or ideologies that color their message? What are their economic and ideological incentives for creating the media? How does it relate to their other work, or work by others in a similar sphere? The message in a vacuum is not the message.

Do you want to understand humans? Understand them by their works. Media is slow telepathy and mind control. It's one party trying to insert new information into the brain of others. What memes (in both classical and new senses) are being spread? While talk is cheap, in a networked world of information, it is through someone's media that you shall know them.

Downloading books and promising myself to read them later.

For me, the passion is exploration.

It's not just physical exploration, although I do enjoy hiking and travel plenty. I also enjoy exploring game worlds, people, modes of thought- anything that's new, alien, or just plain different. Most often the easiest way to sate my fix for exploration is in gaming (Skyrim, Elite Dangerous, World of WarCraft), where I can explore virtual worlds and meet people pretty easily. Nothing beats the thrill of discovery for me.

Telling stories.

I mention often about how I'm a writer (though admittedly fallen very behind on it the past couple years), and I've had this passion for my entire life. The first "complete story" I remember writing was a seven-chapter Pokémon fan fic, each "chapter" one paragraph long (and each with their own word document), when I was seven. Since then, I've never really stopped. No exaggeration, probably 90% of my life experiences can be tied back to writing in some way.

I grew up writing and posting stories on forums, starting with the official Nintendo Pokémon board back when I was probably... 10?? Looking back, most of the early communities I joined stemmed from writing in some way. I was guaranteed to be most active on the writing board of whatever forum I joined. I often say I grew up on an Animal Crossing forum called AXA, and most of my fondest memories of it are specifically about writing stories about AXA where other users could submit themselves as characters.

Offline, I was still writing constantly. My grandparents' computer was full of the first one or two chapters of story ideas. I remember telling my babysitter over summer story concepts that I knew I'd never actually write down. In seventh grade I'd get in trouble for writing in my notebooks during class. In high school I read how Stephen King published a story from high school and I finally started writing short stories in this big notebook of mine. (Still need to type them up.) I'd spend lunches writing on my laptop and probably had a registerable typing speed on a graphing calculator. I put off getting a proper smart phone as long as I could because mine had a slide-out keyboard (and I still hate touch screen keyboards 10+ years later).

Prose is obviously my main medium, but this passion extends to telling stories in all mediums. Every medium has its own strengths and opportunities, and some stories are more suited for one medium than others. I have ideas for all mediums: comics, TV shows, games... Prose is just the most accessible to me because all I need are words.

I ultimately majored in game development specifically for the unique opportunities it presents for storytelling. Even beyond the obvious with multiple endings, it's an immersive medium which creates a stronger connection to the characters. They can communicate a story even without words (Another World is a favorite mine for that exact reason), and you can extrapolate so much backstory just from clues in the environment. I especially love when games can intertwine mechanics and gameplay with the narrative (Wandersong's Steam achievements are a BIG favorite). And of course, a good story can make a good game legendary (Thomas Was Alone had people crying over *squares).

And outside of all that, you know what the biggest strength of being a storyteller is?

Everything is experience and potential reference material for writing.

Every bad experience I have can be filed away as a potential reference for the future. I remember noting my reactions to horrible news, or how injuries felt, and later using that in writing. Sometimes I've done activities solely because I thought it could be good reference. I've also learned so many things just doing research for stories. Every nightmare becomes writing material (though admittedly helps my dreams are more narrative-based).

And this passion for writing genuinely shaped me into who I am today.

As a writer in high school, my goal was twofold: to make people think, and to help people empathize with experiences they could never experience themselves. I've long believed that fiction can be easier for people to "connect with" than tales of real life figures, because there's just something more personal about reading about a character. You get to see their whole lives for the duration of the story, there are (usually) no secrets. I often cite Uncle Tom's Cabin as a big example of the power of fiction.

Those remain my goals, but now with the added goal of providing a bit of much-needed escapsim. In college I wrote fan fiction for a niche that seemed to attract kids and teens with hard lives. I swear I was one of the only people who wasn't subject to a bad home, bullying, or various mental health crises. I think I became a pretty comforting figure in the community, and it really pushed me towards being sort of protective of my readers.

The most important comment I ever got though: someone told me that waiting for new chapters to my story was the reason they didn't kill themselves.

We didn't talk in detail back then, but I've thought about it a lot over the past ten years about how my writing could do that. I don't think it was about my writing being so amazing it gave them the will to live, but that it had more to do with the fact I made a point to update on a set schedule every week. So I think that having that one, tiny thing to look forward to every week gave them something concrete that they could use to counter particularly bad thoughts and moments.

I already understood escapism could be a refuge for people, but that comment and all the other interactions from that time showed me how it could be the literal difference between life and death.

So now one of my main goals as a writer is to give people that respite, to let them disconnect from reality for even just a few minutes, so they don't shatter and break from the pressures and horrors of their lives. I can't do much to fix the world, but I see this as one way I can help people.

All of this to say: practically my entire life has been built around my love for telling stories in some way. Nearly every facet of who I am stems from it. Even when I'm not writing, I've always lived in a bit of a dream world as a lifelong immersive daydreamer. I'm constantly making up stories in my head, and through that I can understand myself and others a little more.

I genuinely have no clue who I would be if I did not tell stories. It's the core of my identity. So thank you for giving me a chance to ramble about it a bit.

Music, plain and simple. Nothing stirs the heart strings or passions quite like it, been that way since I was around 12yo. My guitar is still my ultimate tool for centering my spirit, no matter the mood I'm in.

My passion was Chinese, now it is Buddhism. With work and baby it is difficult to make time to practice outside of academically though... Over the past five years or so I would say I am particularly interested in the lives and practices of the great people of my specific period focus.

I encountered Chinese through a friend and the Asian club in high school, very random. A studying abroad trip to Japan is what led me to encounter Buddhism. I took a class on philosophical approaches to Buddhism (this does not mean Buddhism is a philosophy) and it answered a lot of questions for me that Christianity was not. I then sought out a local Zen meditation temple. Also, I realized it was academically sensical to mix the two interests since the canon of East Asian Buddhism is written in Chinese.

Been my passion for around ten years. I currently mostly express it through my academic work, trying to be a better person, and teaching my child meditation.

Buddhism is both academically and personally important because it has over 2500 years of well-developed and interesting philosophical thought, thousands of records of important humans making history that has not been recorded or studied yet, and all of that can help you in your current station in life. Though Buddhism contains what some may label as supernatural, I would argue that most of its systems are logically sound and can help anyone now.

Some random bits I find interesting.

• I like that all beings are important in Buddhism, not just humans.
• Japanese Buddhism is really shocking if you approach Buddhism from the texts then go to Japan, ie since the Meiji period they can drink, marry, and eat meat, and they very much do this.
• Hell in Buddhism is a temporary place, as is heaven.
• Much of the good and bad you encounter and receive is of your own making, within reason.
• Different traditions tell the story of the historical Buddha different, he was a prince who became a buddha or he was a bodhisattva who used his final life to show buddhahood was possible for all, but at the end of the day the tradition teaches that enlightenment and freedom is available to all.
• Buddhism is not one with everything in the way that wrong beliefs are somehow right, but having a belief Buddhist cosmology and philosophy would label as incorrect would not somehow condemn that person. For instance there is a god in Buddhism who thinks they are a creator god, when they are in-fact deluded as well.

I have quite a few, but to share a different one than space or video games this time:

Martial arts, especially traditional martial arts. This isn't to say that there aren't some effective techniques utilized in MMA gyms but the culture and lack of patience of those places tend to make me roll my eyes. I generally believe almost any traditional martial art that has lasted decades or even centuries have some really interesting techniques and applications within them. You just need to have the patience and curiosity to learn about them.

Puttering.

I come from a long line of men in sheds, garages and back yards who, with an idea in their heads, make it happen through sheer force of obsession and will.

Having long-term projects to daydream about and spend money on is awesome. We've yet to build a garage in our "new" house and let me tell you, I look forward to the day when I can liberate my tools from our 10' x 7' shed.

People, or rather to understand humans.

We are so baffling, yes I do include myself in the group of baffling people.

There is so much we can do.

Fire!

I love arranging a fire, setting it up, and the occasion. Having someone light it, preferably someone that will feel brave and proud to manage it.

I can sit for hours staring and listening to a fire. It is so comforting. And there is some kind of dignity around being in a group around a fire, teaching ourselves and each other the difference between fear and respect. I love fire.

I've had a few passions over the years.
First one that had a major effect was tennis. I played for over twenty years, with no formal training and made it into the advanced levels for a brief period. An injury to my shoulder put an end to this passion, plus I had no one left to play on a regular basis.
Switching to golf was the next one, and I became obsessed with shooting par. Many years later, I was simply burned out, plus it was becoming too expensive to chase after that damn score. Closest I ever got was two over.
A friend asked me to make a bed for him. That fired me up, and I decided it would be as close to perfect as I could accomplish. Cherry wood, with swirling grain on the posts and crosspieces, and Bolivian rosewood inlay... it remains the best piece of furniture I've ever built. Fairly proud of that one.
In 2017 I started having a recurring dream featuring people I couldn't possibly know, but it was important for me to understand them. I started writing my first novel, with no experience writing anything of that length. The story poured out of me, so quickly I couldn't keep up with my typing. That hasn't happened again, and I'm not sure I really appreciated how rare that is. Rewriting and polishing it took a couple of years, and the sequels showed up along the way, but the first one was such a fun experience. I published them, just so I could enjoy their physical presence, to know that what I imagined now existed in the world.

Tsundoku.

I really need to start reading some of those books.

Hobbies. I love hobbies. I love learning about other people's hobbies. Seeing what people choose to do and enjoy with their often limited free time just makes me happy. Finding out someone has a unexpected hobby absolutely brings me joy. Occasionally being the person with an unexpected hobby is also great fun. It's one of my favorite parts about getting to know a person.

I can't really pinpoint a specific inspiration. Maybe it's because I have too many hobbies myself? I'm bad about diving super deep into a new interest then going full distracted boyfriend meme on whatever catches my eye next (thankfully I've gotten better at cycling through my exisiting hobbies these days). My best guess would be the thrill of learning something new, whether it's for my own interests or second hand through someone else's hobby-related excitement

Simulating. Analyzing. And trying new experiences.

There's a reason why Slay the Spire is my favourite game and why I love deckbuilder roguelikes so much, but when I look at what makes me live, it's inherently creating and simulating what will happen. Getting data, adjusting. Improving.

I'm a teacher and it's crazy the progress I've made in 6 years now. Every year, I try some stuff and see of it works. I feel like life is a big sandbox and it's so fun to play with the variables and see what happens.

I've tried many systems in my classes, many ways to teach children and every year there are still tons of "what if I so X, what will happen?" and then I just do it. All of the things I tried got changed eventually. It's the fun of it. My simulations are never completely accurate, but they get better with time.

All my hobbies and projects are centered around experimenting stuff, just because my mind is addicted around finding out.

I love as much simulating in my head too. What if I allow X time to that? What will happen? What if I engage with Y using X conversation point? I'm kinda lucky my simulations are almost always positive. It feels like I have reverse anxiety. I often simulate way too optimistic scenarios, but when they don't happen, I'm like oh so why did it not happen like that? Ah so if I tweak Y, X will change, etc. Maybe there is some autism in me.

I'm lucky I found out about teaching or else I don't know what I would have done.

I'm a big hobby person, but my favorite hobby is tabletop RPGs.

I started by playing D&D 2e back in Boy Scouts as a kid (early 2000s), but unbeknownst to me, D&D 3rd edition was what was in the stores, so I ended up buying that my mistake. I read through those books cover to cover so many times but never actually played it, and eventually ended up selling them at some point along the way.

I always romanticized what the game would be if I played it again, but I never actually committed to attempting to run or play any edition. Back in 2017(2018?) I started running D&D 5e as a Dungeon Master and quickly escalated...everything. I wanted to be the best I could be, and learn as much as I could, so I started buying up other tabletop RPGs to look over their mechanics, advice, and methods of doing things. That got me a bit further, as well as Youtube advice videos (Matt Colville) and some Critical Role.

When COVID rolled around, my purchasing amped up significantly because I wanted to recreate the vibe that I felt when I played AD&D 2e but always found 5e wanting. This was partly the game system, but also partly that my game switched from in-person to an online game for the duration of the pandemic and it just felt too...streamlined, I guess. It lacked heart. I started acquiring physical books from old editions of the game - 1e, 2e, 3e, and a little 4e. I now have...a lot. I'm at the point where insuring my collection should probably be a consideration, but any near-mint books I purchased I also opened because I want to use them, not just collect them. As convenient as digital is, I prefer physical copies of books because they just have an ineffable quality about them that cannot be replaced by a PDF.

I've since transitioned to a game based on older D&D (B/X) - Dolmenwood, and having a blast running it for my friends. It may be a bit clunky in ways that older game mechanics can be, but rolling the same dice for every game mechanic isn't all it's cracked up to be, either.

Tabletop RPGs for me are an all-hobby. It can contain so many other hobbies - drawing, writing, painting, cooking, mapmaking, crafting, performing, socializing, etc. It's the oral storytelling tradition passed onto the current generation and amplified by making it into a game. It speaks to something deep inside me, and I think many others.

Blender has sucked me into a vortex of node based editing and making cursed things I really enjoy that. I guess you could call that a passion because I spend the better part of a year ignoring everything else in my life in order to fixate on blender. I tried Maxon3D and zBrush but somehow, it's an even worse user experience... somehow.

Real passion of mine is casually, slowly over years, building working class solidarity among the working poor in my community (myself included).

Today a co-worker was complaining about how communism is ruining our community with greedy business practices and ruthless profit / rent-seeking. I agreed and explained how communism / socialism / liberals are bad and we need to focus on improving everyday cost of living for regular blue collar types. And yes the WEF is bad and yes I understand why you feel the way you do.

To be clear, I am not a moron. I understand this is disingenuous for me as a marxist however people have been trained to disengage when any of the bad words come out, but I have found they are genuinely receptive to the ideology when framed in a conservative lens.

I struggled with not having a passion for many years, but currently I've settled on a passion for finding new ways to express my strongest-held values.

While most of my interests wax and wane (though discovering new music is evergreen), I have always cared deeply about trust and what it means to be trustworthy. Something I like is it's a statement about the future: A trustworthy person is someone you believe will act a certain way in the future.

Finding ways to impart that feeling about you onto others cascades into a lot of other values, like consistency, honesty and humility.

In part, it stems from seeing how trust cascades upwards into the structure of our society, the role of institutions, what living in a low-trust society is doing to the way we go about our lives and having a desire for something better.

ADHD keeps me from being truly passionate about anything, but I have learned to roll with my daily special interests. Today my special interest was food and cooking, so I watched a ton of stuff from Chris Young, Adam Ragusea, Future Canoe, SauccEats, Vivaldi, Detroit 75 Kitchen, and the like.

Sometimes I'm into game design, so I dink around in whatever strikes my fancy. Sometimes that's a text-based game engine like Twine, sometimes that's a graphics engine like Godot, or Defold, sometimes that's a retro engine like GB Studio.

Sometimes I'm into drawing comics. I have probably a dozen or so that are sitting on my little iPad Mini that I don't really share anymore, since the comics are more for me than anyone else.

Sometimes I'm into novel-writing, and I plunk around with one of my cyberpunk or fantasy stories. I've got literally hundreds of false starts on novels, at least 50+ short stories, scenes, vignettes that are around. I'm an okay writer. Very rarely I'll write a script instead, since I started off with writing for visual mediums (hence the comic creation just before this; it's basically story boarding.)

Sometimes I want to play music. This one is harder. I'm best with piano but my space is limited so I mostly plunk around on my baritone ukulele, but it really fucks with my injured shoulder so I have to be careful. Sometimes I play around with Launchpad on my iPad. I used to dink around with FL Studio but since I'm doing it for fun, FL is too far away from just enjoying what I'm doing.

Sometimes I'm just brain-rotted so I'll spend days watching a comfort show like Archer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Scrubs, The Simpsons, Futurama, 30 Rock, Community, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, My Name is Earl...