Blogocentric Formulations

My Weirdness

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  | May 23

Prompt ▼

What is something you like to do that other people might think is “weird?”

If this were fifteen years ago, I would have said playing Dungeons & Dragons, but with the advent of popular platforms like Critical Role and other live-play podcasts and webcasts, as well as a number of celebrities who have come out as fans of tabletop gaming, it really doesn't have the same outcast status that it used to have. I mean, my wife still looks at me like I'm a weirdo whenever I say I want to spend time DMing a game, but a lot of other people are starting to come to terms with and be cool with it.

So for the entry, I think I'm going to go with cataloging all the things I read and listen to. For some reason, keeping track of every book, script, and comic I've read year after year, plus all the podcasts I listen to, is something that I've come to make a habit. I'm strongly considering also extending it to movies and television I watch, and maybe even online videos or channels that I'm subscribed to. I don't know why I enjoy tracking all that stuff, but the accumulation of data and the availability of a database where I can check if and when I read something is information that I don't mind taking the time to collect, and that's definitely something that most people tell me they think is weird, because they can't imagine taking the time to maintain a spreadsheet or a database of information that nobody else is tracking or cares to track.

I suppose that this mostly comes from the fact that a lot of my natural gifts are in the administrative sphere. I'm good at arranging and organizing things, I like input and having a lot of information to process things, and I collect a lot of random bits of information and trivia. So cataloging all the stuff I read and listen to makes perfect sense because I then have, at my fingertips, all the input necessary to be able to answer any kind of random question like, "Have you read this book?" Or, "How many books by this author have you read?" Or even, "How many books did you read each of the last five years, and what's the average number of books you read a year?"

I'm a total nerd.