I have a lot of niche knowledge about specific issues relating to different brands/models of laptops and phones. it's very rare I find an issue I can't diagnose within an hour with prior knowledge. ask me anything I suppose?

oh, also, I happen to know that Ohio is the only state that doesn't share a letter in common with the word mackerel. works for the territories too. doesn't really get more niche than that.

I am an expert on disaster response preplanning for hospitals and have basically read every English, German and Italian publication on that matter. Sadly that does not pay well...

I can sense what you deleted from your browser history when you interact with me online.

I play a mud called Starmourn. I know the archeology system very deeply, including how long it takes for your npc dig site members to dig, what the two stages of digging are, and what a supervisor actually does (...not as much as you'd hope, but more than you'd fear)

I also know designing in the game, but they're are many people in the game that design!

Reading books on natural philosophy. By that I mean, not mathematics of the physics itself, but what do the mathematics actually tell us about the natural world, how to interpret it and think about it, on a more philosophical level. Not a topic I really talk to many people irl on because most people don't even know what the philosophical problems around this topic. I mean, I'd need a whole whiteboard just to walk someone through Bell's theorem to even give them an explanation to why it is interesting in the first place. There is too much of a barrier of entry for casual conversation.

You would think since natural philosophy involves physics that it would not be niche because there are a lot of physicists, but most don't care about the topic either. If you can plug in the numbers and get the right predictions, then surely that's sufficient, right? Who cares about what the mathematics actually means? It's a fair mindset to have, perfectly understandable and valid, but not part of my niche interests, so I just read tons and tons and tons of books and papers regarding a topic which hardly anyone cares. It is very interesting to read like the Einstein-Bohr debates, or Schrodinger for example trying to salvage continuity viewing a loss of continuity as a breakdown in classical notion of causality, or some of the contemporary discussions on the subject such as Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics or Francois-Igor Pris' contextual realist interpretation. Things like that.

It doesn't even seem to be that popular of a topic among philosophers, because most don't want to take the time to learn the math behind something like Bell's theorem (it's honestly not that hard, just a bit of linear algebra). So as a topic it's pretty niche but I have a weird autistic obsession over it for some reason. Reading books and papers on these debates contributes nothing at all practically beneficial to my life and there isn't a single person I know outside of online contacts who even knows wtf I'm talking about but I still find it fascinating for some reason.