Hi Grendel, one thing that might be more typical would be to have a "deselect inside" mode that would be used instead of a "select everything outside" mode. 
 
That way you could do a "select everything outside" by doing a select all + deselect inside the circle, and you could also do other things like make several swiss cheese like empty selection areas instead of only one deselected area. 
 
 
> On the any close curve shape I am struggling to see a use 
> for it without alot of forethought. If I had something with allot 
> of unique selection criteria I guess it would be handy. 
 
Well, the part that could be good about it would be that it would cover selection by a circle as well.  Would it be too weird if you had to draw the selection circle beforehand as a regular curve object? 
 
Otherwise, if doing a kind of "drag a selection circle" mode like you were mentioning originally, it would probably be something that would occur in screen space with a drag of the mouse, so probably there would not be specific radius values and stuff available for that. 
 
But being based off of a curve would let you use any variety of object snaps or drawing tools to build the outline... 
 
    - Michael 
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