End of Year Wrap (As seen on Facebook)

I was going to do something a bit different and narrate this end of year review as an audioblog, but it seems my social media presence, Facebook especially, doesn't have an easy way to upload audio files. So here is yet another post year text post.

"Buy all the film you can get your hands on..."

I got a bit of a confession to make. I was getting bored of taking pictures.

Although I'm an avid amateur photographer, I have found myself getting into a bit of a rut regarding the hobby. This was probably not helped by changes at work and it picking up in what should be a fairly quiet period, as well as a lack of major holidays and conventions for me to go to for this half of the year.

The problem I was getting is that I have been in the photography game for a while. At least 13 years if you only count the years I've been in the hobby seriously and continuously, possibly more than 15 if you count the years I've been taking pictures on and off. After this amount of time, things get stale. Familiarity breeds contempt and it is too easy to get fatigued, not just in photography but any hobby.

I had some money still left over from my trip to Southampton, despite the amount spent to travel and stay there. That in itself is a dangerous thing. Boredom and money are an even more lethal combination. After doing some brief research (Read: Typed words into a search engine and skimmed through the results), I ended up deciding that I needed to go retro.

Really retro.

Cosplay Experience Retrospective

As we come to the end of another year and enter a new one, I feel it would be appropriate to look back on my time in the geeky community and why this year is particularly important to myself, especially from an emotional standpoint.

I had been watching Anime during my early childhood, mostly through video tape cassette recordings sent from relatives in the spiritual Motherland that is Hong Kong, and after a long gap, got back into watching it when I started attending University. I am not sure what encouraged me to return to Anime, but it happened. Until then, however, I felt like I was only just scratching the surfance of the fandom. At some point, I caught wind of certain events where fellow Otaku would congregate, so-called “Anime Conventions”, where geeks would actually be able to see and speak to each other about various geeky topics in the same place. It was only after I attended my first Anime Convention about 12 years ago where I felt I had finally felt like I was a full blown Anime geek. But there was one thing I felt I was missing out on but didn’t have the confidence to try.

That being Cosplay.