The Hobby Elimination Game: Cutting recreational costs in a terrible economy for otaku

Okay, so unlike The Otaku Elimination Game, my Hobby Elimination Game involves cutting costs of my hobbies to really manage my finances in this tough economic time.

Here’s my first drafting:

Hobby One: Books and Comics/Manga

Hobby Two: Video Games

Hobby Three: Magic Cards

Hobby Four: Anime figures

Hobby Five: DVDs of movies and TV shows I like watching (this includes anime).

Hobbies are expensive and I can’t manage to support them all at this time. Keeping this in mind, evaluating my hobbies in terms of the most useful to me goes like this:

Hobby One: Books and Comics/Manga

This one’s like Rick Astley, Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down. Keeping this one because hell, I actually read a lot of books, comics, and manga. However I might have to start using the Library once I get to University.

Hobby Two: Video Games

I get the feeling that Tekken 6 is the last video game I will buy this year. Not a lot of video games interest me these days but as a useful purchase, my Tekken 6 preorder comes with an arcade stick which I can use with my existing fighting games.

Hobby Three: Magic Cards

I actually play Magic once a week at my friend’s house, so I’m considering keeping this hobby. Nothing insanely regular, but I buy cards once a month if I can. Zendikar looks good and so does this damn fine intro deck which has sky pirates in it.

Hobby Four: Anime figures

I might actually have to buy less of these until I know for sure that I will have more room for them. I like anime figures a lot because they allow me to do photography sessions, but I really need to ask myself about what figures I buy and why: why would I buy figures of series I don’t know very well when I could just stick to buying figures from series that I like? Case in exception: Marvellous Melmo figure I bought for Christmas because I’ve vaguely familiar with the history of that Tezuka character.

Hobby Five: DVDs of movies and TV shows I like watching (this includes anime)

Definitely buying more DVDs and Blu-Rays recently, particularly coming up to Christmas. I like finding rarities like Hercules Returns (an awesome Australian film that even Shin will admit makes our country redeemed) as well as anime movies and shows that look interesting. Unlike Baka-Raptor I find that the films of my home country don’t always suck, possibly because if I was bombarded with Indian music from a young age I’d hate my own culture too. So I’m torn between reading up on more Australian films, and watching more new anime which I haven’t seen yet. The important thing is to realise with me is that I don’t watch anime just because it’s anime, it’s because most of the time I will get sick of being bombarded with American TV shows and movies when I want to be entertained. I’m not a weaboo, I can’t speak any Japanese at all apart from finding out thanks to Japanese dubbed Twilight clips how to say my name in Japanese (it’s Jeikobu by the way).

Finally we get to the hobbies I can enjoy without spending much money at all:

Sucking up to Baka-Raptor: Baka-Raptor’s latest post really sums up some interesting viewpoints he has about anime and manga he’s been watching and reading. Baka-Raptor even though he’s a bit abrasive in some topics and he’s not going to appeal to everybody, he backs up everything he says about anything and gives an unbiased opinion on current and classic anime and manga. He takes a while to do posts but he really does deliver quality most of the time. It’s fair to call him “gonzo” if by “gonzo” you mean the outside-of-the-mainstream type of blogging style rather than the original use of gonzo which is applied to professional journalism in the 1970s. His podcast inspired me to do this post.

Photography: Nothing too impressive on my Flickr page yet but there is some good photos like the one of The Big Merino which I took with my digital camera. The Big Merino is a monument to the Australian wool industry, if you’re ever in the country town of Goulburn going to Canberra by car, check it out.

Writing: Been writing a fair bit this month having achieved victory at NaNoWriMo this November. It was a narrow victory but I did it nonetheless before I wore myself out after I reached 50,000 words. I can’t talk much about what my NaNoWriMo novel is about because I don’t want people to plagiarize my idea. But I can tell you I had a lot of fun writing it and I hope that once it’s completely finished it might end up as a published novel some day. Who knows?

Anyway, I hope you liked reading this post, it allowed me to really consider what I’m really about to a small extent, and I managed to do some pimping of blogs and even learned a thing or two about just relaxing and not letting my lack of funds to continue all my hobbies at the same time get me all worried.

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Text Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.