Introduction to my Hobbies

I want to keep this post short and be an introduction to some of the hobbies I enjoy, and those that you could expect to see written about here. I will go in chronological order by when I engaged with the hobby.

Music:

First, I got into music reproduction and mastering; notably in EQing and understanding the reasoning behind why an artist chose to add a certain instrument at that instance as a backing or main instrument. For example, in recent memory my brother likes the song “Don’t Hate Me When It’s Over” by Stephen Dawes, which has snare drums as the main instrument, with reverb on the vocals in the second half, while the vocals are the main focus with the main instrument being a guitar and snares being the backing track. These types of interactions occur to emphasize a specific element in a compensatory nature; for example, vocals can be accompanied with an electric guitar to give it a sense of excitement, a drum to give them tension, a violin or piano at a higher key, with lower tempo for sadness, and several others. The interaction of instruments, their layering, and the juxtaposition of certain music families interacting with each other is fascinating to me. I got a guitar at one point to learn it, but I didn’t have time to learn it unfortunately.

Additionally, I am into collecting music physically; I have 26 records, and several CD’s that I either purchased myself or was gifted to by my friends and family. I am attaching several images of my favorite records, and how they are being displayed in my room at home.

Knives:

I got into knives because I saw several knives that my classmate had modified; I wanted to gain better hand motor skills, so I thought that modifying knives would help me work better with smaller components. I have built a PC before, and that was the most technical thing I had worked on prior. My favorite aspect of this hobby is learning how all the internals work, the different use cases for knives because of blade shape, and learning about the different chemical compositions of steels and why they mixed the ratios the way they did.

Here are some of the knives I’ve modified:

Skateboards:

I got into skateboarding for a very silly reason; I fell off my bed, landed on my laptop and had to send it in for repairs. I needed something to do, and my roommate skated so I asked him if I could have him teach me how to skate to fill up the time taken up by watching anime on my laptop, which I couldn’t do for the four weeks it took to come back from repairs. I got surprisingly good at skating and bought my first board, a penny board (the orange and green one); I didn’t like the way it felt and made my own custom board three months into skating. I have built four custom boards, but one has been stripped for parts for the other builds.  

I am attaching images of my customs, and the ones hanging on my wall:

Manga:

This is my most recent hobby, which I started collecting in January. I love anime and have wanted to collect manga for a long time. Now that I have more knowledge on which brands to buy from, the ability to read digitally from apps, and know where to look for sales on manga, I have been purchasing some of my favorite series. The ones in Japanese are either special editions (HunterXHunter) or not published in English (One room of Happiness), which I read digitally.

I am attaching a picture of my current collection (the dragonball manga came after I took the picture):

These are some of my favorite hobbies that I would like to write about; I also collect old philosophy books not mentioned in this post; however, I have used and will continue to use philosophy in my posts. Additionally, I am a novice photographer, and will write more extensively about that at a later date.

I hope you will look forward to future writings on these topics!