State of the Collection: 2023 Edition

In my previous collection update a year ago, I expected I'd buy in 2023 "maybe not as much as in 2022 but we'll see". I definitely did buy less manga this year, but for Blu-rays we did see and what we saw was that I ended up pretty much doubling my Blu-ray collection. I can thank the monetary graduation gifts I received as well as my work try-out for giving me the necessary budget to spend, but on the down side the shelf space is really starting to become an issue. Let's see how my collection looks as 2023 comes to its close.  


Manga & Light Novels 


Even in a relatively quiet year on the manga front, my collection grew enough for the larger size volumes to now occupy almost all of my top-left shelf. New arrivals on the English side this year were Bocchi the Rock! vol. 1, Children of the Whales vol. 2, Soloist in a Cage vol. 1, the first two volumes of Oshi no Ko and The Promised Neverland vol. 3. As I recall most of them were ordered online, maybe one or two I bought from the Fantasiapelit store in Helsinki but can't remember which ones. As for the smaller size Finnish volumes, on this side the only new addition is Bird ihmemaassa (Fushigi no kuni no Bird) vol. 1. 


On this side, however, there was more new Finnish volumes. I bought Fullmetal Alchemist vol. 1 at... Hypecon, I think? Only one new One Piece volume, sadly, as the Finnish rights are apparently temporarily in limbo. The other new additions are Attack on Titan vol. 3, The Case Study of Vanitas vol. 1 and Eiichiro Oda's Wanted! one-shot collection. No movement with light novels. 

Nintendo Switch Games 


I bought a Nintendo Switch this year and started collecting physical games. It's not much in terms of the number of items yet, but there's still a lot to talk about. Doki Doki Literatute Club Plus and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I ordered from Puolenkuun Pelit when they were on sale, so I got them for a reasonable price. The House in Fata Morgana: Dreams of the Revenants Edition, on the other hand... since it was a Limited Run release, I had to buy it second-hand from eBay. It was not cheap. But worth it. 

Oh, I also bought NieR Automata for PS4 this year but forgot to include in this picture. 

Blu-rays & CDs 


Here we have a lot to talk about. First of all: the DVDs have left the shelf. I still have them in temporary storage but will have to figure out what to do with them. A year ago I had 14 Blu-ray items in my collection - now (if I count each box set as one) I have 32. And that's just the anime. But we'll get to the music in a minute. Listing all the new ones would take a while, so I'll just focus on a few highlights. At the far left is the first Japanese anime Blu-ray in my collection: the standard edition of Suzume (which has English subtitles for the main feature). The second steelbook to join my collection is Evangelion 3.0+1.11, which annoyingly doesn't have a slipcase like 5 Centimeters per Second so it sticks out like a sore thumb among other Anime Limited releases. Oh well. And definitely the biggest Blu-ray box in terms of width is now The Garden of Sinners - you'll have to zoom in to see the title on the spine, otherwise it just looks like a big black box. 


The collector's edition boxes continue to this side, which also is now the home of my separate music collection. 6 new additions to it, two of which I've unboxed on this blog (the Kessoku Band CD and Ema Full). You may notice that these are not even on a shelf of their own - I know, not ideal. 

Bonus: Artbooks


I also got some artbooks this year: Academy Museum's Hayao Miyazaki catalogue I received as a Christmas present, and The Heike Story Illuminated and The House in Fata Morgana: The Anniversary I bought myself. I've been interested in starting this section of my collection for a while, so I'm glad I was able to do so this year. 

That concludes the current state of my collection at the end of 2023. Next year is going to be very different for me (more about that on the blog next week), so I don't expect to be able to spend anywhere near this much money on this hobby of mine. And this time I mean it. But for now: Happy New Year! See you in 2024! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy 20th Anniversary to Sound Horizon!

Yeah, I know I'm a week late with this blog post. Been a lot going on so haven't been updating this blog much. But that should change in Near Future™. Anyway, happy (Around The) 20th anniversary, SH! The major debut album is a couple of months younger than me, so our ages match for most of the year. Fun coincidence, perhaps divine foreshadowing. And right off the bat, we already have anniversary projects from SH, including the shortly upcoming Halloween to Asa no Monogatari and its already released lead track Halloween Japanesque '24 - fun song, that. Also concerts but those I won't be able to see since they're in Japan. Here's hoping for a Blu-ray. In fact there's many concerts I'd like Blu-rays of. As for fan projects, ICYMI my  365 Revo Songs  Twitter bot is now up and running and will tweet one Revo song every day until the next anniversary. I had a lot of technical problems with getting it to run reliably, which I might talk about in another blog p...
Read more

It's Time for Me to Touch Grass

... or snow, I guess? With it being winter and everything. Almost minus 20 degrees Celsius at the time of me writing this! Let’s hope it warms even a little before next week. After all, I'm starting my military service next week. I've already written about it here months ago, but to recap: Finland has mandatory military service, 6 to 12 months depending on how important stuff one ends up doing. I'm aiming for 6 because it would fit my future plans, but who knows. What this means is that I'm going to be very busy for a few months starting from next Monday. So, I'm officially(?) putting this blog on hiatus. It's not like I updated it very often anyway, but it's likely going to be at least 6 months until I expect to post here again.  As for social media, I might still tweet every now and then but definitely less than usually. So, uh... if you really need to contact me for some reason, feel free to DM but don't expect a quick answer. It's going to be int...
Read more

Around 20th Birthday and New Horizons

A lot has happened since I last updated this blog. I went and touched grass (well, snow for over half of it - dear god it was cold this winter) and served 165 days (fairly standard length for rank-and-file soldiers) in the army. With my citizen's duty now fulfilled, I'm a free man once again, at least until that dim-witted dictator on the other side of our eastern border decides to mess with us. If that happens, Signalsman [redacted] may have to grab an assault rifle again. Here's hoping that never happens. With that out of the way, it's time for some more long-lasting big changes in my life. First of all: I'm now in my 20s! As of today. Happy Around 20th Birthday to me, yeah~ (as you can see, still a brainrotted Laurant). Secondly: I'm going to university! In a different city! Since it'd be a bit of a long commute, the third thing is that I'm moving on my own for the first time in my life! In fact, I'm celebrating my birthday in the middle of packin...
Read more