I spend a lot of time removing dust.
Many people asked what I have been doing since last year, and I would tell them that I have been making games. Though on some days, I probably spent more hours removing dust than doing any other productive work. To get a sense of why it takes so much time, you can play a game of "spot the difference" and guess how many corrections were made to the photo below.
The answer is on the order of hundreds. Tewi and Udonge might have accumulated more dust since they have been with me for over 10 years, but having to remove hundreds of spots per photo is fairly typical for me. This is probably atypical for most other people -- the average photographer take pictures of large subjects, while the average viewer browse photos on their mobile devices at 1/10 the resolution compared to how I edited these photos. It just so happens that I like to take pictures of small things, so I see more dusts and scratches than average, and I happened to be the kind of person who can't unsee them. Thus I end up spend a lot of time digitally cleaning up photos. Most people never suspected how much dust was there, and I consider that a success.
Even with all the extra (invisible) work, the macro lens is still my favorite lens, and over 3/4 of all my photos in 2023 were taken with it. I would recommend everyone to try photography as a hobby because it would help them see the world in a different light, and every photographer should try to get a macro lens because it would greatly expand the world.
Well actually, editing photos is the kind of task that I can do without thinking too much, so I have also been listening to a lot of Bocchi the Radio. It might take just ~5 hours to watch all of Bocchi the Rock anime, but Bocchi the Radio is 40+ hours worth of content, which I might not have had the time to enjoy if I wasn't busy removing dusts. 2023 was a dusty year, but it has been great.
Previous (2023-12-09): A Virtual White Elephant
Next (2024-01-28): "No Game No Life" volume 12 by Kamiya Yuu