Anttilat

I'm interested in a number of different things. This means I have a load of different hobbies that take up lot of my freetime. These hobbies are not all equally active, but they all are fun and interesting. None of them are forgotten, so I can come back to them again some day.

History and Culture

People, history, culture and languages are my big passion. I'm an active member in SCA, a society dedicated to researching and re-creating middle ages. This hobby includes many other hobbies, that reflect the society and life in middle ages. Crafts, cooking, music and dance are some of the things that I've enjoyed in SCA.

I like studying languages, even though I'm not particularily good at it. Currently I'm learning Estonian, but I've also tried studying German, French, Hungarian and even Tolkien's elven language Quenya. Languages are an essential part of a culture and you can't really get inside a culture if you don't know anything about it's language. Thus my interest in languages is strongly connected to my interest in different cultures and their histories.

Travelling is something that has always been a big part of my life. Our family travelled around Europe a lot when I was a little child. I don't remember much of those travels, though, and I'd love to see the world again as an adult.

Excercise

I'm definetly not a sproty girl. I have traumas from school gym classes and have always felt a little clumsy. But I want to take care of my health and I strongly believe that physical health is strongly connected with mental wellbeing. Thus I have had to find ways to enjoy moving and excercising.

I've studied Tai Shin Mun Kung Fu, a traditional Chinese martial art, since autumn 2009. (That is, I'm still a total newbie.) It's been really interesting and I've learned a lot of new things. It's important to me that I'm not doing pointless excercises but that I'm actually learning new skills.

There's also other kind of motivational factors that get me moving. For example seeking geocaches can be good excercise with a nice motivational goal. Same type of motivation is my decision to take pictures on my walks. Looking for something worth photographing is much more interesting than just walking on a path.

Stories and Pictures

My parents read a lot of books to us when I was a child. Storytelling is an essential part of my life, keeping me sane. I mostly enjoy other people's stories by reading books and watching movies and analysing the stories they tell and how they tell them. I also do a little bit of my own writing. One of my dreams is to write a movie script. I still have a lot to learn for that, though.

Pictures are one way of storytelling and thus they interest me, too. I'm a horribly bad at drawing, but the computers give me more chances to be creative. You can read about my process of learning Blender in my blog, see the photographs I've taken in galleries and find some other works in my portfolio.

Web and Computers

Computers, building websites, programming etc. are my work and thus I hesitated to put this heading here. But the truth is that I spend a lot of time on my computer doing all kinds of things that I don't have to do because of work or studies, and as such it counts as a hobby.

I've been a webmaster on a number of websites - mainly my own and some SCA local group websites. Also I have tried a number of different social web services, and I still use quite a few of them. I enjoy learning more about web techniques, trying new programs and tinkering all kinds of things with computers. I'm not much of a gamer, but if I happen to find a really good game I can spend quite a bit of time with it.