I like putting things in order. I like organizing my DVDs but theme and then by colour. This isn’t like some people, “teehee I like things in order I’m so OCD” — I do have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, which I won’t go into!
I don’t consider organizing like this part of that – I call it “curating.” And that’s what you see here at my website. It’s constant curating. I don’t have room to set my costumes out on display in certain ways, so I do it on the web. I organize them different ways, make little icons, update the descriptions at different websites and so on. It’s the same thing to me as organizing my books alphabetically – I get the same pleasure from finishing a part of my website and looking at the finished product as I do from stepping back from my bookshelf and admiring my handiwork.
That’s why I’ve generally kept several profiles going at once – in addition to my website here, I have my costumes organized over at my facebook page, my facebook profile, my cospix site, my ACP site, my instagram, and my deviantart. I enjoy curating my collections in those places. I look forward to adding a picture a day to places like my facebook or instagram – I like figuring what needs a new picture to make the collection “complete” and doing it one or two photos a day stretches out the process and gives me a little thing to look forward to each day.
I did take a big step last week. I deleted all of my content at cosplaylab. I know there are still some folks who use it, but I decided to delete everything and stop curating there. In this particular case, it wasn’t a huge step – I didn’t keep up with much anyway. The bigger step was tackling my cosplay.com account.
While I still have all my costumes listed on my profile, and a handful of pictures – I went through and deleted a lot of it. I think I left it with something like 30 photos – old stuff that has a lot of great comments from old friends, mostly. With some of my oldest stuff though – which were probably some of the oldest photos on the site! – the thumbnails were broken. And they’ve been broken for ages. I said forget it, delete them. And then I was like, let’s just delete some more stuff too.
So while I’ll probably keep my costume list updated and still drop in to check the dragoncon forum – I’m pretty much done with cos.com. Which is sad, but it was time to let it go and pare down the number of sites I curate.