(1) I have made Diamond rank in MtG Arena Ranked. I've been a hardcore gamer ever since the pandemic began, it's what I did to pass time while in lockdown, and this is the highest I have been in any seriously competitive ranked game.
(2) After having been a vegetarian for 10 months (Sept 2023-July 2024), I am back to eating meat. It just felt like it was time.
(3) I have joined the Democratic Party (gasp! shock!) No, I haven't become a socialist, I have not renounced my theory of economics, I'm just a conservative Democrat now. (There is no such thing as a libertarian Democrat, so obviously I can't be one, but there are conservative Democrats -- Senator Joe Manchin is one. If you look back at history over the past hundred years, there have been many famous conservative Democrats.) The local GOP in my area is very, very anti-trans, and since I have become public as being agender, I felt like the GOP not only didn't want me, but had some active hate towards people like me. And the Libertarian Party in my area is virtually nonexistent, I tried to start one, we had two or three people who came to our meetings, and then after two years it died. To say nothing of the fact that the Libertarian Party now has so many Donald Trump supporters that it is merely a branch of the GOP at this point, virtually all the LPCT members are loyal to Trump first, principles second, and I am not.
With Gen Z, and even with Millennials, there has been this radical demographic shift post-pandemic that straight cis men tend to be on the Right, and have serious masculine gender insecurity, and cope with their gender issues through politics instead of therapy, and hate trans people, while cis women and queer people tend to be on the Left, and they don't hate trans people. Only one of those two categories describes a place I can exist without fear of getting shot. The Left has its own set of issues, but I will have to live with it. In theory, Leftism means Communism, and I am not a Communist, but I will just have to see whether there is still such a thing as a moderate Democrat or centrist Democrat. We'll see. I believe in factual research, so I will be collecting firsthand data on this question.
And, by the way, no, I really didn't do this because of Kamala-mania -- I think she's better than Trump, but in terms of her policies, she seems to embrace everything Biden did, so I expect her to be pretty much exactly like Biden in terms of how she governs, although, unlike Biden, she doesn't suffer from early-stage Alzheimer's disease. She won't solve inflation, but Trump, with his protectionist tariffs, might not have solved inflation either.
