21 October 2020

Transition of Interests & Hobbies

By Alexa

Everyone speaks about social and medical transition. But I recently became aware of a 3rd kind of transition: interests.

Second Puberty

When I started taking hormones half June I didn’t overly realise I would head into my second puberty. I should have known though – I have been through puberty before 😉

I don’t think I need to explain to you what that means for natural born buys and girls going through puberty. Their body starts producing the (naturally) needed hormones and their body develops as such. Girls become women and boys become men.

A transgender receiving hormones of their opposite birth gender (I am not sure if I should put it like this or say gender identity – the latter might be confusing for non-binary people?) gets a boost of new hormones in dosages not intended for their biological gender. This huge influx of hormones of the opposite (biological) sex means the start of a second puberty – the body starts to transform into the desired gender (more or less…).

Change of Music

It didn’t take long for me to realise that my taste for music changed dramatically. In the past I used to listen to progressive metal and had a lot of albums on vinyl (yes I am an audiophile and prefer old fashioned analogue sound over digital). I had almost all albums of Ayreon and quite a lot of Dream Theater and a number of collected metal albums of other artists. I am talking about newly (2000+) pressed 120gr/180gr albums.

Instead I found myself listening more and more to music from the late ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s including Motown, Soul and early Disco. San Fransisco ’70s Hits has become one of my favourite internet radio stations.

Programming

An other change in my interests is programming, or rather the lack of it.

I have been a hobby programmer since I was 14th. And though I am no master when it comes to programming, I know my way around several coding languages and have made quite some nice things over the years.

But the more I became my true self, the less time I spent programming. This already started before I started using hormones and by now I haven’t worked on that MMORPG project of mine for 9 months (if not more).

Gaming

Gaming is an other one of my long-standing hobbies. I remember that an aunt of mine bought the Atari 2600 and we (my brother and I) visited her a lot to play on it.

Later when I started earning my own money I bought computers and consoles to continue on that o-so fun hobby.

But that has all changed now. A couple of months ago the XBOX 360 and the PlayStation 3 have been mothballed. The PlayStation 4 is somewhat unemployed as well, meaning that I am no longer using it to play games. It is more of a very expensive Netflix streaming device.

As for my whole console gaming collection, most of it has been sold and a select few (collectable) games is for sale on eBay.

The Pages from Sages Blog

Then there is the gaming blog I had: Pages from Sages. With little to no time spent gaming, the blog was dying once more. The last post I wrote was half July. I didn’t feel like writing anything new for the simple reason that there was nothing new to write about. It is sufficient to say that that blog is dead (again).

The WordPress plugin licenses I purchased for that blog have been transferred to this one. That means I can make my own template for this blog later on…

New Hobby

If you have been following me on twitter lately, you might have noticed some creative (cosplay) tweets.

Indeed, I have made a start on sewing my clothing. My mother gave me her old sewing machine and I am going rampart on the thing.

By now I have made the corset skirt shown above (it is one size too big though so I will make an other one), 2 face masks and a pair of gloves. And the want-to-make list is getting pretty big as well with half a dozen items on it right now.

…perhaps I should add a sewing section to the blog as well..?

More Quality Time

Less time spent (wasted?) on gaming means that I have more time for other activities. I find myself more and more on the couch next to my wife during the evening watching TV with her (I seriously never really watched TV). Our dog also notices it because I am walking more with her these days.

It is just a sad thing that COVID-19 is still around for I would love to spend more time with other family and friends. Perhaps when the COVID-19 threat is far less severe next year I can make those visits.

Those are the biggest changes in my interests and hobbies I have noticed the last few months. There are lots of smaller ones as well, but if I’d post all of them here I might as well start writing a novel 😂

Thanks for reading and with love Alexa 😘💖