Some further research suggests that you’re right. They’re not native to the area but I guess were introduced a long time ago. Thanks!

I also really liked Vermont while I lived there, and everything that you mentioned are great features. That said, the state (and much of New England) is overwhelmingly white. I am white-passing, but my spouse is not, and they felt consistently othered while we lived there. Not in an aggressive or hateful way, but in a “strangers see me as a novelty” way that you tend to get in homogenous communities. Burlington is probably a bit more diverse than the relative middle of nowhere where we lived, so your mileage may vary.

You just unlocked a childhood memory of mine. At maybe 6 or 7 I found it very strange how closely my church’s dogma rhymed with various”pagan” mythologies that I’d read about. I recall asking my mom about it, in some childish way, and being taken aback at how unsatisfying her “paper over the cracks” response was. Later on, I also had a lot of “I’m supposed to feel something but don’t” moments. This was a source of considerable distress until I managed to deprogram myself.

Yeah it’s wild how many ways humans can express “don’t question the dogma,” both explicitly and implicitly with deflection, body language, etc. I’m a child of clergy, so I very much grew up “in” a church. Consequently, I don’t even have any specific memories of asking questions and being told not to doubt or what have you. I’d never not been immersed in the fundamentalist milieu, so I subconsciously learned to police my own thoughts and actions without realizing it. It’s taken years to recontextualize some of my childhood behavior. Most of it is sad stuff, like realizing “oh I ghosted that friend because I was trying to avoid becoming aware of the homosexual crush I was developing”. Anyway, I guess my point is that we can be good at preventing ourselves from questioning dogma, too. Until the shelf collapses.

I’m not an ex-Mormon specifically, but this shelf analogy resonates with my experience as someone who was raised in an evangelical Protestant church. Eventually you stack up too many inconsistencies and the cognitive dissonance is too much.

Dragonfruit is delicious, but this depends heavily on where you get it. Most non-tropical markets get imported dragonfruit that was picked too early and shipped/stored over long periods, resulting a relatively bland taste and drier texture. Ripe, fresh dragonfruit is lovely. It’s in my top 5 fruits personally.

I played a Druid a few years back whose magical focus was narrowly on stone and earth. The idea was her culture (from which she had been exiled years prior for failing to fulfill some of her clerical responsibilities) considered the world to be a huge grave, and her role in said society was to interact with and advocate for the decomposed and petrified remains of the long dead. So she considered herself something of a necromancer, just for the dead that are so far gone as to become the landscape. 5e isn’t built to support this interpretation of the Druid class, but we managed it with some minor reflavoring and homebrewing. It was a fun concept but her beliefs and goals ended up becoming too at odds with the rest of the party, so I retired her to avoid friction.

It’s not likely to happen, but it would be great for everyone if the voting block composed of American Catholics and American evangelical Protestants were to splinter.

A lot of folks thought he would push fascist policies, though? He was notable for his nativist and protectionist rhetoric on the campaign trail. The audacity of it all is what got him all that free print and airtime.

By hour count this year:

1. Behind the Bastards
2. The Dollop
3. The Best Thing Ever (used to be called Read it and Weep)

Wow and I thought I had a lot. I salute you.

Boring boomer humor.

Unfortunately for you, you are not the authority on what is and isn’t a slur.

It has been used as a “term of contempt towards women” for “over six centuries”, and is a slur that fosters sexism against women. It has been characterized as “an archaic word demeaning women since as early as the 15th century” that seeks to control women.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch_(slang)

It’s always disappointing to see people who think themselves reasonable delighting in the usage of slurs when given the opportunity to tear down someone they perceive as disliked by their community. It is much more damning to them than the object of their ire.

Greene is a symptom of the cancer metastasized on our civilization, but deploying gendered slurs against her is counterproductive and pitiful.

You’re gonna need to find a new fascist dog whistle.

I will never understand how the cruise industry still exists. I cannot fathom the appeal, nor how the companies survived Covid.

Extreme wealth and a love of authoritarianism, name a more iconic duo.

Why do people always focus on women’s appearances when discussing topics wholly unrelated to appearance?

Because misogyny is pervasive in culture and when most people perceive a woman as “bad”, it suddenly feels ok for them to reduce her to her appearance. Most folks are not nearly as enlightened as they like to think.

🎉

I’m surprised not to see more people mention From Software games. Going all the way back to demon’s souls they consistently teach you how to understand the tools at your disposal, the challenge that you currently face, and how to use the former to overcome the latter. I learned how to “read” opponents to find and exploit vulnerabilities while playing dark souls way back, and that general approach is consistently useful in all sorts of other games. There are lots of other translatable skills involved, of course, like timing and resource management.