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.
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:
Wow and I thought I had a lot. I salute you.
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.
Scientists have GOT to stop allowing religion-flavored nicknames for phenomena. It imports a bunch of inappropriate connotations and confuses the message. “God particle”, “demon particle”, etc. What is this clownshoes nonsense?
I find Sikhism interesting. My reading thereupon suggests that it has generally positive pro social values. There’s some gender stuff that I don’t like, but no major religion is free of that. Moreover, I can really get behind the dictate to carry a knife to defend the innocent.
I’m fairly positive that my drug use in early adulthood damaged my intelligence somewhat. I am also certain that it broadened my perspective and improved my ability to understand others. Good trade imo.
I’ve had a similar journey, and am consistently surprised at how common this path seems to be.
Human cognition/consciousness is not special. There have likely been many now-extinct intelligent species whose evolutionary niche did not encourage the indefinite expansion and subsequent habitat destruction that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, other intelligent species will likely evolve after we are extinct. There is also no reason to believe that consciousness is unique to biological creatures, although mechanical sapience will most likely look very different from ours.
I stopped drinking about six years ago. My university had a very “party” atmosphere, and I faced a lot of social pressure to drink during most outings. Being an oddball nerd, I drank for the first time alone in a basement so that I could understand how it felt before doing so in front of others. After some vaguely pleasant spinning about the room I ended up vomiting and had a rough hangover the next day. And that pretty much summed up my relationship with alcohol for the following decade. Have a mildly good to mediocre time, followed by regret. Even with just a small amount. Eventually I had a moment of clarity in my late twenties where I realized “this is not for me” and just stopped. I wish I had possessed the self awareness and bravery in my late teens to take the stand then.
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.