Ironhold

5E never impressed me, and the scandals out of WOTC over the last few years have been such that I've basically noped out of D&D for right now unless it's an older edition. That being said, I recently acquired the Anime 5E manual, and find that to be a far better balance of all-ages & compelling to play. I just need to carve time out to get a group together.

https://www.heb.com/ In much of Texas, there's a chain called H-E-B (named for the initials of its founder). H-E-B pursues a *very* aggressive "low-cost leader" strategy that includes both store brands and in-store coupons. Central to this is the "meal deal", where if you purchase a main course you'll get 2 - 4 sides and a beverage for free. For example, a few weeks ago they had it that if you bought two bags of store-brand chicken nuggets, you'd get a deluxe-sized box of store-brand macaroni & cheese, a bag of broccoli, a box of snack crackers, and a bottle of Italian-style soda for free. Most H-E-Bs have a dedicated end cap display with refrigerated unit and nearby wire racks where they keep the coupons and components to keep them all together. This is helping ease the burden, but prices are still creeping up to the point that it's hurting. What you see in this photo here? I got this a few years ago for $10. It was a prototype for a charitable "Thanksgiving in a basket" plan I was organizing, where people would assemble enough for a proper Thanksgiving dinner, minus the refrigerated items, and donate the whole assemblage to a local food bank. There's literally no way for me to put this together for $10 anymore; this is more like $20 now, especially as that brand of chili has been discontinued.

Another thing to remember is just how contrarian people can be. Make sure you have your own firm knowledge and faith in case they try to challenge you at some point, but don't be the aggressor as they'll take that as being attacked.

The senior officials with the Democrats don't understand that Biden and his cabinet have generated such confusion and ill will that there is a real danger a strong candidate would defeat them. Instead, not only are they insisting upon running him, at least one primary has confirmed that nobody *but* Biden will be on the ballot for President. This is causing people opposed to Biden to have a variety of negative sentiments, including taking this as "proof" of Biden being the puppet of a nefarious third party. Thus, these individuals are largely going over to Trump, who is seen as both the rightful President and the only person who can defeat Biden in a fair election.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-george-albert-smith/chapter-21?lang=eng Going with a story about President George Albert Smith.

It's my unfortunate experience that things like DEI, Privilege Theory, and so on tend to be embraced largely by academics or people who otherwise have little real-world experience outside of academia. This is why, for example, they fail to understand that most people define "privilege" on the basis of "wealth, power, and prestige" and so don't understand why people respond to their rants about "white privilege" the way people tend to do. I *literally* had one person I tried to explain this to snap at me and tell me that it's not *their* job to educate the public on the different definitions and that the public needed to just educate itself.

I happened to have this open because someone elsewhere just tried to drop a canned list of "citations" on me (most of which were from non-canonical sources) - https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-principles/chapter-41-the-postmortal-spirit-world?lang=eng What most of mainstream Christianity knows as "Heaven" and "Hell" we identify as "Paradise" and "Prison", areas where people will be *temporarily* assigned to based on their actions and knowledge in life. While there, these individuals will be taught in full and brought to a complete recollection of what they did while alive, leaving them to understand what they did both based on what they knew and compared to what should have been. It's only after a person has this understanding that they will be judged.

"Miracle Man" by Ozzy Osbourne was him mocking Swaggart over his troubles, but since the song merely references "Little Jimmy Sinner" it could actually apply to both men. The video depicts swine wandering through a chapel while a man in a mask melodramatically begs forgiveness.

Just for the sake of clarity, which translation of the Bible are you using? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses the KJV as the standard English-language translation, so I would recommend locating a parallel Bible if your regular version is not the KJV. Otherwise, you can reference the scriptures off of the church's website - https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures?lang=eng&platform=web - during the conversation.

At one point Phillip Morris owned a number of legit companies as a way of white-washing their image. I would need to check his resume to see if he was there at the time they owned these companies as he might have come up through one of these companies.

There's a reason why a lot of old-school folks, particularly MBAs, see "diversity" programs as cultural and economic poison. Basically folks, this whole thing is straight from Satan for the purpose of further dividing humanity.

The simple truth of the matter is that a growing number of Democrats have begun to understand that Biden cannot defeat Trump 1 - 1 unless there is indeed a dirty election, but large numbers of other Democrats fear that Biden *is* the only person who can defeat him and so are refusing to even consider anyone else. Word is that at least one primary has actually declared that Biden will be the only candidate on the ballot.

Pro tip: if you see a critical source use ellipses (the little "..." you sometimes see in quotations) when referencing something that was ostensibly said by a church leader or presented in official material, find the original citation and read it in full. Critics of the church - and others - frequently play games with people by using ellipses to change the context of various citations. In one extreme situation I personally encountered, a critic took two paragraphs from one of Young's sermons that were talking about unrelated topics, inverted their order, and used ellipses to stitch them together as if they were all about one single thing. When I pointed out what she'd done and showed everyone the real citation, she tried to do a "my bad" and then couldn't understand why no one would trust any of her citations until we saw them for ourselves.

No, they don't. Modern "progressive" society teaches people that it's all about "I", that the needs and desires of the individual should always trump everything else.

The selling point was that it was made using some form of dragonfruit, a real but obscure fruit. However, MatPat on "The Food Theorists" over at YouTube tried to break down what the actual ingredients list was, especially since the bottles she was using to ship it in used yellow lids instead of pink lids. His best hypothesis was that she was using mayonnaise as the main ingredient and that the squeeze bottles were in fact the bottles that had previously held the mayonnaise since there are brands of mayonnaise that use bottles like what were going out. This would also explain the incidence rate of people who were getting sick, as she was sending a mayonnaise-based product through the postal system.

In all seriousness, last year there was the infamous "That Pink Sauce" which some internet influencer was making and selling via mail-order. Due to both considerable problems with the labeling and numerous reports of people getting sick, the Food and Drug Administration began an investigation of the influencer and how they were making the product. Cue the person making a video in which she protested "Why is the FDA after me? I'm not making medicine!".

Well, this wasn't on my 2024 bingo card... https://www.ksl.com/article/50833479/national-uproar-in-italy-after-chef-puts-pineapple-on-pizza

Already did an "Entertainment 101" bit a year or so back on the concept of Easter Eggs in media, and so I'm waffling on a separate column on the topic. I've done it before when a topic had too much material for a single column, but I've tried to avoid it.

For those who don't know, we're having a total eclipse next year. It'll be in early April, not long after Easter. The town I live in will be in the path of totality. A few months ago, one of my brothers confirmed that he was wanting to come down with his family in order to see it in person. He's normally got everything together, and so more than likely has already reserved a hotel room (no, no more rooms are available within several *hours* of where I live). I don't have an office at the newspaper, and so I have to do all of my typing from home. This means I'll still have a few hours at night or in the early morning in which I can work. Well, I literally just now found out that my second brother is also wanting to come up with his family, but that he likely didn't get a room. That means staying with us unless they can make other plans, and that means someone camping out in the family office as that's where we have a spare mattress set up. This means I now have to get my annual Easter column, and at least two additional columns, knocked out ASAP to compensate. So... what are some topics you'd like to see explored in print? Keep in mind that it's a family of secular local-level newspapers, so I can't go deep into anything. I just need some ideas for things I can slap together quickly. Thanks.

As I've mentioned before, there were a series of pivot points in my life where within the course of a single moment my life was altered forever. Many of these pivot points altered my life for the worst, such as the medical episode that landed me in the hospital where I got incompetent treatment. There's a part of me that is desperate for a do-over simply because it's tired of constantly hurting and longs for back before everything went sideways. I relied on this part of me for several years as nostalgia gave me something positive to think about to as a counter to the misery I was frequently in, but that came with the cost of not always being aware of and living in the present. Yes, it's a struggle to move forward, but I keep doing it because someone has to ensure these lessons are carried forward.

I've reached the point in life where younger individuals are asking me what the world was like when I was growing up. As I've explained to them, while there are some things about the past I do miss, it was always a mixed bag; we had bad with the good, and so a full return back to the past wouldn't be wise. Better to learn the lessons of the past, preserve the values that have been tested, and move forward.

Before the pandemic and lockdown, Texas-based grocery store chain H-E-B was trying to position beef brisket as an alternative to turkey and ham at seasonal meals. I doubt anyone could successfully cram stuffing into a brisket.

No, it sounds like you have an unclear communications policy at work. If you were supposed to read the entire e-mail trail, that should have been made clear to you ahead of time.

We kinda need more than just a basic claim...

Remember, I've spent a fair bit of time dealing with people who saw their degrees as shields of invulnerability. They either forgot or never understood that you have to actually back yourself up, and the notion of "evolve or die" has never once crossed their mind. They might occasionally attempt "publish or perish" if so required, but then you have to watch for dodgy work if your brain can withstand the sheer onslaught of how awful the whole assemblage tends to be (like a recent Ohio State University paper about the "attack helicopter" meme that actually spiked my blood pressure...). It's to the point now that you have academics who make their careers challenging other academics and investigating academic misconduct. If you're on Twitter or YouTube, one of the more prominent such individuals goes by the handle "Aydin Paladin". She's managed to ruffle feathers the way I used to back when I was more active in doing apologetics work.