JcDent

So, in ep01, she says her parents were killed in a village on the Russian-Ukrainian border - not mortarbanned, but supposedly due to the villagers stringing them up as witches

Hoo boy

First of all, this is portraying Eastern European villagers as superstitious backwood yokels, living in log huts and meeting every stranger with pitchforks and torches

Secondly, as my gf pointed out, if the locals had believed them to be witches, they'd be swimming in cash

We Eastern Europeans, for some reason, really go for witches, mystics and other such types

The one president we impeached had a Sakartvellan seer who claimed that God told her about the future - and that she could charge TP rolls with healing energy.

People in urban areas will go to get their fates read or their ills magiced up.

This is happening concurrently to those people considering themselves good Christians.

If this was cooler, you might consider it syncretism, but there's no system behind it.

Most of these folk derive their powers from I-said-so, not some ancient pagan beliefs you could point at.

I assume a lot of this is due to USSR promoting Eastern mysticism to deny popular power to the Roman Catholic Church, but I haven't really looked into it.

So next time you're writing a book where someone is mistaken for a witch in Eastern Europe, they better end up getting paid to enchant a bog roll with impotence-healing powers.

Lithuanians don't naturally have a Halloween. Technically, we should go visit the graves on Vėlinės on the 2nd, but the 1st - All Saints - is a day off as well and people use that for the same reason.

I probably could tell you more if I was a better Catholic.

What we don't have is dressing as ghouls, goblins or supernatural monsters (Tzarist Russians?) and get fucked up beforehand. Tricking-and-treating is also out of the question.

However, American culture reaches all via ghlo-bah-lee-zation. Kids want to dress up and get candy because they've seen it on TV, pubs and bars want one more day for people to get fucked up on, people want to get fucked up (and dress up, maybe), etc. So Halloween is worming its way into the public sphere.

One of our foster kids went trick-or-treating with her friends. Had skull face paint. Got candy (and apples, and a few tangerines). Had a lot of fun.

However, some people are mad about this. There are roughly too camps: the nationalist fun-haters who don't want to see a non-Lithuanian tradition take root and the clerical side which insists that Halloween isn't just fun and games because anytime you draw a skull, you're worshipping death or something.

Both of these camps are fairly boring and will be brushed to the side by the world hegemony and the desire to dress as a skelly.

We do have a similar trick-or-treating tradition during Užgavėnės (literally "Time before Lent"), which is our Mardi Gras et al. The difference is that kids are mostly supposed to dress in traditional costumes... which often means parodying minorities like the Roma! Very few people ever saw issue with that, but the blackfacing is on the way out, sort of like the tradition itself.

I guess the reason for that is that Užgavėnės was never culturally a reason to get fucked up in an office party!

Oh, and like half of all Lithuanian celebrations, it's pagan as fuck, including burning of a straw woman to show that we kicked the winter's ass

Games Workshop unleashed a new website that unified their store fronts, ditching a fairly settled system that was decent for navigating all the plastic garbage you wanted to buy,

I hate this.

Anyway, someone take a look and tell me whether I'm just Mad That Thing Change