When we moved to a developed nation from the US, I started commuting via train. My reading logs for books have gone through the roof. I also get to practice languages and use the time to generally enjoy my day. Driving a car never allowed this kind of living well.

I’m up to about 230 days car-free and it’s wonderful.

Though the CDU/CSU party keeps trying to move right to get some of those A* voters and it’s not working.

I played soooo much CivCTP (one). It’s a weird cousin of the Civ games since there was some kind of falling out with Sid Meier at the time. The company couldn’t call it Civilization 3, so it’s this “definitely not Civ” set of games from the era.

The coolest part was network play. In 1999 that was a huge deal. We had one game go all night. My buddies got good start points. I was on a glacier in the Antarctic.

By 8am I started sinking their newly discovered wooden ships with submarines and dropping nukes on their cities. We called it done at that point.

Having moved from the US to the EU recently (but having visited for 25+ years). Yes, the food is better in the EU.

The US food is over processed sugar infused sawdust unless you work hard to get specialized and direct from small farms sources.

Here in the EU I walk to any corner store or street vendor and it’s consistently amazing.