Yeah. I grew up near one of Germany’s largest open-pit lignite mines. Had a tour of the mighty Bagger 293 as a kid and was allowed to touch some coal.

The little aquatic drone that could

Back in the day you could afford both med school and running an elaborate murder hotel with some gruesome custom made contraptions. Now you can’t even afford a simple murder house. What has come of this country.

With my first prepaid phone in Germany texts did cost 0.49 € per text. So I did not use them super often. Years later around 2011 that price had decreased to 0.15€ and I was texting friends a lot during uni. Around the same time me and my friends got our first smartphones with contracts for 30-40€ per month that included a small bit of data (below 1Gb). Texts still did cost 0.15€, but the data for a WhatsApp message was in the low kilobytes. So a lot of people switched to WhatsApp

Yep, I was one of only roughly 15% of men in my cohort that had to do conscription or civilian service after leaving high school. The rest did gap years or did go to university directly. This was generally considered to be unfair. This is why now a “Allgemeine Dienstpflicht” is discussed by politicians, where everyone has to do some service to society for a year, but can freely decide whether it is military os civilian service.

Civ has a lot of old fans since civ 1 or 2 that just buy and play any new civ game that comes out. I had: Civ 1 Civ 2 + Addons Call to Power (which was no official civ) Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Civ 4 + Addons Freeciv Civ 5 + Addons Civ: Beyond Earth Civ 6 + Addons Unciv

Good to know it exists. Have been in the Socca Valley this year and it is a super beautiful place.

The article has a paywall. Can anyone post a short summary?

I hope they did not go for the Holodeck Series Finale, where we kill a main character, again.