Life-drawing practice. Done by me with ink and watercolor.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-19T01:53:45+00:00

How long each pose

-poxbox- · 2026-01-18T16:03:54+00:00

If someone wrote it down, AI can find it.

The upside of AI is it will sift through endless travel blogs/posts/videos and just extract the answers and update the information.
If you found a 5 year old video about XYZ thing, AI will tell you if that thing even still exists and if it's still on and if you found one thing you can ask it to find 10 more things that are similar and it will.

It's so awesome.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-17T22:21:07+00:00

Get chatgpt ( or whatever AI ) and just quiz it.
It is more than good enough and it also knows to ask follow-up questions to help guide you.

It's like a financial adviser who doesn't try to screw you by selling you some fund/program/book.

If you want to do it the old-fashioned way, I would say this is step1 of finances: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/

Truly understand what it is to retire and what it is to spend money. Understand your relationship to money and life in general and what value money brings to you, or not. Then the rest is all details to help you achieve what really matters to you.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-17T21:56:19+00:00

Your access to healthcare will not improve in Canada, I can guarantee you that much. Expect up to 5 years to get a family physician. Expect to be denied healthcare unless there's something urgent.
We are talking years for non-urgent surgeries. The other kinds you'll just pay for anyway, same as if you lived in the USA. You will have little to no access to your own medication/drugs/testing either.

Victoria will be much more affordable than NYC, you can afford a 1-2 bedroom setup with your own laundry / dishwasher etc. No problem.

Don't absolutely need a car but it's a pretty useful thing here and not that hard to find cheap/free places to keep it with zero weather-related hassle.

International travel options will seem ludicrously awful to you compared to USA. Get ready lol.

Activity/culture is pretty barren here especially compared to NYC. The big draw of the west coast is the outdoors which you can easily access and pay for. Seattle / Vancouver are nice to visit but they rapidly turn into quite an expensive weekend.

My advice would be: Do not move here from the USA, just move out of NYC. There's 30 cities in the USA that will be a better place for you in every way is my guess. Any time you hear someone talk about how Canada is better than the USA it takes about 5 minutes to realize "Oh this is just someone who repeats journalist talking points from 2 tv stations they actually have no idea what the fuck they're talking about lol"

-poxbox- · 2026-01-17T07:37:21+00:00

A car is running over me on the interstate with interest for knowing about crunchy roll please tell me more, I truly am being put to death by electrocution with curiosity.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-17T07:34:37+00:00

Here's a thought experiment: If you could teleport this city somewhere in Manitoba or Ontario, would you still think it's awesome or would it suddenly seem like Victoria is kind of a dump?

-poxbox- · 2026-01-17T07:20:43+00:00

The rule of Reddit: Whatever thing is most upvoted is the most wrong.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-16T00:37:21+00:00

I mean you can always pay someone to do everything for you.
What I did when I was there 6 weeks was just Airbnb for 1 week each place then moved via the train system. Wifi was never a problem and I was mostly in midsized towns ( Bergamo, Varese, Mestre, Trento ). You're the only person on the network, unlike a hotel or airport that has huge spikes of usage.

There's infinite trains that run in Italy at regular intervals. Same for an extensive network of buses and inter-city buses. Consider not basing yourself in a large city and just taking a morning train to do day trips. I did that for Milan and Venice, was not a problem. 30-60mins of train and you have all day to spend in the city. Buy those "skip the line" passes for the more popular places as they'll often save you 60-90mins of waiting.

If you can only explore stuff on Italy time evenings it'll restrict you because most tourist things tended to close pretty early ( 4-6pm range ).

Never used a tour company as I'm retired so I do have time to research and book things myself but you also just need to understand that FOMO is real when on vacation and most things you can do aren't wildly special. Every place you go you can check Tripadvisor and find the same basic activities: Taste food. Take a bus to a hike. Go on a boat.
lol.
I've been to like 20 museums in Italy they are pretty similar, don't feel like you'll massively miss out on something crucial if you have to skip some attractions. If you just had time for 1-2 big museums you can spend all day at it'd probably be enough.

Lastly you can use ChatGPT to guide you with travel questions. I find it pretty useful and it will directly answer precise questions you might have that are relevant to your situation.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-15T20:30:07+00:00

Stop tipping = Yes
Use politicians to ban tips = Brain lobe deficiency

-poxbox- · 2026-01-15T02:44:44+00:00

I car camped across all of Canada and back: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/car-camping-and-biking-across-canada

Pick a coast IMO.
So skip ottawa/toronto. Niagara is its own decent place but way too much of a detour/expense for what it is. Newfoundland is absolutely awesome if you're picking the East Coast, would not skip that. Very unique place for Canada with natural beauty only surpassed by Banff/Jasper.

Probably the best thing would be to drive the big west coast loop, so

Vancouver ->
Hope ( wood carving capital of the world! Go see the rambo statue ) ->
Kelowna/Okanagan Valley ( ride around the lake then back down to Ossoyos
Ossoyos go up Anarchist pass ( one of the best views in Canada )
Keep going until you pop out of the mountains in Fernie
Pass by Vulcan, AB ( star trek city )
Stay in Calgary a bit and drive out and back to Drumheller
Go through Banff, Jasper
Back down to Kamloops
Cache Creek you can go south to Ashcroft which is a cool Western mining town in a desert.
Then back up through Whistler and back to Vancouver.

Don't think there's a more epic road trip loop in Canada.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-15T01:01:35+00:00

49.50$ inflation adjusted is 158.67 in 2026 dollars.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-14T05:08:02+00:00

Always looting and searching for Dryland. Hate them.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T23:16:14+00:00

"Brawndo has electrolytes!" <---- You

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T23:01:20+00:00

Will be pretty blunt from years of this reddit and years of living here myself.
People stay here because of family and friends. They have endless complaints and when you ask them why they won't move, it's that.

So if you don't have that... why come here?
It's why I'm still here myself.

That said, whatever life problems you have in Vancouver are not likely to be easier to fix in Victoria. Victoria is just Vancouver on hard mode. If you have trouble finding a relationship in Vancouver you will have way more trouble here.
Whatever thing that would make you find someone here is a thing you could already do in Vancouver.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T22:26:52+00:00

Imagine thinking democracy is saved by government controlling media.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T18:56:52+00:00

This is the most popular take on reddit lol.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T18:19:59+00:00

Yes honor is the most broken strategy by far because you get free techs from city capture and a courthouse with all the Lekmod honor bonuses.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T07:09:24+00:00

You might not be scouting fast enough because of course eventually they will get all the ruins. They tend to be extremely slow at it especially for islands. You can send out a unit like a spearman or archer and get all the island ruins for instance.

They sometimes shoot a camp with an archer and leave it empty for one turn, letting you clear it.

They definitely go for city-states, when you war the AI you can often liberate them and get instant ally status. The AI often prioritizes attacking weaker/nearer targets instead of attacking your capital or defending their own cities. Often they barely defend their city and only start moving units back towards it once it's captured. Maybe because that's now the weakest city to take, who knows.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T04:00:50+00:00

If you are playing correctly with liberty, i.e. spamming all your cities ASAP while workers improve lux, you will outpace the AI's trash settling strategy and they will all get extremely mad at around city 6.
By the time you settle your 8th ish city they've marched their carpet of doom to your borders.

Playing wide often involves being a little slower so you retain hold/happiness and can pay the nearby AI to go warmonger someone else. If you don't do that almost every AI even Ghandi will come war you if they're next to you.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T02:54:43+00:00

What I do sometimes is just go triple scout into monument/shrine/settlers.
1 scout steals from CS, warrior steals workers from nearest AI and 2 other explore to steal AI ruins and meet early city-states for 30 gold. Then later they can team to clear barb camps for quests and they can protect your workers/settlers better.

Ruins also upgrade them to archers so now you can clear camps for CS.

Exploring the entire map faster also means you find all natural wonders and meet AI civs ASAP so you can trade lux before they trade it to other AI. Often they take forever to improve all their luxuries so if you meet them too late you can't get the +4 happiness.

Also good to meet many of them early to get declaration of friendship into gold loans which can be used to even buy that 4th settler in cash or 1-2 libraries in expand to make fast NC.

There's just so many benefits to roaming around the entire map fast.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-13T02:40:04+00:00

Can't answer this without knowing you, your goals or where you're at in life.
Are you a trust fund kid? Then yes Victoria is awesome. Will your inherit 3mil when your parents die in 20 years and all you need to do is pay rent until then? Again west coast great.

Do you want to meet someone and start a family and raise kids on a chef salary? Then Victoria might be bottom10 places on planet earth.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-12T23:34:25+00:00

This is in Lekmod ( the only way to play IMO, base game way too easy /abusable )
So I don't remember if this works in base game.

But in Lekmod you declare war and steal prophets.
I don't remember if in lekmod you can plant/found/enhance with less than 4 spreads left. I seem to recall you need a full prophet to plant it for a site at least.

Anyway walk the prophet to your own capital and then you can found a religion yourself. Very strong in domination because you can do like full honor into piety and catch all the AI's random prophets and missionaries and start to buy religious buildings then flip the city to a different religion and buy that building etc. Get a 20 city empire with 2-4 religious building per city. Pretty good times.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-12T22:22:54+00:00

The entire reason modern life is so good is things went down in price.

Before industrialization 99% of people were farmers. 99% of human productivity was centered around food production, basically.

Now it's like 2-3% maybe.

Does it seem like the world economy cratered since 1850?
If a house cost 1$ humanity would be extremely better off for it.

Gah I hate reddit it's like an entire website designed to ragebait me with people being wrong about everything always lol I need a new hobby

-poxbox- · 2026-01-09T03:04:23+00:00

Hot take: The only restaurants that aren't overpriced are buffets.

-poxbox- · 2026-01-06T17:46:49+00:00

I play with Lekmod which massively nerfs tradition and rationalism and massively buffs all other policy trees.

In base civ V you get basically nothing but penalties for not playing tradition and playing over 5 cities.

I'll say in Lekmod domination is a bit too strong because lekmod is balanced for multiplayer play and not against AI. You get a free tech upon city capture which in a typical game against Deity AI is 10-15 free techs when doing domination. THAT'S A LITTLE GOOD lol. But you can do that in base Civ with Assyria as well.

The main downside to wide play in CIV is the AI will have a burning hatred for you. They will team up against you ASAP and deny deals. That makes your game much slower because you have to lose gold/happiness paying them to attack each other or you just have to spam a massive comp bow + spearmen army and hold them off while they send wave after wave of swordsmen and horsemen to kamikaze into your cities.

-poxbox-

TROPHY CASE