Someology

Buy DRM free music instead of streaming it.

Nowhere did OP say anything about a desktop. I thought they meant “what’s the current laptop equivalent to a Thinkpad back in the day?” If they meant a desktop, they should have used the word desktop. “PC” is not exactly specific.

Convenience.

It makes no sense to say a government censored it. It makes the Historical British Empire look evil. The UK is certainly not controlling the Hugos. It criticizes the Chinese CCP zero, because they are not mentioned. It shows great evils that were done TO China in the past by colonial powers, which should be a positive from the CCP perspective. The Hugos certainly have not been snubbing Chinese authors (see award winner Liu Cixin), and therefore the USA has not stopped them. I mean, Liu Cixin shows us that the revolution in China could have traumatized some people, yet it won.

EDIT to add: Now, I’ve just seen a post over on Reddit that actually explains what people think are going on with the Hugos this year. This post didn’t explain that at all. I still can’t see any logic behind this supposed censorship, but it’s nice to have context. For anyone else who doesn’t follow World Con Politics: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/19ctcmn/im_a_bit_surprised_by_the_relatively_subdued/

Gotta say that it boosts my confidence in the Hugo Awards to see Babel NOT get nominated. This has zero to do with the author’s nationality and ethnicity and everything to do with Babel being a poorly written novel (with the ending obvious a long way off) and horrific character development. It would be shameful to award a novel where all characters are stand in caricatures of their cultures of origin instead of actual individuals. It just comes across as racist in itself, promoting stereotypes, instead of merely showing the reader that racism existed.

In the USA, you can’t even use a landline or a office voip phone. Must use an active cell phone number.

The sand is black sand, and the white lines are the remnants of frost leftover on the surface of the black sand. The dunes are free of the frost remnants, because they are slowly moving. This means we can fully see the color of the black sand, which plays with visual perspective. Here’s the same area in an earlier photo when it was completely all frosted over: https://static.uahirise.org/images/2023/details/cut/ESP_076510_2230-2.jpg

That’s just about when it got a bit more watchable.

One of the first things I do on a new Samsung phone is disable Chrome and install Firefox. You’ve just saved me from ever buying a Redmi.

Check the first one out of a library, perhaps, to see if you like it.

Some jerk company (like Google) cannot suddenly discontinue my entire reader with all my feeds, because its mine, on my server. But because it’s a web app, I can use it from any device, unlike a local app. After Google killed reader, That was just too annoying. Self hosted since.

I really enjoyed Star Trek: Klingon, on PC back in the day. It was officer cultural sensitivity holodeck training for the officer exchange program. You had to make decisions appropriate to Klingon social customs. It was bundled with a Klingon language learning program with speech recognition tech. Very cool stuff for 1996 CD-ROM games.

Here I am, 9 days past the listed date, and my factory unlocked S22 Ultra just got the October security patch. sigh Unlocked model owners always left until last.

I am glad you like it, but the acting was most not good enough, and the writing generally not good enough to deliver. There are a couple of exceptions, but they do not outweigh the giant mountain of Meh that must be waded through.

And, no, the boxy CRTs took more money than the flat plastic slabs used in Star Trek shows from the Era (which they just pretended were flat screens and tablets most of the time). Trek only imposed graphics on those screens a minority of the time. Using CRT screens doesn’t make it relatable. These people have interstellar space ships and giant space stations. CRT screen are just a stupid choice that do not make the setting relatable. The times it becomes relatable are due to the exceptions, like the character development with Londo. Not because they inexplicably use this one type of actually ancient technology.

It is much more like an old school daytime TV Soap Opera in acting style and overall production style than like other SF shows. This is really jarring. Acting very inconsistent. Crappy production values. Like, huge CRT screens being used everywhere? Really? At this same time, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine knew that hundreds of years in the future, nobody would use huge boxy CRT screens. They depicted thin tablets and terminals even though 1990s tech wasn’t able to do that yet. There are so many things like this that jarred me out of the story.

The development of a few characters was cool, but it was like suffering through a mountain of junk to get the good crumbs. The plot had a lot of “I can see it coming a mile away”.

Not worth it IMHO, if you already tried it and didn’t like it.

The best lines are mostly Carl Sagan quotes, which I appreciated, but that isn’t enough.

A huge percentage comes down to this. Don’t treat women as objects or aliens. They’re people.

Lucky you, to live where there is a passenger train.

1. Treat them like a human person.
2. Let them know you like them without being pushy.
3. Refer to item 1.

You should include what country you are talking about. I know nobody in the USA who had an arranged marriage in the 1950s. They met partners at school, church, and neighborhood/extended family picnics and parties for the most part. They met in stores, libraries, and cafes. We have to maintain public casual community spaces. To paraprhase a Sociology professor I once had: you can’t marry someone you never meet. It requires talking to other humans to make even casual friends.

Thank you for sharing the information!