Desperation is often the cause of stupidity. Walking into an invading army while unarmed is never a wise survival strategy. Show me one single time in History where this went well for most of the people involved.

Buy DRM free music instead of streaming it.

"‘I’m going to Gaza City. It’s enough. We need to go back to our homes and lands. We are tired of displacement… we heard people saying we can go back, but no one official told us. We’ll leave it to God,’ Majd El-Aqqad said. "

That was a phenomenally stupid thing to decide to just walk into an invading army based on gossip. Predictably horrible outcome.

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.

“You can cross the veil at will” makes me think about Medium.

Convenience.

I have a loved one with permanent nerve damage from chemo. We’re very happy the chemo was successful, but imagine a combo of numbness and constant pain for the rest of your life in all your fingers, which becomes dramatically more severe with exposure to cold. It makes make simple daily life tasks from driving, to cooking, etc. far more difficult. They do not tell patients in advance they are going to continue the treatments until the point where permanent damage happens. You only realize after going through it that this was the plan all along. It makes medical talk about informed consent feel ridiculous. The severity fluctuates, but it has already been like 7 years, and this is never going away. It is not for “a while”.

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.

Yes, but in the lingo of the 2020s, that is not a gender difference. It is a sex difference. Yes, I know this was not always the case. I’ve read old dictionaries, but at the moment, that’s the usage.

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

Why else would I own a Playstation? Single player games are the only reason. Didn’t want to wait a year for a game to come to PC.

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

I keep hearing George Carlin’s old comedy routine about how we evolved because Mother Earth needed plastic for reasons, and now that we’ve made enough to last a very long time, she can get rid of us…

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.

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.

You probably have-at construction sites or something, with giant beds meant for towing huge digging equipment, and so never noticed them at all.

I promise, you’re unlikely to see an “everyday American” driving an F650. There might be a literal handful of exceptions out there somewhere, but most people will only ever see this in industrial applications. Most often you’ll see a 650 outfitted with a cargo bed or a (extra large, for towing big rigs) wrecker setup, or something large, robust, and industrial like that. This is just a publicity/marketing stunt. 99% of Ford F350 and larger trucks you will ever see will be industrial/cargo/heavy equipment moving/etc. industrial job vehicles. It’s even relatively common to buy the truck, and buy the bed you need for your industrial application, custom. This is not something you’ll see set up like a pickup truck in very many American driveways. The handful of those exceptions are the same sort of enthusiast niche that will hot rod customize to a ridiculous impractical degree a regular car, just to say they can. Very small group.

Reacting as if this is real is just as insane as thinking it’s really common for somebody to trick out their excavator and drive it to McDonald’s.