Someology

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.

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.

Freshrss is pretty great.

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.

Thank you for sharing the information!

I’m sorry, but are you being this snotty for any other reason than to make yourself feel better for being rude?

Thanks for the info!

If you connect your phone to the car, can it spy on your Signal messages? I mean, they have to decrypt on your end for you to see them, right? Or has Signal taken specific steps to stop this?

In my region, where public transport doesn’t exist much at all, if you don’t drive, you might not eat or work (the lucky few work remotely, but not all).

What model did you buy? It is rare to see one these days that doesn’t have all this nonsense.

The issue is that this 20 year old car is not going to last forever or have replacement parts available forever. We need better privacy laws, because time and entropy will eventually force us all into this evil mess.

If you do not teach proprietary software un schools, you will hobble your students’ job hunting potential. We should ALSO teach open source alternatives, and teach the idea that there are functional alternatives, but a student who has never used the major apps isn’t getting their resume even looked at by a human.

I’ve never bothered to check, because I self host to serve 1-5 users, and I’ve never generated enough traffic for any ISP to notice. I would need to pay them more for a static IP address, but we have dynamic DNS services for that. My ISP doesn’t put any actual obstacles in place beyond dynamic IP.

I find that the entire category of auto-immune diseases are a thing most people fail to really “get”. Especially if it is even moderately uncommon.

I run BicBucStrim on my NAS, and I access it through the web browser of any PC or tablet, my Kobo eReader, or Mobiscribe eReader. You can download a book to the device to read it, though. It basically just generates a nice web layout to access your Calibre library.