Someology

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.

This is why they will not release the 90s shows on 4k BluRay. They don't want anyone to actually own copies.

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.