Someology

"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.

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.

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.