nowadays i dont
really feel alive
just blending day to day
fuck around to pass the time
sitting on my hands, eating
snacks watching tv.
waiting for a change
pray an angel comes to lift me
maybe this is penance
yeah, the cost of all the sinning
all pointing to the night
when you did some heavy drinking.
bottle to your lips
knife at the wrist
her essence in your head
you can't recall her voice
but you recant the promises

chant them like a cultist
while you watch the silver dance
and your press to the beat
of your alcoholic pants
sweat fills your hair
haze fills the mind
love, pain, and anger
made your soul unwind
now it lays there,
exposed to open air
only to be trampled on
by those who should be there
in a spot of rage you
threw the knife into the floor
rose from your chair and
opened up the closet door
only to write in red upon the white
"STOP ME" in bold, what foresight

you whip your head around
try to shake the thoughts out
you can't recall her face,
now an obscure grey cloud
that radiates depression
makes you feel alone
spent years with a person
they can't once pick up the phone
spent years with a person
yet you can't recall her voice
we said we loved us to death
i'm finding truth in that choice
you've suffered spring and summer
now you're heading for the fall
you look about your broken mind
god-damn it all
you thought you'd built a home
you were in it for the haul
appalled it's all dissolved
your heart it calls for more resolve
you miss her love, your home, your dog
you drove your car into a wall.

.

.

.

.

bones fractured top to bottom
are the mind manifest
codeine sponsored dreams of
laying your head on her chest
instead you feel a tightness on your neck
and this ringing in your head
you've got a neck brace, your mom's here,
you're in a hospital bed.
what's your name, and your birthday,
perfect sir, where are you at?
another nurse coming through
to make sure my mind is still intact
rib cracked, pelvic fracture, hooked
up to an iv and a piss-bag
you wore a seat belt and dont know
if that's something to thank god for
or be pissed at
isn't this the kind of story
that you wanted after all?
just to be so down and broken
hope someone saved you from the fall
have someone to hold you, stroke your hair
and tell you you can beat it all
needing that, having a lack thereof
you drove your car into a wall.

Summary

The article is an interview with Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish refugee who has been detained by the Australian government on Manus Island since 2015. Boochani discusses his experiences of detention and the book he has written about those experiences.

Extract

I don't remember exactly when I started to write the first words but I remember that I thought my writing of this time was like a mission and duty ... to make readers aware of this prison camp. I imagined there would be unknown readers from around the world ... That's why I wrote it in a literary language. Not only for this historical period or those people who are involved in this plight ... I wrote this book so that it extends beyond geographical bounds and generational imaginaries.

This chapter about the way they exiled us to Manus was one of the hardest parts to write … If you remember, years ago, I wrote a letter to you and complained that I was scared of writing, that I hate writing. You answered me, saying: ‘Behrouz I wrote about my relatives who were killed.’ Your grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins … I knew that I had to do it to survive. I knew that I could expose this system through these words … I could get back my identity through writing this book and not allowing this system to reduce me to a number.

Link

https://www.theage.com.au/national/australia-s-barbaric-policy-confronted-by-boochani-s-prison-memoir-20180821-p4zyt7.html

Anyone seen this? I heard about this movie on NPR and decided to check it out. Wow! It's a great, well told story that pulls a lot of discreet threads together. As an aside from the main story of a black cop infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan it also references racist media of yesteryear like Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation. There are several moments that wink at Donald Trump's talking points and policies. There was a lot of reaction from the predominantly black crowd I was in, the connection was certainly noticed.

And the end! Wow. Almost had me in tears, really brought me back to a year ago when I saw the Vice News on Charlottesville. I was in a theater in Richmond, VA about an hour from Charlottesville. You could have heard a pin drop right when the movie ended. I've never seen so many people get gut punched like that all at once. The timing of this movie was absolutely well thought out.

So, as a followup to the music tagging thread from a few days ago, I would like to propose the following for discussion.

1. Should all musical posts be tagged with at least one high-level musical genre?

The consensus from the last post appeared to be a yes on this. Please note:, this doesn't mean that anyone who submits a track is required to go look up / determine the best genre themselves. If they choose not to, one of the tag mods may do so for them while browsing. Further, we seemed to reach a consensus last time that in the future it would be best to automate this step as completely as possible.

2. Which tags do we want to use?

I / @Whom have done some digging and found several different schemes we might use as a basis. For convenience, I've reproduced them in a table for you below:

I think ideally we will be able to come up with (say) a list the size of wikipedia, allmusic or discogs such that determining the right genre isn't much of a burden on tag mods. In the future, we could expand this or even start inheriting the RYM genre hierarchy (e.g., Ska -> 2 Tone, Jamaican Ska, Spouge, Third Wave Ska)

So with that out of the way, I think the best way to proceed is for each of you to either:

A) Build a list of your own with one of these as a basis. We can count up how many people include a genre an count as a vote for it's inclusion.

Or

B) Argue for / against a specific genre's inclusion.

Sound good? Did I miss anything?

I came up with the following dialogue for a scene in a novella that I'm working on, and thought that if I stripped out the extraneous details it might make a decent writing prompt. What can you do with the following dialogue?

"How could you keep this from me?"

"You weren't ready --"

"What gave you the right to decide I wasn't ready to know?"

"You weren't ready to ask until now."

What's the secret? Who's keeping what from whom? Why wasn't the first person ready to ask until now? That's for you to decide if you decide to use this.

I've finally finished writing something. It's been about four years since I actually finished something nicely.

I'm entering the editing phase, which generally takes longer... But I'm a bit excited.

Hopefully this is an acceptable thing to talk about, and I'm going about things the right way.

So... To spin off into discussion, here's two things:

A part of the story:

The ground rose up and struck Raul in the face.

He blinked, stumbling backwards, seeing his master standing nearby.

The old man was glaring, his hands clutched around a brightly coloured stone.

Raul opened his mouth to question, but the old man was whisked away to a distance hillside, and the boy found himself tumbling head over heals backwards down a hillside.

He scrambled onto his knees, staring as he found himself on the shore of the lighthouse.

His master placed a solid hand on his shoulder, and muttered gibberish.

Raul glanced up, but found himself staring at the light of the lighthouse.

Spinning.

A bright light, round and round.

Lightning struck him, and Raul screamed, stumbling backwards.

The rod lay in front of him.

He tore his gaze away with effort, and saw his master, hands outstretched, the stone of red, gold and silver floating between them.

Almost as astonishing, the stone was clean.

A hammer hit him between the eyes.

Raul found himself stumbling behind his father, watching as the old man struck stone, separated it, revealing the river of solid copper within it.

"Boy!"

I'm hoping I've got the grammar at least semi-right. My illness means I can forget words, or my brain can replace words at random with others that it thinks are related.

Any guidance or critique is welcome. (I'd give a bigger quote... But this is probably more than enough to discuss.)

The build script I'm using:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo 'Please provide an output file name.' >&2
  exit 1
fi

tmp=$(mktemp)

echo 'Building...'

cat title.txt > "$tmp"
echo '' >> "$tmp"
cat LICENSE.md >> "$tmp"
echo '' >> "$tmp"
cat Prologue.md >> "$tmp"

for file in 0*.md; do
  echo '' >> "$tmp"
  cat "$file" >> "$tmp"
done

for file in 1*.md; do
  echo '' >> "$tmp"
  cat "$file" >> "$tmp"
done

echo 'Converting...'

pandoc --toc "$tmp" -o "$1" 2>/dev/null

rm "$tmp"

echo 'Done'

title.txt is basically just YAML markup for pandoc. The other files should be fairly obvious.

I'm silencing pandoc's output, because I make use of a self-reference to add comments to the Markdown, that get killed by the parser and never make it to the output:

[//]: # (This is a Markdown comment. Isn't that cool?)

However, as all the references point to themselves, pandoc warns.

I'm using pandoc this time around, because it produces fairly clean files. I've used GitBook and Calibre in the past, and though the ebooks they produce work and look okay, the amount of crazy markup they produce means the books lag on some ereaders.

However, that does make a lot of back and forth. Building, checking output, rebuilding, etc.

I've found that the red (X new) indicator next to a thread's comment count on the main page keeps me coming back to the discussion to see the latest messages. This is a good thing, but the UX for actually navigating through those messages leaves something to be desired.

There are two relevant existing features I'd like to discuss:

• All new comments since I last viewed the thread are highlighted with a conspicuous red stripe.
• The sidebar on any given discussion page has a link to jump to the most recent comment.

I use the most recent comment link in threads that I know only have one new comment. The link takes me right to it. But in threads with more than one new comment, it's a lot less foolproof. My only method for seeing them all is to scroll down the page and stop when I see a flash of that red stripe. This is tedious in busy discussions which both update frequently with new comments to read, and take a long time to scroll through every time I check them. It's also easy to miss something this way, and since comments are considered "read" after you load the page, there's no second chance to see whatever I missed.

I'd like to propose a method for iterating through all unread comments on a page, either in chronological order (oldest first) or in order of appearance on the page. Or if @Deimos wants to get really fancy, some kind of hybrid sort that keeps nested comment chains grouped together for contextual continuity when navigating.

This would require two controls: "Jump to next unread comment" and "Jump to previous unread comment." These could be "sticky" clickable icons on the page, or just some sort of keystroke (like , and . for previous and next, respectively) without a UI at all.

An important secondary feature of this would be a count indicating both how many unread comments are on the page and how many within that set you have jumped to with this mechanism so far:

Viewing 2 of 7 unread comments

This could remain visible or only appear briefly when jumping to the next/previous unread, then fade away. It could also be shortened to something more minimal:

2/7

That on-screen feedback would help prevent getting lost in busy threads with high unread counts, particular if the sequence is not determined by order of comment appearance on the page.

Edit: Whoops, fixed my formatting error I didn't notice after posting.

Tildes code of conduct says

Do not post anyone's sensitive personal information (related to either their real world or online identity) with malicious intent.

Can you change that to just say don't post personal info? Even if it's not done with malicious intent it should still be removed to protect people's privacy.

Also while it does say to not post spam on tildes terms of service I think It should say that on the code of conduct.

Edit: I mean posting personal info without consent and not public information.

Telling someone how to contact a company would be fine but not posting someone's address.

I finished The Little Stranger last week. While I found the pacing very compelling, I felt some pretty palpable dissatisfaction in how everything ended. I can't quite put my finger on it...

I'll go first.

I'm currently rewatching Veronica Mars right now and find myself really admiring many of her traits. She is witty, sarcastic, intelligent, and capable. I think what sets her apart from many other female protagonists is that she is not a martyr. If someone wrongs her, she will stand up for herself and in most cases get even. Her need to "get even" probably isn't actually a great personality trait, but I find it kind of refreshing.

Does anyone else wish they were more like a certain character on tv?