Summary

A look at the situation of Rohingya women living in Bangladeshi refugee camps, with a focus on health, medicine, and education.

Extracts

Before coming to a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Rashida had never seen a foreigner.

[...] the biggest shock she had was when a community health worker suspected Rashida was pregnant again and took her to the clinic for an examination.

"What I found out that day was that you can stop having babies if you want to," she says. "I had never heard of family planning."

Rashida has since thought hard and discussed this with her husband. Their shelter is cramped, and their future uncertain.

"Three children is a nice family size," she says. "After that, I don't want any more. What I want is to learn something. When we go back home I'd like to be able to work, not just look after children."

Bakoko [a midwife from Uganda] teaches new mothers how to wrap babies and put on nappies. She examines pregnant women to check for signs of eclampsia, the biggest threat to pregnant women's lives. And she teaches women to check for multiple pregnancies, and to care for women before and after they give birth. She has saved numerous lives.

Link

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-25/bangladesh-rohingya-young-women-coxs-bazar-refugee-camp/10161260

If you missed it, Reddit recently announced some major planned changes to Reddit Gold. It's pretty vague and confusing, but my summary was:

The current gold system is basically:

• When you have reddit gold, you can disable ads and have access to a few extra features.
• You can buy gold for $4/month or $30 if you buy 12 months at the same time. You can also buy "creddits" for the same prices, which are basically stored months of gold and can either be used on yourself or to give gold to other users.
• Giving gold to other users is called "gilding". You can gild individual posts on the site, which puts a gold icon on that post and gives the author a month of gold.

---

Now, from what I can understand, this is the new system:

• Reddit gold is now called "Reddit Premium". You can buy it for yourself for $6/month. There are no bulk discounts any more, so a year of Premium will cost $72. Existing subscribers can keep their current pricing as long as they're subscribed before the change.
• When you have Reddit Premium, at the beginning of each month you will be given some amount of "Gold Coins". These Coins can be used to give "awards" to other users' posts.
• You can give 3 different types of awards to a post, which each cost a different number of Coins:
  • Silver Award - costs the fewest number of Coins; adds a silver icon on the post; the author receives no further benefits
  • Gold Award - costs more Coins; adds a gold icon on the post (same as current icon); the author receives some small number of Coins (not Premium)
  • Super Gold Award - costs the most Coins; adds a "spectacular" icon on the post; the author receives a month of Reddit Premium
• Gold Coins will be purchasable in bundles separately from Premium, pricing not announced.

Today they released more info in /r/lounge (here's the post if you have reddit gold to be able to view it). The summary of the new post is:

• "Super Gold" has been renamed "Platinum"
• If you have any creddits, you have the choice to convert them to months of Premium membership before Sept. 10. If you don't, they'll be converted to 2000 Coins per creddit.
• You get 700 coins per month for having Premium.
• The awards that you can give to posts have these coin costs/benefits:

And there will be the following "Coin Packs" available for purchase:

I spend far too much time looking for a reply button before I realise I have to scroll to the bottom.
Also, it'd be a lot less work in big threads, where you might be scrolling for a while to get to the reply box.
Yes, I'm that lazy.
I noticed that sometimes I don't engage if it's a big thread because of this, if the topic being discussed is only of passing interest for example.

There's been some discussion around tags since users were given tag-editing privileges, such as Tag Use and Article Tags

I've noticed a few things about tags and rather than make a topic for each one I thought I'd make a few top level comments instead, hopefully with others doing the same for anything tag related they'd like to see discussed.

Previous episode | Index thread | Next episode

Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 2 - White Bear

Victoria wakes up and cannot remember anything about her life. Everyone she encounters refuses to communicate with her.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Hi folks,

I figured this would be a good place to ask a rather simple question.

Where do I start to learn to code?

I'm in high school, so I have (some) time to dedicate to it, and it seems there are a plethora of websites/resources out there, so I ask: what do you recommend, and why has it worked for you? I have no prior experience. I believe that this would really help out in the long run, as I will graduate high school with an Associate's Degree in Business. Thank you!

EDIT: Thank you for all your responses! I'll start with Python and move on from there. You guys have been a great help, and I'll vote you up or reply.

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.