Hasta La Gadget!

Note: This article contains disturbing images from the beach at Bodrum that will be upsetting to some readers.

It has already been one year since heart-wrenching photos surfaced of a 3-year-old boy who, forced to flee his home in Syria and subjected to a grueling journey from the Middle East to Europe, was found facedown, washed up on a beach in the Turkish resort town of Bodrum.

The visceral sorrow associated with the images of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body caused a social media firestorm, uniting people in grief. 

Images like these are necessary reminders of what people from countries like Syria face day in and day out. But one snapshot fails to encapsulate just how much of a toll war can take on a country’s citizens, especially its children. 

The Alan phenomenon is not an isolated one. Images of other children have also reverberated across social networks worldwide, like those of Omran Daqneesh, the 5-year-old boy who was photographed on Aug. 17 in the back of an ambulance in Aleppo, Syria, after being rescued from rubble.

The photos of Omran and his older sister, who was also in the ambulance, put another facet of the conflict into perspective. Civilians still stuck in Syria are constantly hammered by airstrikes, while access to medical care has become more and more sparse.

Take, for instance, 11-year-old Yaman Ezzedine, who was dying from meningitis ― a totally curable illness ― in the blockaded city of Madaya because treatment was inaccessible. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent finally evacuated him and a few other children in August after The WorldPost first called attention to his dire condition.

Children in the region are faced with a variety of life-threatening conditions, including renal failure, rheumatic fever, shrapnel wounds, and liver and heart disease. They’ve been reduced to “walking skeletons,” according to testimonies gathered by Amnesty International.

Once children leave Syria as refugees, they’re met with a host of new troubles. The journey from the Middle East to Europe is a grueling one that many, like Alan, don’t survive. More than 3,000 people have already died in the waters between Turkey and Greece this year, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency.

Tens of thousands of these children have lost their parents or become separated from them along the way. Europe has welcomed an unprecedented number of unaccompanied children seeking refuge across the Continent in the last two years, according to Pew Research Center data from May, and many of those are from Syria.

For children who do reach countries like Greece these days, they’re relegated to government-run refugee camps that are lacking in basic services. Since many European countries have shut their borders, Greece has become somewhat of a holding pen for people.

Several organizations are focused on improving the fate of children.

There are about 27,000 refugee children in Greece, Eleonora Mansi, the International Rescue Committee’s child protection manager, told The Huffington Post. The vast majority of them “have experienced traumatic events and violence during [their] journey or back in their country, like the death of some of their parents or relatives.”

The IRC sets up safe spaces in refugee camps across Greece, tailoring activities to different age groups “so children can restart, have a routine, restore their well-being and their normalcy because that’s what they need after so much trauma.”

Children are forced to grow up more quickly, she said, because of the horrors they’ve faced and the new roles they now play in the Greek camps: “Even here they’re expected to support their younger siblings and parents with translation and kind of help parents who have also experienced traumatic events and are less able to provide a caring environment.”

The organization is also working with government partners to find solutions for unaccompanied children, Mansi said, “whether it’s staying [in Greece] and being fostered in a family or moving on and rejoining their families.”

Lucy Carrigan, the IRC’s regional communications officer, fears for the future of these children, even if they’re in good hands.

“We certainly expect that these children will be in Greece certainly for months to come if not longer,” she said. 

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The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we’d shared a bed since they were infants. My daughter was 7 then, my son 3. I got lonely at night. I woke up in the small hours. I felt the coolness of the empty sheet beside me. So I said yes.

Then they decided to stay.

I have a king bed, one of those memory-foam mattresses that doesn’t jiggle as you get in or out. Even if you cleaved it down the middle with a pickax, the thing wouldn’t tremble. It’s practically earthquake-proof. My ex-husband and I chose the mattress together, back when we thought the hefty price tag was worth it because the bed’s 20-year warranty would affect us both. It’s a motionless bed, so I can creep in after the kids are sleeping and wriggle between them without waking them up. (Usually there’s also a pug dog on the bed, sometimes turning around in circles as he tries to settle his body comfortably on my daughter’s face.)

After the kids are sleeping is key to this routine: My mental tranquility depends on the two free, private hours between their bedtime and mine, hours I like to spend with wine or food, TV shows or novels, sometimes a phone call involving language that’s probably inappropriate for innocents to overhear. The moment when they fall asleep has always been a great liberator.

But once I go to bed myself, I love the company. I love the heap of dreaming mammals. And I’m well aware that childhood has an end.

It turns out, though, that I don’t sleep so well in the heap, though it took me a surprisingly long time to notice. I can be pretty dense about my own basic needs, when my focus is getting through the many small tasks of a day’s work and a day’s caretaking. My daughter lies motionless and contained as she sleeps; my son thrashes and hugs me and digs sharp little toes into my flesh. Once I woke up to find both his feet down the back of my pajama pants. That didn’t seem right. (Apparently his feet get cold. I try to make him wear socks to bed, but in the morning I tend to find them shucked, balled up in the covers.)

So recently I bought a device to monitor my sleeping patterns. “1.5 hours of deep sleep,” it told me again and again, after an eight-hour stretch. “3.5 hours of interrupted sleep.” I’m no mathematician, but I was pretty sure that didn’t add up to eight.

This year I noticed: I’m 47. When I get up in the morning, patterns of blankets and pillowcases are imprinted on my skin, and unlike when I was in my 20s and 30s, the patterns can take hours, not minutes, to fade. I walk into the office or take my son into school and there’s a flower on my cheek I wasn’t born with. A certain beloved shag pillow that sometimes gets crushed against me leaves a field of indentations that frightens casual observers, resembling some dread affliction that might be contagious. Then there are the under-eye shadows, two dark sides of the moon.

And the children are 12 and 8. I can almost hear the challenge from Child Protective Services. I picture an unannounced home visit. “Ma’am. Is there a teenager in your bed?”

Also, after a half-decade dry spell there’s an adult I wouldn’t mind sleeping next to, and though he lives on the other side of the country, he may someday visit. I’m not always astute about the subtleties of interpersonal dynamics, but my suspicion is, king or no king, that overnight might work out better minus children. (There’s not much I can do about the dog, though. Pugs are creatures of habit.)

Some breathing room is called for—mine as well as theirs.

So first it was one night a week in their own beds, then two, and now we’re up to three, with four on the schedule for next month. I’m pretty excited about four. They spend one night with their father most weeks, so four often means five, and five means well-rested. Five means I may even crack a smile before my coffee. Possibly.

In the meantime, when they’re not there, it feels like there’s space in the bed, and I have room to move and stretch out my limbs. There’s a sense of luxury. And privacy. No one can see me! Other times it just feels like emptiness. Invisibility. No one can see me.

Will it always be just me from now on, I wonder, when I wake up to no sound at all at 2 in the morning? Silence stretches around me. Will it always be me alone on this wide expanse of memory foam? A man in his own bed thousands of miles away, a girl and a boy, in their separate rooms, growing up and apart?

Maybe.

Or maybe not. Either way it’s my bed now. The 20-year warranty is mine alone. And the nights are my own. I can choose to feel the luxury of space or the emptiness of solitude. It isn’t so bad, having that choice.

Lydia Millet is the author of Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Mermaids in Paradise and Magnificence.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

According to an earlier report from Reuters, it was suggested that Google had shelved Project Ara, which for those unfamiliar was their plan to create a modular phone. So far everything had been moving along slowly but steadily, and there were even plans to commercialize it in 2017, but obviously that is no longer happening.

The folks at 9to5Google have since reached out to Dan Makoski, the former head of design at Google ATAP and who is also the founder of Project Ara, to get his thoughts on the matter. According to Makoski, “It’s disappointing to the teams who have worked so hard to make it real, disheartening to the developers hoping to bring their innovations to life, and frustrating to the fans across the world who were so eager to have Ara in their hands.”

He adds, “I’m personally saddened at the lack of courage to take it across the finish line, but I know and respect Rick Osterloh. He was one of the few executives who encouraged me when I first pitched the idea, and trust that he has good reasons to postpone.” Makoski also expressed that modularity is not a fad.

In fact in Reuters’ article, they claimed that Google won’t be letting Project Ara just die out, and could be looking at licensing out its technology to other companies, thus letting the concept of modular smartphones live on.

Project Ara’s Founder Speaks Up On Its Reported Closure , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The only problem with VR headsets like the HTC Vive is that it is wired. This means that it needs a wire to be connected to the PC, which in turn means that with regards to mobility, there are some limitations in place. Like you can’t walk or wander too far unless you want to rip the wire out of its socket.

However it seems that this problem is currently being addressed. According to a report from Shack News, it turns out that there is a wireless HTC Vive prototype that is in the works that could be unveiled this coming fall. This prototype is said to be a joint venture between Valve and Quark VR.

According to Georgi Georgiev, a Quark VR co-founder, “Getting the experience to feel seamless through Wi-Fi, keeping in mind the inevitable connection delay, was a huge challenge, but we’re getting extremely close to being able to show it in action.” Unfortunately we’re not sure how long it would take the prototype to become a commercial reality, but we guess at the very least something is being done about it.

There is also no word on when the prototype will be shown off, but the report does say that it should be arriving this fall, so we guess we’ll just have to keep an eye out for it.

Wireless HTC Vive Prototype To Be Shown Off This Fall , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Dell has revealed a 13-, 15- and 17-inch lineup of thinner, VR-ready Alienware laptops that pack new designs and whiz-bang eye-tracking features. For gamers, the main attraction is support for the latest NVIDIA laptop cards. The big-screen Alienware…