richardmurray

I saw this posted somewhere online

THE FOLLOWING IS MY REPLY

 

To me, the issue you raise is powerful. To be blunt, many in the industry, many fans, many et cetera oppose aging of characters in general and want ways to avoid aging, ala alternate worlds and dimension jumps because a central idea exists in comics in the usa. A comic imprint losses money if the title character is aged out. I will restate, taking away characters who were written long lived naturally, like kal-el or diana or thor or silver silver or similar in the us comic book world, can the comic book imprints of aquaman/batman/flash/greenlantern/shazzam/green arrow/zatana...spider man/wolverine/iron man/daredevil/hulk/captainamerica/luke cage survive if the characters naturally moved on and were replaced by this thing called time? I say yes. The problem is, most in the industry, most of their imbalanced research, many fans <can't say most> say no. Thus, the age problem in the usa comics industry. I argue, when we talk about characters changing in comics, that the absence of them changing naturally with time aids in their inability to be changed well culturally. I will end with Milestone. One of my biggest sadnesses is that Milestone chose that same model when they restarted their comics. I wish I had power or control to demand they continue those comics from when they stopped. Why not an older icon and rocket, with rocket who is human, not an older woman with a mature child. maybe she has already passed the mantle of rocket to her child. I think that is an interesting story, of an extraterrestrial , convinced to be a superhero by a human and continuing to be a superhero with the child of the human who convinced him , who he helped raise. I like that idea. No need for a reboot. What about a Hardware who is still working for alva industries but is a shareholder publicly, while privately still the superhero. What does that mean when one achieves a level of freedom as an engineer, which si what I felt hardware was about , but is not older and settled in? who are his villains? what about a family? What about an older static? living on his own? maybe a family? does he leave dakota? static was a teenager, does he leave dakota? What about hsi relationship to being a superhero? when I think of child actors and how many do not end up actors, I think that rejection of ones childhood job is alive with static. Shadow Cabinet is obvious? what intelligence agency ever stays the same over time. If anything the question is, where are the original members and how did they survive or get killed.? Xombi is much like the hulk in one way. How can a human man, with a condition that grants a sort of immortality survive as an outcast in humanity, forever, at some point, this human must be healed or this human must exist as an outcast on their own accord in the truest sense. And that connect to the natural immortals i mentioned above, at some point, they should , I have to leave? I never forget being told by a reader to a story I wrote, that superheroes don't want to give up superheroing? And I still think that is a false mentality. Just cause one has powers means they are infatuated with being a superhero. I think that is a lie, and explains the problem in superheroes is readership views towards what it means to be a superhero.. continuing... Kobalt, like any vigilante ala the punisher, suffers the most storywise. how does a street hero not get killed over time more quickly? i am not suggesting someone else can not pick up the mantle, but kobalt, punisher, come on, they haven't been injured very badly at least, in their entire tenure as a street hero? come one. And lastly, my favorite Milestone imprint, blood syndicate... What about blood syndicate! as an older gang ? the city has allowed this section of the city to be operated by them eternally. the bureaucracy of a city and their illegal existence alone demands a very lively existence that can't just be sunday mornings with the super villains for decades. so, time matters. I oppose faux immortality in my stories and I reject it when I appreciate others.

The Designer Of The NES Dishes The Dirt On Nintendo's Early Days

Masayuki Uemura demonstrates a Famicom at Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters on July 1, 1985.
Photo: The Asahi Shimbun (Getty Images) ByMatt Alt 7/07/20 5:00PM 

When discussing Nintendo’s rise as a digital dreamsmith in the ‘80s, game designers like Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi get most of the limelight. But it was the hardware designed by Masayuki Uemura that served up their fantasies to millions around the globe.

I spent 2019 criss-crossing Japan researching my book Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World, in search of the country’s architects of cool. In March of that year I came face-to-face with a true legend: Masayuki Uemura, the engineer who designed Nintendo’s first cartridge-based game system, the Family Computer, aka the Famicom, aka the Nintendo Entertainment System.

With a design based on the arcade hardware that powered Donkey Kong, the Famicom quickly revolutionized home gaming in Japan when it was released in 1983. As the NES, it revitalized the home video game market in the United States after the Atari market crashed. From then on, it proceeded to deliver a steady stream of Japanese fantasies into the hearts and minds of people around the world. It’s hard to imagine a world today without Uemura’s machine.

Masayuki Uemura joined Nintendo in 1972. Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor and toy designer whose products like the Ultra Hand had transformed Nintendo from a humble maker of hanafuda, Japanese playing cards, into a well-known toy and game company, recruited Uemura away from his previous employer, the electronics company Hayakawa Electric, known today as Sharp. Uemura retired from Nintendo in 2004, and currently serves as the director for the Center for Game Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. The university’s leaf-covered Kinugasa campus is a quiet oasis in what is—or was, before COVID-19—a bustling and tourist-packed city. It is also a 10-minute walk from the ancient Zen rock garden of Ryoan-ji temple, whose evocatively arranged boulders and artfully raked gravel seem to me one of Japan’s earliest “virtual realities.”

Departments that teach students how to make video games abound in higher education today, but the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies is one of only a handful of academic efforts specifically designed to preserve home video gaming equipment and ephemera. Its archives contain everything from early home versions of Pong to the latest consoles, every controller variation under the sun, and an ever-expanding library of software on tapes, cartridges, and discs. The packed shelves of its climate-controlled storage facility look like something out of a kid’s dream, organized with the obsessive rigor of the Library of Congress. The scent in the air is that paper from countless magazines and strategy guides, tinged with the nostalgic ozone smell of vintage electronics.

Uemura was 75 years old at the time of our interview, but seemed much younger. A benefit of a life spent making playthings for the world? Whatever the case, there is no mistaking the amusement and restless curiosity in Uemura’s eyes as we sit down over a round of Famicom Donkey Kong to talk about the little beige and burgundy machine that touched so many lives.

 

< Interview> 

 

Kotaku: What was Nintendo like when you joined the company?

 

Masayuki Uemura: One of the things that surprised me when I moved from Sharp to Nintendo was that, while they didn’t have a development division, they had this kind of development warehouse full of toys, almost all of them American.

 

Kotaku: What were your impressions of Nintendo’s former president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who ran the firm from 1949 to 2002?

 

Uemura: He loved hanafuda and card games. I remember once, early on, a birthday party for an employee and he showed up and got right into hanafuda with everyone.

He was a Kyotoite. It’s a city with a lot of long-running businesses, some maybe five or even six hundred years old. In the hierarchy of the city, traditional craftspeople rank at the top. Nintendo, as a purveyor of playthings like hanafuda or Western playing cards, originally ranked down at the very bottom. Doing business in that environment made him very open to new ventures. He wasn’t interested in specializing. He was keenly interested in new trends.

Here’s an example of what I mean. In 1978, he bought around 10 tabletop versions of Space Invaders and placed them in headquarters and our factory. The idea was that we’d playtest them as a form of research. But what ended up happening was the entire company got so obsessed playing it that we couldn’t get a turn in. It was like a fever. Everyone abandoned their posts and stopped working. I was just bummed out that we hadn’t made it ourselves. Shocked and annoyed [laughs].

 

Kotaku: Did you feel behind the curve compared to other game companies back then? 

 

Uemura: In the 70s, we had no idea what was going on with companies like Namco or Atari because we were here in Kyoto. If you lived in Tokyo, you’d probably pick up lots of things about companies like Taito or Sega or Namco or even what was happening in America. But none of that filtered down to Kyoto at all. That’s Kyoto for you—a little standoffish, going its own way, and proud of it. To a certain degree, not even caring about the outside world. A little conservative when it comes to new things. When I worked for Sharp, I took many business trips to Tokyo. But when I started working for Nintendo, that completely stopped. It’s pretty shocking when I think back on it, but Kyoto has always been kind of closed off that way. So no, there wasn’t any sense of us being behind.

 

Kotaku: I’ve heard that the atmosphere inside the company was very competitive, with a big rivalry between Nintendo’s two R&D divisions.

 

Uemura: There wasn’t really any R&D 1 and 2! It was just Yokoi and Uemura. There wasn’t any rivalry! Yokoi found me and recruited me to Nintendo; he was my senpai. It was Yamauchi who set us up as rivals. It was symbolic, which is important in any corporate organization. That’s why he created R&D 1 and 2.

 

Kotaku: How did the Famicom project come about?

 

Uemura: It started with a phone call in 1981. President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges. He always liked to call me after he’d had a few drinks, so I didn’t think much of it. I just said, “Sure thing, boss,” and hung up. It wasn’t until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, “That thing we talked about—you’re on it?” that it hit me: He was serious.

 

Kotaku: Were you influenced by other companies’ machines?

 

Uemura: No. I mean, after I got the order I bought every single one, took them apart, analyzed them piece by piece. I looked at the chipsets, saw what CPUs they used, checked out the patents, all of it. That took about six months. Most of it I did myself, but I did have some help from outside resources, people who worked at semiconductor companies. I looked into Atari’s [2600] machine, of course—it was the biggest—and the Magnavox machine. Because those two were the biggest hits, and Atari’s biggest of all.

 

Kotaku: How did you analyze rivals’ game consoles?

 

Uemura: I had a semiconductor manufacturer dissolve the plastic covering on the chips to expose the wiring underneath. I took pictures, blew them up, and looked at the circuitry to understand it. I had some experience with arcade games, and right away I knew that none of what I was looking at would be any help in designing a new home system. They simply didn’t have expressive enough graphics. They had a monopoly on patents for them, circuit structures and features such as scrolling. And they were simply old-fashioned. That’s why I couldn’t use anything from them.

 

Kotaku: Did America’s game industry crash scare you?

 

Uemura: Japan didn’t really experience a video game industry crash like America did. What we had was an LCD game crash. They stopped selling at right around the same time—Christmas of 1983.

 

Kotaku: In US the crash made the very concept of games taboo in the industry for a while. What about Japan?

 

Uemura: In Japan, the issue was that toy stores didn’t know how to carry them. Toy stores didn’t carry televisions. So they didn’t see game systems as things they should carry, either. That’s why a lot of companies tried positioning their products as educational products, with keyboards, more like PCs than game systems. The thinking in the industry was that was the only way to go, back then. The only way to sell a video game was showing it on a screen, and it was a big ask of toy stores, making them purchase TVs. LCD games had their own screens; you could just put them out and they’d sell themselves.

 

Kotaku: Is that why you chose to style the Famicom more like a toy?

 

Uemura: It was less of a choice and more that this was the way it had to be.

 

Kotaku: Why is that?

 

Uemura: Because that was the cheapest way to do it [laughs]. The colors were based on a scarf Yamauchi liked. True story. There was also a product from a company called DX Antenna, a set-top TV antenna, that used the color scheme. I recall riding with Yamauchi on the Hanshin expressway outside of Osaka and seeing a billboard for it, and Yamauchi saying, “That’s it! Those are our colors!” Just like the scarf. We’d struggled with the color scheme. We knew what the shape would be, but couldn’t figure out what colors to make it. Then the DX Antenna’s colors decided it. So while it ended up looking very toy-like, that wasn’t the intent. The idea was making it stand out.

 

Kotaku: And it did. Were you surprised when it became a societal phenomenon?

 

Uemura: I didn’t have time to be surprised! When it really took off, I was totally focused on making the NES for the American market, and also on making the Disk System. I had my hands full. And we were swamped with defective returns. At first we had a very high percentage of defective machines being returned to us. We were just getting so many returns, far more than anything we’d ever seen before. That’s when I realized just how many people out there were playing with them; there hadn’t ever been a system this popular before. That was about the time Super Mario Bros. came out, 1985. Everyone in the company realized we were going to be swamped. Super Mario was fuel on the fire of the fad.

 

Kotaku: Mario arguably became even more of a phenomenon than the Famicom itself.

 

Uemura: Super Mario Bros. was the first to really bring a kawaii perspective to game characters. Actually, Donkey Kong was first to do it, in the arcades, and it established that unique sense of design. Until that point, most games followed the arcade style of shooting game design. Super Mario is often cited as the very first game to connect that style of cute character and cute music together. I’m not sure who specifically on Miyamoto’s team connected the dots, but that’s what happened. Probably Miyamoto himself.

 

Kotaku: After Nintendo went from 3rd or 4th place to 1st in the ‘80s, was there a sense things changed, among people inside the company?

 

Uemura: No! We’re in Kyoto [laughs].

Well, my salary went up. That’s a fact. So I was getting paid more, but the flip side was my job got a lot harder. President Yamauchi’s attitude played a big part in this, but my feeling was one of “seize the day.” Just go for it. You have to remember, there was a time, after Donkey Kong, that we really didn’t make another game for about two years. Well, not exactly, but pretty much. That’s the period Super Mario Bros. was being developed. That game basically ended up including everything and the kitchen sink, gameplay-wise.

 

Kotaku: What led to the decision to export the Famicom abroad?

 

Uemura: There’s a rule in the game industry that fads last for three years. That’s why President Yamauchi targeted America—to get around that. The prevailing sense at the time was that television games would fade into history as they were replaced by personal computers. So we were shocked that the fad kept going. It was Kudo-san, the president of a company named Hudson, one of the Famicom’s first licensees, who said to Yamauchi, “this is a culture.” Yamauchi was like, “What are you talking about?”

 

Kotaku: Japanese games swept the globe starting in the late 70s: Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. Why do you think this made-in-Japan culture resonated with people all over the world?

 

Uemura: Actually, that’s what I want to ask you [laughs].

Super Mario Bros. isn’t set in Japan, but the character’s Japanese. The name Mario sounds Italian, but he isn’t Italian. They were really able to capture that ambiguity. The number of dots you could use to draw the characters was extremely limited, so Miyamoto was forced to use colors to differentiate them. He spent a lot of time working on the colors. In the end, it became the template for how a designer might express themselves through a game. It was a whole new world.

Until video games became able to portray characters, they were nothing more than strategy games like shogi or chess. Once hardware developed to the point where you could actually draw characters, designers had to figure out what to make. Subconsciously they turned to things they’d absorbed from anime and manga. We were sort of blessed in the sense that foreigners hadn’t seen the things we were basing our ideas on.

 

The Designer Of The NES Dishes The Dirt On Nintendo's Early Days (kotaku.com)

Legend Collage

 

zenith power- audio
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRXjzRo0lUkjXu2klky1XijDDmyhAQ5Mqle3M6OBvjQFAcv5tja-8_uDvBulO-5oV1BeX28kyMzLH7a/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

Zenith power- text
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRUwzS9fkJK_I_Im_hjAAntAiCUn7T8eVoJ7OVwjRWZYC_yj5jvCKGpC4uiPsA1gfz1crgtaJnv7YHN/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

legend- scroll
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9kLdUeVEb5LdICS3Tu5zE-TOJ4iOla-8HtNd6ekgpioloWoK0OUhTGVK4K-3zBiI2hyRKJmDNPr07/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

legend - no scroll
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSwqhkCrZ00Uvkzv_6ICHQYRTJnmOsOTKSyXDdAN9oTsqqPMtRoZ_GVMy0F_DIFjqXuLBXWg04M7REL/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

Zenith Power Collage

 

zenith power- audio
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRXjzRo0lUkjXu2klky1XijDDmyhAQ5Mqle3M6OBvjQFAcv5tja-8_uDvBulO-5oV1BeX28kyMzLH7a/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

Zenith power- text
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRUwzS9fkJK_I_Im_hjAAntAiCUn7T8eVoJ7OVwjRWZYC_yj5jvCKGpC4uiPsA1gfz1crgtaJnv7YHN/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

legend- scroll
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9kLdUeVEb5LdICS3Tu5zE-TOJ4iOla-8HtNd6ekgpioloWoK0OUhTGVK4K-3zBiI2hyRKJmDNPr07/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

legend - no scroll
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSwqhkCrZ00Uvkzv_6ICHQYRTJnmOsOTKSyXDdAN9oTsqqPMtRoZ_GVMy0F_DIFjqXuLBXWg04M7REL/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

 

One black wins and that is enough.. One black becomes president, one black becomes a billionaire, one black becomes a mayor. One black false accusation gets overturned. 

It is amazing how the black community in the usa has positive news dominated by individual results. 

It is never the black community gets and all black people can have something tangible, it is always a black individual gets and all black people need to cheer for them. 

A California court just returned real estate it took from a Black family in 1924. It could be the beginning of a wave of redistribution.
Jason Lalljee Dec 6, 2021, 5:46 PM
The Bruce family is getting their land back. It's the first time Black Americans have successfully reclaimed land that the government took from them, raising hopes for families like them who have lost their homes throughout US history.

The family is retrieving ownership through a law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in September. In 1924, the city of Manhattan Beach used eminent domain to seize land from the Bruces, Newsom's office says. Eminent domain is a law that allows the government to take land that is privately owned and re-appropriate it for public use. The process involves compensation for the previous landowners, but they are otherwise given no choice in surrendering their property. 

Newsom signed the land over to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, who left Manhattan Beach after facing racial harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and their white neighbors in the early 1900s. Willa and Charles turned the property into the first resort for Black people on the West Coast, calling it "Bruce's Lodge," when segregation kept them out of most other beaches. 

The KKK tried to burn the resort down. White Manhattan Beach residents harassed the resort's customers. 
The city seized the land, claiming that they wanted to turn it into a public park — they never did. It remained as an empty plot before being transferred to the state, then LA County. 

The Manhattan Beach government explicitly acknowledged the racist motive for seizing the Bruce's Lodge twenty years later in an article by one of the city council members who voted to take it, Frank Doherty, for the Redondo Reflex newspaper. 

"We thought that the Negro problem was going to stop our progress," he wrote in 1945. "We had to acquire these two blocks to solve the problem, so we voted to condemn them and make a city park there. We had to protect ourselves."

Barriers still exist to reclaiming Black land nationwide
The Bruce family's landmark case is inspiring others who hope it acts as a precedent. Experts say that proving original ownership, however, may be a fraught challenge. 
Kavon Ward, the co-founder of the group Where is My Land, helped lead the fight on behalf of the Bruce family. She told The Washington Post on Monday that she's heard from more than 100 people ready to argue that they have a rightful claim to property that's not currently theirs. 

The Bruce's Manhattan Beach land was relatively clear-cut — their historical claim to the property was well-documented through their resort and the violence they faced. Few other cases are supported by written history. 

The historical seizure of Black property rests at the center of contemporary disparities between Black and white wealth in the US. In the first quarter of 2020, 44% of Black households owned their homes, according to the US Census Bureau, while 73.7% of white families owned theirs. That gap is worse in individual cities — only about 25% of Black families in Minneapolis own their homes, for instance, according to a study by Redfin.  

The typical Black family only has about 10% the wealth of the average White family, according to the 
Federal Reserve
. Phenomena such as redlining, blockbusting — whose impacts still linger even after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — are also responsible for the way that Black homeownership and wealth have stagnated in the US. 
When it comes to eminent domain, that kind of relationship with formerly Black-owned land lingers in plain sight: even our most sprawling national icons, like Central Park in Manhattan, aren't immune. 
https://www.businessinsider.com/california-gives-land-back-to-black-family-raising-hopes-others-2021-12
 

 

Watch a Never-Before-Aired James Baldwin Interview From 1979
Buried by ABC at the time, the segment reveals a unique glimpse into Baldwin’s private life—as well as his resounding criticism about white fragility, as blisteringly relevant today as it was in 1979.
By Adrienne Westenfeld < https://twitter.com/adriennemwest >

When Lovett received the assignment, he was excited to meet one of his heroes: “I had been reading [Baldwin] since I was a teenager. I thought he was brilliant and brave and speaking to the moment of history that we were all living in. I was thrilled; I was beyond thrilled.”
Lovett and his crew arrived early, woke Baldwin, shared breakfast with him, and rolled the cameras before Baldwin, a heavy drinker, had a chance to imbibe. “He hadn’t had a drop to drink and he was brilliant, utterly brilliant,” Lovett said. “We couldn’t have been happier. He was such an eloquent, masterful speaker, with such a great mind. It was such a privilege.”

 

Conducted by the late Sylvia Chase, the interview took place at 137 West 71st Street—the Manhattan apartment building Baldwin bought for himself and his family in 1965, following the success of his early books. It showcases rare footage of Baldwin relaxed and gregarious at home, surrounded by a large and close-knit family. In a private conversation with Baldwin’s mother, Emma Berdis Baldwin, in the kitchen of her apartment, Chase asked if she always knew that her son would be a wildly successful writer; Baldwin's mother responded, “I didn’t think that. But I knew that he had to write.”

The segment also takes viewers behind the scenes of Baldwin’s play, The Amen Corner; during a rehearsal for the Lincoln Center production, Baldwin is shown beaming as he watches the performers. The production was produced and directed by Val Gray Ward, founder of Kuumba Theater, who is featured in the clip along with her Kuumba cast. To see Baldwin laughing and smiling in the thick of rehearsal is a welcome, joyful sight. Yet it’s his words about white fragility and white fear that rise above the 1979 milieu, remaining achingly relevant all these years later.

“White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness,” Baldwin said. “They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here. They know that, and they’re telling me lies. They’re telling me and my children nothing but lies.”

The far-ranging interview was a resounding success, and Lovett was eager to see it air. Yet as he was called away on other assignments, including interviewing Michael Jackson, nothing came of the Baldwin segment. When he inquired about the delay, ABC reported that it had been scrapped, because, “Who wants to listen to a Black gay has-been?”

“I was stunned,” Lovett said. “I was absolutely stunned, because in my mind, James Baldwin was no has-been. He was a classic American writer, translated into every language in the world, who would live on forever, and indeed he has. His courage and his eloquence continue to inspire us today.”

In a portion of the segment filmed at the Police Athletic League’s Harlem Center, Baldwin addressed a group of student reporters, telling one young student, “Nobody wants a writer until he’s dead.” Uncovering this interview over forty years later, Baldwin’s unnerving words seem frighteningly prescient. Lovett will discuss the 20/20 segment further on June 24 at 8:00 PM, when he moderates a free virtual panel titled James Baldwin: Race, Media, and Psychoanalysis, featuring psychoanalysts Annie Lee Jones and Victor P. Bonfilio, as well as Aisha Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s niece. RSVP here to help Baldwin’s legacy live on.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a36727428/james-baldwin-1979-abc-interview-buried-surfaced/

 

as a harlemite, whose bloodline has been in harlem long before I was born, I admit, I wish, black people will stop. HArlem isn't a black community anymore. Yes, Black people live here, but this community is mixed and going to white. it isn't black and I think people in media, black people in media, like to do what to many of the remaining black people in harlem like to do, and that is hang on to a former time... and in historical defense, harlem has been many things, before it was a black community, it was a white one, the white community version of harlem had four versions. Originally it was the defensive fort for manhattan. One of the last battles of the secessionary war, called the revolutionary war was in harlem. Then it became farmland, as a subset for the Bronx, which was the main granary of the city, owned by the brunkz family. then it became urbanized for the top rich ala the polo grounds or some of the homes in harlem's structure or appearance and then it was for the european immigrant in particular italians and jews of europe. And, before it was white, it was part of the lenape people's cyclic living where they found rare herbs on the island of manhattan. So, I am not bitter that harlem is not black today, but it isn't and I find the need for black people in media, as meagan good does in the article to evangelize a former community is... dysfunctional. ... to that end, I hope the show does well. Love the cast, pretty black women all, great supporting cast. Hope the stories speak well to black women in particular.

IN AMENDMENT

Yes, HArlem still has sexy black women walking around. What people have to comprehend about Harlem is its black populace at one time was the full length of black financial existence. Black people with money , more than most black people will know have lived in harlem. Louis Armstrong or Jackie Robinson or Sugar Ray Robinson lived in Harlem. So, Harlem has always been a home to the Black Statian financial one percent and for them HArlem has been unchanged, cause they weren't the ones kicked out. 

IN AMENDMENT 2

The executive producers are Pharell Williams and AMy Poehler, Pharell williams is from the south. His idea of HArlem is not a Harlemite's idea. And AMy Poehler is white and probably has a vision of harlem from the fiscally well to do from a black perspective blacks that historically hang around whites more. And meagan good is from L.A. and her father was a cop. what do any of these people know about Harlem? 

Ah well, what the hell.

I am willing to say I rather they chose PArk WIndsor Hills in Los Angeles? why not?  

 

Meagan Good and the Cast of am*zon Prime Video's New Series 'Harlem' Pay Homage to the Historic Black Community (blackenterprise.com)

 

 

 

 

Well... it is another Friday, another day to love, to Oxum, Oshun, Freya, or Venus, another day to Kizomba!
SOmetimes, you just dance to have fun and we see that in Irina dancing side José N'dongala, I love how the camera moved when he tried a trick. PErhaps it is the heat, but complicated motions and trained moves is just not what the weather is due.

 

Emotions of Princess Candace 
< check out the "Princess Candace and Prince Menelik" gallery for more content> 

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Emotions-of-Princess-Candace-899748611

Princess Candace in Purple Puff land < check out the "Princess Candace and Prince Menelik" gallery for more content> 
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Princess-Candace-TofuChrissa-submission-899748285

The DeviantArt Holiday Card Project is back! Create a digital holiday card for a hospital patient and receive 300 fragments — equivalent to a one-month Core Membership!

Since 2004, the DeviantArt Holiday Card Project has led the DeviantArt community to use its artistic talents to design and create uplifting, physical greeting cards for hospital patients during the holiday season. To date, over 32,000 cards have been distributed to patients around the globe. For 2021, given the impact of COVID-19 and in the interest of public health, DeviantArt has opted to make the project digital!

Create a card and submit it to DeviantArt with the tag #DAHolidayCardProject2021 so it can be collected and distributed to hospitals. Digital cards can be shared with many patients, giving your kind gesture an even greater impact. In the spirit of spreading joy and kindness, every Project participant will also receive 300 fragments that can be used to grant badges to deviations or comments you love — meaning participants can give a one-month Core Membership to others!

MORE INFORMATION AT THE FOLLOWING LINK
https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/Holiday-Card-Project-2021-899312819

 

In Amendment:

an interesting essay on lone wolf and cub https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4287-samurai-and-son-the-lone-wolf-and-cub-saga

 

Title: See the world in my way- day of the deviant2021
Artist: Richard Murray
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/See-the-world-in-my-way-day-of-the-deviant2021-899560350

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms
 View ORCID ProfileSam Kriegman,  View ORCID ProfileDouglas Blackiston,  View ORCID ProfileMichael Levin, and Josh Bongard
aAllen Discovery Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155;
bWyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115;
cDepartment of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405

PNAS December 7, 2021 118 (49) e2112672118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118
Edited by Terrence J. Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved October 22, 2021 (received for review July 9, 2021)

Significance
Almost all organisms replicate by growing and then shedding offspring. Some molecules also replicate, but by moving rather than growing: They find and combine building blocks into self-copies. Here we show that clusters of cells, if freed from a developing organism, can similarly find and combine loose cells into clusters that look and move like they do, and that this ability does not have to be specifically evolved or introduced by genetic manipulation. Finally, we show that artificial intelligence can design clusters that replicate better, and perform useful work as they do so. This suggests that future technologies may, with little outside guidance, become more useful as they spread, and that life harbors surprising behaviors just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered.

Abstract
All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.

Like the other necessary abilities life must possess to survive, replication has evolved into many diverse forms: fission, budding, fragmentation, spore formation, vegetative propagation, parthenogenesis, sexual reproduction, hermaphroditism, and viral propagation. These diverse processes however share a common property: all involve growth within or on the body of the organism. In contrast, a non–growth-based form of self-replication dominates at the subcellular level: molecular machines assemble material in their external environment into functional self-copies directly, or in concert with other machines. Such kinematic replication has never been observed at higher levels of biological organization, nor was it known whether multicellular systems were even capable of it.

Despite this lack, organisms do possess deep reservoirs of adaptive potential at all levels of organization, allowing for manual or automated interventions that deflect development toward biological forms and functions different from wild type (1), including the growth and maintenance of organs independent of their host organism (2⇓–4), or unlocking regenerative capacity (5⇓–7). Design, if framed as morphological reconfiguration, can reposition biological tissues or redirect self-organizing processes to new stable forms without recourse to genomic editing or transgenes (8). Recent work has shown that individual, genetically unmodified prospective skin (9) and heart muscle (10) cells, when removed from their native embryonic microenvironments and reassembled, can organize into stable forms and behaviors not exhibited by the organism from which the cells were taken, at any point in its natural life cycle. We show here that if cells are similarly liberated, compressed, and placed among more dissociated cells that serve as feedstock, they can exhibit kinematic self-replication, a behavior not only absent from the donating organism but from every other known plant or animal. Furthermore, replication does not evolve in response to selection pressures, but arises spontaneously over 5 d given appropriate initial and environmental conditions.
 

Results
Pluripotent stem cells were collected from the animal pole of Xenopus laevis embryos (SI Appendix, Fig. S1A), raised for 24 h in 14 °C mild saline solution. These excised cells, if left together as an animal cap (11) (SI Appendix, Fig. S1 A and or brought back in contact after dissociation (12) (SI Appendix, Fig. S1 C and D), naturally adhere and differentiate into a spheroid of epidermis covered by ciliated epithelium (13, 14) over 5 d (9) (SI Appendix, section S1 and Fig. 1A). The resulting wild-type reconfigurable organisms move using multiciliated cells present along their surface (which generate flow through the coordinated beating of hair-like projections) and typically follow helical trajectories through an aqueous solution for a period of 10 to 14 d before shedding cells and deteriorating as their maternally provided energy stores are depleted.

 

Fig. 1.
Spontaneous kinematic self-replication. (A) Stem cells are removed from early-stage frog blastula, dissociated, and placed in a saline solution, where they cohere into spheres containing ∼3,000 cells. The spheres develop cilia on their outer surfaces after 3 d. When the resulting mature swarm is placed amid ∼60,000 dissociated stem cells in a 60-mm-diameter circular dish (B), their collective motion pushes some cells together into piles (C and D), which, if sufficiently large (at least 50 cells), develop into ciliated offspring (E) themselves capable of swimming, and, if provided additional dissociated stem cells (F), build additional offspring. In short, progenitors (p) build offspring (o), which then become progenitors. This process can be disrupted by withholding additional dissociated cells. Under these, the currently best known environmental conditions, the system naturally self-replicates for a maximum of two rounds before halting. The probability of halting (α) or replicating( 1 − α) depends on a temperature range suitable for frog embryos, the concentration of dissociated cells, the number and stochastic behavior of the mature organisms, the viscosity of the solution, the geometry of the dish’s surface, and the possibility of contamination. (Scale bars, 500 μm.)

 

Previous studies reported spontaneous aggregation of artificial particles by groups of wild-type self-organizing (9) and artificial intelligence (AI)–designed (10) reconfigurable organisms: the particles were gathered and compressed as a side effect of their movement. Here, kinematic self-replication was achieved by replacing the synthetic particles in the arena with dissociated X. laevis stem cells as follows.

When 12 wild-type reconfigurable organisms are placed in a Petri dish amid dissociated stem cells (Fig. 1B), their combined movement reaggregates some of the dissociated cells into piles (Fig. 1 C and D). Piled cells adhere, compact, and over 5 d, develop into more ciliated spheroids (Fig. 1E) also capable of self-propelled movement. These offspring are then separated from their progenitor spheroids and placed in a new Petri dish containing additional dissociated stem cells (Fig. 1F). There, offspring spheroids build further piles, which mature into a new generation of motile spheroids (Movie S1).

In four of five independent trials using densities of 25 to 150 cells/mm2, wild-type reconfigurable organisms kinematically self-replicated only one generation. In the fifth trial, two generations were achieved. Each successive generation, the size and number of offspring decreased until offspring were too small to develop into self-motile organisms, and replication halted.

To determine if offspring were indeed built by the kinematics of progenitor organisms rather than just fluid dynamics and self-assembly, the dissociated stem cells were observed alone without the progenitors. With no progenitor organisms present, no offspring self-assembled at any of the stem cell concentrations tested (SI Appendix, Fig. S2E).

 

Kinematic Self-Replication.
Given their rapid loss of replicative ability, reconfigurable organisms can be viewed as autonomous but partially functioning machines potentially amenable to improvement. Autonomous machines that replicate kinematically by combining raw materials into independent functional self-copies have long been known to be theoretically possible (15). Since then, kinematic replicators have been of use for reasoning about abiogenesis, but they have also been of engineering interest: If physical replicators could be designed to perform useful work as a side effect of replication, and sufficient building material were discoverable or provided, the replicators would be collectively capable of exponential utility over time, with only a small initial investment in progenitor machine design, manufacture, and deployment. To that end, computational (16⇓–18), mechanical (19), and robotic (20⇓⇓–23) self-replicators have been built, but to date, all are made from artificial materials and are manually designed. Kinematic self-replication may also, in contrast to growth-based biological forms of reproduction, offer many options for automated improvement due to its unique reliance on self-movement. If progenitor machines could be automatically designed, it may become possible to automatically improve machine replication fidelity (24), increase or alter the utility performed as a side effect of replication, allow replication to feed on more atomic materials (25), control replication speed and spread, and extend the number of replication cycles before the system suffers a loss of replicative ability. We introduce an AI method here that can indeed extend replication cycles by designing the shape of the progenitor reconfigurable organisms.

Amplifying Kinematic Self-Replication.
Determining sufficient conditions for self-replication requires substantial effort and resources. Each round of replication takes 1 wk, and regular media changes are required to minimize contamination. Thus, an evolutionary algorithm was developed and combined with a physics simulator to seek conditions likely to yield increased self-replication, measured as the number of rounds of replication achieved before halting, in the simulator. Progenitor shape was chosen as the condition to be varied, as previous work demonstrated that shapes of simulated organisms can be evolved in silico to produce locomotion in cardiac tissue–driven reconfigurable organisms (10), or enhanced synthetic particle aggregation by cilia-driven reconfigurable organisms (9).

Simulations indicated that some body shapes amplified pile size and replication rounds, while others damped or halted self-replication. Some but not all geometries were better than the spheroids. The most performant geometry discovered by the evolutionary algorithm in silico and manufacturable in vivo was a semitorus (Fig. 2A). When 12 semitoroidal progenitor organisms were constructed and placed in an arena filled with densities of 61 to 91 dissociated stem cells/mm2, they exhibited the same enhanced piling behavior in vivo observed in silico (Fig. 2B). The offspring produced by the progenitor spheroids (Fig. 2C) were significantly smaller than those produced by the progenitor semitoroids (Fig. 2D), although both progenitor groups produced spheroid offspring. Controlling for dissociated cell density, the diameter of offspring produced by progenitor spheroids was increased 149% by the progenitor semitoroids (P < 0.05) (Fig. 2E). The replication rounds achieved by progenitor spheroids (mean = 1.2 ± 0.4 SD, max of 2 shown in Fig. 2F) was increased 250% by the progenitor semitoroids (mean = 3 ± 0.8 SD, max of four shown in Fig. 2G) (P < 0.05). The only trial using semitoroids that reproduced less than three rounds was terminated early due to fungal contamination. Across the five trials with wild-type progenitor spheroids and the three trials with AI-designed progenitor semitoroids, the size of the first generation of offspring correlated with the total number of generations achieved (ρ = 0.93; P < 0.001).

Fig. 2.

Amplifying kinematic self-replication. Due to surface tension, reconfigurable organisms naturally develop into ciliated spheroids, but they can be sculpted into nonspheroidal morphologies manually during development to realize more complex body shapes. Progenitor shapes were evolved in silico to maximize the number of self-replication rounds before halting. (A) Shapes often converge to an asymmetrical semitoroid (C-shape; pink) with a single narrow mouth in which dissociated cells (green) can be captured, transported, and aggregated. This evolved shape was fabricated and released in vivo (B), recapitulating the behavior observed in silico (A). Offspring built by wild-type spheroids (C) were smaller than those built by the semitoroids (D), regardless of the size and aspect ratios of the spheroids, and across different concentrations of dissociated cells (E). The maximum of two rounds of self-replication achieved by the spheroids (F) was extended by the semitoroids to a maximum of four rounds (G). (Scale bars, 500 μm.)

 

Given the observation that larger spheroids yielded more replication rounds, another, simpler route to increasing self-replication seemed possible: increasing the density of dissociated cells. However, Fig. 2E shows that spheroid offspring size does not appreciably increase even when tripling density from 50 to 150 cells/mm2 in the presence of sphere progenitors.

The semitoroidal design was found in silico using an evolutionary algorithm (Fig. 3A). First, 16 progenitor shapes are randomly generated. For each shape, nine simulated organisms with that shape are evaluated within a simulated Petri dish (Fig. 3E). If the swarm creates piles large enough to mature into offspring, the simulated offspring are transferred to a fresh dish (Fig. 3F), and the process continues (Fig. 3G). When self-replication halts, the shape is assigned a performance score computed as the number of filial generations achieved. Higher-performing progenitor shapes are copied, mutated, and replace shapes in the population with poorer performance. Each of the newly created progenitor shapes is expanded into a swarm, simulated, and scored (Fig. 3C). The algorithm terminates after a fixed amount of computational effort has been expended, and the shape that produced the most replication rounds is extracted (Fig. 3D). A total of 49 independent optimization trials were conducted, yielding 49 high-performing progenitor shapes (Fig. 3H) that, in silico, produce larger offspring (P < 0.0001) and more replication rounds (P < 0.0001) than simulated wild-type spheroids (SI Appendix, Fig. S6).

Fig. 3.
Evolving self-replication. (A) An evolutionary algorithm, starting with random swarms, evolves swarms with increasing self-replicative ability. (FG = number of filial generations achieved by a given swarm. The fractional part denotes how close the swarm got to achieving another replication round.) The most successful lineage in this evolutionary trial originated from a spheroid that built piles no larger than 74% of the size threshold required to self-replicate (B). A descendent swarm composed of nine flexible tori (C) contained two members that built one pile large enough to self-replicate (two arrows), which, alone, built piles no larger than 51% of the threshold. A descendent of the toroid swarm, a swarm of semitori (D), contained six members (E) that collectively built three piles large enough to mature into offspring (F). One of those offspring built a pile large enough to mature into a second generation offspring (G). An additional 48 independent evolutionary trials (H) evolved self-replicative swarms with diverse progenitor shapes.

Conditions other than progenitor shape can be optimized to improve self-replication. To that end, the algorithm was modified to evolve terrain shape rather than progenitor shape to amplify self-replication in silico for wild-type spheroid progenitors. Terrain was shaped by the inclusion of reconfigurable walls that, once positioned along the bottom surface of the simulated dish, constrain the stochastic movement of organisms along more predictable trajectories within predefined limits. Starting with randomly generated terrains, the algorithm evolved terrains that, in silico, increased the number of replication rounds achieved by the wild-type spheroid progenitors compared to their performance on a flat surface (P < 0.0001) (SI Appendix, Figs. S7 and S8).

The algorithm not only can amplify kinematic self-replication in a given environment but can also bestow this capability on swarms otherwise incapable of achieving it in adverse environments. In a cluttered environment, the wild-type progenitors cannot move enough to self-replicate. However, the algorithm discovered progenitor shapes with ventral surfaces that elevated the simulated organisms above the clutter while maintaining frontal plane curvatures that facilitated pile making and the achieving of self-replication (SI Appendix, Fig. S9).

In contrast to other known forms of biological reproduction, kinematic self-replication allows for the opportunity to significantly enlarge and miniaturize offspring each generation. This was observed in vivo (Fig. 1C) and in silico (SI Appendix, Fig. S10). This suggests that swarms may be automatically designed in future to produce offspring of diverse size, shape, and useful behaviors beyond simply more self-replication.

 

Exponential Utility.
von Neumann’s original self-replicating machine (15) was capable in theory of not just building a functional self-copy but also other machines as a side effect of the replicative process. If these tangential machines performed useful work, the entire system was capable of exponential utility. As long as sufficient feedstock was available, only a small expenditure of energy and manufacture was required to build the first replicative machine. To estimate whether the self-replicating reconfigurable organisms introduced here may be capable of exponential utility, we created a computational model using known features of the physical semitoroids to forecast their potential rate of increase in utility. It is assumed that progenitor machines will be placed in semistructured environments, sufficient feedstock will be within reach, and random action of the swarm will be sufficient to result in useful work. Given these requirements, the task of microcircuit assembly was chosen (Fig. 4A). Although current circuit assembly systems are fast, efficient, and reliable, in situ repair or assembly of simple electronics in hostile or remote environments is currently impossible using traditional robots, rendering this a use case worthy of investigation. The simulated environment contains microscale power supplies (26), light emitters (27), and disconnected flexible adhesive wires (28) (SI Appendix, Fig. S11). Random action by swarm members can inadvertently move wires and close a circuit between a power supply and a light emitter (Fig. 4A), considered here as useful work. The environment is also assumed to contain dissociated stem cells, such that offspring organisms may be built in parallel with circuit assembly. If any offspring are built, they are divided into two groups and moved into two new dishes with more electronic components and stem cells (Fig. 4 B and C). If no offspring are built, the process terminates (Fig. 4D). In this model, utility increases quadratically over time (Fig. 4E).

Fig. 4.
Forecasting utility. (A) A swarm of self-replicating semitoroidal organisms (gray) was placed inside a partially completed circuit (black) containing two power sources (red dots), four light emitters (circled X; black when OFF, red when ON), and disconnected flexible adhesive wires (black lines). Dissociated stem cells (not pictured), if pushed into piles, develop into offspring (irregularly shaped gray masses). Dissociated cells are replaced every 3.5 s. After 17.5 s of self-replication and circuit building within a single dish, the progenitors are discarded, and all first through fourth filial generation offspring are divided into two equal-sized groups and placed into two new dishes, each containing a partially completed circuit (B and C). If only one offspring is built, one dish is seeded with it. If no offspring are built, bifurcation halts. This process results in an unbalanced binary tree (D). The red edges denote circuits in which at least one light emitter was switched on by closing a circuit from power source to light emitter (OFF/ON inset). The gray edges denote circuits in which no light emitters were switched on. The number of lights switched on increased quadratically with time (E). This differs from k nonreplicative robots that can switch lights on in k Petri dishes per unit of time, resulting in a line with slope k (e.g., a single robot arm could switch on all four lights in its dish at every unit of time [dotted line in E]). With sufficient time, the self-replicative swarm can achieve higher utility than the nonreplicative swarm for any arbitrarily large value of k.

Superlinear utility here depends on a superlinearly increasing supply of dissociated stem cells. This may be more achievable than mining artificial materials for nonbiological robot replicators given that a single female X. laevis can produce thousands of eggs daily, with each embryo containing ∼3,000 cells for dissociation, and X. laevis itself is capable of reproduction and thereby superlinearly increasing egg production. Reconfigurable organisms are thus constructed from a renewable material source which requires less invasive component sourcing than other existing self-motile biological machines (29, 30). The quadratic increase in utility predicted by the model in Fig. 4 may not be achievable when in situ circuit assembly and repair matures and the model can be tested empirically. But, as long as the components are small enough in weight and size to be moved, an acceptable temperature range is maintained, sufficient components have already been created and deployed and are nontoxic, and self-replication is maintained, the system will produce superlinear increases in utility. This can be contrasted with nonreplicative robot technology for the same task, which would require superlinear investments in robot construction, deployment, and maintenance to realize superlinear utility.
 

Discussion
The ability of genetically unmodified cells to be reconfigured into kinematic self-replicators, a behavior previously unobserved in plants or animals, and the fact that this unique replicative strategy arises spontaneously rather than evolving by specific selection, further exemplifies the developmental plasticity available in biological design (1⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–8). Although kinematic self-replication has not been observed in extant cellular life forms, it may have been essential in the origin of life. The amyloid world hypothesis (31), for instance, posits that self-assembling peptides were the first molecular entity capable of self-replication, and would thus represent the earliest stage in the evolution of life, predating even the RNA world. Unlike self-replicating RNAs which template themselves during replicative events, amyloid monomers can form seeds which produce a variety of amyloid polymorphs, yielding either larger or smaller “offspring” depending on peptide availability, kinematics, and thermodynamic conditions. This variation is similar to modern-day prions, where self-propagating misfolded proteins are capable of forming aggregates of multiple sizes and polymorphisms (32). Although reconfigurable organisms are not a model for origin of life research, which strives to describe the first information unit capable of self-replication, they may shed light on its necessary and sufficient initial conditions.

Traditional machine self-replication is assumed to require a constructor, a copier, a controller, and a blueprint to describe all three (15). However, there are no clear morphological or genetic components in the organisms described here that map onto these distinct structures. The concept of control in reconfigurable organisms is further muddied by their lack of nervous systems and genetically modified behavior. This suggests that reconfigurable organisms may in future contribute to understanding how self-amplifying processes can emerge spontaneously, in new ways and in new forms, in abiotic, cellular, or biohybrid machines, and how macroevolution may proceed if based on kinematic rather than growth-based replication.

Today, several global challenges are increasing superlinearly in spatial extent (33), intensity (34), and frequency (35), demanding technological solutions with corresponding rates of spread, adaptability, and efficacy. Kinematic self-replication may provide a means to deploy a small amount of biotechnology that rapidly grows in utility, but which is designed to be maximally controllable (36) via AI-designed replicators. Even if the behaviors exhibited by reconfigurable organisms are currently rudimentary, such as those shown in past (10) and this current work, AI design methods have been shown to be capable of exploiting this flexibility to exaggerate these behaviors and, in future, possibly guide them toward more useful forms.

 

Materials and Methods
Manual Construction of Reconfigurable Organisms.
Wild-type reconfigurable organisms were constructed manually from amphibian X. laevis epidermal progenitor cells using methods described previously (9). Briefly, fertilized Xenopus eggs were cultured for 24 h at 14 °C [Nieuwkoop and Faber stage 10 (37)] in 0.1× Marc’s Modified Rings (MMR), pH 7.8, after which the animal cap of the embryo was removed with surgical forceps (Dumont, 11241-30 #4) and transferred to 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing 0.75× MMR. Under these conditions, the tissue heals over the course of 1 h and differentiates into a ciliated spheroid capable of locomotion after 4 d of incubation at 14 °C. Water exchanges were done three times weekly, and the organisms were moved to fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dishes containing 0.75× MMR and 5 ng/µL gentamicin (ThermoFisher Scientific, 15710072) until ready for experimental use.

For nonspheroid designs, morphology was shaped via microcautery and microsurgery (SI Appendix, Fig. S1 E–H). The initial production of these organisms began using the methods described above; however, after 24 h at 14 °C, the spheroids were subjected to 3 h of compression with a force of 2.62 mg/mm2. This compression results in a mild flattening of the developing tissue, producing a disk that is more amenable to shaping because it is less likely to rotate out of plane. Following compression, the organisms were cultured for an additional 24 h at 14 °C, after which final shaping was performed. Shaping was accomplished using a MC-2010 micro cautery instrument with 13-μm wire electrodes (Protech International Inc., MC-2010, 13-Y1 wire tip cautery electrode) in combination with a hand sharpened pair of surgical forceps. Each organism was shaped by first subtracting tissue to make a coarse morphology, then by fine sculpting to remove any cellular debris. After 1 h of healing, the morphology became stable for the remainder of the organism's lifespan. Following shaping, individuals were moved to fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dishes containing 0.75× MMR and 5 ng/µL gentamicin and cultured until ready for experimental use.

All animal use was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and Tufts University Department of Laboratory Animal Medicine under protocol No. M2020-35.

 

Dissociated Stem Cells.
Dissociated cell layers for all self-replication experiments were obtained from the same starting material as the manually constructed reconfigurable organisms: X. laevis embryos 24 h of age (raised 14 °C). Similar to the manual construction of reconfigurable organisms, the animal cap of each embryo was explanted, and the rest of the tissue was discarded. Excised tissue was then moved via transfer pipette to a fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing a calcium- and magnesium-free dissociation medium (50.3 mM NaCl, 0.7 mM KCl, 9.2 mM Na2HPO4, 0.9 mM KH2PO4, 2.4 mM NaHCO3, 1.0 mM edetic acid, pH 7.3) and allowed to sit for 5 min. The pigmented outer ectoderm layer does not break down in this solution and was gently separated from the underlying stem cells with surgical forceps and discarded. The remaining tissues were agitated with manual flow from a pipetman until fully dissociated.

Material from 30 embryos were combined into a pool of cells (progenitor organisms are made from the same material, taken from a single embryo, and are composed of ∼3,000 cells), which was then collected and transferred to a sterile Eppendorf tube containing 1 mL 0.75× MMR. This solution was further mixed via manual pipetting up and down an additional five times, creating a final stem cell suspension. Using a clean transfer pipette, this solution was moved to a new 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing 0.75× MMR. The speed and angle of the suspension deposition determined the concentration of the cells in the dish, and this concentration was quantified by imaging five random areas in the arena, then counting and averaging the number of cells per sq. mm. Cells were allowed to settle for 2 min before beginning kinematic self-replication experiments.

Conditions for Kinematic Self-Replication.
All experiments were initiated by distributing a stem cell suspension into a 1% agarose–coated 60- × 15-mm Petri dish filled with 15 mL 0.75× MMR, as described above in the preceding paragraph. Dishes were placed on the stage of a stereo microscope equipped with an eyepiece-mounted camera allowing for still photographs and timelapse imaging across the duration of the experiment. Cell suspensions were allowed to settle for 2 min, after which an image was captured of the center of the arena for cell density quantification. Following the initial setup, 12 adult organisms were placed in the center of the area among the dissociated cells via transfer pipette. All experiments were performed with adult reconfigured organisms aged 5 to 6 d at 14 °C, as this time point was previously found to represent the middle of their lifespan, and provides a standard movement rate (9).

Combinations of progenitors and dissociated stem cells were allowed to interact overnight (20-h total trial length) at 20 °C, and once the progenitors were placed in the arena, the Petri dishes were not moved or manipulated in any way to avoid disturbing the dissociated cell distribution. Imaging lights were also turned off for the duration of each generation of self-replication, as the heat generated by the light source was found to induce mild convection currents in the solution. Following completion of a generation, dishes were immediately imaged under the stereo microscope and then moved to a Nikon SMZ-1500 microscope with substage illumination for offspring size quantification. All aggregated stem cell tissue, now compacted as individual spheroids, were then pipetted to the center of the dish, and offspring size was calculated by measuring the diameter of each spheroid in the dish.

Upon completion of self-replication, adult organisms were returned to their original dishes, and their spheroid offspring were moved to a fresh 1% agarose–coated Petri dish containing 0.75× MMR and 5 ng/µL gentamicin. Each dish is washed as often as necessary to remove any remaining loose stem cells. The offspring were then cultured 14 °C for 5 to 6 d to verify the mobility and viability of the following generation. Where applicable, further rounds of replication proceed exactly as the first: 12 individuals (the largest individuals are chosen in successive generations) are placed among feeder cells, allowed to self-replicate for 20 h, and then offspring are quantified and separated for culture.

 

Evolving Swarms In Silico.
An evolutionary algorithm (38) was used to evolve simulated swarms with better self-replication, and for exhibiting diverse ways of doing so. Each independent trial starts with its own unique set of 16 initially random, genetically encoded replicator shapes. Each encoding is evaluated by prompting it to generate its shape, that shape is copied eight times, the resulting nine-progenitor swarm is simulated, and the amount (if any) of self-replication is recorded. The process is repeated 15 times with each of the remaining encodings. Each of the 16 encodings is then copied, randomly modified, and the swarm it generates is simulated. A 33rd random encoding is added to the expanded population to inject genetic novelty into the population, and its swarm is also simulated and scored. Encodings are then evaluated in pairs: if one encodes a swarm more self-replicative and evolutionarily younger than that encoded by the other, the latter encoding is deleted. Giving a selective advantage to younger swarms in this way maintains diversity in the population. Pairwise competitions continue until the population is reduced back to 16 encodings. This process of random variation, simulation, and selection is repeated for 48 h of wall-clock time on eight NVIDIA Tesla V100s.

Generating Initial Swarms In Silico.
Each replicator shape was encoded as a generative neural network (39) that places voxels at some positions within an empty volume of fixed size. The largest contiguous collection of voxels output by the network was taken to be the shape of the replicator. Randomly modifying the edges or nodes in the network modifies the shape it generates.

Simulating Replication.
Reconfigurable organisms and dissociated stem cells were simulated as elastic voxels using a version of a voxel-based soft-body simulator (40) modified to run on highly parallelized (GPU-based) computing platforms (SI Appendix, Fig. S5). Interactions between two voxels are modeled as deformations of an Euler–Bernoulli beam (translational and rotational stiffness). Collisions between voxels and the bottom of the Petri dish are resolved by Hookean springs (translational stiffness). The height of the aqueous solution, and the walls of the Petri dish, were modeled as soft boundaries that repel voxels penetrating predefined bounds with an opposite force proportional to the squared penetration (SI Appendix, section S2.1). The aggregate metachronal wave force produced by patches of cilia was modeled as an impulse force against each surface voxel, pointing in any direction in the horizontal (x,y) plane. The vertical (z) moments and forces of a simulated organism’s voxels were locked in plane to better approximate the behavior of the physical organisms which maintained constant dorsoventral orientation. The dissociated stem cells were simulated by adhesive voxel singletons with neutral buoyancy, and were free to be moved and rotated in three-dimensional space. When two adhesive voxels collided with each other, they bonded. Compaction and spherification, observed in vivo, is modeled in simulated piles of stem cells by stochastically detaching voxels around the surface of a pile, applying forces pulling them inward toward the center of the pile. Voxels were simulated with material properties manually tuned to allow for the largest stable time step of numerical integration. All other parameters of the model were estimated from biology according to SI Appendix, Table S1. At the start of each simulation, the simulated dish is seeded with the nine progenitors and 1,262 dissociated stem cells. After 3 s of simulation time, the progenitors and any piles with 108 or fewer voxels are deleted. Any piles with more than 108 voxels (incipient offspring; Fig. 3E) are then given an additional 0.5 s to compact and spherify. Empty space in the dish is then replenished with dissociated stem cells. The offspring are matured by adding random cilia forces on their surface voxels (Fig. 3F), after which they are simulated for another 3 s. This process continues until no piles greater than 108 voxels are achieved (Fig. 3G).

 

Measuring Self-Replication In Silico.
The self-replicative ability of a swarm was taken to be the following:
f=s/p+g,
where g is the total number of filial generations achieved, s is the size of the largest pile, in voxels, at the end of an evaluation period of 3.5 s (16,366 time steps with step size 2.14 × 10−4 s), and p is the pile size threshold required for a pile to develop into an organism. If s is greater than p, a new filial generation begins; otherwise, the simulation terminates. A conservative threshold of p = 108, two-thirds the size of the simulated wild-type spheroids, was selected such that relatively few randomly generated shapes achieved g > 0 (SI Appendix, section S2.2). Such overly conservative estimates can compensate for inaccuracies in other simulated parameters.

Statistical Hypothesis Testing.
The diameters of the 10 largest physical offspring (generation 1) built by wild-type organisms across five independent trial, and across different cell concentrations (gray points, Fig. 2E) were compared to the diameters of those built by the semitoroidal organisms in three independent trials (pink points, Fig. 2E). The diameters of all offspring were normalized by dividing by the cell concentration at which they were built. Comparing offspring size in this way is a conservative test since the volumetric difference between two spheres is eight times as large as their diametric difference. A Mann–Whitney U test was performed with a sample of eight independent measurements: the average offspring diameter within the eight independent trials (three trials with progenitor semitoroids, five trials with progenitor spheroids). The null hypothesis is that the average size of the semitoroid’s offspring (normalized by cell concentration) was no different from the average size of wild-type spheroids’ offspring (P = 0.037). Controlling for false discovery rate (41), this null hypothesis can be rejected at the 0.05 level of significance (SI Appendix, section S4.1).

Wild-type organisms produced just a single filial generation in four of the five independent trials. The only trial to produce two generations of offspring was the one with the highest cell concentration tested (150 cells/mm2). The first of three independent trials using the semitoroidal organisms resulted in two filial generations at 61 cells/mm2 but was then halted because the organisms all contracted a motility-compromising fungal infection. In the second and third trials using semitoroids, additional precautions were taken to avoid fungal infections. Three successive generations of offspring were produced at 61 cells/mm2; four successive generations of offspring were produced at 91 cells/mm2. A Mann–Whitney U test was performed. The null hypothesis is that the number of generations of self-replication achieved by the semitoroids (2, 3, and 4 g) was no greater than the number of generations produced by the wild-type spheroids (1, 1, 1, 1, and 2 g) (P = 0.019). Controlling for false discovery rate, the null hypothesis is rejected at the 0.05 level of significance (SI Appendix, section S4.2).

A Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient of 0.9322 (P = 0.00074) holds between the number of generations achieved and the aggregate size of the 10 largest first generation offspring.

 

Forecasting Utility.
Three kinds of microelectronic components that adhere permanently upon collision were added to the simulation: light emitters, batteries, and wire (Fig. 4A). Each component contains vertically stacked and insulated conductors which maintain connectability under translational and rotational movement in plane (SI Appendix, Fig. S11 C–E). As a side effect of movement, reconfigurable organisms will randomly push together microelectronics modules present in the dish (SI Appendix, section S5.1). If a light emitter connects by an unbroken circuit of wire to a battery, the light emitter switches on permanently (as indicated by a red circled X in Fig. 4 and SI Appendix, Fig. S11).

The swarm builds piles, which, if large enough, develop into offspring, and the dissociated cells are replenished every 3.5 s. Piles under the size threshold are removed to make way for fresh dissociated cells. Because we are interested in estimating utility rather than self-replication, progenitors are left in the dish and continue building additional offspring alongside their former offspring for another four, 3.5-s periods. After 17.5 s of simulation time, the number of light emitters connected to a power supply was recorded, the progenitors were removed, and all offspring were extracted. The offspring were then split equally into two new simulated Petri dishes, each with a new partially completed circuit (SI Appendix, section S5.2). Self-replication and circuit building begin afresh in these two dishes, again for 17.5 s. This is the start of a binary simulation tree (Fig. 4D) in which each simulation begets at most two simulation branches, each containing one-half of the produced offspring of their root simulation. If only a single offspring is created by a swarm after 17.5 s, then only one new simulation branch is started. If no offspring were built, then that branch of the binary simulation tree terminates.

After 50 simulation bifurcations, 5,024 light emitters were switched on. Symbolic regression (42) was used to find the degree of a polynomial function that best explains the cumulative number of lights switched on. Regression found that utility increases quadratically with time, as estimates found by symbolic regression all converged toward the quadratic curve derived by ordinary least squares: 2.7x2 − 43x + 182.4, where x is the number of simulation bifurcations (R2 = 0.9988).

 

Data Availability
Source code is available in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/skriegman/kinematically_replicating_organisms). All other data are included in the manuscript and/or supporting information.

Acknowledgments
We thank the Vermont Advanced Computing Core for providing high-performance computing resources. This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Cooperative Agreement No. HR0011-180200022, the Allen Discovery Program through The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group (12171), the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Vermont, the Vice Provost for Research at Tufts University, and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University.

 

Footnotes
↵1S.K. and D.B. contributed equally to this work.

↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: josh.bongard@uvm.edu.
Accepted October 8, 2021.
Author contributions: S.K., D.B., and J.B. designed research; S.K. and D.B. performed research; S.K. and D.B. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; S.K., D.B., M.L., and J.B. analyzed data; and S.K., D.B., M.L., and J.B. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no competing interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

See online for related content such as Commentaries.

This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2112672118/-/DCSupplemental.

Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

 

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 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 1, 2021 

Local Business Owner Joyce Williams, Esq. Named to NSBA Leadership Council 

Virginia – Joyce Williams, Esq. of Armooh-Williams, PLLC of Alexandria, was recently named to the National Small Business Association (NSBA) Leadership Council. NSBA is the nation’s oldest small-business advocacy organization and operates on a staunchly nonpartisan basis. Ms. Williams, a recognized leader in the small-business community, joins the NSBA Leadership Council alongside other small-business advocates from across the country as they work to promote the interests of small businesses to policymakers in Washington, D.C. 

“As a small-business owner, I see daily the importance of being involved and active when it comes to laws and regulation,” stated Ms. Williams. “Joining NSBA’s Leadership Council will enable me to take our collective small-business message to the people that need to hear it most: Congress.” 

Ms. Williams is the founder of Armooh-Williams, PLLC, a global boutique law firm focused on Project Finance and Development, International Trade, and Immigration Law. A practicing attorney, Ms. Williams is a sought-after speaker on trade facilitation, global migration, and other international trade issues. 

Ms. Williams joined the NSBA Leadership Council as part of her efforts to tackle the many critical issues facing small businesses, including tax reform, regulatory restraint, advocacy on export issues, and how the Build Better Act will impact small businesses. The NSBA Leadership Council focuses on providing valuable networking between small-business advocates from across the country while ensuring small businesses a seat at the table as Congress and regulators take up key small-business proposals. 

“I am proud to have Joyce Williams as part of our Leadership Council,” stated NSBA President and CEO Todd McCracken. She came to us highly recommended, and I look forward to our coordinated efforts for years to come.” 

Please click here to learn more about https://armooh-williams.com/

 

For more on the NSBA Leadership Council, please visit www.nsba.biz

 

 

https://armooh-williams.com/news/local-business-owner-joyce-williams-esq-named-to-nsba-leadership-council/

 

PASSING BY MOVIES THAT MOVE WE

 

MY THOUGHTS

2:14 Many people I know have said the topic of passing is heavy but I don't see it that way. Yella people pass cause they are phenotypically closer to white. The real issue for me is the one drop rules great dysfunction in the usa. The one drop rule favored white european purity. 
6:56 great personal story from Nicole Candace about passing in her bloodline. The key issue is just because one isn't white does that mean one isn't black. 
9:02 Carol Channing was not black. I don't care what anybody say. She was Yella. It is time for Black folk to use Yella as an official label. 
11:43 Yes, Harlem at a time was somewhat of a bubble, not completely. But Colored women, Black or Yella, still try to protect colored children by not admitting the culture they live in. 
13:24 In the same way Irene's husband and IRene have disagreement about their association to the usa, has that difference of opinion on the USA  between black women side men still exists? even if it isn't advertised. 
17:00 good point in how these two women deemed black are both unhappy in either situation. 
19:25 well, I think an open secret in the room is how yella women have a long history of being abused, by black men who want a trophy wife and white men who want a woman to abuse or own. 
21:59 all our names, funny , Nicole
22:44 My Little Nig by THomas G Key in 1845 Signal of Liberty poetry section < https://aadl.org/signalofliberty/SL_18450303-p1-02 >  Here is "My Little Nig" reused in the book Clotel by William Wells Brown < https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/161/clotel-or-the-presidents-daughter/2842/chapter-11-the-parson-poet/ >  Signal of america was an abolitionists newspaper < https://aadl.org/papers/signalofliberty>
25:15 PReach Nike, Negras are not blancos but the idea of being latino in the usa is predominated by what are called mestizos in latin america. 
27:13 Nicole, I will love to know what black women think on yella/white skinned women choosing the blackest black man so to speak? 
28:29 The director, geniously or in the spirit of larson, realized the two women are in a trap as individuals and they both are dealing with realizing their uncomforts. The story destroys the tragic mullattess
35:22 Clare is releaved when she is amongst black people cause she has spent years worried at every gesture, while Irene has yearned for more than her comfortable life.
38:43 interesting, the director maintained that query. I offer a question. Imagine being two women , who are phenotypically white, as children, alone among a midst of black children. It will pull both female children together. My point is, when people are pushed into proximity to each other against all others, it creates a closeness to each other that may not lead to intercourse but comes as praise or adoration.
43:39 Interesting Nicole, I think Larson was trying to get away from the tragic mulatto , but you are saying the director pushed the tragic position.  HAHA! PAssing 2!:) I know the title for PAssing 3, it is PAssing 3 the grands Great point by Nicole
45:30 Like the book, the movie ends on the cliffhanger , like a who dunnit detective novel, all we need now is the stuff dreams are made of:) 
46:40 I agree, a sense of total failure, exists, but it isn't merely the lies, it is the bad marriages, it is the country. Two men who don't know their wives good enough. Children who don't know their parents.  Look at the RHinelander trial, that LArson admitted knowing about < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinelander_v._Rhinelander > 
49:20 Nicole makes an interesting point, to out Clare is to out himself , specifically, to injure his social standing. Some white men will not associate with clare's husband if they found out. 
51:24 Yes, there was a time where the black community in nyc in particular had the wealth and had a cultural desire to be considered upstanding. Most black people lived in the southern states and were dirt poor.  Well, that harlem is gone, and the architecture of harlem was meant for whites, rich whites, so harlem itself in some way was passing. The polo grounds was meant to play polo, not baseball, like the ny giants or ny yankees that played there. So, harlem's architecture was meant to be for wealthy whites. but black people got harlem cause rich whites went away.
55:36 good point about the reality in another time Nicole, it works for all things. Ala the people of Hong Kong and their britishness.

Video Link- if embedding fails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0DnBaH5KDo

IN AMENDMENT
CLotel more information : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotel

A lasting thought was about the label Karen. Do we need to use the label Irene for Yella black women that like to be uppity? OR use the label Clare for Yella black women that want to be blackity black?
 

Shoka La Kipito - my final fantasy weapon, what do you think? 
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Shoka-La-Kipito-899283961

 

the death of any validity in metoo, and this is new york state, I don't want to hear it about weinstein/cosby/rkelly/luis ck / whomever... but a question arises, who is we, who is our, who is us? whenever the law comes into play in the usa someone utters plural pronouns supposedly suggesting all in the usa are together or one but historically that has NEVER been true. Maybe it is time for people in the usa to realize they are part of one group among groups of people in the usa, there is no we. 

I quote the article in brackets <  “The purpose of our court system is to be equitable and fair, and to make sure the punishment fits the crime,” John Bellocchio, a spokesperson for the group, told WKBW. >
Bellocchio is wrong. The court system is not Richard Murray's , it is applied onto Richard Murray but it is not Richard Murray's . The court system Richard Murray lives under is applied to him but is not derived from him. 

I quote the article in brackets again < “My client threw up in the ladies room following the sentencing,” Cohen told The New York Times. “If Chris Belter was not a white defendant from a rich and influential family” he “would surely have been sentenced to prison.”>
If a system is not applied equally then it is not owned equally. if a system is not administered equally then it is not owned equally. I ask everyone in the usa, to be honest, be truthful, stop suggesting equality when it does not exists. Can a country have a system equal to all individuals? yes. IS that country the usa? no!!!! Will that country be the usa?.... NO!!!!

 
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‘I Agonized’: New York State Judge Prayed Over the ‘Appropriate’ Sentence Give a Wealthy 20-Year-Old Who Pleaded Guilty to Four Rapes, He Opted for Probation

Niara Savage
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ARTICLE CONTENT

A New York state man who pleaded guilty to raping a several teen girls when he was also a teenager won’t spend any time in prison following a judge’s decision to hand down a sentence of eight years of probation.

Niagara County Court Judge Matthew Murphy said it wouldn’t have been “appropriate” to sentence Christopher Belter, now 20 years old, to prison for the sex crimes committed at his family’s home in the Buffalo suburb of Lewiston, New York, in 2017 and 2018. Belter faced a maximum of eight years in prison.

Murphy sentenced Belter as an adult, denying him youthful offender status after he bypassed monitoring software on his computer to view pornography while he was on probation, WKRC reported.

“I agonized, I’m not ashamed to say that I actually prayed over what is the appropriate sentence in this case,” Murphy said last week. “Because there was great pain. There was great harm. There were multiple crimes committed in the case.”

SNAP, an advocacy group for sexual assault victims, filed a complaint against Murphy in the New York Commission on Judicial Conduct following the ruling.

“The purpose of our court system is to be equitable and fair, and to make sure the punishment fits the crime,” John Bellocchio, a spokesperson for the group, told WKBW.

Bellocchio said that Murphy, who announced he would retire at the end of December, should be immediately suspended.

Belter sexually assaulted four girls, including three 16-year-olds and one 15-year-old in 2017 and 2018. Belter’s mother was also charged with supplying marijuana and alcohol to teens who gathered at the home in the wealthy community not far from Niagara Falls.

Belter plead gulity to charges of rape and sex abuse in 2019. One of Belter’s victims, identified only as M.M. in court documents, was diappointed by the judge’s decison to let her attacker off without prison time, according to her attorney, Steven M. Cohen.

“My client threw up in the ladies room following the sentencing,” Cohen told The New York Times. “If Chris Belter was not a white defendant from a rich and influential family” he “would surely have been sentenced to prison.”

Legal analyst Elie Mystal said the ruling was one of the most “disgusting” he’d ever seen. “This is among the most disgusting rulings I’ve ever seen. Wealthy white bit rapes four teenagers, IS CONVICTED, gets no jail time from the judge.”

Murphy didn’t explain his reasoning in choosing not to sentence Belter to prison time, but said probation will be “like a sword hanging over his head” for the next eight years.

 

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Audiobook Stylistics: Comparing print and audio in the bestselling segment
Karl Berglund
 , 
Mats Dahllöf
November 02, 2021 EDT

The Study is from Sweden, but consider it for your region

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Hollywood Loves Books

By Kate Dwyer 13 Days Ago

When author and illustrator Ariella Elovic drafted her book proposal for Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir, she never considered that the graphic memoir about body acceptance might one day become a television series. Growing up, her biggest insecurities were her visibly hairy arms, sideburns, unibrow, and upper lip hair; as a young adult, she created an illustrated alter-ego to help her process all of the ways her body was changing. When she signed with literary agent Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company, the agent offhandedly noted that she could see the world of Cheeky expanding on a streaming service such as Netflix or Hulu. After the book was finished, Simonoff’s coagent at United Talent Agency (UTA)—one of the four major Hollywood talent agencies—presented Cheeky at a general meeting where talent agents brainstorm creative partnerships between their clients. Throughout the summer of 2020, Elovic, 30, took the resulting one-on-one phone calls with actors, directors, and showrunners looking for a partner with whom she clicked creatively. She hit it off with an established comedian. “It basically felt like what we would create together would be a really strong combination of our two brains,” Elovic says. Though the partnership has yet to be announced, the pair are working with a production company on a “mini-pilot” to pitch to streaming services. A few weeks ago, the author quit her day job as a project manager at Paperless Post. It’s a big commitment, she says, but “I figured at some point, I [would] have to quit my job to help prep material. I’m going to want to give it my all.”

Cheeky was not a bestseller, celebrity book club pick, or runaway hit at launch. It received positive reviews and a decent amount of attention. Its Hollywood prospects are not noteworthy because of being extraordinary, but rather, increasingly ordinary. In 2020 alone, streamers produced 532 new television shows. Their appetite for content is fueling a golden age of adaptations, according to Michelle Weiner, head of the books department at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which includes the book-to-film department and the publishing group. “The volume of film and television being produced has increased dramatically,” she says. “A book is one of the greatest story bibles”—what TV producers use to track details about characters, plots, and more—“that a television show or a film can have. It has a fully-fleshed-out plot, highly sophisticated characters, and, often, a very inventive world.” As a result, there is more opportunity than ever for authors who wish to adapt their work for the big (or small, or even pocket-sized) screen.

Every year, the streaming industry becomes even hungrier for intellectual property to adapt. “What Hollywood needs is more and more content because of all the outlets,” says Knopf editor-at-large Peter Gethers, who previously ran Penguin Random House’s book-to-film department and now co-produces projects for Universal Studios, STUDIOCANAL, and Food Network. But in many cases, before studios buy the rights to a book, they “need some form of validation, so they know something is good.”

Of course, production companies, like readers, can make judgements via reviews and The New York Times bestseller list. But increasingly, producers look to celebrity book clubs to help figure out which titles could become blockbuster streaming hits. CAA—an agency that represents not only authors but also screenwriters, directors, and some of Hollywood’s top actors—has worked with clients such as Reese Witherspoon and Emma Roberts to create those book clubs. Weiner calls the platforms “a win for every aspect of our business,” because the featured authors increase their audience sizes, while their projects become attractive to film and television buyers who then feel like they’re investing in a project that has a larger, built-in viewership. (It sounds like a circular system because it is.)

Some of these high-profile book clubs shepherd projects directly into the adaptation pipeline. Reese’s Book Club produces adaptations through Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, and Roberts’ book club, Belletrist, is working on Victoria Schwab's teen vampire drama “First Kill” for Netflix, among other projects. “The exact role the author plays differs in every situation, but we always do our very best to make sure the original storyteller feels gratified by the way his or her material is adapted,” says Lauren Neustadter, Hello Sunshine’s President of Film and Television. “In the case of Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng handed off the adaptation to Liz Tigelaar and our writers room and cheered them on. In the case of From Scratch, Tembi Locke was intimately involved in the adaptation and her sister Attica was the showrunner.”

Obviously, authors make money if their book is optioned, but sometimes factors—like celebrity hype, great reviews, and a place on the bestseller list—combine to create the kind of deal literary dreams are made of. Take Brit Bennett’s number-one New York Times bestseller The Vanishing Half, which landed a splashy seven-figure deal at HBO, with Bennett attached as executive producer. The Vanishing Half rights were the subject of a heated 17-way auction. Other high-profile examples of authors signing onto their adaptations include Lisa Taddeo producing her number-one New York Times-bestselling nonfiction debut Three Women for Showtime (following a hot bidding war for the rights) and Taffy Brodesser-Akner spearheading the FX adaptation of her novel Fleishman Is in Trouble (also following a 10-way scramble to own the rights).

Taddeo, who is mid-production on Three Women and in development on a handful of other projects, admits to experiencing a steep learning curve when she first started working in Hollywood. There, the author is just one more voice in the room. “Writing books is a solitary enterprise, and then an editor is involved, but the experience is much more author-focused,” she says. “On a TV show, there are many pluses to having lots of brains on a project, but there is also a dissipation that happens. Sometimes the force of a single voice can be weakened by the ideas of many. Other times the opposite is true. It depends, project to project, partners to partners. There are just so many more variables.”

The latest novel of Alexandra Kleeman, a critically-acclaimed author and professor at The New School, Something New Under the Sun, follows an author who flies out to L.A. to work on the adaptation of his novel, and then gets relegated to the role of production assistant. This would never happen in real life. “I don’t know if I would say that authors have more control, but I would say that authors seem to be more visible in Hollywood,” she says. Featuring authors so prominently in the media, Kleeman believes, “offers a guarantee of artistic merit and announces the prestige quality of the project.” Influencer book clubs and brand collaborations like Warby Parker x The Paris Review deal in this same brand cross-pollination. In exchange for a brand giving the author a wider platform, an author gives the brand a deeper sense of authenticity or cultural cachet. “I’m like an artisanal baker or jam maker or something, making stories in the slowest possible way,” Kleeman says.

Weiner says well-regarded partners, like the famed comedian Elovic is working with, are key for authors looking to make the jump to screenwriting. “There are a great number of established screenwriters who are incredibly open to mentoring authors to adapt their work,” she says. (To clarify, those experienced screenwriters are also paid by the studio.) “We've seen authors who start as producers on their first book, and then learn and absorb as much as they possibly can, and then end up writing and producing on their next [book’s adaptation].”

For every author like Taddeo who had the clout to maintain significant creative control over her project, there are many other authors who aren’t as lucky. “Screenwriters are not given the same amount of respect by the studios and by the directors that book authors are given by their editors and publishers,” says Gethers. “So they ultimately, in screenwriting, have much less control, except for very few who have a good amount of control, but there are very few of them.”

Still, authors are scrambling to join the supposed gold rush of TV or film writing. “I’ve heard friends in the writer community say, ‘I think I wrote that book because I thought it would make a good movie,’” says Kleeman. “I see Hollywood picking up options on things that wouldn’t seem very Hollywood before, things that are difficult to film,” she says. “It’s become very common to talk to another writer about [the status of] their project in Hollywood as a catching-up sort of question, when it used to feel rarer and more exceptional.”

As for the money? “The TV-writing money can be really fantastic,” says Will Watkins, Literary Agent at ICM Partners. “Because if you get a show on the air, you can make well in excess of a million dollars. You can even make that if you don't get a show on the air, if it's the right deal.” Writing a pilot script can garner “at least” six figures, he says, and options for even not-so-competitive titles could run in the low-to-middle five digits. The upside for those lucky authors is that this “can kind of liberate them from having to do all these other things [podcasting, teaching, copywriting] to make ends meet, depending on what's going on on the publishing side.”

Midlist authors (i.e. authors whose books get less of a marketing push, therefore garnering fewer readers) are not necessarily set for life when their film rights sell. Sure, the pay is “better than books,” says Maris Kreizman, publishing-world insider and host of “The Maris Review” podcast, but “it’s not that every person who writes for TV is wealthy and set up and doesn’t have to worry about money.” Most adaptations in development don’t even get made. Of the ones that do, it’s ever harder for a show to become a hit, explains Kreizman. “How many of them get made and get lost? It’s almost as if Netflix is inventing a midlist again. There are so many shows, not all of them can rise to the top.”

Authors have historically tended to also be teachers or professors and vice versa. Many writers share their tradecraft in Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) programs, which boomed in the late 20th Century and are still going strong. “I don't think [exclusively] writing books ever was a way to make a living,” says Gethers. “I mean, in the old days, authors were doctors and lawyers and had real jobs. Writing was rarely considered a full-time job. The difference is now, there are so many other opportunities for authors to write.” Many full-time writers operate similarly to startup founders or gig workers, writing across podcasts, journalism, books, even video games, to make ends meet as professional storytellers. Before Taddeo went into production on Three Women, every workday was a balancing act. She started her career as a freelance writer juggling articles for a range of New York publications, and sold a novel that was never published. Flash forward to June 2021, and her day might include a book interview for her novel Animal, a Zoom meeting with a director for the Three Women TV series, another Zoom meeting with a producer for Animal (which is in development for TV), and an interview with a reporter for a women’s glossy magazine. Then, she might sit down to write an article, since she’s still a practicing journalist. “It feels like I never have my feet in one area,” she says.

Sweetbitter author Stephanie Danler, who co-wrote and executive-produced two seasons of a Starz series based on her book, is now a prolific screenwriter and co-founder of Desierto Alto, the wine store and specialty shop near Joshua Tree, California. “Scripts are very creative and I feel lucky that I get to write as a day job,” she says. “I’m still thinking about characters and momentum and pacing and story and plot.” In her experience, a novel can take years of mostly solo work, while a script is more collaborative (with actors, directors, other writers). “I think being an author is sacred in a way,” she says; it’s more of a vocation.

The Hollywood book boom comes at a time when corporate consolidation in the publishing world threatens authors’ abilities to profit off their work, making TV writing a necessary second career. “Penguin and Random House merged, and if they end up acquiring Simon & Schuster as well, there will be one behemoth where you can publish and three other smaller places and many other micro places that absolutely can’t compete,” says Kreizman. Say the merger does go through and a book doesn’t find a home at Penguin-Random House-Simon & Schuster, an author would automatically be looking at a smaller advance elsewhere, since the monopoly would give authors and their agents less negotiating power. Regardless of whether the merger happens, midlist advances against royalties (authors’ up-front paychecks) are dropping across the board, so authors who don’t have full-time jobs face greater pressure to generate multiple revenue streams through storytelling. “It's harder to make a living as a [genre] book writer or midlist book writer probably than it's ever been before,” Gethers says. [On November 2nd, the Biden administration sued Penguin Random House to prevent the deal from happening.]

Agents also play a vital role in setting their authors up for success in Hollywood. “There are those of us that feel very strongly that authors can and should stay on their own projects, as long as they have the interest to do so,” Weiner says. “There are many authors who have successfully done it, which also paves the way for others.” Think: Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins.

“I want the author as involved as they possibly can [be], as much as they want to be,” echoes Heather Karpas, a former publishing agent who spent nearly a decade representing authors at ICM Partners, and now leads scripted development at Richard Plepler's Eden Productions, which has an overall deal with Apple TV+. “Authors often know more about the topic than anybody else in the room,” she says. “There's a wealth of knowledge there that ought to be tapped into."

But not every author is suited to the adaptation process, where style and nuance is often sacrificed for story. Gethers knows some writers who “shy away from [screenwriting] because it can be heartbreaking,” he says. “It's much harder to let go of your darlings—to kill your darlings in a book—if you're the actual author of the book. And often that's what has to happen in a movie.” Others are not interested in the politics and compromise of Hollywood, and their agents encourage them to take the money and run. In book publishing, Karpas says, “there is one person's name on that cover, and it is the author's name. That is the closest to complete control is as you're going to get. In Hollywood, that's just not the nature of the beast.”

ARTICLE LINK
https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a38172712/book-author-hollywood-screenwriter-transition/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit Hub Daily: November 10%2C 2021&utm_term=lithub_master_list 

What If We Taught Writing the Way We Teach Acting?
Jaime Green
Nov 10, 2021

Actors studied movement, script analysis, emotional connection, our bodies, our voices. In my writing MFA, we got . . . workshop.

READ THE REMAINDER IN THE ARTICLE LINKED IMMEDIATELY BELOW

ARTICLE LINK
https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/jaime-green-acting-writing-training-pedagogy?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit Hub Daily: November 11%2C 2021&utm_term=lithub_master_list 

 

REFERRAL LINK
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/11/12/spotify-audiobooks-library-audits-and-a-bestseller-study-this-week-in-book-news/ 
 

HEAVY METAL Exclusive Preview: NEVER NEVER #5 (OF 5)

Never Never #5 hits your local comic book shop and digital platforms on November 10, but thanks to Heavy Metal, Monkeys Fighting Robots has an exclusive preview for our readers.

The book is written by Mark McCann, with art by Phil Buckenham, Agnese Pozza drops the colors, and you will read David Withers’ letter work. Christopher Lair created the cover.

About Never Never #5:
In the final issue of the series, armies of killer king Petros strike the heart of the pirate stronghold, and Winter must make a last effort to free the denizens of the Never and get back home. Aided by the fairies, will it be enough to get past legions of feral boys and the killer king himself?

Enjoy the preview below BY CLICKING THE PREVIEW LINK!

PREVIEW LINK
https://monkeysfightingrobots.co/heavy-metal-exclusive-preview-never-never-5-of-5/?goal=0_ed3dc1bc6e-7f0e6e7b7e-18550247&mc_cid=7f0e6e7b7e&mc_eid=4a9fb21904 
 

The Library of Congress will no longer use “aliens” and “illegal aliens” as categories.
 
Original article by By Walker Caplan
November 15, 2021, 2:20pm

At a regular meeting of their Policy and Standards Division, the Library of Congress confirmed it will replace the cataloging subject headings “Aliens” and “Illegal aliens” with the terms “Noncitizens” and “Illegal immigration.”

This decision comes after a long conflict between advocacy groups of the changes and elected officials representing populaces that didn't want the change. In 2014, students and librarians at Dartmouth, submitted a formal request to the Library of Congress for the “Illegal aliens” catalog heading to be revised to “Undocumented immigrants.” The Library of Congress announced that they would not change the heading; subsequently other librarians, including the American Library Association, continued to petition the Library of Congress to revise the heading.

The Library of Congress agreed to replace the subject headings in 2016—but a group of elected officials in Congress following their voting populace, added a provision to an appropriations bill that required the library to keep the “Aliens” and “Illegal aliens” headings.

"as expeditiously as possible. ...This update better reflects common terminology and respects library users and library workers from all backgrounds,” said ALA president Patty Wong in a statement responding to the change. “It also reflects the core value of social justice for ALA members, who have been at the vanguard of this change for years.”

 

MY THOUGHTS

I think patty wong is incorrect at a level. She says the terms: noncitizen or illegal immigrant are in line with common terminology but that is not true. If you go through legal papers from the states or the federal government it is clear, the most common terms historically are "aliens" or "illegal aliens". I am not suggesting they are sensitive terms, or unthreatening terms, but they are the common terms. In the same way colored or negro or blacks were the common terms for the often called african or afro american or black american in modern usa. She also is wrong. No terms respects all people. The people who didn't want the term changed are not being upheld by this terminology change. One of the great flaws in modernity, meaning the now, is the idea that a certain is better for all people even when it clearly is against the wishes of a segment of all people. And, utilizing another term isn't a negative or positive, but, when we lie and suggest it is common instead of radical, it is a dysfunctional act in the goal for better discourse.
 
ARTICLE LINK
https://lithub.com/the-library-of-congress-will-no-longer-use-aliens-and-illegal-aliens-as-categories/ 

 

 

 

Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk is under investigation for insulting modern Turkey’s founder—in a novel.
 
Original article By Walker Caplan
November 16, 2021, 12:48pm
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is being investigated by the government of Turkey.

Earlier this year, Pamuk was investigated on criminal charges of insulting the Turkish flag and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in his latest book. Nights of Plague, a historical novel about a plague epidemic on a fictional Ottoman island, features a character—Major Kamil—who was read by the prosecutor as a parody of Atatürk. Pamuk and his publishing house denied the allegations, and the case ended in non-prosecution due to lack of evidence.

But the lawyer who made the initial complaint—Tarcan Ülük—appealed the case, and now, the investigation has been reopened. If Pamuk is found guilty under Law 1816 of the Turkish Penal Code, he could receive a sentence of up to three years in prison.

In 2005, Pamuk had to go to court after he told a Swiss newspaper that around one million Armenians were killed on Turkish territory in the early twentieth century. In 2020, the Turkish government jailed at least 25 writers and public intellectuals for their writings—the third-highest number of writers and public intellectuals jailed globally by one country that year.

“Pamuk’s writing has had a profound impact on the literary world, yet his reputation for having courageous and uncompromising politics has made him a target of the Turkish government’s ongoing and systematic effort to silence dissident voices,” said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of free expression at risk programs at PEN America, in a statement. “[The reopening of the investigation] points to the overall climate of repression against writers in Turkey and demonstrates how the legal system enables appalling authoritarian restrictions on free expression and creativity.” 

 

MY THOUGHTS

Artist's are all alike in at least one way, where they live may or may not be comfortable to what they create. But, a question arises. Is Pamuk Turkish? Now many will say, of course, he is. But I argue, like many who were raised in schools that mirror the culture of the white western european christian community, he has a mental rearing that reflects a non turkish culture and there lies the problem. The culture of the majority where an artists live need not be the culture of the artists, but the artists judgements of that larger culture warrant reprimand. When sojourner truth wrote about the essence of freedom, was she writing something indicative to the white majority of the time? no. Does this mean I oppose her writings? no. But I comprehend the risks any artists take when they have a stance that many in their geographic proximity oppose. And if you take the risks then you have to be ready to handle a potential burning. The USA loves to use the imperial demand through filtered reconnaissance, in this case pen america, and it is sickening. Turkey is not the usa, legally. And, Pamuk knows this. Is he writing with respect to Turkish law, or not? Should turkish law reflect the legal code of the usa? I say no.

 

ARTICLE LINK
https://lithub.com/nobel-winner-orhan-pamuk-is-under-investigation-for-insulting-modern-turkeys-founder-in-a-novel/

 

THE BLOOMINGDALE STORY: READ THE NEVER-BEFORE PUBLISHED PATRICIA HIGHSMITH DRAFT THAT WOULD BECOME CAROL (THE PRICE OF SALT)
A rare gem from Highsmith's newly released diaries and notebooks, with annotations from the author and her editor.
NOVEMBER 16, 2021 BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
VIA LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING

This draft of “The Bloomingdale Story” was written by Patricia Highsmith in 1948. It would later be expanded and significantly reworked before being published as the novel The Price of Salt, later titled Carol. The draft is included in the newly released book, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941 – 1995, published by Liveright Publishing, which has made it available here. Notes presented in the right margin were made by Highsmith upon revisiting her notebooks at a later date, accompanied by explanatory notes from her longtime editor, Anna von Planta.

READ THE COMPLETE DRAFT IN THE ARTICLE LINK

ARTICLE LINK
https://crimereads.com/patricia-highsmith-bloomingdale-story-draft-carol-price-of-salt/

 

Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book’s binding
Scholars knew the work about Guillaume d’Orange and the bloody siege of his city existed, but until now believed it had been lost completely

Alison Flood
Thu 18 Nov 2021 07.32 EST

Guillaume kills a giant in an illumination from 13th and 14th century manuscripts of the 'Chanson de Guillaume d'Orange.' Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

A fragment from a 12th-century French poem previously believed to have been lost forever has been found by an academic in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Dr Tamara Atkin from Queen Mary University of London was researching the reuse of books during the 16th century when she came across the fragment from the hitherto lost Siège d’Orange in the binding of a book published in 1528. Parchment and paper were expensive at the time, and unwanted manuscripts and books were frequently recycled.

Scholars had believed the poem, which comes from a cycle of chansons de geste – epic narrative poems – about Guillaume d’Orange, existed, but there had previously been no physical evidence that this was true. The fragment only runs to 47 lines, but it proves the existence of a poem thought to have been completely lost.

The poem is set in the ninth century, during the reign of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son and heir. Atkin said that while it is believed to have been composed in the late 12th century, the fragment itself is from a copy made in England in the late 13th century.

A fragment from the Siege d’Orange. Photograph: Tamara Atkin/Bodleian Libraries

“Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin,” runs an early section of the fragment, which Philip Bennett, an expert on Guillaume d’Orange from the University of Edinburgh, has translated as: “He asks him, ‘How goes it with him?’ / ‘Badly,’ said Count Bertram. / ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.’”

The quoted lines come as Bertram begs the king for help relieving the siege of Orange, a city in the Rhône Valley, describing the dire siege conditions. “In later parts of the fragment we hear him berating the queen (at one point he even calls her ‘pute russe’ or ‘red-headed whore’), who has objected to her husband leading a relieving army south,” said Atkin.

Atkin also found a parchment fragment from Béroul’s Roman de Tristan, telling part of the story of Tristan and Iseult, in the same book. The 12th-century poem is one of the earliest versions of the medieval romance, and until now the only evidence of its existence had been an incomplete 13th-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The fragment found by Atkin differs “significantly” from the manuscript, and shows the poem was circulated more widely than had previously been thought.

“When you find manuscript waste in a 16th-century book, it tends to be in Latin, and it’s almost always something theological or philosophical, and from the point of view of modern-day literary scholarship, perhaps not that interesting. But the fragments in this book were different,” said Atkin. “They were in French, they were in verse, and in one of the fragments the name Iseult immediately jumped out. I’m not a French scholar, and I realised I was going to need to bring in some collaborators. From there, it’s just been really fun and exciting.”

She approached academics from the universities of Bristol, Edinburgh and British Columbia to help. “I knew it was something important,” said JR Mattison, a French-manuscript specialist from the University of British Columbia who helped to identify the Tristan and Iseult fragment. “This piece of the poem comes from a significant moment when Iseult speaks with her husband King Mark. This fragment expands our knowledge of the poem’s audiences and its changing meaning over time and contributes a new perspective on how Tristan legends moved across Europe.”

Bennett said there had been “no physical trace” of the Siège d’Orange poem before. “There is much evidence from other chansons de geste that a poem about the siege Guillaume d’Orange suffered in his newly conquered city must have once existed,” he said. “The discovery of the fragment we now have fills an important gap in the poetic biography of the epic hero. This is a most exciting addition to the corpus of medieval French epic poetry.”

The team will now work to discover more about when and where the fragments were copied, and how they came to be bound in the 1528 book. “That manuscripts were made at all reflects the value once placed on the texts they contain. But manuscripts that were dismembered and reused as waste were no longer valued as texts. Their only value was as a material commodity – parchment – that could be used to reinforce the binding of another book. The manuscripts containing these French poems were probably recycled because the texts were considered old-fashioned and the language outdated,” said Atkin.

“It’s fantastically exciting to discover something that’s been lost all this time, but I do think it is also worth simultaneously holding the thought that actually, the only reason these fragments have survived is because at some point, someone thought the manuscripts in which they appeared were not valuable as anything other than waste. There’s a sort of lovely tension in that, I think.”

ARTICLE LINK
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/18/fragment-of-lost-12th-century-epic-poem-found-in-another-books-binding 

WHY SHOULD CHILDREN READ DARK BOOKS?
Katie Moench Nov 12, 2021

Scary books made to give readers the chills may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of “children’s literature.” Horror, whether it be books, shows, or movies, is often thought of as a more adult genre, especially when it depicts violent situations of terrifying outcomes. Death, dismemberment, and masked men with sharp, stabbing knives aren’t exactly the stuff of bedtime stories, and no parent could be blamed for wondering if their kid will never sleep again after reading ghost stories. But even though darker subject material may not be the most common type of children’s book, it can play an important role in the emotional development of young readers.

When children encounter new situations in books, whether scary or not, it gives them a chance to think through how they would handle such things, as well as experience new emotions from a safe and hypothetical place. As children’s author Cavan Scott puts it in his workshops on juvenile horror, “the world is a scary place.” By giving children scary books, Scott argues, young readers can be “pushed to the edge of their comfort zone,” but still get a resolution at the end. Since books for younger readers tend to end at least somewhat happily, children get the experience of being scared, but aren’t necessarily exposed to the more ambiguous endings dark books for adults might contain. If kids are not allowed to read anything frightening or shocking, then they won’t be able to develop the coping skills they’ll need when scary situations arise in their lives.

In addition to allowing children to develop skills for navigating difficult situations, scary stories can also warn young readers about dangerous situations. Even now, I can still remember moments where my favorite charcters in childhood books were put in danger, and how they reacted. Though it’s not healthy to be fearful all the time, books can impart important lessons, from the dangers of getting too close to wild animals to the need to be cautious around strangers. Kids can also think about, and discuss with the adults in their lives,how to stay safe and what kinds of choices they would make in such situations.

And, of course, dark reads can appeal to young readers simply because kids, like adults, like them. Children, in my experience, are their own best judges when it comes to what they find interesting to read and how difficult of stories they can handle. Many otherwise reluctant readers might love the Goosebumps or Tales from Lovecraft Middle School series, precisely because they are full of exciting and nerve racking characters and events, and reading these kinds of books can set children up as lifelong lovers of horror. When kids find books that engage them and that they enjoy, they are more likely to view themselves as readers and to feel like they have a place in the world of books.

No matter how much we might wish otherwise, children, like all humans, experience fear. We are programmed to fear new experiences and unknown things, and even if worries about monsters under the bed or shadows lurking in the dark might seem silly to grown-ups, to children they are very real dangers. Additionally, situations like starting at a new school, dealing with a divorce or death in a family, or moving to a new house can all bring up feelings of anxiety or even dread for kids learning to work through the emotions surrounding such events.

Whatever our age, books, and stories give us the opportunity to process situations outside of ourselves and to draw inspiration and comfort from how others have coped with similar, scary situations. While an adult might not immediately see the connection between being the new kid at school and a book about a kid who hunts ghosts, for a young reader, it’s an opportunity to see someone their age being brave. Just as the best horror novels play on our realistic fears, dark reads for kids can help them emotionally explore frightening situations through the safety of a book. Plus, kids might find they really connect with darker reads, and it can help set them on the path to being engaged and lifelong readers! If you’re looking for dark reads for the kids in your life, hand them some of the books below.

USE THE ARTICLE LINK BELOW TO VIEW THE ENTRIES SUGGESTED

ARTICLE LINK
https://bookriot.com/why-should-children-read-dark-books/ 

 

REFERRAL LINK
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/11/19/book-bans-the-national-book-awards-and-a-lost-poem-fragment-this-week-in-book-news/ 
 

Angelique noire side her husband on the  cover of dandy magazine

 

A still from the video

Halle Berry On Starring In And Directing 'Bruised,' Assembling An All-Women Hip-Hop Soundtrack
Trey Mangum < https://shadowandact.com/author/Tmangum >  
November 24, 2021

Halle Berry is making her highly-anticipated directorial debut with Netflix's Bruised, and she's not only the director, she's also the lead actress in the film.

Shamier Anderson, Adan Canto, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Sheila Atim also star in the film, which chronicles Jackie Justice, a "disgraced MMA fighter who has failed at the one thing she’s ever been good at – fighting. When 6-year-old Manny, the son she walked out on years ago, returns to her doorstep, Jackie has to conquer her demons, face one of the fiercest rising stars of the MMA world and ultimately fight to become the mother this kid deserves."

Talking about why she wanted this film to be the project she made her director's debut with, she told us she's always been a "huge fight fan from English boxing" when she was little to "then being a really big MMA fan."

"I was following the UFC, MMA and Invicta, Strikeforce for years before this script sat down on me," she said. "And when it did, right away, I was in inspired by it and ignited about it because it's a world that I love so much. It's a sport that I follow [and] that I'm passionate about. Every Saturday night I was watching a fight of some sort. So this gave me a great opportunity to tell a story about a sport that I love and a genre that's always been winning. The fight game is always winning for me...these underdog, feel good stories. I think we as people always can see ourselves reflected in these stories. So it was a winning combination for me."

In playing Jackie Justice, Berry said that she learned more about her own strength -- that she's strong than she ever knew she was.

"I have the power to make up my mind to do something and that I actually have the fortitude to see it through," she continued. "And these are things that you don't really know to be true about yourself. I think we think we would be the kind of person to work really hard and see something through and when things got harder, you would just get stronger. It's easy to say, but I got to prove to myself that I'm actually made up of that. And that's a really good feeling for better or for worse, whatever anybody thinks about the film, I did it, I made it. I made my way through it on my own terms."

Aside from the film itself, Bruised and Berry accomplished a historic feat with the film, producing the first all-women hip-hop soundtrack. It was something she didn't realize had never happened before. She executive produced the album with Cardi B.

"I think as Black women, Black people, we have to uplift one another, especially Black women," she explained. "We are in my mind on the bottom of the rung so it's really important that we join forces and we support one another and we uplift each other. And so bringing Cardi on board to do the soundtrack, I didn't realize there had never been an all female hip hop album. I'm thinking, 'How can this be? How has this never happened?' And I thought, 'Well, s**t, I'm going to do this.' Like, this is really important. And when Cardi said yes, and then we were off to the races, and I think it's a beautiful soundtrack for this movie because it very much accompanies the world that I've created. It's an authentic, true world and this music sort of lends that authenticity to it."

Ultimately, she believes this universal story that the film depicts can resonate with a lot of people

Watch the interview with Berry below  , as well as chats with co-stars Atim and Valentina Shevchenko:

 

'I depict mundane images because the life of a Black woman is just like any other': Billie Zangewa on anatomy, Kusama and celebrating imperfections
The South African artist tells us about her favourite books, music and artists on the A brush with… podcast

Billie Zangewa.
Photo: Andrew Thomas Berry. © Art basel

Billie Zangewa, Domestic Scene (2016). Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin

Billie Zangewa on... her fascination with the human form

"When I was at art school I loved life drawing. My son once asked me: 'Mom, how come when you do bodies, you can see the bones and muscles?'. And I replied: 'When I was at university I was completely thrilled by that little bit of science in art.' We would draw bones by themselves, under flesh, and then muscles by themselves and then under the flesh. So that really stuck with me and now when I look at the human form, I'm always seeing the nuance of the light and the protruding shapes that are coming from inside the body."

Billlie Zangewa's Serious, 2021.
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

... why she depicts mundane images in her work

"I knew from my childhood that being Black and female was going to be a very difficult journey for me. And that a lot of people were going to project their fantasies and desires onto me and that they would not see me as a person, they wouldn't be able to empathise with my daily struggles, or even to understand that I had feelings. That is one of the reasons why I choose to depict such mundane daily images, because what I am trying to say is that a Black woman is just like any other person. We go through the same routine every day, we go through the same struggles. We're all human."

... her favourite contemporary artist

"Yayoi Kusama is incredible—I honestly don't think that anybody can equal her.There are lots of brilliant artists, but I think she in particular has an incredible focus and her work just gels together. She doesn't seem like she's going off over there and then going in a different direction. It always seems like she's expanding on a theme, and I think that's what makes her really incredible."

Installation view of Billie Zangewa: Flesh and Blood at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul.
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

... the process behind her cut out silk works

"Those kind of uneven, even edges are really works speaking to each other. So I would have cut out a piece [of silk] for a previous work, which would have created a negative space. [...] But it's only until the work reveals itself to me that I think that piece of fabric is going to be perfect for what I'm trying to say. So I do keep it quite spontaneous. I'm not trying to force any thing into anything. I really enjoy those irregular edges because it speaks to society and to individuals, about how we have wounds, scars and certain thought patterns that don't serve us well. I'm speaking to everyone's combination of the perfect and the imperfect."

• For the full interview with the artist, listen to our podcast, A brush with... Billie Zangewa < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/11/17/a-brush-with-billie-zangewa > , which is available on the usual podcast platforms. < https://plinkhq.com/i/1525997434?to=page > A brush with… series 7 runs from 17 November-15 December 2021, with episodes released on Wednesdays. This episode is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects. 

• Billie Zangewa: Running Water < https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/billie-zangewa3 > , Lehmann Maupin London, until 8 January 2022; Flesh and Blood < https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/billie-zangewa2 > , Lehmann Maupin Seoul, from 18 November-15 January 2022; Thread for a Web Begun < https://www.moadsf.org/exhibition/billie-zangewa-thread-for-a-web-begun/> , Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, until 27 February. 
 

Model: MEreba

Videographer: Ronald Reed

 

Tamara Jeree Interview

 

MY THOUGHTS

Tamara Jeree told a summation of her story to now
She made this game 
https://www.harrytuffs.com/fallen-london#:~:text=Fallen London is a free%2C browser-based%2C literary RPG,Ballad of Johnny Croak%2C and The Icarian Cup).

Games is a collaborative effort. 
COMMENT IN STREAM: And, the financial reward too Tamara... I am not saying it is impossible, but usually it is better if you have a bigger name to get a financial reward for the work 
COMMENT: I don't know if you guys will talk about modern long epic poems?  but what do you think of that audience's size? 
COMMENT: ahh ok Chloe, I know many different poets, but I don't think the audience is particularly large
COMMENT: And literary games demand dialog, all games demand plot but literary games demand dialog use
COMMENT: Cthulu alert:) I always say that the second a tentacle god thing is mentioned:) 
COMMENT: I never tried gender neutrality hmm I don't feel it yet
COMMENT: I think gender neutral is a smart choice for the future for certain audience 
COMMENT: that is interesting... that is a poor reader who assumes because of the writer the characters are a certain way ... thanks for sharing the story 
COMMENT: Tamara do you have a particular artists you like, check out an artist whose name is GDBee , gdbee has a lovely style in terms of mermaids and aquatic female beings
COMMENT: i wonder what disney will do with that project, i know ariel will be black but i wonder if they are manipulating preproduction /production heavily 
COMMENT: Damn creatures of the night:) if i hear about one more vampire story:) I will eat my own gizzard
COMMENT: Tamara or CHloe or other what story you didn't write had your favorite structure of a sea being ? 
COMMENT: The gift of THistle and Verse questionaires:) that is a good one 
COMMENT: I think one of the issue is reading poetry too, I will never forget a classmates delivery style:) 
COMMENT: Tamara did you see, valerien and the city of a thousand planets, and bubble scharacter, in terms of morphing and identity ?
COMMENT: yes for us writers Tamara but I think general audiences can lose interest on poetry based on how it is read
COMMENT Valerian and laureline is a bande dessinee or a comic book, franco /belgium, but a story  was made into a film, valerian and the ~  the director of the film made  fifth element
COMMENT: I think all of you will like Cyber 6, the argentine/italian comic, the lead character is a cyborg/clone that dresses as male, they made into a cartoon but some big story elements was missing
COMMENT: ode to lithium, lovely title 
COMMENT: less loud Tamara:) I will love to see how many people actually yell when they type in UPPER CASE:) 
COMMENT: @Thistle & Verse  your right, yes, robert burns halloween
COMMENT: la luna, moon poems, ... great memory Chloe, good interviewing 
COMMENT: I concur, i start early too:) this year I used nanowrimo to make the content to edit for next year, i am nearly done
COMMENT: Tamara, I admit, the reason was I am drawing more so doing both and it  takes time and thus I need to push so I can get sleep ... i am becoming a vampire:) 
COMMENT: take your time Tamara and beyond recommendations, it can be from the work you like to read the most, damn what anybody else thinks, that is not yours
COMMENT: Do you think long titles are wise for anthologies, thanks for the photo chloe
COMMENT: and what determines horror is not the same 

Soft science by frannie choi
Odes to lithium from shira erlichman
Julian K Jarboe's Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel

 

VIDEO NOTES
Tamara Jeree's socials
website: https://www.tamarajeree.com/ 
twitter: https://twitter.com/TamaraJeree

Recent works/ preorderlinks
Unfettered Hexes: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fngs-fr-th-mmrs/carpe-noctem-vampires-through-the-ages

 

Link 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MA9YGyyfQ