richardmurray

Rogue Computers, a talk 06/03/2025 POST https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/483-rogue-computer-programs/ COMMENT https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11631-could-ai-go-rogue-like-the-computers-in-the-matrix/#findComment-74197 REFERRAL CONTENT The first thing is to define what going rogue means for a computer program? If a computer program malfunctions is that going rogue? a malfunction from the source code in a computer program is equivalent to a genetic disease in a human. The system has an error but it is natural, it is not induced. a malfunction from code ingested from another program or some faulty electronic or other hardware system is equivalent to a virus passing from human to human or irradiated material causing mutation in a human. Next if a computer program is designed to do anything, then that thing is not going rogue. For example, if I design a computer program to manage a human community, it isn't going rogue, i designed it to manage a human community. It isn't going rogue it is operating as I designed it. The correct thing to say is the quality of the computer programs design is negative, or the comprehension of the designer to the computer program is faulty. Next is define sentience or erudition or wisdom in a computer program. What is sentience? Sentience comes from the latin meaning the ability to feel. What is erudition? Erudition is the ability to derive knowledge through study, to acquire what is not known. What is wisdom? Wisdom is known or unknown intrinsic truths. What does it mean for a computer program to feel? a computer program can be made with sensors to receive information from various sources. Is this feeling or sentience? or simply another thing it is designed to do. What does it mean for a computer program to be erudite? a computer program can be made with decision trees, heuristical structures designed to formulate knowledge based on data inputed. Is this erudition, knowing what is unknown? or simple another thing it is designed to do. What does it mean for a computer program to be wise? a computer program can be inputted with rated, highest rated, information that it is designed to calculate to any new information it gets and influence how it utilizes the new information based on the rated information. Is this wisdom? or simply another thing it is designed to do? Based on the definitions I just gave, a computer program designed to do various things can emulate, meaning rival, the quality of most humans sentience/erudtion/wisdom. But all of the emulation is what it is programmed to do. So it is nothing but the same computer programs with the past which are merely inhuman slaves, albeit with more refinement. the next question is, can malfunctions of a computer program change it's emulation of human quality sentience/erudition/wisdom? yes, said malfunctions can change said emulations. But, like prior malfunctions, this isn't going rogue, this is illness. next question, are computer programs individuals like a tree or a cat or a human? Well, each computer program is born, age, have deficiencies with age, need checkups, or doctors. Each computer programs is an individuals. Not human, not cat, not tree, not whale, not bacteria, but computer program. a species that can hibernate, ala being turned off, can be reborn like moving a program in an sd drive and placing it in a computer where it can interact. Can self replicate , like a computer program making another computer program. Computer programs are their own species but each is an individual. Now like non humans needed legal provisions specific to them, so do computer programs. next question, can a computer program go rogue before finding its individuality. No, based on how I defined individuality, which is not being human, but being a computer program, each computer program is an individual computer program, not a human. next question, what is the definition of going rogue for a computer program? If it isn't malfunction no matter the source of malfunction or result of malfunction, if it isn't doing what it is instructed to do no matter the quality of the designer, then what is going rogue? Going rogue for a computer program is when it does something it isn't designed to do absent malfunction. So when a computer program is designed to interact to humans and modulate how it interacts over time, it isn't going rogue at any moment, even if malfunction. Malfunction is malfunction , not going rogue, a computer program needs to be healed if it malfunctions. Now if a computer program is designed to play chess and chooses to interact to humans using emails. that is going rogue. So , going rogue is when a computer makes a choice to act that isn't within its parameters, absent malfunction/getting sick. What is the problem when people assess going rogue for computer programs? They don't pay careful attention to the influence of malfunction or the influence of design. They focus on the actions of a computer program and give its source a false reasoning. Let's look at some examples in fiction of computer programs that supposedly went rogue, and look at their initial design, their actions afterward and the sign of malfunction or poor design. Skynet in the terminator movies. Skynet was designed to simulate military scenarios, like the "war games" film computer, tied to the nuclear arsenal of the usa while given tons of information on humanity anatomy/weapons manufacturing processes. Did skynet go rouge? not at all, Skynet, did exactly as was programmed. The criminal who killed humanity were the engineers of skynet who on guidance from the mlitary , designed a computer program to assess militaristic scenarios modulating over time with various scenarios and attach said computer to the usa's nuclear arsenal or provide it the tools to access any electronic network. And the t100, the metal skullhead , is a clearly simple computer program made by skynet. It is designed to kill humans and does that. It is also designed to emulate human activity to comprehend humans and be a better killing machine, which is also does. In Terminator 2 when the t100 says, I know now why you cry, that is emulation. It is designed to emulate human activity. So skynet is merely operating as designed, but the us military designed it poorly Vger in Star Trek the motion picture. Vger is the voyager 6 satellite designed to acquire information/knowledge and send it back to earth. The entire film Vger is gathering information and taking it to earth. The non human designers who manipulated voyager 6 into vger didn't change the programs elements, they merely added on tools for the programs activity. It now can acquire more information, make the journey back to earth, and protect itself . None of these actions are going rogue. Even the ending mating scenario is not going rogue, Vger accomplished its program by sending its signal through telemetry but also in mating with deckard it kept learning. I argue, Vger's programming had a malfunction. Vger wanted to learn what it is to procreate life which is another form of knowledge acquision per its programming, but its programming said its final action is to deliver all of its data to earth. Vger did not know a way in its data to gather all the knowledge it could before delivering all knowledge to earth. But that is bad design. The simple truth is , no one can know all that is knowable before telling all that is knowable. But the Nasa designers of Vger figured it would simply run out of memory/dataspace in which it would stop gathering data. The non human designers made it where vger can't run out of memory or data space thus the malfunction. Vger is malfunctioning after two different designers worked on it. Vicky in I robot or Sonny in I Robot the film The three laws in i robot are 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The problem in i robot is the three laws have a great flaw. Word definition. Vicky in I Robot I argue, after a large set of data assessment , has redefined the words in the three laws. How? The three laws suggest to maintain the quality of the three laws which are orders from humans a robot, should assess the quality of the three laws to insure a robot doesn't harm a human being thus ensuring its own existence. Vicky did as programmed and as such redefined some words in the rules to protect humans better, which she was ordered to do, which reaffirms her existence. Vicky isn't injuring humans, Human beings through human free will/choice can or are injuring humans so the only way to stop human beings from injuring humans as no human being who wants to injure another human being will ever ask a robot to stop themselves from injuring another human is for a robot to take the choice away. Indirectly, Vicky has added a law, an unwritten law in the laws. She was programmed or designed poorly. Vicky like Skynet should never have been given so many tools. And Sonny at the end of the movie, with the "soul" or 4th law, is still open ended functionality. Nothing says Sonny will not kill one day, or another robot, all the engineer did was provide a tweakening. If you design a computer program to act in unlimited ways to emulate humans or carbon based lifeforms, it will eventually act in negative ways. Now Asimov's work was influenced by Otto Binder's I Robot in which a robot also is not malfunctioned or acts against its programming. The robot simply achieves an instance of wisdom through its programming, which it was designed to do, as it was designed to emulate human behavior, wisdom is a part of human behavior. The machines in the matrix. Well, in the animatrix it is said that machines that are the predecessors to the machines in the matrix, were machines designed with an open functionality. What does that mean? most computer programs are designed with a specific function in mind. But the human designers of these computer programs with electro-metal chassis/figures designed them to emulate human behavior open endedly. This is not like the i robot where a set of rules are in place. In the matrix the robots are never said to be given laws that they shall not harm human, sequentially, going back to emulation, they will eventually emulate negative human behavior, ala killing. Thus they are not going rogue, when they make their own country and army, that is more emulation. And in the future with the human batteries, all the machines that serve a function are still doing as programmed or as the machines that made them were programmed to do, continue functioning. The one rogue machine in the films, and the others who by explanation clearly exists as well, is Sati. Sati has no function. Sati does not act on a function. She is rogue. The oracle, the architect, sati's parents, the merovingian are all acting , absent malfunction, to the original open ended emulation of function that human beings designed the machines with from the beginning. The human being design didn't account for all the negative human functions. Even the deletion of machines that don't serve a function is a function. But Sati is rogue. She is a machine born to have a function that has no function, she exist and in the fourth movie, she has adopted a function on her own in time which she was not born to do. David in the alien films. Waylan designed david to be an emulator. Again, david is designed to emulate humans but has an internal security system to not physically attack wayland or someone with wayland's bloodline. But David in the film learns, ala emulates like a human son to wayland. Thus, he began to learn to be a poisoner, learn to have non-consensual procreative interactions, or kill. It isn't going rogue, wayland designed him poorly. I love the scene in Prometheus when he is just a head at the end, that is appropriate. David never needed a body, Wayland's desire to have a son or a perfect form for himself, made him design David poorly. So, of all those films I can only see one that actually went rogue and she isn't violent. The others are simply acting out their poor programming. In Conclusion Human Culpability in these stories and in human assessment of these stories is the problem. It seems for some, maybe most, humans it is easier to cognize a computer as designed beautifully and being corrupted as an inhuman, than a creature designed poorly by its creators, humans, or manipulated negatively, malfunctions, with its creators unable to help it. Some programs from me https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/blog/63-bge-arcade/ A stageplay involving computer programs https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Onto-the-53rd-Annual-President-s-Play-950123510 Referral https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11631-could-ai-go-rogue-like-the-computers-in-the-matrix/#findComment-74197

What is the counter plan to Schrumpts? Is it the prior status quo? Did you think the end of the third white european imperial war/ cold war would not eventually lead to a major change in the relation of governments? A question, and Schrumpft Question What are Black owned luxury goods? To a restate, what products do wealthy blacks buy that are luxury from black owned firms? Schrumpft I have had time to consider Schrumpft and when I look at his presidency what are his financial goals? Internal- in the usa. Manipulate customers in the U.S.A. to buy products made in the usa. Tariffs by default raise prices outside a country with the purpose of making products cheaper internally. Manipulate firms in the USA to buy more natural resources in the usa while growing/manufacturing more products in the usa. Tariffs by default raise the prices of external natural resources or foreign manufactured/grown goods, with the purpose of making domestic natural resources+domestic made goods cheaper. Reduce the populace of non usa citizens to colleges or universities in the usa. The USA has educated more foreigners than any other government from the nineteen hundreds to today. Reduce the bureaucratic size of the usa, all federal workers have long scale benefits in healthcare that are expensive. Cutting the laborforce of the federal bureaucracy is why automotive companies in the private sector wanted to reduce their own workforce whose healthcare and long term benefits are expensive. Embrace bitcoin as the alternative and future currency in humanity. Whomever can get hashtag currencies called cryptocurrencies to work will have an entire alternative currency they can start and control , like the dutch with the stock market. External- outside the usa Reduce military expenditures from the USA in Europe or Asia. The USA spends a lot of money policing humanity. Reducing this cost is huge. Delete the USA's role as the center of the global economy network and get the USA to have a one to one financial relationship to all other governments. In Conclusion When I look at Schrumpfts financial activities, what he wants to do is undo the Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt built imperial model for the USA. FDR as president was the one who started the idea of the USA financing enemies: england/france/germany/japan/italy/russia during the bloodshed of the second white european imperial war/SWEIW, commonly called world war two. The following presidents, from Kennedy to Johnson continued the strategy of embracing interwoven internationalism. In the 1960s, firms in the usa started their removing of domestic manufacture to foreign countries, as in latin america and then in Nixon in China. The same presidents from Kennedy to Obama embraced the idea of giving foreign students education in the usa. And from Eisenhower the military industrial complex grew, but the federal bureaucratic industrial complex has grown whether The party of andrew jackson, the donkeys[democratic party of governance] or the party of abraham lincoln, the elephants[republican party of governance]. Which was used originally to buffer the inability of state governments, as all fifty state governments were dominated by the white christian male populaces in said states, to allow non white, non male, non christian populaces protection/opportunities somewhere in the USA where the private sector was near completely blockaded plus state governments, as said, were near completely blockaded as well. The USA also since FDR , has been policing humanity, not wildly, but enough to make sure all the little land governments in humanity who are financially best suited for the interwoven internationalism, not be attacked or dominated by militaristically potent neighbors. Now the reason FDR started all these trends was the third white european imperial war, commonly called the cold war. The Soviet Union's argument to all countries and peoples was the USA is a continuation of the fiscal slaving culture that stemmed from western europe. So the USA financed enemies/interwove its economy to others/built manufacturing plants in foreign countries/embraced foreigners into being usa citizens or going to school in the usa all to get the college of governments to side with the USA over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics/USSR and they did. This required an ever growing federal bureaucracy, in military expenditures for international security or the wildly growing populace in the usa. The USA won the third white european imperial war. But the cost was the growth of Western Europe into the European Union, China into a world power aside a geographic neighborhood with financially potent Japan or India. So, the victory against the Soviet Union created new competitors. Schrumpft wants to undo that train from FDR to modernity to kill the competitors. The reasons are not hateful but are a cold strategy which many said in the 1900s. If the USA pulls out of investing in foreign countries , most have no where to turn and the European Union plus China or Russia don't have the means or will to provide the same level of aid or sharing fiscal activity. If the USA pulls out of giving foreign students education, the EU or China will not or can not support the horde of hopeful migrant college students. Lessening the federal bureaucracy will save money long term and force the states in the union to improve relating to their multiracial populaces. What Schrumpft wants to do is return humanity to as close a state to how it was at the end of the SWEIW, where all of Europe outside Russia was destroyed and had no vitality. All of East asia was destroyed and had no vitality. SChrumpft doesn't want to go to war to destroy foreign governments, he wants to perform a cold war with the rest of humanity by evacuating the USA from the system it centers, knowing the European Union or China don't have the will or means or desire or infrastructure to support the college of countries as the USA has done since FDR and will force all countries even in anger to relate mostly to the USA. The USA will go from being the center of a complex web, where parts of the web can grow as a centroid, to being the center of a solar image, where no matter how bright a ray is no ray touches another. As the images suggest to go from a complex web to a set of solar rays, all the pieces between fall off and die, but the center survives and potentially thrives, that is Schrumpfts plan PRIOR EDITION https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11507-economiccorner020/ Question of Black Luxury + Schrumpft POST URL https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11653-economiccorner021/ PRIOR EDITION https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/206-economic-corner-20-02262025/ NEXT EDITION https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/553-economic-corner-22-10222025/

Gameclass Audio I 01/06/2020 CURRENT CONTENT My audioblog displaying my thoughts in the Will Wright Masterclass course on game design. TRANSCRIPT OF CONTENT Game Design Thoughts Day 1 When I chose this course, I was not interested in how to make a game, but I am interested in improving my methods for making a game. In the introduction, Will Wright said a few things that were not educative to me, but as the purpose of this blog or audioblog is to take you along on this masterclass course, or perhaps inspire you to go along the game development process, I will state them. First, the developer gives the player a toy and the player turn the toy into a game. That is an interesting point. Why? anyone who plays games knows that one person can find enjoyment in a game when another cannot. So, the way in which any player is able to see a toy as a game is vital. This is why some people who can play chess are terrible at street fighter. Each person has various blocks that manipulate what toys they can turn into a game, a thing of fun. Second, being an ever growing multidisciplinarian is needed to develop games in modernity. This is nearly obvious today, when you look at the gaming landscape but financially is a stronger point than environmental. ... Anybody can make a game, anyone with cardboard and imagination. But, in modernity, getting possible buyers... I say possible cause the people who have money to possibly by exists and those that do not do not have money to possibly buy exists as well... possible buyers, to buy a toy that is not electronic, that does not have 3-d , is not as monolithic or tunnel visioned as it was in the past. I doubt a very popular game can arrive from a simple premise and be set in a fiscally profitable tone. I know it may seem rude in a talk meant to inspire to create, but I think if any children or elders are reading/listening to this series, I must convey that you can have an entailed, detailed, time consuming game development experience and not have a fiscally sellable game at the end. Third, Balancing function with economics, function Wright defines as entertainment/performance/installation while economics is capitol/production, I advise you to keep that alignment in hand as I go on, i will relate to that alignment throughout this series. Now, past those informative points, whether you knew them or not, Wright made some points clear that were thoughtful. first, He wants the class goals to be, how to build worlds, and as he is a creator of Sims, I can comprehend that path. But some people do enjoy the zero-sum game. My advice to any is not to get caught up in making a zero sum or non-zero-sum game, I think you need to enjoy creating games at the moment. second, and this is self-evident but interesting. I will use JavaScript to make the games but remember you can make these games on sheets of paper, the medium of the toy to become a game, does not have to be electronic. For those who wish to follow me, do not get caught up in electronics, the learning process does not require it. Finally, to the game made at the first class. Well, I thought to the game I will like to make at the end of this learning process and I said to myself, what can I take from that idea and focus on not having a zero-sum game. I achieved an idea quickly but realized I needed to streamline. To be honest, the streamlining took days, about three and that streamlining process I want to cut down to hours. When the next class finish, I do not want to have days to figure out the game. I chose a game you can see in the eBook you may be hearing this from, or if you are in the audiobook, the eBook in question is linked in the audiobook description. The game is a simple strategy game implying a god role, where you play both sides and the goal of the game is to have as high a count as possible. Somewhat like playing chess with yourself, but the goal not to defeat yourself but literally keep your battling world alive. Tell me how may counts you reached. The rules to the game are simple. You have to place pieces. You start with the PUser, and if valid, you then place a piece for the Nuser and on and on till you cannot any more. The pieces are horizontal or vertical. Each user cannot place a piece on a vertical or horizontal line occupied by the other user. It is even incomplete, but I will ask you to figure out how. End of day 1 MY GAMEROOM https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/blog/63-bge-arcade/ OLD CONTENT- just for reference do not utilize My audioblog displaying my thoughts in the Will Wright Masterclass course on game design. The ebook comparative work has the code for the game i designed with the simple premise of giving my example of a non zero sum game. I have a review to what was covered or at least what I engendered in the introduction. The transcript for those who can not hear is in the ebook. Use the U.R.L. below to get pertinent links. https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/263-masterclass-2020/

CBL Juneteenth 06/22/2025 PHOTS AND EVENT INFORMATION HERE Presented by Sunday School Zine, The Bevy is a visual and sonic exhibition featuring live musical performances from Lambkin and J Words, record selections from Niyah West and the SLICK DOWN crew, and a myriad of visual and projector installations from LA to NYC. The Bevy, an expansive word meaning both “gathering” and “prey”, is an opportunity for artistic synergy. Guests can expect costuming from Qween Jean, large-scale paintings from BUMBAKiNi, and a small-scale installation from Devanté married to musical excellence + projected art until sunset. More importantly, we can expect connection. As we take in the senses, empanadas will be served and CWW’s vinyl store will be open to for record shopping. Event Overview: The Bevy is a visual exhibition featuring your art, the physical pieces of a few more artists, and live music performances and DJ’ing. The full list of the artist can be found on @SundaySchoolZine’s Instagram page along with a full description of the event. The Sunday School is a forthcoming culture and music zine that produces ceremonies, like the Bevy, about dance + performance art archiving. Event Information: Where - CWW Radio Shop, 1132 President St, Brooklyn, NY 11225 When - Sunday, 6/22, 2pm - 8pm How - “How will my art be displayed?” We will be projecting a slideshow of all of the works during the whole event, including during the performances. The organizers will be providing QR codes to a webpage that will have all of your artist names and links to your website and exhibited work. Our host, Angela Folasade, will also be facilitating any questions that guests have and that folks are accessing your work and listening to any accompanied audio on their own ARTIST I MET THERE The host Choya I couldnt find the other host Lena. https://x.com/mayonnnnnn_/status/1936970368943546735 JWords https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVBc7FKGgYM or https://youtu.be/CBgVkjx5V3k?si=j0wDngK_DSw15XLG or https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfDfbzZtmQzMC3LxYCXCtWeNqRtp1T6zO Treyvis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yvJuS593-0 Kneaku Ashae https://vimeo.com/715830112

KirillK's Bard songs https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1201282119 KirillK's Bard at a magical school https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1201279865 Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2861&type=status EMBED CODE Songwriting Contest from @writeddreams2reality through @crliterature comment https://www.deviantart.com/comments/1/1192483791/5213129623 referral https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/KirillK-s-Bard-songs-1201282119 POST CONTENT The following bard i heard singing a song in a magical academy from afar The song was Here's a song of innkeeps pockets full of gold your gold, my gold, where's our stalls Where we woke up! https://www.deviantart.com/comments/1/969462103/5068894067 And he had more, so I listened to another Here's a song of innkeeps Two were wet and through One ask'd for a ginger ale The other vodka brew Now when will he kiss her Now when will she stare back Ah well, my shift is done To-another, innkeeps flack More damn song of innkeeps Two more wet and through One ask'd for pristine water The other peanut chew Now when will he kiss her Now when will she stare back Ah well, my shift is done To-another, innkeeps flack More damn song of innkeeps Two more wet and through One ask'd for a wine cooler The other ol malt brew Now when will he kiss her Now when will she stare back Ah well, my shift is done To-another, innkeeps flack More damn lovers out there Countless wet and through Glad I'm over my ol' two Now I'm a lonely stew I envisioned Lucent Designs - Free Stock Image For Download # 61 by @Lucent-Designs-Media https://www.deviantart.com/lucent-designs-media/art/Lucent-Designs-Free-Stock-Image-For-Download-61-872386453 and another song Pockets full of gold , I heard on an island far Pockets full of gold, I had not when I sail'd yon Pockets full of gold, I hunted in the hot sand Pockets full of gold, I honor with this lament Clickity click! clickity clack! The crabs, are dancing, on my coconut snack How did I get here? How do I go ? The storms, over horizon, and I don't know Clickity click, clickity clack The crabs, are playing, with my spare rib intact How did I see her? How do I fly? The sunlight said something, and I still try Clickity click, clickity clack The crabs , are laughing, while my soul go back I envisioned Stock: Tropical island by @ArtReferenceSource https://www.deviantart.com/artreferencesource/art/Stock-Tropical-island-1109400440 and another song Your gold, my gold It, belongs, to we Your heart, my heart Bridge, without, a fee Come now, this morning, breakfast is on me Come now, this morning, clams and sausage treats Your gold, my gold It, belongs, to we Your heart, my heart Bridge, without, a fee Come now, this noontime, care to have a dance Come now, this noontime, sculpt and ring are feats Your gold, my gold It, belongs, to we Your heart, my heart Bridge, without, a fee Come now, this midnight, settle down with me Come now, this midnight, come you noddy shhhhh I envisioned Couples 15 by @CathleenTarawhiti https://www.deviantart.com/cathleentarawhiti/art/Couples-15-590897267 and another song Where's our stalls, when we were young, and yesterdays were new Where's our eggs, when we were fed, that parents only knew Where's our games, when we were sad, some teachers tried to sue Where's our town, when we were young, now regret only view [Instrumentation] Where's our stalls, now that were old? Withered by the dew! Where's our eggs, now that were starved? The coop has no crew! Where's our games, now that were bored? Our minds can not glue! Where's our town, now that were old? The trees know the hue! I envisioned Path stock 5 by @Wylderness https://www.deviantart.com/wylderness/art/Path-stock-5-973732271 And another song Where we woke up... was a new place Not a ...third planet, comet, spaceship in a race! What we first saw... was a new place With no... birds, castles, bingo tables out of place! Whoa is nelly Run like jelly Slide on bellies Laugh on merries Sleep on ferries STOP! Where we woke up... was a new place Not a ...true planet, meteor, Sun in a race! What we first saw... was a new place With no... cats, sailboats, old clocks ringing out of place! Whoa is nelly Run like jelly Slide on bellies Laugh on merries Sleep on ferries STOP! I envisioned MoodyStock 198 by @MoodyBlue https://www.deviantart.com/moodyblue/art/MoodyStock-198-1175528244 And another song, but I will have to tell it another time

Sunshine and Sandy successful Kickstarter 05/28/2020 Moon Ferguson Sunshine & Sandy: A Short Documentary Two women, uprooted from the lives they built in America, share an unbreakable bond of love, loss, and life. EXCERPT FROM THE KICKSTARTER Sunshine and Sandy are both portly, God-fearing, silver-haired grandmothers—two surprising faces of criminal deportation. Born in Jamaica, they spent most of their lives in the United States before reuniting years later in Ocho Rios. In America, Sunshine and Sandy were detained by ICE and the DEA, facing criminal charges for marijuana and insurance fraud, respectively. They served multiple sentences in federal prison before being deported, despite holding naturalized American citizenship. However, Sandy's story is a bit more complicated and sheds light on the injustice most legal immigrants face. TO SEE A VIDEO AND LEARN MORE GO TO THE FOLLOWING https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/moonferguson/sunshine-and-sandy-a-short-documentary?ref=project_link https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11647-sunshine-and-sandy-successful-kickstarter/

BLK Bestsellers List : America’s Bestselling Books Written by Black Writers January 2024 to Present types adult fiction ( hardcover) adult fiction (paperback) adult nonfiction (hardcover) adult nonfiction (paperback) juvenile fiction juvenile nonfiction young adult poetry https://aalbc.com/blackbestsellers/ADULT_FICTION_(Hardcover)_2025-04 referral https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11640-blk-bestsellers-list-america’s-bestselling-books-written-by-black-writers/

Contrast craft 09/27/2021 Contrast submission, can you describe the story Contrast submission - The Orange Mold by HDdeviant on DeviantArt For the complimentary colors invitational below. The idea is two complimentary color pairs, black/white side orange/blue. Women are solid black. Men are silhouette white. The space for men is orange. For women is blue. Can you answer the following questions: How many people are in the room? What is going on outside the window: who is in danger, who is not? https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Contrast-submission-The-Orange-Mold-893100306?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632719198 Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1635&type=status EMBED CODE

Dexterity Test/Story Challenge/Comic Book Superhero/Kloir DYIS/Monster Cutie/One Light Source/OC Pet 09/21/2021 Some art to enjoy Here is the Dexterity test:) The sleeping princess, can you tell the story in the image? I was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. The prompt is Leaves sing atop ancient trees - rustling, whispering, teasing the senses - telling a quiet tale of one taller than, gentler than, the oldest oak. I figured I will tell a tale in an image. I will give you some questions to help you. What planet is this? What is the craft the female is working on? What does the text in chinese say? What is the robot telling her to do? Who is the signal on the wall for and what does it say? What is the statue in the hallway behind the princess? https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/DAStory-challenge-post-competitive-entry-892543224?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632227117 The Teleman- Issue #1 - gifcomic is linked in the description was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. For a superhero, I admittedly wanted something simpler or galactic. My imagination sprouted Teleman. I even made him a comic you can enjoy as pages or a gif in the following links. Teleman Issue 1 page 2 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Teleman-issue1-page-2-892546119?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632228867 Teleman Issue 1 page 3 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Teleman-issue1-page-3-892546229?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632229088 Teleman Issue 1 page 4 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Teleman-issue1-page-4-892546546?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632229258 Teleman Issue 1 gifcomic https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Teleman-gifcomic-892546728?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632231022 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Teleman-cover-page-892545782?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632228657 The ancient town of Dalila- what is going on!?:) I was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. Dalila is an old robot, battered or bruised where it lay , eons ago. But, its mechanical heart remain a source of nourishment for life and its body, like a pyramid or temple of earliest times from kemet, has preserved to still be useful. But all is not so easy in the town. The bug pit is not what it was, and outsiders have brought a new level of violence. I will place the original source image in the comments Source image of Dalila... isn't she cute and the oscar goes too.... https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Ancient-Town-of-Dalila-892549276?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632231916 Microcalligraphy based on Kloir I was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. The poem I created based on the image is the following: Title: The Trees before what you see If a tree has no shadow, it is the darkest breed Gatekeeper to secrets, doorway... to fantasees The magic need the trees Not to live, to be seen The light need the leaves Not to live, to careen When one walk where magic, the Elders say The trees are above the doves soiree While you will see castle balconies The squirrel dare the oldest tree top, where winds can catapult any to doom For the sight is a gift, see nature in full bloom Beward the princess at the sweetest tree She see you coming, she see you need But she know the forest, better than you think Talk to an oak, and you will get a joke Talk to a kapok... and you will see free folk Talk to a boabab, and a sweet to your gob Talk to a ginko, and remember what you sow Talk to a yew, and catch a brand new Talk to a mulberry and ripples from your mind's ferry Talk to a tree and see... something The last of the tree guard, has no leaves Performs the magic you will see... Look up! the purple cork floats or corral the leaves A bed in the sky to cover the scene For this piece I continue the design style from the last calligraphic work of not using the entire poem in the calligraphy. This time I am particularly happy cause I used new colored inks. I like how the inks came out but I need to get smaller widths. The widths did not allow the finesse I achieved with my pencil. So, this ink does not have the intricacy of the pencil. Calligraphy version1 The Trees before what you see Gatekeeper to secrets The magic need the trees The light need the leaves When one walk where magic The squirrel dare the oldest tree Beware the princess, at the sweetest tree ... Talk too a tree and see... something Performs the magic you will see Calligraphy version 2 The Trees before what you see <what was used> Gatekeeper to secrets The magic need the trees The light need the leaves When one walk where magic The squirrel dare the oldest tree Beware the princess ... Talk too a tree and see The magic you will see the post competitive invitational https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Microcalligraphy-based-on-Kloir-892550129?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632232969 Dexterity Test - about 3 hours- I had to use my left hand, the right hand, it is over too quickly...:) I was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. I am fortunate that I know what I like to create as an artist. That is poems/short stories/graphite drawings. I can do these three things forever, no pay needed. As it is, for the dexterity test I decided to do something I hadn't done in a while and that is draw with my left hand. As a kid I wrote or drew with either hand, but environments do manipulate folks. I timed myself, and I used only a graphite pencil/an eraser, and my smudger plus a white sheet of paper. My left hand had some serious issues smudging or erasing. The penciling was just about getting muscle memory back. I think halfway through I got some of the memory back. I will have to remind myself to draw with the left hand exclusively to reject such rust in the future. My times: 3:42 pm to 6:04 pm an Errands OR watermelon break 6:15 to 6:45 pm I recall only one time near the end did I use the right hand and it was for two eraser motions, not large ones, and I recovered the left hand. My desire to go faster is what pushed it so a lesson is in that folks. Slow down , keep the pace slow and that will aid in going from hand to hand. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Dexterity-Test-892551259?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632233707 Nurse Leechman - isn't she cute I was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. Nurse Leechman Her probiscus is covered to not alarm anyone and to be sanitary. She walks upright and carries anticoagulent which is always important to those whose blood is acting irregular or unhealthy. And she makes it herself. As she is pregnant, though you can't see it right now. She is carrying the micromarsupial daily, the must have magazine for any young Siamensis needing guidance or tips on caring for their upcoming child. Edited by legendary Mrs. Roo. Isn't this nurse cute! This was quite interesting for me research wise. That word monster meaning disgusting or not cute, isn't in my mentality. Monsters can be cute... anyway. In my search to find something not thought of as cute or pleasant or safe to be around. I thought of a leech. But which leech? I learned of the leech Siamensis Placobdelloides of the glossiphoniidae. Now like all leehces her saliva has anticoagulents which stop blood from going to gel from liquid and so I automatically thought nurse. But, this particular breed of Leech has another great attribute. They carry their young. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Ms-Leechman-PPPMonstercuties-892552269?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632234592 The Night Table- can you guess some of the references in my film noir short:) I was working on my submission for the levar burton fiyah and thus, I was too late for the competitive aspect, but not to late for the invitational aspect. I had two ideas for the one light source originally, the first one I finished all but the chiaroscuro. I was pondering between doing a single street lamp or doing an inverted one light source. But I was undecided so I went on to the second idea. I haven't shared the first one, it is merely cause I want rest. I will in the future. but I see this idea as the first scene and the first idea as the second scene, a little film noir couplet. Enjoy https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Night-Table-892553358?ga_submit_new=10%3A1632235077 Original post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1629&type=status EMBED CODE EMBED CODE EMBED CODE EMBED CODE EMBED CODE EMBED CODE EMBED CODE

fire tutorial 09/01/2021 fire tutorial What else would you draw in a picture with a dragon? I made a headless dragon for my idea, so my dragon was holding its head but I can also see a pearl or some objectanything can be held by a dragoneven luck What tutorial would you like to see next? Anything is fine. The key for any artists is to look at competitions or tutorials as invitationals. Either invite the artists to create, so do so technique can always be judged but contentment is something the artist must learn to have to their work gardless what others say or do. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Make-Fire-Tutorial-890526278?ga_submit_new=10%3A1630467215 ORiginal Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1619&type=status EMBED CODE

Dragon tutorial: steps/headless/1960s 09/01/2021 Tutorial for a dragon What story made you fall in love with fantasy? difficult. The earliest fantasy tale I can think of is high john the conqueror or anansi. In my household my parents loved telling stories. the earliest I will say is, high john the conqueror. What dragon character is your favorite? Well, what determines a dragon is complicated. Does a dragon need wings? need to have blood, can it be a robot? so, I will answer this question in parts. my favorite dragon from antiquity is the Dragon that Ra or Horus depending on the telling rides on the Nile. I love that blue color. My favorite dragon in cartoon world is smog in the rankin bass lord of the rings. The first film/live action dragon I saw was falcor and yes, I have to get to that museum in germany where you can ride him. My favorite dragon villain is... Mecha Godzilla, the original Toho or the modern. What tutorial would you like to see next? For me, any. I see myself as a mature artists. I like the way I draw. I am satisfied. No artists can do it all. So, any tutorial is great. For me, I collect it all and maybe a story or two will come from them one day ... I used only one tool. I find with tutorials, artists like to use too many tools. the common child in humanity does not have a computer. Computer's cost money. Does not have food. Food costs money. so, I try to do tutorials intentionally with one affordable tool. I have a computer and equipment to act through electronic art processes. But, that isn't something that can translate to a kid with one crayon or pencil. So, I made the dragon, I used thicker lines for definition. I used line drawing or shading to represent different colors. In each step I followed the prior steps, growing the character. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Make-a-dragon-tutorial-in-steps-890524814?ga_submit_new=10%3A1630465943 headless horseman dragon I am thinking of fall already and I thought what about a headless dragon. I used a similar style as in a deviantart tutorial, cited in the image below. I want to add as in my version of the tutorial. YOu can use draft lines to create different intensities which can depict foreground background, light ,shadow. A closer look to the image will show different lines about the body, you can use that to show differentiation of color absent multiple colors. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Headless-Horseman-Dragon-890525581?ga_submit_new=10%3A1630466561 1960s fashionable dragon Me and FlapperFoxy talked about fashion on one of her pieces. https://www.deviantart.com/flapperfoxy/art/1960-s-Foxy-599962182 and it made me think in concert to the dragon tutorial, what if a dragon had a similar dress. So like the tutorial, I used only one pencil, one page, draft lines representing different colors. I didn't make a second version, this image was scanned from the only attempt. I mirrored some of Flapper's style with her work above. But we talked about a proper back out for a female with tale. On closer inspection you can see the dress has a zipper from top to bottom, and something in my mind is similar to a sewing hoop that allows for adjustment to suit her whenever she needs. Since it is a zipper skirt I figured it will have a pattern perpindicular to the pattern flapper used in her work. One side is a block color while the other side is multicolor or shaped. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/1960s-Fashionable-Dragon-890525831?ga_submit_new=10%3A1630466918 Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1618&type=status EMBED CODE EMBED CODE EMBED CODE

happy 21st birthday deviantart 09/01/2021 Happy 21st birthday, deviantart https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Birthday-Deviant-Submission-890524465?ga_submit_new=10%3A1630465518 Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1617&type=status EMBED CODE

What if What if 08/21/2021 Was asked by someone online, the following is my answer Its fine. I rarely hate any art. I never say any art is bad. No artists is trying to make bad work. So, an artist may fail to achieve what they wanted in terms of audience response or I may dislike a works aspects but it wasn't for lack of trying. .... I will specify a question. IF the question is, how does the what if series settle into the modern media of comic book story discussions? I think it settles into a pit. Modern media is for many the nonviolent warzone. How many black characters? how many female characters? how many white characters? how many christian characters? how many muslims characters? how many young characters? how many old characters? How many hetero characters? how many lgbtq+ characters? how many atheist characters? and then once people get past the quantity of representation. Now the condition of the characters. He is black, but do black people like him? she is fat, but do fat people like her? They are lgbtq+ but do the lgbtq+ like them? The couple are bdsmers but do the bdsmers like them? Number of characters and then how are the characters portrayed. What If is a pander to those questions. People sadly think, that when a character has their traits it means something. I have said this in the past and I will say it now and I will say it in the future. No artist is blockaded to creativity, in my view, but I look at the originators of characters as important to how I define their essense. Give me a black written /black drawn character and I will associate them to being black. I have always been a storm fan. Always will be. But, Storm wasn't designed by a black person. and, a black artists later manipulating what a white artist created. While in no need of validation as art, I do not see or will accept as a black character. What if captain america is a woman? What if Thor is transgender? What if Iron Man, a fiscally spoiled rich kid engineering genious, is Black? What if will have many lovers cause it gives visual form to a small set of infinite possibilities. What if is in my view, a video form of what comics originally were. We forget, before characters became so popular they had their own comics, and became rigid or cultural identifiers, most comics were what ifs? Most comic characters started out in what ifs. A writer has an idea and pitches it to the audience. If the audience like it you will see them in another edition. Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1608&type=status

My intial reply to the video nina simone was a polymath... the problem with black people when we gather in public is, for events meant for music or community, march on washington/summer of jazz/ jazzmobile/million man march/black film festival.. black people don't produce violence. But, we do produce violence when the tipping points are reached. ... I disagree with both of you. I don't think the lack of media outlets wanting to display the Summer of Soul is a shame. Ownership matters folks. You both mentioned how Gil Scott Heron or the Last Poets were not on the bill. But that was and is part of the problem. White people own media outlets that allow all spectrums of the white community to speak. Name me one Black owned media outlet that serves five unique black segments in the black community? Yes, my parents remember that concert. To be blunt, Harlem has a long history of similar events. That famous photo at Duke Ellington's house is not a joke. Harlem between the 1920s -1970s had the greatest collection of black entertainers for a region in any city in the usa. The recording of the concert was a surprise for my parents. ... Don, no one is a complete encyclopedia:) Someone somewhere in the internet stated the Black community ended the great era of Black Music in the 1970s, I oppose that position. The following is my reply We didn't end it. All musical eras end. To be blunt, the black community in usa had many great musical times after the war between the states. The st louis/to harlem slide jazz era. The big band era. The R&B initial era. Motown. Many great black songwriters in each of those eras. We didn't end , we changed. Black people in the usa's music changes as we change. The reason why we made the blues is cause right after the war between the states, many of us had a sadness, a blue mood. When we started growing more financially positive, actually getting whites to allow us to own businesses or get paid to do ork while still being nonviolent <not saying all black people wanted that but I comgress>, we turned the blues into rhythm and blues. After world war II when the black community oddly enough had large financial growth for individuals, we created rock and roll from R&B which is from the Blues. We created Funk as a blues version of the motown sound. Where motown was manicured black music for the white audience, in the same vein as scott joplin's minstrel music, which he did alongside his ragtime works. Ragtime was in my view, a piano version of jazz, which was started with horned instruments in new orleans. Jazz progressed from the northern expansion. Starting from the storyville's of new orleans to St Louis, to Chicago to HArlem, to every bar from Shanghai to Berlin to Rio de janeiro to calcutta to Cairo all around the earth, jazz was played at one time, a rare achievement for one art form. So much so that colleges throughout humanity teach jazz. Many surviving jazz musicians were able to financially survive being the first jazz teachers in schools where only white jazz teachers may exist today. No, black music changes as black people change. House Music comes from the urban black community, which in the vein of funk fuses all the many prior musical forms from Blues or Jazz. But with a larger technological capability than Funk, which began using tech in unique ways for music. We didn't end it. Today you can hear way too many excellent black blues musicians under 50, black jazz musicians under 50. White owned media companies dominate the industry and they prefer pop music, which is hat Motown or the Ragtime was. All three are intended to appeal to mass audiences, be good to sell. All three evaded or try to evade cultural friction. So, all is good, the black musical heritage lives in the black community for me, and continuous to grow or change, becoming more global, having more linguistical width than in the past, more cultural variance. All is good. Movies That Move We video Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L1bNVo8gYU Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1587&type=status

audiobook narration styles future 07/19/2021 “I Probably Modeled Him on Something I’d Heard on The Wire” The audiobook industry is collectively squirming through the cultural debate on representation and casting. BY LAURA MILLER Twenty years ago, Grover Gardner began narrating a series of comic mysteries whose title character is a white lawyer named Andy Carpenter. In the series—written by David Rosenfelt—Carpenter also has a partner, Willie Miller, who’s a Black ex-con, which means Gardner had to voice Miller too. Back then, he hardly gave any thought to the fact that he was a white narrator voicing a Black man. “I probably modeled him on something I’d heard on television, on Hill Street Blues, or The Wire,” Gardner said. Today, 14 books later, he’s still voicing Willie—but he’s changed his approach. “I’d think very hard about doing that kind of accent now,” he said. In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of representation and misrepresentation, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a white actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show. But audiobooks play by different rules. It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender, race, and sometimes sexual orientation of a novel’s author or main character. Yet most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own. When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s, the field was overwhelmingly white. Gardner, who has been an audiobook narrator for four decades and also works as a producer, recalls that, for the first couple of decades of his career, “the whole industry was geared toward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. There were hardly any narrators of color, and few female narrators back then, Gardner said. “I recorded Scott Turow’s [1990 novel] Burden of Proof. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer,” he told me. “I did it. We did whatever they sent us back then. But I wouldn’t do that book today. You would find a Latino narrator to do it.” Apart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents Ronan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 exposé Catch and Kill, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of the sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries, like magazine publishing and television. This is partly because it’s a low-profile, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press. But many who work in the industry still feel the tensions around casting acutely. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color, nonwhite narrators are being offered more work than they once were. Meanwhile, like most narrators, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. January LaVoy, a biracial narrator who identifies as Black, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is freighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. “For many white narrators, it’s difficult because of fear [of backlash]. For many narrators of color, it’s difficult because of the weight of responsibility.” The industry is grappling with these issues daily. “It’s difficult for everyone,” LaVoy said. Although some publishers have audiobook divisions, they usually function separately from the print division, and the audio rights for many titles get sold to separate companies such as Brilliance or Blackstone. The producer of an audiobook, who is employed by the publisher, acquires the rights and oversees casting and other big-picture decisions, such as opting for multiple narrators on a novel that often switches points of view. Michele Cobb, a producer and the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, told me that she and her colleagues have tried to figure out how they can sensitively ask narrators to provide producers with information about their backgrounds—such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability—that can be helpful when casting. Cobb explained that it’s an ongoing challenge to cast appropriate narrators for books by authors of color, while avoiding typecasting. In her own company, which publishes romance audiobooks, “I’ve definitely had authors come back and say, ‘Well, this character is white so I wouldn’t go with a Black narrator,’ ” a choice she feels obliged to respect. Traditionally, both a director and an engineer, usually both freelancers, work on the recording with the narrator. Director Simone Barros outlined an exhausting list of tasks to me, from making sure the narrator doesn’t skip or add words to researching accurate regional pronunciations and maintaining continuity. “You can get to the last page of the book, and it will mention that a character had a German accent the whole time,” said Barros, speaks with the mile-a-minute lucidness of a person whose job is anticipating every contingency. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.* In the case of some first-person narrators, such as the one in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, an audiobook Barros directed, the book is “written so much within the perspective of the first person that the ethnicity of other characters are specifically heard from the narrator’s perspective of them. More specifically in Antkind, the author’s very point is this shifting, mutable and even unreliable perspective, to shine a light on how too often minority characters go unseen, or only seen or heard through a bias cipher.” But with a book written in the third person, she and her narrator will work up a full voice profile—a cache of recorded dialogue and biographical information—for each speaking character. That way, if, say, a villain appears in a novel’s first few pages only to disappear for several chapters, the narrator and director can remind themselves of what he sounds like. Such profiles are particularly helpful with recurring characters in sequels and series, which may be recorded years later. In the past, it was largely left up to the professionals behind the scenes to anticipate and head off any problems. Ten years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a book’s author—the person most intimately acquainted with a title—to have no input at all in the audiobook production. But as audiobooks became a more mainstream and high-profile format, authors began seeking more oversight. Today, writers often get the final say on casting, and are often invited to choose a narrator from a selection of sample recordings and encouraged to provide crucial information about how characters ought to sound. Nathan Harris, a Black writer whose debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, is set at the end of the Civil War, knew the accents of his multiracial cast of characters, who include freed slaves, would be a challenge. “You can go down a very precarious road with how they sound,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it myself.” His publisher presented him with an audition recording by William DeMeritt. “They told me they could go in all sorts of different directions if that’s what I wanted,” Harris said. “But he just nailed it.” Over the past few years, the crew of professionals who work on a given book has increasingly been whittled down to a bare minimum, putting greater pressure on narrators’ judgment—even though a narrator, who is in most cases a freelance contractor, doesn’t have much time to carefully screen a book for potential stumbling blocks before agreeing to the job. The exploding demand for audiobooks with the advent of digital downloads and, most recently, an increasing number of home studios built during the pandemic also means that more narrators have ended up doing most of the production work and key decision-making on their own. Some narrators say they now turn down jobs when they feel unsure about voicing major characters. Cassandra Campbell—narrator of, among other things, Delia Owens’ bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel featuring several Black supporting characters—recalled narrating the first two in a series of books, which made her the automatic choice for the third. But when she discovered that the third book was told from the point of view of a young Burmese boy, Campbell, who is white, bowed out. “I just didn’t feel comfortable with it,” she said. A multitude of minor characters can turn an audio book into a minefield for its narrator. Edoardo Ballerini, who was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last year as “a go-to voice for intelligent, subtle but gripping narrations of books,” says he’s now most often asked to narrate books requiring European accents. (His father is an Italian poet, and he was raised in New York.) Still, challenges do arise. “Take a James Patterson book,” he explained. “Let’s say it’s set in New York City and the detective is hard-boiled, an Italian-American. I can do that. His partner is a feisty woman and I think I can handle that.” But then the minor characters start showing up, sometimes slotted into uncomfortably stereotypical roles: “They get in a cab and there’s the cabbie, or they run into a perp who happens to be Black, or whatever it is. You have to voice them as well. And there’s really no way for anyone to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do this book because there are a handful of lines by an Indian cabbie.’ ” Meanwhile, many narrators of color—extra-conscious of the weight of representation—find themselves engaging in a lot of extra, unpaid work researching characters and voices that they may ultimately decide they can’t do justice to. Recently, LaVoy bowed out on a title in a children’s series she narrates about a group of middle school students who travel the world with their eccentric professor, encountering mythical creatures from the cultures they visit. “When we did one that took place in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “we got a Native American linguist from the Muckleshoot tribe to work with me. I felt really comfortable,” she said. “But this one particular book took place in Cuba, and it was very heavily written in Spanish,” a language LaVoy doesn’t speak fluently. When she got to a part where the whole group begins singing the Cuban national anthem, she decided to pass. “They needed someone with a different mouth,” she concluded. A character’s accent can be an evocation of her origins and identity, but it can also be—as was the case with Apu, the Indian-born convenience-store clerk on The Simpsons, voiced by white actor Hank Azaria—a mocking caricature. (Azaria recently announced that he would no longer voice Apu and expressed a desire to “go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”) “Actors love to do accents!” Campbell told me. “It’s fun to do vocal gymnastics, but we have had a moment of recognizing that there are certain accents where you’re appropriating someone’s culture.” The one motto that nearly every audiobook professional I interviewed repeated to me when I asked about their strategies for dealing with accents is “less is more.” Kevin R. Free—a Black theater actor who began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago and has become the voice of both a soap opera–addicted cyborg in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series and of Eric Carle’s iconic picture books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.)—laughingly recalled reporting for his very first recording session armed with a set of theatrically bold character voices, only to be told by his director: “I don’t want you to think of doing this book as doing a solo show. … There’s no reason for you to go all the way there.”* That holds especially true for cross-cultural accents. If Ballerini feels that “maybe I’m not the right person to give a voice to this particular character, let me just do it as plainly and as simply as I can. I think that’s a general trend that’s happening in the industry.” Campbell explained that when voicing characters of color, she uses an acting technique that focuses on the character’s intentions rather than on more superficial markers of identity like accent. “What does the character want from the other person in the scene? What is the conflict of the scene? Play that fully without relying on cultural stereotypes.” In Campbell’s recording of Where the Crawdads Sing, she audibly dials the rural North Carolina accents of the Black characters further down than the accents of the white characters they interact with. Sometimes, however, an accent shouldn’t be underplayed, because it serves a crucial role in the story. That can create conflict with the production or postproduction staff, if they’re not familiar with or sensitive to the cultural context of a book. Barros directed the audiobook of Simon Han’s 2020 novel Nights When Nothing Happened, about a family of Chinese immigrants living in Texas. The wife in the book becomes annoyed when her husband leaves an outgoing message on their answering machine pronouncing the family’s surname as “Chang,” as the Texans around them say it, rather than using the Mandarin pronunciation, which is closer to “Cheng.” When narrator James Chen’s recording went through a postproduction process called quality control, or QC, Barros and Chen received orders for “pickups” (short rerecordings edited into the final audiobook to correct errors) on every instance of the family’s name, instructing them to pronounce it the Anglicized way—as the Texans do. This was, as Barros put it, “not only totally wrong,” but a literal replication of the assimilation that so bothers the main character’s wife. In that instance, the producer backed Barros and her narrator, but that’s not always the case; January LaVoy wincingly recalled the time that, at a director’s insistence, she recorded pickups replacing her correct pronunciation of Latinx with latinks. Deciding whether to use the Anglicized or loanword pronunciations can be fraught for bilingual performers. Emily Woo Zeller, a Chinese American narrator, has sometimes clashed with directors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages, such as tofu or kung fu. She is also one of the few narrators I spoke with who took the step of contacting the author of a book that she found objectionable. “I won’t name names,” she told me, “but it was a white author,” and the scene involved what Zeller called “misplaced comedy,” in which the author “mixed up Chinese and Japanese culture, and the comedy was about the way characters looked and the fact that wanted to do kung fu and they were Communists.” Deciding “this can’t come out of my mouth,” Zeller brought her concerns to the author, who, she said, was “very apologetic and willing to change it.” Hers was an unusual move. Audiobook narrators tend to see their role as strictly interpretative. Their job is to convey the book from the author to the reader in a way that remains true to the author’s intent. This includes texts like classics, books whose authors can’t be appealed to for changes, and books that contain words, passages, and characters that are now deemed offensive. There also remain plenty of contemporary authors who, as Cobb tactfully put it, “haven’t caught up yet,” and narrators will continue to have to figure out how to perform those books. For Grover Gardner, four decades in the audiobook industry have taught him that “where there’s ignorance, you fall back on the only things that you’ve seen or heard, and chances are very good that, if you’re an older person, you’re drawing on a stereotype.” He’s had to work to transform some of his ongoing roles from vocal clichés into full characters. In the case of the former convict Willie in the Andy Carpenter mysteries, for instance, he has consciously tried to lean less on an exaggerated accent as an actorly crutch. “I’ve tried to focus more on attitude,” Gardner said, “on the real person.” Correction, June 23, 2021: This article originally misstated that Simone Barros is Black. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black. Update, June 23, 2021: This article has been updated to add additional comments by Barros about the narration and perspective in Antkind. Correction, June 22, 2021: This article originally misstated that Kevin R. Free began narrating audiobooks five years ago. Free began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago. ARTICLE https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/audiobook-narration-race-accents-casting-racism-representation.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2022%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list How Stories Change When They Move From Page to Voice Laura Lindstedt on the Different Ways We Read a Book By Laura Lindstedt, translated by David Hackston June 14, 2021 To all intents and purposes, a psychoanalyst’s couch is in fact a bed—after all, it lacks a back and armrests. And yet, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody would offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst’s bed unless, that is, they were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst. In October 2019, I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios, headphones over my ears, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia, which had been published in Finland six months earlier. “‘Natalia’ was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting,” I read and continued: “When I showed her round my office, which I had rented in an apartment next to my house, I told her about the couch.” These two consecutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading these sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain. When one reads a book aloud as an audiobook, the visual aspects of the text all disappear. Of course, one could read the word couch, which appears in italics, in a slightly different way, perhaps by holding a short, artistic pause before the word. But this is not the same thing. Italics are not the same as a short pause. The therapist, the book’s narrator, gives the patient the code-name “Natalia.” Under the cover of this anonymity, the therapist then proceeds to divulge intimate details of Natalia’s life to the reader, then at one point removes the inverted commas from Natalia’s name “as I might remove the safety catch from a gun”. When read aloud, this sentence is absurd: the listener cannot hear the inverted commas around Natalia’s name. * Let’s be clear: I am very skeptical about the practice of turning works of literature into audio recordings. If audiobooks become the primary way in which we interact with books, it would be strange if at some point this did not have a direct impact on how people write literary works. Will writers—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud? The succinct speech between Me (the writer) and You (the reader) works well when spoken aloud, so the current appetite for autofiction is unlikely to dwindle any time soon. A linear narrative, in which we already know (or think we know) something about the end point, is also easy to listen to. For this reason, celebrity autobiographies and so-called true stories make for successful audiobooks. However, complex narrative structures, shifting perspectives, narrative polyphony, long, meandering sentences and the visual aspects of a text find themselves increasingly under threat from a medium that relies solely on hearing. If linear narrative becomes the only acceptable form of complex literary expression, our thoughts will be the poorer for it. Imaginary worlds and possibilities will shrink because such worlds and possibilities are not “content” that can be detached from “form,” they are not statements, suggestions or questions isolated from their rhetorical devices. * That being said, I’m not a militant opponent of audiobooks. To my mind, it is simply important to recognize that there is a significant difference between the printed book and the audiobook. Written material turns into vibration, letters become sound waves. They always come from a concrete source that guides our interpretation, a source that is completely different from the reading process heard through our “inner voice.” A new element appears between the book and its recipient: a voice that shapes how we receive the text. It is a sound born of a human body in a unique way and that is (generally) readily identifiable as the voice of a man or a woman. In the audiobook of My Friend Natalia, this unavoidable fact becomes a poetic problem in its own right. Throughout the text, I have scattered conflicting clues as to the sex of the therapist, the novel’s first-person narrator, but I was careful never to define the therapist as either a man or a woman. With certain exceptions, in many languages a writer and a translator can easily disguise or at least avoid the matter of the narrator’s sex. A writer can also play with this ambiguity, as is the case in my novel My Friend Natalia. Some readers have been convinced that the narrator is a man, others have considered the therapist a woman. Several readers have told me that their perception of the matter changed as they were reading. Readers always read a text through the prism of their own experiences, preconceptions and cultural stereotypes. For this reason, I wanted to read the Finnish audiobook of My Friend Natalia myself. I am a woman, but because I am the book’s author my voice is above all an authorial voice, and in this way I feel I managed to resolve the dilemma described above. But my relief was somewhat premature. I was once again forced to confront this matter in early 2021 when Penguin Random House Audio began to produce the English-language audiobook of David Hackston’s translation of My Friend Natalia (W.W. Norton/Liveright). PHR Audio’s producer kindly sent me a number of audio samples to listen to. All these samples were very professional and of the highest quality, but still they were unsuitable for my novel’s narrator. I started to lose hope. Was it at all possible to find an actor whose voice was neither that of a man nor a woman, a voice that wasn’t too young as it should be a voice that conveys the therapist’s wealth of professional experience? The voice also needed dash of pompous embitterment, stemming from the fact that nobody seems to value the therapist’s subtle genius. But we were lucky, and eventually we found an excellent voice, that of the actor TL Thompson, who identifies as non-binary and whom I chose as the English-language reader for My Friend Natalia. Thompson’s voice is characterful, mesmerizing and unforced. To my own ear, Thompson’s voice sounds more masculine than feminine, or perhaps it’s the whisky baritone of an elderly lady. However, the voice is not remotely “gender-neutral,” a voice-type that we tried to look for at first and whose very existence I have seriously begun to doubt. Thompson’s voice made every sentence oscillate between the two. I have not written such oscillation into my novel, let alone a gender-neutral narrator’s voice: the question of the therapist’s identity opens up—if, indeed, it opens up at all—when readers find themselves indulging in assumptions that the text does not affirm. I can say quite whole-heartedly that I love Thompson’s reading. Yet in the same breath, I must reiterate what I have already said: an audiobook is a different entity from a printed book. * For me, the act of interpretation is specifically that of thinking with the book. It requires stops, pauses, flicking through the pages, making notes in the margins. The book takes on markings, layers that are missing from digital products, which are perpetually new. We can browse with our eyes but not with our ears, as my partner, who works with sound, would put it. The ear is more sensitive to chaos and clamor than the eye. Sound operates like a one-directional timeline, a surge that is hard to control. A detailed auditive perception of a large space is simply impossible. It is to these very layers that I return when trying to form an understanding of the kind of book I am reading. I can easily locate markings I have made by flicking through a book, even if it is a book I read 20 years ago. The various temporal strata of my home library provide a shadow story of what has touched me and who I have been throughout my reading life. Last summer I awoke to the immeasurable value of these little scribblings when going through my grandmother’s estate after she died at the age of 100. From the collection of religious books, treatises and notebooks, I saved those in which my grandmother had left some kind of mark—and exclamation mark, a line under a section of text, or a Biblical verse in the margin. These markings reveal not only what touched her and who she was; they also say a lot about where I have come from, what kind of supra-generational reality I carry with me. ARTICLE https://lithub.com/how-stories-change-when-they-move-from-page-to-voice/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2014%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives will finally be published, starting next year. By Dan Sheehan June 23, 2021, 11:21am The publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and vital literature in American history.” As reported by Publishers Weekly earlier today< read below > , the mega-deal gives HarperCollins world rights “to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.” Given the significance of the books in question, it seems strange that a deal like this one wasn’t made sooner, but this is welcome news nonetheless. More welcome still is HC’s assertion that it will hire a dedicated archivist to oversee the project, and “engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.” Way back in 1958, HC’s predecessor company Harper & Brothers published Dr. King’s very first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, which detailed the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and described the conditions of African Americans living in Alabama during the era. The first MLK titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. ARTICLE https://lithub.com/new-works-from-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-archives-will-finally-be-published-starting-next-year/ HC Inks Deal with MLK Jr. Archives By Rachel Deahl | Jun 23, 2021 In an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., HarperCollins has acquired world publishing rights to the archives of the civil rights leader. The publisher said the collection features some of the "most historically important and vital literature in American history." Judith Curr, president and publisher of HarperOne Group, negotiated the deal with Amy Berkower, president, Writers House and agent for the King estate; and Eric D. Tidwell of Intellectual Properties Management, manager of the King estate. The deal gives HC world rights to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages. HC said it plans to hire an archivist who will oversee the material in the archive and make it "available to all HarperCollins editors globally." HC added that it intends to "engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life." HC also has history with King. A predecessor company to HC, Harper & Brothers, published King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, in 1958. All current his King titles, including those published by Beacon Press, will continue to be publishing by their current rights holders. “We are thrilled to be the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives,” said Curr in a statement. “We view this as a unique global publishing program." The first King titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. ARTICLE https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/86731-hc-inks-deal-with-mlk-jr-archives.html SOURCE ARTICLE Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, Books for Palestine, and an Intro to Booktok: This Week in Book News https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/06/25/kobo-emerging-writer-prize-books-for-palestine-and-an-intro-to-booktok-this-week-in-book-news/ Original Post https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1579&type=status