Troy

If it were not Cynique's Corner it might be Pioneers Place or maybe Del's Den or Mel's Manor. Alas however, Cynique's Corner is etched in granite.

Yeah I vaguely remember the site. I'm not sure I realized that you were the one who created it. What is the URL of the one that is currently running?

Well I agree with you @Pioneer1, but I completely understand why people do it. I've created many websites myself, and only two are still active (one minimally so). How many of the websites that you created are still active? Creating a website is easy, making it viable over the long term is not. But to your point the moment we set up shop on a corporate platform we are at their mercy. I call it digital sharecropping.

Ah don't be so hard on folk man. Running a business is hard enough, trying to make a website on top of that can very daunting -- especially if you are poor and uneducated.

At some point the world will end. the sun has a finite life and once it has exhausted it's fuel it will be a wrap for us...in another few billion years. In that amount of time many forms of intelligent life could evolve a go extinct. Maybe one of them will get it right.

I have to check my racism all the time too

Well thanks for the insight. Seems to me there'd be something more interesting to troll about... maybe so.ething a bit more plausible... what are you favorite black forums?

Well the so called "evil white man" has not been around since the beginning of time Indeed for most of recorded human history The Black man flourished. The "evil white man" has only been wreaking havoc for a couple thousand years, and much of this time they were running around killing each other. Just think about the last 150 years; Civil war 800K, WWi 20M, WW2 60M... Sure darker skinned people will almost certainly outlast melanin deficient people, but that is because they are so outnumbered.

The "employment" data is a joke. And yes those fees accrue interest and penalties if not paid in a timely fashion -- making a bad problem worse even insurmountable. I predict crime will start to increase in places like NYC as a result. I could see Black people becoming republican because they are fiscally or socially conservative, but today it is the party of 45...

Hey @ZakiaDivers, I have to tell you this post sounds crazy on it's face. Usually I just delete these types of posts and ban the user, but yours I'll leave. I checked the petition on change.org, and I presume they do some minimal degree of checking so I figured I'd let this one ride against my better judgement... So John Lennon was incredibly racist, huh? Would you care to share a few of the racist things that he did?

MOMMY'S KHMAR by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, Illustrated by Ebony Glenn "A Top 130 African-American Children’s Book" I thought this book was sweet. While Muslims make up a relatively tiny portion of Black America's religious community. I think it would be useful not just for children in this religious minority for children outside the group to learn about different aspects of our multifaceted American culture.

@Queen X speaking of poverty, @Kalexander2 raised an interesting point that is rarely discussed: fines. I've lived in the' hood for most of my life and fines are crippling our communities. Over policing and onerous fines leveled against poor people is devastating to many. I could go on all day about parking traffics, traffic violation, littering tickets. White people walk around greenwich village smoking pot in the open, negros in Harlem get run through the system -- don't let it be the weekend you might spend a night in jail.

How does 999 relate to computers?

Poverty, for the descendendants of formerly enslaved people in America is a complex problem. We have been, and are, bombarded by a wide variety of assaults. What I do not is that our poverty will not be alleviated by the actions of out government alone. The government is necessary, but not sufficient to solver poverty in our communities. Black people must to do most of the work. This is a very difficult thing for us to do. This was made crystal clear to me only after I became a business owner. AALBC has lasted more than 20 years only because of my community. If we are to pull the Black community out of poverty we have to be the ones do to it.

This was one the the click-baity headlines you see advertised on websites. Even though my perverse curiosity is often peaked (who can resist the "You'd be alarmed how these 10 beautiful famous people look today") I avoid these links like the plague. How every this title, "WATCH: Two Transgenders Blow Out Girls In State Meet," made me laugh because I immediately thought about @Pioneer1 Rather than clicking the link I did a google search and was surprised to discover Transgender athletes is "a thing" now. Apparently all a guys has to say is that he is a girl and he can race with the girls. The "ex-dudes" are breaking records. From YouTube Earlier this week when Connecticut held its CIAC Track & Field Championships, the previous records for girls were broken in both the 100 and 200-meter runs. A transgender, won the events. Another transgender, was the runner up in the 100 meter dash. According to the Connecticut Post, the results are causing some controversy. “A lot of people have asked, can you run a separate race, can you put an asterisk next to their name, do something that shows there is a standard that is different from that?” said CIAC executive director Karissa Niehoff. “When you get into that playing out, you have got civil rights issues. “Then within the same gender, you are taking one population of the gender and you’re separating them and creating another class. That’s what Title IX speaks to. That’s what Office of Civil Rights guidelines speak to. You cannot discriminate based on gender. And in our case in Connecticut, gender is gender identity.” Yet what about the two girls who worked for years who got knocked out of the finals by Miller and Yearwood? And what about the two girls who finished seventh and eighth in the finals who were denied a chance to compete in the New England championships? “We do feel for them,” Niehoff said. “Fully agree it doesn’t feel good. The optic isn’t good. But we really do have to look at the bigger issues that speak to civil rights and the fact this is high school sports.”

Seriously I need to check myself with regard to the way I view people. If social media bring joy to an otherwise fruitless life for some, who am I to give them grief for it. Mel who you telling! The fact that Facebook owns instagram is obscene. Facebook now determines what people, across the nation's most popular social media platforms, see. The notion that Facebook has a lock on the least educated amongst is really quite dangerous. Whether you follow people, brands, or hashtags ultimately Facebook still controls what we all see. For example, after four hours, I posted this chart on Twitter, Facebook, Goolge+, and just now posted on Instagram. So far one retweet, one "Like on Facebook (that was from @Cynique thanks!) As far as I can tell no one has seen it. I can't track the traffic resulting from the post, because the link was to a different website (where the graphic was created).

I fired up my facebook account a couple weeks ago after having it disabled for a couple of months. It is just too hard to do what I do without an account, because so much information I need when researching people is most easily obtained on Facebook. Facebook's structure requires people to include information that is often left off their websites -- better bios for authors, bookstore hours of operations, event details, etc. I still post links, that get virtually no engagement. I've come to terms with the fact that I just don't have it in me make the type of posts required to get engagement of Facebook. On the advice of my students, I have recently begun using Instagram. I've purchased some advertising and even installed the app on my phone. I've created some posts and am experimenting with the platform to see if I can generate some traffic to the website. But I know, unless the traffic generated is great, I will not use the platform. I just don't like engaging in the activities that are needed to amp up traffic. All the sharing of personal minutiae is too much for me... I'm even beginning to feel contempt for the people doing all the sharing. ...this is a bad sentiment, because in the real world I actually really like some of these people. So it is likely I will ultimately disengage from Instagram before I become some online misanthrope.

@Delano just click Mel's Avatar and you'll see a list of everything thing she has posted including a recent one about block chain.

I dunno about the password. I do t know them the software handles that. You may need to reset it

Nope Del you did not (that I recall). I'm just saying impeachment because K2 mentioned it.

I'm glad you took the feedback as it was intended. We can all use Feedback.

Thank you and I will, to the best of my ability to just that. Buyt as you said I need people to engage, our people to engage here with the same enthusiasm as they do on Amazon and Amazon's site Goodreads. Recently, I experimented with using Goodreads reviews on AALBC.com to keep people on the site longer, but I'll probably remove them because it actually encourages engagement on Goodreads rather than AALBC.com.

Hi @Kween Yakini you can embed video directly by just pasting the the unshortened URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RriAEfw57W8 We need the truth for real! Just a bit of unsolicited feedback: the background music is too loud and distracts from you piece.

So Pioneer Ariens like conflict huh. I'm an Aries as well. Maybe that is why I always understand where you coming from and have no problem disagreeing with you (when appropriate of course).