Troy

@DanjumaTela welcome to the forums... I think. nI'm keeping my eye on you. 🤨

Hey @Pioneer1 this priest had an NDE (near death experience) and he reported that he went to hell. He said, we saw men walking like dogs and heard demons singing Rihanna songs. Is this the type confirmation you are talking about? Seriously. @ProfD, if there was confirmation of what would happen after you die, people would forget what is happening in this life and begin preparing for the next one... explains why so many people are already doing that now.

I always read ebooks on my cell phone. If I'm gonna read on something as big as a tablet I just go with the book.

"Confirmed," really? Please tell me what happens after we die? Again, there are many things that are unknowable from the grand, like what happened before the big bang, to fantastically small, like where exactly is an electron. No. Whatever most people believe or what those in power force us to believe is the closest we can come to truth, but it is never universally accepted. We can't tell, that would be one of those unknowable things 😉

Yes, of course, most things are unknowable. We accept things based upon approximations or just straight up faith. What happens after you die? Many claim to know, but they are relating faith not knowledge.

If something is unknowable, how do you know it is true?

I was thinking the reaction was fascination and a desire learn what could possibly interest a monkey enough to try to read a book. 🤔

On some level I don't think we can actually tell what is "true." Our brains don't have the capacity for this. Our bodies are very limited in terms of what we can actually sense, Our brain create our perception which can differ from person to person. Even when our physical perception of the world is very close, we still can't agree on what is true. This has become more evident in the age of alternative facts and the resulting alternative realities they conjure. Some people believe Astrology is real others don't. Some people believe there are multiple human races, choosing to completely ignore the science. Still other believe you will suffer eternal damnation of you don't accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior. If is real for them, while for the majority of the rest of the world something else is "true." How we decide what is true is different for each person, and I'm not convinced it is a completely rational and conscious decision.

I generally don't ask people about what they are reading in public. This is not because I don't care; in fact, I'm often very curious, but I don't interrupt them to ask out of respect for the person's privacy. I was on the NYC subway reading the book Cold Mountain. Engrossed in the novel I looked up and noticed the woman sitting next to me was reading the same book. I looked at her, she smiled and said, "Isin't this a really good book!" I said, "Yes it is." We went back to enjoying our novels. It was a pleasant enough exchange, but neither of us probed the other for more information. @Pioneer1 Why do you think these white folks are curious enough to impose and ask you what you about what you reading?

While u was writing about the supply side. I don’t think demand for books is contracting. in fact i believe there is room for growth as there is unmet demand in some categories and distribution for what is in print is constrained by the power of Amazon and the near monopoly of Ingram, so the books in print are harder to discover and get to the places where people will purchase then. Things may be entirely different down under though. People could reading their books on their phone. The last book i read, i read the ebook version and listened to the audio book. So to a casual observer in public it may have appeared i was looking at my phone. When i read the hardcover i was at home. That was the first book i consumed in 3 different modalities. (I needed to get through it quickly).

@Pioneer1 In my mind's eye I always envisioned you as more Kalid Muhammad than Master Fard Muhammad in the completion department. Would you pass the brown bag test? LOL!

Here is a list of more than 200 book festivals and fairs from around the world. Thes are not just the Black events, virtually all of them feature Black writers. I included all the ones I could find 🙂 Of the 18 depicted in the graphic below I've attended 8 of them. I always wanted to go to Calabash, which is held in Jamaica. I'm going to the Go On Girl! Book Club event in two weeks. I need go through the entire list an see how many events I've attended

Hey @Pioneer1 I could not help but think of you when listening to Neil Irwin Painter relate the pseudo-science of race from her book the History of White People.

As far as I know @josephinabazan the data does not exist. But my data has to be indicative, or reflective of the total given the large differences. I think it is newsworthy to understand the decline. Welcome to the forum!

I forgot to mention i added this book to the site when pioneer first mentioned it.

Added: https://aalbc.com/events/event-detail.php?st=Maryland#BLK+Author+Expo

Black comics also include imagined Black characters, like Tuvok of Vulcan. Every so often I but a comic, usually to support the artist. Yesterday however i brought a comic just because i liked the cover. I’m just imagining what the sister is saying to the Hulk 😉 Now thatis a Black comic!

Richard don’t under estimate the power of the algorithm. Think of it like a very addictive drug like crack. People can’t help themselves. Still it is a pet peeve of mine too. People all on “Black Twitter” talking about Black empowerment — it is ludicrous. @Pioneer1 the other day a buddy of mine who runs a website knows the site was no longer coming up in google search. The problem was an important file on his server was modified to tell Google Not to index his site. No one knows how happened. The guy is a former Panther and when stuff like that happened back in the day they would just chalk it up to “the man.” Most of the time they would be right…

It does not look like this event survived the pandemic I'm updating my events calendar. I see The Southern Minnesota Book Festival was not the only event to make it to 2023. My own Black Pack Party did not recover. Still, I have found more than 200 events this calendar year! If you want to enjoy books in the Prescence of other humans 2023 has been the best year since the "before times." Here is a list of book fairs and festivals for 2023 and 2024 (the list continually evolves). On a related note I used Chat GPT to write python code to copy information from my website into my events database which drives the events pages -- Amazing!

@ProfD That is a good question for any poster. If I understood that, I would use that information to attract more posters. What bring you back to these forums? I enjoy reading all of y'alls posts. I don;t know enoguth about Sudan to participate, but I appreciate reading what @Stefan and @frankster have shared.

Sorry @Mel Hopkins I meant to post a link to the Internet Archive's snapshot of https://africanfront.com/ (it is not a GoDaddy issue this time. When I looked at in on Saturday it only went back to 2009. Today is goes back to 2001 (weird), which means we may be able to find out who created this timeline, if we know where they put it.

What is wrong with these devils?! The videos is clearly computer generated, but works. I found this on TikTok, or later when I logged into TikTok the video just started playing. These socials media websites make it virtually impossible to go in with blinders on...

I'm not sure I ever thought everyone would have their own website any more than I think everyone should have a social media presence. What I did not expect to happen was that a handful of companies would so completely dominate and control the world wide web. The web did not start out that way and today's web is a far less rich space as a result. Those inclined to run a website and contribute something unique to the web are prevented from doing so for a variety of reasons including the one I detailed above. The site has reached a point that I can't continue to grow it without more committed humans. I've recruited a couple of retirees, and I'm hoping that will allow AALBC to continue to expand 🙂 Ultimately it needs to be handed off to the next generation... but I a few years before that is necessary 😉

Well I've been on TicTok, in earnest, for 2.5 months and in that time, I have posted 9 videos. That is less than one a week. Going in I thought I do closer to one video a day. The videos don't take long to create; I'm use my cell phone and do no editing. I don't upload all of the tictok videos I've created to youtube, but I have loaded a few for comparison purposes. My Black Book Ecosystem Video was upload to Youtube and Tictok as the same time. YouTube reports 36 views, 3 likes, and 0 comments TickTok reports 633 views, 97 likes, and 3 comments Tiktok engagement is an order of magnitude better. When you consider that I have 351 followers on TikTok and 2,480+ subscribers on YouTube the difference in engagement is staggering. Tiktok's engagement is 200 times higher than YouTube's as a function of followers. If Tiktok follows the trend of every other social platform, engagement will drop off as the platform begins to strive to deliver and sell more advertising. Then again, the China-based company might be completely satisfied with just our data -- which is very valuable.

It was the Devil. i paid Godaddy for a two/year SSL certificate. Which basically says your website’s traffic is encrypted (https), which is a requirement on the web today Apparently, the SSL certificate i had expired after year. So my site was no longer secure (http) so every browser throws out that message and may even prevent you from visiting the site. Now I’ve had an SSL Certificate since Google made it a tracking signal — years ago and Godaddy always handled it without a hitch. Godaddy let my site go down without warning! I checked my certificate and it did not show as expired because i prepaid for two years. So I call tech support after waiting on hold an hour and some guy in Bangalore did a few things and “assured” me the site is up. As he can bring it up. I believed him, because I brought up the site in Firefox but forgot i bypassed the warning just to make sure the site was actually working and it was only a certificate problem — it was after midnight and i was tired. @richardmurray reached out to warn me and i assured him the site was up. The next day @Mel Hopkins reached out to report the same problem. i figured it was a caching issue (Computers store old versions of website files to make breeding faster ) or something. So i double checked and realized the site has now been down 12 hours. I checked my google analytics and see the only visitors on my site are foreign — no one from the western world is on the site, which explains why the guy in India could see my site, but not why he did not know WTF he was doing. i called Godaddy again and the guy i spoke to this time explained the problem and told me it would be $39.99 to fix it! My site was held hostage i had to pay. The site up less than an hour later. i hope to be off Godaddy servers before of the year they suck. these companies will nickel and dime you for a few extra bucks customer loyalty means nothing — i’n just a number. My first web hosting company was run by a Brother out of Brooklyn (an exgirlfriend’s husband). We did business over drinks and it was all good. I like doing business with real people. The best business relationships I’ve had have been with people i can talk to and get to know. companys nowadays rely on chat bots to diagnose problems i moved my email server from GoDaddy to Microsoft and it was hellacious. my email was down for 4 full days. Even Microsoft will misinform you and sell you stuff you don’t need. You’d think after running a website for more than a quarter of a century that this stuff would get easier, but it is harder and i understand why fewer people operate their own sites today.