Neale Sourna's Blog, page 16

Repost answer from LinkedIn: Erotica Writers Group_re-imagining one of your stories for readers with a different sexual preference. K.B. Stevens

Oh, good fun. It's a truly interesting challenge in writing; for character developments and the plotting changes that come from that. I have two of three combinations up on my college story TENURE [MFM / MMM].

http://libidinous.neale-sourna.com/tenure_mfm.html MFM
A bisexual, male Professor, newly tenured and bored at his college’s Student / Faculty mixer, discovers two young Freshmen openly hav­ing sex— a gorgeous, brown-skinned classic Greek “godling” and a beautiful, gold-skinned mixed race coed female.

Professor’s enormous “Clydesdale - Shire” of a “horse cock” and his superior use of it lures the two to pursue and invite him for intimate, private sex fun, during a student dorm kegger night.

Prof may have academic tenure — a protected and permanent job — but, he might still lose it all over these two.

Do you think they’ll be worth it? Oh, yeah, Professor knows they will.

_13,760 words approx.

Bonus: Professor privately tutors a certain Tight End footballer. The boy will definitely get more than his grades up, to save his place on the team, while Prof rams knowledge into him.

_5930 words approx.

Total words: 19,690

http://libidinous.neale-sourna.com/tenure_mmm.html MMM
A bisexual, tenured, male college professor, bored at a Freshmen mixer, discovers two young freshmen boldly having sex openly — a gorgeous, brown-skinned classic Greek godling and a beautiful, gold-skinned mixed race male.

Prof’s enormous “Clydesdale - Shire” of a horse cock and his superior use of it makes the two pursue him and invite him for some very intimate, private fun during a dorm kegger night.

Prof may have tenure — basically a protected and permanent job — but, he might still just lose his job and career over these two.

But, do you think they’ll be worth it? Oh, yeah, Professor knows they will.

_13,761 words approx.

Bonus

_5934 words approx.

Total words: 19,695

Announcing UNET – New Unity Multiplayer Technology May 12, 2014 in Company News and Info, Technology by Erik Juhl

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/12/announcing-unet-new-unity-multiplayer-technology/


A few weeks ago, at our Unite Asia conferences, we announced that we are developing new multiplayer tools, technologies and services for Unity developers. The internal project name for this is UNET which simply stands for Unity Networking. But our vision goes well beyond simple networking. 
As you all know, the Unity vision is to Democratize Game Development. The Unity Networking team wants to specifically Democratize Multiplayer Game Development. We want all game developers to be able to build multiplayer games for any type of game with any number of players.
Before joining Unity, members of the networking team worked mainly on MMOs such as Ultima Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Marvel Heroes, Need for Speed Online and World of Warcraft. We have a lot of passion for and a ton of experience with making multiplayer games, technology and infrastructure. 
The Unity vision was known to each of us and was always very appealing. 
When the chance to do something truly great like specializing the Unity vision with multiplayer came up, it was impossible to decline.  So we all left our former jobs and joined Unity to make this vision happen. 
Right now, we’re working hard to deliver these tools, technology and services so anyone can make their own dreams of a multiplayer game a reality.
This is of course a pretty big undertaking, but, like I said, we have all done this before, and we are all very driven to do it again (because it’s really, really cool!). The way we have tackled this is to divide our overall goal into phases which should be familiar to Unity developers. 
We take the approach of releasing a Phase 1, getting feedback from our users, adding that feedback to our work to make the next phase even better and repeating that cycle.
For UNET, Phase 1 is what we call the Multiplayer Foundation – more on that in a bit. Phase 2 is where we build on Phase 1 to introduce server authoritative gaming with what we call the Simulation Server, we’ll blog about this later. Finally, Phase 3 is where we want to introduce the ability to coordinate multiple Simulation Servers through a Master Simulation Server. 
As usual, exact dates for this are not possible and of course things can change, especially after gathering feedback from our users. But we can say that Phase 1 will be part of the 5.x release cycle and Phase 2 is in R&D right now.
So what do we mean by the Multiplayer Foundation for Phase 1? The main features are as follows:High performance transport layer based on UDP to support all game typesLow Level API (LLAPI) provides complete control through a socket like interfaceHigh Level API (HLAPI) provides simple and secure client/server network modelMatchmaker Service provides basic functionality for creating rooms and helping players find others to play withRelay Server solves connectivity problems for players trying to connect to each other behind firewallsWe had some inherent limitations with our legacy system that we needed to address and with our greater goal in mind it became clear that we needed to start from scratch. Since our goal is to support all game types and any number of connections, we started with a new high performance transport layer based on UDP. 
While it’s true that a lot of games are done quite well with TCP, fast action games will need to use UDP as TCP holds the most recently received packets if they arrive out of order.
From this new transport layer we built two new APIs. We have a new High Level API (HLAPI) which introduces a simple and secure client/server networking model. If you’re not a network engineer and you want to easily make a multiplayer game, the HLAPI will interest you.
We also wanted to address feedback we’d received on our old system: some users needed to have a lower level access for greater control. So we also have the Low Level API (LLAPI) which provides a more socket-like interface to the transport layer. If you are a network engineer and want to define a custom network model or just fine tune your network performance, then the LLAPI will interest you.
The Matchmaker service is used to configure rooms for your multiplayer game and get your players to find each other. And finally the Relay Server makes sure your players can always connect to each other.
We know from our prior experiences that making multiplayer games involves a lot of pain.  So the Multiplayer Foundation is a new set of easy to use professional networking technology, tools and infrastructure for making multiplayer games without this pain. 
To even get started, I think it is fair to say that making a multiplayer game requires a fair bit of knowledge of networking and protocols. You either overcome the painfully steep learning curve yourself or find a network engineer to join you.  
Once you’ve gotten past that, you then have to solve the problem of getting your players to find each other.  And once you’ve solved that problem, you now have to deal with getting players to be able to actually connect with each other, which can be troublesome when they are behind firewalls with NAT.  
But then if you’ve solved all of that you’ve created a bunch of associated infrastructure which wasn’t game development and probably wasn’t fun. And now you have to worry about dynamically scaling your infrastructure which usually takes a bit of prior experience to get right.
Our Phase 1 addresses each of these pain points. 
The HLAPI eliminates the need for a deep knowledge of networking. But the LLAPI is there if you are a network engineer and you want to do things your own way. 
The Matchmaker solves your problem of getting your players to find each other. 
The Relay Server solves your problem of getting players to be able to connect to each other. 
And we also solved your problem of the associated infrastructure and dynamically scaling it. 
The Matchmaker and Relay Server live in Unity’s Multiplayer Cloud. So not only do the physical servers scale up and down based on demand, but the processes scale up and down as well.
We are very excited about UNET and are eager to share more details. Over the next few weeks we’ll follow up with more blogs from the rest of the team.  We would love to hear what you think, and we can’t wait to see what you all make with this in the future.

10 Oldest Surviving Documents Of Their Type Plus 1 by Alan Boyle

http://listverse.com/2013/11/10/10-oldest-surviving-documents-of-their-type-in-the-world-2/
10 Oldest Surviving Documents Of Their Type
Alan Boyle November 10, 2013

Writing things down is one of the most important innovations in human history. As well as being able to spread ideas accurately across distance and time, writing also provided the records needed for law to function. Documents have literally changed the world, and some of them have survived for hundreds or even thousands of years. 

Every type of document provides a unique window into our shared heritage as human beings, in ways that are both surprising and fascinating.

10 Oldest International Treaty
The Hittites and the Egyptians were among the earliest great civilizations. They had an uneasy relationship and both wielded a relatively large amount of military power for the time. One of their key sticking points was the city of Kadesh, located in what is now Syria. In the 13th century BC the Hittites marched on the city, which was under Egyptian control, and took it, giving them a threatening position over important trade routes. 

Egypt’s Pharaoh Ramesses II (later known as Ramesses the Great) marched with 20,000 of his own men to take it back. The ensuing battle was a draw.

Both sides realized that neither of them was likely to gain a decisive victory, so sought another solution. The result was a peace agreement, signed around 1269 BC, which is the oldest surviving treaty in existence. A copy is on display in the United Nations, because they’re really into treaties there. A translation of both the Hittite version and the Egyptian version is available. The treaty promises everlasting peace, created by the leaders “in order not to permit hostilities to arise between them, forever. 

There are clauses agreeing that should an Egyptian flee to the lands of the Hittites (or vice versa) they will be returned to their homeland, making it the oldest extradition treaty as well. The countries also agree to send troops to one another’s aid should a third party attack. 

While there is a lot in the treaty we’d consider at the height of diplomatic relations, few people would nowadays be comfortable with the promise to send troops to squelch any uprisings from within a neighbor’s country: “If Reamasesa, king of the country of Egypt, rises in anger against his citizens after they have committed a wrong against him… the king of the country of Hatti, my brother, has to send his troops and his chariots and they have to exterminate all those against.” The promise is made in the other direction as well. 

9 Oldest Surviving Medical Document
Whilst humans have dabbled in healthcare of some sort since our earliest days, the first record we have of specific medical advice is in the form of an Egyptian papyrus. This document is 4,000 years old and is known as the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus. It was discovered in 1889 and contains information on the diagnosis and treatment of a number of ailments.

While some of the meaning may have been lost over the millennia, Egyptian women seem to have suffered from some unusual conditions, like the smell of roasting while their womb wandered. The Egyptians liked to blame the womb for a whole bunch of stuff that probably wasn’t related. For example, “a woman whose eyes are aching till she cannot see, on top of aches in her neck” is diagnosed as having “discharges of the womb in her eyes.” 

The recommended treatment is fumigation of the womb (ouch). Toothache? “It is toothache of the womb” and more fumigation is needed. If your ears hurt so much you can’t make out the words you’re hearing, that’s also the womb. It’s really nothing but trouble.

8 Oldest Surviving Religious Texts
The pyramids of Egypt are amazing structures built by the greatest craftsmen of their era (not slaves and definitely not aliens). They were built as a resting place for Egypt’s rulers, and the walls were lined with stories and spells designed to help the soul on its journey to the afterlife. The oldest of these inscriptions comes from the pyramids of Unas and are the oldest surviving religious texts in the world.

The texts bring us the earliest description of Osiris, Egypt’s king of the dead. They are written in a way that suggests the words were designed to be chanted, or at least spoken allowed. The description of ascent to the afterlife is rather poetic, comparing spirits to herons, haws, and grasshoppers leaping into the air. 

A full English translation is available online should you wish to try any of the spells for yourself.

7 Oldest Surviving Poem
Early literature often came in the form of poetry. Before writing, oral tradition passed on stories through the generations and poetry was an easy way to learn and recite tales. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a contender for the first epic poem. The earliest surviving written versions are dated to around 2,000 BC. There is actually a shorter surviving poem older than that—ancient Sumeria’s Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. It’s exactly what the title suggests.

The oldest love poem in the world is only slightly younger. Written on a tablet about the size of a cell phone, the 4,000 year old Sumerian ballad also contains the oldest recorded chat-up line: “You have captivated me, let me stand trembling before you; Bridegroom, I would be taken to the bedchamber.” 

It seems the last several thousand years has seen the quality of propositions heading in the wrong direction. And on the subject of sex…

6 Oldest Depiction Of Sex
There’s a famous commentary on human sexuality, that “every generation thinks they invented sex.” It’s seen as a mass delusion to avoid having to think about your parents or grandparents going at it (or at least going at it enthusiastically). 

Yet the Ancient Egyptians have left evidence that they had the whole thing down pretty early on, in the form of the Turin Erotic Papyrus. The document, which is over 3,000 years old, features diagrams of twelve different sexual positions.

Some of the equipment seen scattered around the amorous couples in the pictures has been pretty standard forever, like beer and wine. Other stuff, such as the love rattle or the huge phallus supported by a team of handmaidens, fell out of favor until the Internet came along. 

The positions fall somewhere between impressively acrobatic and unnervingly ambitious. A man doing a handstand falls into the former category, whereas the man on the ground chasing a woman on a chariot is a definite case of the latter.



5 Oldest Message In A Bottle
The message in a bottle has a firm place in our cultural consciousness. The oldest one talked about on the Internet is that of Chunosuke Matsuyama, who supposedly sent out a message in 1784, asking for rescue after he became shipwrecked. The message washed up on a beach in 1935, a little too late. 

The Internet, however, offers up no images or indication as to where the bottle is now. It’s likely this story is apocryphal—Guinness World Records certainly seems to think so, so the “oldest bottle” title lies elsewhere.
 The oldest confirmed message in a bottle ever found is from 1914. It had spent 35,736 days at sea when it was found by Scottish fisherman Andrew Leaper on April 12, 2012. The message had been launched as part of a scientific experiment to map sea currents for Scotland’s Fishery Board. It may be less romantic than the last words of an abandoned sailor (or a lonely British pop star), but it’s at least a bit more useful. 

4 Oldest Correspondence
The oldest correspondence ever sent were diplomatic letters between the pharaohs of Egypt and neighboring statesmen. These clay tablets, known as the Amarna letters, were sent in the 14th century BC. 

Jerusalem’s Canaanite king Abdi-Heba used one letter to ask the pharaoh Akhenaten for military assistance against other city states in the region.

The letters were dug up in 1887 and are now housed in various museums around Europe. One example in the British Museum is from the king of Mitanni, a city state in modern-day Syria. It is addressed to pharaoh Amenhotep III and wishes him and his family well, before saying that a statue of the goddess Ishtar is on its way. The goddess herself had apparently given direct approval.

3 Oldest Printed Book Bearing A Date
Texts in some Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism are known as sutras. The best known of these in the West is the Kama Sutra, but it is far from the only one. 

The oldest complete printed and dated book is a Buddhist text known as the Diamond Sutra, a name apparently suggested by the Buddha himself, as the text is designed to “cut like a diamond blade through worldly illusion to illuminate what is real and everlasting.”
It was found hidden in a cave in 1907 by a British explorer, one of 40,000 documents that had been locked away for around 900 years. The cave in the desert, with its dry air, had helped to preserve the items. The text deals with identity and criticizes the idea that people have an immutable core. 

The book holds itself in very high regard, quoting the Buddha as saying, “if a good son or good daughter dedicates lifetimes as many as the sands in the River Ganges to charitable acts, and there were another person who memorized as much as one four-line verse of this scripture and taught it to others, the merit of the latter would be by far greater.”

2 Oldest Marriage Certificate
The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of documents dated to the 5th Century BC found on the island of Elephantine in the River Nile. At the time a Jewish settlement called Yeb was located there as an Egyptian garrison. Among the various letters and contracts were three marriage certificates, the oldest known to survive. 

The contracts appear to have been drawn up in unusual situations. The brides were a slave, a former slave, and a divorcee. The purpose of the documents was to record the economics of the wedding, including the dowry. If the marriage was later dissolved, the wife got to take this along with the possessions she brought with her. 

One lucky groom was named Ananiah ben Azariah and his bride was a handmaiden called Tamut. The certificate contains sections that have been erased or added to, suggesting last-minute negotiations.

1 Oldest Surviving Set Of Laws
The Codes of Ur Nammu are the oldest laws that we know of, a creation of the Sumerian king of that name. The codes were written around 2,050 BC and covered a wide array of crimes. The punishments set out include a fine of 15 shekels for perjury, compared to a fine of five shekels for raping a slave. Cutting off a man’s foot falls exactly between these two crimes and will set you back 10 shekels.

Ur Nammu’s code also included rules about tax, courtroom procedures, and ceremonial laws. The period when the laws were written was called, “Year Ur-Nammu Made Justice In The Land.” 

The implementation of laws seems to have worked out fairly well, as the empire prospered under Ur-Nammu’s rules. The rules are imperfect: speaking insolently was punished by having one’s mouth scoured with salt, a law that applied only to slave women. Nevertheless, the idea of a codified set of laws was an important step in humanity’s progress.

+ Oldest Newspaper
The world’s first newspaper was launched in Germany in the early 1600s and was snappily called Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien (Collection of all Distinguished and Commemorable News). There are no surviving copies for the first four years it was published; the earliest copy that exists is from 1609. 

The papers were published in Strasbourg, a Catholic city, so the protestant Relation published anonymously to avoid given away the printing location.

The oldest surviving English language newspaper was printed in Amsterdam and dated 2 December, 1620. It opened with the line, “new tydings out of Italie are not yet com,” which seems unfortunate. 

It had no title, as that wasn’t considered particularly important. After all, if there are no other newspapers you don’t need to make yours stand out. The oldest surviving newspaper printed in England (in 1621) was snappily called, “”Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys.” 

America didn’t get a home-grown newspaper till 1690.

Alan is a full-time writer who you can pester on Twitter, email, or read his blog (which he promises to update more often) at skepticalnumber.com.

Video Sneak Peek of Book Trailer in Production - Neale Sourna's BECCA DuMAURIER (publishing in 2015)

BECCA DuMAURIER (publishing in 2015), the expanded and extended full novel.

Excerpts  (2 chapters: --- 2/ 2: Becca Escapes to Sea --- 3/ Becca Gets Her Sea Legs)and FILM SHORT VIDEO:

Becca Gets Her Sea Legs_SneakPeek_05-08-2014.mov

Becca
A swashbuckling pirate story, as short story chapters!
Short Stories - Chapter 1 --- 2--- 3--- 4 --- 5 --- 6  more
1: Becca in the Woods2: Becca Escapes
to Sea3: Becca Gets Her Sea Legs4: Becca's Faux Honeymoon5: Becca Comes Ashore6: Becca Outlaw's Sea Battle  more Becca.Neale-Sourna.com

26 Years Ago Today… Posted on March 06, 2014 1:24 PM

http://www.dianagabaldon.com/2014/03/26-years-ago-today/


I get the occasional question as to how I came to write OUTLANDER, and given that today is the 26th anniversary of my doing so, thought I’d maybe post this explanatory message—which I wrote a few years ago in thanks to the Compuserve folk who Witnessed the Creation , now updated.

Dear All–

On March 6, 1988, I started writing a novel. I wasn’t going to tell anyone what I was doing, let alone ever try to publish it. I just wanted to learn how to write a novel, and had concluded—having written All Kinds of nonfiction at that point—that the only way to do that was actually to write one. (I was not, btw, wrong in this assumption.)

Now, as a (rather convoluted) side-effect of my day-job, I’d become an “expert” in scientific computation (really easy to be an expert, if there are only six people in the world who do what you do, and that was my position, back in the early ’80′s), and as an even weirder side-effect of that, I became a member of the Compuserve Books and Writers Community (then called the Literary Forum), somewhere in late 1986.

Well, when I decided to learn to write a novel by writing one, I also decided a few other things:

1) I wouldn’t tell anyone what I was doing. Aside from the feeling of sheer effrontery involved in doing so, I didn’t want a lot of people telling me their opinions of what I should be doing, before I’d had a chance to figure things out for myself (as I said, I’d written a lot of non-fiction to this point, and nobody told me how). Also didn’t want a lot of busybodies (in my personal life) putting in their two cents, asking when I’d be done, and when it would be published, etc.—since I had no idea whether I could even finish a book.

2) I would finish the book. No matter how bad I thought it was, I wouldn’t just stop and abandon the effort. I needed to know what it took, in terms of daily discipline, mental commitment, etc. to write something like a novel. (I had written long things before—a 400-page doctoral dissertation entitled “Nest Site Selection in the Pinyon Jay, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus,” (or, as my husband says, “Why birds build nests where they do, and who cares anyway?”), an 800-page monograph on “The Dietary Habits of the Birds of the Colorado River Valley,” etc.—but I’d never written fiction, other than lame short stories for English classes.) And

3) I’d do the absolute best that I could with the writing, every day. Even though this was a practice book that I’d never show anybody, it didn’t matter. If I wasn’t trying my best, how would I ever know if I was any good, and more importantly, how would I get better?
 
(In this regard, I had some evidence to go on. I’ve read all my life—hugely—and noticed that in most cases, while I’d enjoy all of an author’s books, including the first one, the books got noticeably better as the writer kept on writing. So, I concluded, with perfect logic, writing was like ballet dancing or piano-playing; if you practiced, you got better at it. I was not wrong in this conclusion, either.)

So, anyway, the book I wrote for practice was OUTLANDER, and here we are, 26 years and (almost) 14 books later. I just wanted to acknowledge the role of the Forum and my friends there, in that process.

How did that work, since I’d decided not to tell anybody what I was doing? Well, I stuck to that decision (I didn’t even tell my husband), but about six months into the writing, I was logging on intermittently late at night, picking up messages and posting replies—and found that I was having a argument with a gentleman (named Bill Garland, RIP) about what it feels like to be pregnant.

“Oh, I know what that feels like,” Bill assured me. “My wife’s had three children!” [pause here to allow the ladies to roll on the floor for a moment]

“Yeah, right,” I said. “_I’ve_ had three children, buster.”

So he asked me to describe what that was like.

Rather than try to cram such a description into a thirty-line message slot (all we had back in the old 300-baud dial-up days), I said, “Tell you what—I have this…piece…in which a young woman tells her brother what it’s like to be pregnant. I’ll put it in the data library for you.”

So—with trembling hands and pounding heart—I posted a small chunk (three or four pages, as I recall) of the book I was calling CROSS STITCH. And people liked it. They commented on it. They wanted to see more!

Aside from a few private moments associated with my husband and the birth of my children, this was the most ecstatic experience I’d ever had. And so, still trembling every time I posted something, I—very slowly—began to put up more.

 Now, I don’t write with an outline, and I don’t write in a straight line, so my chunks weren’t chapters, weren’t contiguous, and generally weren’t connected to anything else. 

But they did have the same characters –and people liked those characters.

There were (and are) a lot of very kind and encouraging people who inhabited the Forum—some of them still there: Alex, Janet, Margaret, Marte… and many who aren’t, like Karen Pershing and John Kruszka (RIP), Mac Beckett, Michael Lee West–and Jerry O’Neill, whom I count as my First Fan and head cheerleader; always there to read what I posted and say the most wonderful things about it, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.

So, over the course of the next year or so, these people kept egging me on. Asking questions, making comments*, urging me—eventually—to try to publish This Thing (it started out as a perfectly straight-forward historical novel, but then Things Happened, and what with the time-travel and the Loch Ness monster and all, I had no idea what it was).

*(Just to clarify—these were not critiques, just interested comments. I’ve never had a critique group nor ever would; nothing against them at all—I just don’t work that way. But regardless, I’d never put up _anything_ for public viewing that I didn’t think was completely ready for human consumption.)

Some of these people were published authors themselves and very kindly shared their own stories, and advice regarding literary agents and the publishing process (thank you, Mike Resnick, and Judy McNaught!), and in the fullness of time, John Stith very kindly introduced me to his own agent—who took me on, on the basis of an unfinished first novel. 

And…I finished it, to the supportive cheers of the Forum. A couple of weeks later, my agent sold it, as part of a three-book contract, to Delacorte, and bing!—I was a novelist.
Not saying I’d never have written a book without y’all—but man, you guys _helped_. 

Thank you!
–Diana

====
I avoided this book until its siren’s call said, Really, just read a few pages, then buy me and read me in full. Did, and have been in love ever since.

There’s more to how she did it. Search online about Jamie Fraser and his inspiration and connection to Doctor Who.

_NS

Actor Auditions

Tri-C student films have screened in film festivals throughout northeast Ohio and graduates have established successful careers within the local and national film and video production industry.  Tri-C is proud to present the following student films for production this spring.

“Becca Gets Her Sea Legs”

It is 1688 in Stuart England, at war’s end, and out to troubled, deep seas, in what should be a romantic tryst, a general’s runaway bride, noblewoman Becca is utterly seasick, in Irish pirate Aidan’s ceaselessly moving ship.

S E Reynolds (dba Neale Sourna) is a Tri-C student directing an online promotional book trailer for her novel (working title BECCA THE BUCCANEERESS). www.romantic4ever.com/romantic-fiction/index.html

As a student film all compensation for performers and crew members is being waived.


“Marshmallows and Fire”

An eccentric grandfather with a flare for story telling is asked to chaperone his grandsons’ sleep over, which he views as a grand opportunity to tell one or two of his over the top, not so accurate tall tales. His daughter who is very concerned with the not so accurate aspect of her father's stories makes him promise not to tell any. But with the help of his equally eccentric friends and the demands of his captive audience of children he finds away to tell the story while keeping his promise.

Robb Scott is a student filmmaker working on his thesis film, a short film entitled "Marshmallows and Fire." This is a short student film that will be shown in film festivals, and online on Vimeo.com. This is an unpaid opportunity. Cast will receive a copy of the complete film for their reels and an IMDB credit.

Auditions for both the films are Saturday Jan 25th 9 am - 6 pm on the Metropolitan Campus MLA 101 located at 2900 Community College Ave and E. 30th St. Cleveland, OH 44115.

Please allow 45 minutes to an hour and a half for your audition.  Call backs may be scheduled later the same day.

To read character descriptions and to schedule an audition for the student films listed above please complete the audition request form by clicking here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZFgrt7E4liWTh2bcPEVovYrDwl7quM9dh2rkEA_ONgg/viewform

Simone Barros
Adjunct Faculty, Media Arts and Studies & Journalism and Mass Communications
P. 216.987.4333 ext. 1097 | simone.barros@tri-c.edu
Cuyahoga Community College | Where Futures Begin

Contribute to Cleveland, Ohio USA local film and local film friends / colleagues' project from Conrad Studios.

Contribute to Cleveland local film and local film friends / colleagues' project.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-wind-is-watching--2

Blackalicious with TOY JACKPOT

Amazon Censorship, Part ... Well, More.... MONSTER PORN: Amazon Cracks Down On America’s Latest Sex Fantasy Eric Spitznagel, Dec. 21, 2013_Censoring Adult Fantasy Fiction

They're cracking down on ALL titles of adult fiction subgenres and descriptions. As if, like when standing on the street, when you search you just avert your eyes and move on quickly when coming upon something that freaks you out. It's not clearly illegal.

Amazon and many others, including Smashwords now, I read, have reneged on the contracts of content they've been selling for years, one of mine for a decade, and now decide to make you change a title they just made you change a month ago. Spastic much for a handful of complaints?

http://www.businessinsider.com/monster-porn-amazon-crackdown-sex-fantasy-bigfoot-2013-12

 

Author Virginia Wade's fiction debut follows a group of women who embark on a week-long camping trip to Mt. Hood National Forest. There, in the shadow of Oregon’s highest mountain, they are kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a mysterious woodland creature. "What the hell is that thing?" asks one protagonist.


“‘It's f---ing Bigfoot,’ hissed Shelly. ‘He's real, for f---'s sake.’ Horror filled her eyes. ‘With a huge c---.’”

The book, with the decidedly un-PG title "Cum For Bigfoot," is just the first of 16 fiction ebooks that Wade (a pen name) has written about the legendary beast sometimes known as Sasquatch, each detailing a series of graphic and often violent sexual encounters between the apelike creature and his female human lovers. 
Wade has made an exceptional living writing these stories.



Virginia Wade's bigfoot erotica has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

It began in December of 2011. A stay-at-home mother from Parker, Colo., Wade had no ambition to be a published author and no real writing experience other than a few attempts at historical romance in the mid-90s.
 But then, she says, "I got this crazy idea for a story." So she sat down and wrote the entire book — more of a novella, at just 12,000 words — in a matter of weeks. 
She never even considered trying to sell it to a mainstream publisher. Instead, she went directly to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, an online platform for self-publishing with a 70% royalty rate for authors. (The average royalty percentage for authors with mainstream publishers is between 8 and 15%.)

"Cum For Bigfoot" wasn't an overnight best-seller. "The first month, I think I made $5," Wade admits. But over the course of 2012, the book was downloaded well over 100,000 times. "And that was just Amazon," she says. "That's not counting iTunes or Barnes & Noble or any of the other places that sell self-published books." 
With no marketing muscle, no bookstore tours or print reviews or any of the publicity that most top authors use to sell books, she started bringing in staggering profits. During her best months, she says, she netted $30,000 or more. At worst, she'd bank around six grand — "nothing to complain about," she says.

She branched into other genres, penning ebooks like "Taken By Pirates" and "Seduced By The Dark Lord," but her "Cum For Bigfoot" series was the biggest money-maker. "I started cranking them out," she says. "If there was a market there for monster sex, I was gonna give it to them." She even brought in her family to help with the workload. 
"My dad, who's an English instructor, was my editor," Wade says. "My mom did the German translations" — including the equally popular "Komm für Bigfoot." "I even had my own 401k. It became a cottage industry."

The prose wouldn't win any fiction awards (a sample line: "From within the tufts of matted hair, the creature released a huge pale c--- that defied logic"), but her readers loved it, and their numbers seemed to be growing every day. "I was putting my daughter through college with the profits," Wade says. "I used to joke with her, 'Bigfoot smut is paying for your school.'"


Courtesy of Virginia Wade
Author Virginia Wade enlisted her family's help to meet the demand for her work.
Wade is hardly the only author who has made a mint writing about monsters and the women who love them (or at least submit to their sexual appetites). She's part of a burgeoning literary genre that's found a wide audience online: monster porn, otherwise known as “cryptozoological erotica,” or as some of the authors prefer to call it, "erotic horror." 

 Their self-published books feature mythical creatures of every possible variety, from minotaurs to mermen, cthulhus to leprechauns, extraterrestrials to cyclops, who become involved in sexual trysts, often non-consensual, with human lovers. 

They have titles that are often more silly than sexy [NS_but are highly sought through online searching]— from "Demons Love Ass," part of Trisha Danes' "Beasts & Booty" collection, to "Frankenstein's Bitch" and "Sex With My Husband's Anatomically Correct Robot" — and the plots are never less than imaginative. 

A feline shapeshifter might be saved from a tree by a firefighter with a cat fetish (as in the ebook "Out on a Limb"), or a buxom cattle rancher might be abducted and kept enslaved "in a strange, perverted alien zoo" ("Milked by the Aliens").

It's easy to snicker, but somebody is buying these things. Authors of monster porn may not be notching sales to rival E.L. James or Amanda Hocking, the trailblazers of self-published erotica, but they're making more than enough to survive. That’s especially remarkable given the low price tag on many of their books. 
"Amazon pays a royalty of 35 percent for books listed below $2.99," says K.J. Burkhardt (a pen name), the 45-year-old author of "Taken by the Tentacle Monsters" and "Bred to the Creature." 
"For those listed at $2.99 and over, I can claim 70 percent in royalty payments. But I didn't feel comfortable nor right in asking someone to pay $2.99 for a five-to seven-thousand-word short story." So instead, the majority of her titles are listed at 99 cents, the minimum allowed by Amazon.
"Even with the small prices that I was asking," she says, "it doesn't take much imagination to guess that I was selling a lot of books to earn $4,000 each month."

 Then everything changed.
Attack of the Pitchfork Brigade
In October, the online news site The Kernel published an incendiary story called "An Epidemic of Filth," claiming that online bookstores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, WHSmith, and others were selling self-published ebooks that featured "rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse." 
The story ignited a media firestorm in the U.K, with major news outlets like the Daily Mail, The Guardian, and the BBC reporting on the “sales of sick ebooks.” 
Some U.K.-based ebook retailers responded with public apologies, and WHSmith went so far as to shut down its website altogether, releasing a statement saying that it would reopen "once all self-published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available." 
The response in the U.S. was somewhat more muted, but most of the retailers mentioned in the piece, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, began quietly pulling hundreds of titles from their online shelves — an event Kobo coo Michael Tamblyn referred to last month as "erotica-gate." 



The title pretty much says it all.
The crackdown was meant to target the obvious offenders — ebooks like "Daddy’s Birthday Gang Bang" and others that fetishized incest and rape — but in their fervor to course-correct, the online bookstores started deleting, according to The Digital Reader blog, "not just the questionable erotica but [also].... any e-books that might even hint at violating cultural norms." That included crypto-porn. 

Wade’s sexy Sasquatch, not unlike the elusive hominid beast of legend, vanished without a trace.
 
But it wasn’t just Bigfoot who was herded into extinction. Wade says that 60% of her titles disappeared from Amazon and other online bookstores. "They started sending my books randomly back to draft mode" — where new ebooks are uploaded and edited before going on sale — "and I'd get an email from them saying, 'We found the following books in violation of our content guidelines,'” she recalls. 
“But they wouldn't tell me why. There were no specifics. It was a huge guessing game trying to figure out what the issue was."


She altered the titles of several volumes in her blockbuster series, from "Cum For Bigfoot" to "Moan For Bigfoot," and they were returned to Amazon's shelves, but now they're only seen by readers searching for them specifically. "They can still be found in the store," Wade says, "but it requires extra digging." 
Even more confusing, only some of her titles were flagged by Amazon, so while some books are listed as "Moan For Bigfoot," others remain "Cum For Bigfoot." 


Mike Nudelman/Business Insider
There are plenty of fish in the sea.

Burkhardt had a similar experience. "Amazon has been systematically banning just about every book I have listed with them," she says. As with Wade, she was told her books had violated content guidelines. "The guidelines are very vague," she says. 

"Reading them implies any and all erotic pornography is prohibited, so I'm left to wonder exactly what erotica is allowed."   
[NS_And once accepted, under their contract, they come back and ... change the rules of acceptance.]
"Taken By the Monsters 4," which Burkhardt first published with Amazon in July of 2012, disappeared from the site just a few weeks ago. "After 16 months, they have determined that it either no longer meets their guidelines or they didn't really look it over to begin with and just now caught it," she says.
Beauty and the Beast
Amazon declined to comment for this article. Its content guidelines state that the company doesn't accept “offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts."  But works that contain precisely that, from de Sade's "Justine" and Pauline Réage's "The Story of O" to the recently released French bestseller "The Victoria System" by Éric Reinhardt (which contains the memorable line "My erection beat time in my underwear") are readily available.

To explain the policy, the site offers this unhelpful bit of advice: "What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect." Vague as that may be, Amazon is within its legal rights to stock whatever books it chooses. 

"Bookstores are private enterprises, and are thus not required to sell every book that people ask them to sell," says Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA who specializes in First Amendment cases. 
"There is no law of which I’m aware that would require bookstores to sell a book that they disapprove of, whether or not we might think their judgments of disapproval are sound." Amazon makes the same point elsewhere in the content guidelines, when it notes, "We reserve the right to make judgments about whether content is appropriate and to choose not to offer it."  
[NS_even to breaking their contract with books they've sold for a ten year period or have just a month before asked the publisher / author to "correct" a month before.]




The ancient Greeks would approve.

Burkhardt, who lives in Northern Virginia and writes as a hobby — she claims her day job is working as a personal protection specialist for a foreign ambassador — continued emailing Amazon with questions, and soon learned that the main objection was to her book's listing descriptions, which anybody pursuing the Amazon website could read. 
They were too graphic, she was told, and potentially offensive. Burkhardt wanted to compromise, but she worried that a less detailed description would cause more trouble in the long run. 
"I want readers to know exactly what they are buying when they make a purchase," she says, "and not be surprised and offended later because I couldn't say the book contains explicit sex with monsters.”

Her concern isn’t unjustified. One can only imagine a "Fifty Shades of Grey" fan happening upon Burkhardt’s ebook "Taken by the Monsters," and their horror upon reading about the vicious gang-rape of a woman by hirsute “humanoid” creatures in an abandoned building, which ends with them “filling her womb deep with [their] monster seed.” A little spanking this isn’t.

Author Emerald Ice (a pen name) — who lives in southern Illinois with her husband, a Catholic high school teacher — is less concerned about offending Amazon browsers than being overlooked by potential paying customers. The first three books in her Alien Sex Slave Series — "Alien Love Slave," "The Sex Arena," and "Alien Sex Cove"— were runaway hits, she says. At least until Amazon pulled them from distribution and requested changes, once again citing content guidelines. That's how "Alien Sex Slave" became "Sidney's Alien Escapades."  
[NS_Like a bad parent or quietly belligerent teacher, saying something is wrong with it but we won't say what, and after you've "fixed" it, we'll ask you to do so again. Leaving you in a neurotic wasteland of of WTF? What is the list of words, what are the situations? We are businesspeople trying to sell our legal products in a manner we know people who read these search. What the...? Can I say What, or The?]
 "I hate it," she admits of the new title. "I came up with it because I was in a panic about the books disappearing." Her sales have since plummeted, and she isn't surprised. "If I was a reader searching for hot alien sex books, I wouldn't look twice at something called 'Sidney's Alien Escapades.'"




Monster erotica is often purchased in series form.
Alice Xavier (also a pen name) had her first experience with censorship when her ebook "Serpent God’s Virgin," originally published last April, was pulled from Amazon in mid-October. "They flagged it because it had virgin in the title," she guesses, because after she renamed it "Serpent God's Maiden," it again appeared on sale. 

"Amazon didn't care that the plot involves sex with a giant snake deity," she says. 

"Ultimately, Amazon is amoral. They don't care either way that they're selling dirty, filthy erotica. Their main goal is to keep their customers happy. They have plenty of customers who get righteously outraged and complain, complain, complain. And Amazon has way more at stake than just books. So they want to keep everybody happy, understandably."

Even so, she and other monster-sex authors are more than a little unsettled by the recent purge, which lumps their work in with ebooks depicting rape, incest and bestiality — unfairly they insist. The latter label is especially dangerous, says Xavier, who authored books like "Cuckwolfed" and "At the Mercy of the Boar God." 
Although she considers bestiality "an egregious act of animal cruelty when it occurs in real life," she's not so sure it should be off-limits to writers. "If writers want to write about it, that's great for them, because plenty of people love reading about it." Then again, that doesn’t mean she wants to be in any way associated with the genre. "It's a media ....storm waiting to happen,” she says. “It's massively taboo — more so than incest, I think. It has the potential to be incredibly damaging to the whole image of erotic literature.”
Wild Kingdom
Is crypto-smut the same thing as bestiality lit? It may seem like a fine distinction to the uninitiated, but for many authors, it’s crucial. "Is a werewolf an animal? What about a minotaur?” asks Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords—one of the few ebook self-publishing platforms that didn't clean house in October. “Where do you draw the line? 
Sex with beasts is a common theme in paranormal romance. Do dinosaurs need to be a protected class of animal? What about a Sasquatch? When are they real, when are they not, when can you have sex with them and when can you not?"


Mike Nudelman/Business Insider
Satyrs are such notoriously passionate creatures, there's a whole disorder named for them.
And even in the cases when the creature is an animal (a giant squid, for instance) Xavier insists that the power dynamic is critical. “How can you commit animal cruelty when the monster is in control, is consenting, and is an intelligent being?” she points out. In the world of fantasy, a creature can be classified as a person, she says, even if it's not a human person. “A barnyard animal is just an animal without the power of consent.”

Modern crypto-porn has more in common with the myths of ancient Greece, many of which feature gods taking animal form — Zeus was famous for this move — and having their way with humans. “Just because he turns into a swan doesn't mean he's turned into an ordinary animal,” Xavier points out. “He's still a god with his godly powers and intelligence, just in the form of a swan.”

Smashwords, which gives authors 85% of net profit, regardless of their work’s length, had its own issues with censorship last February, when PayPal threatened to deactivate the ebookstore's account if it didn't cease selling, according to a PayPal statement, "erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest." [NS_without ever considering that there may be consent or ... a lesson or morality or of personality hidden within the sexual tale.]

Although Smashwords initially complied, especially with regard to incest and sex involving underage characters, Coker was never comfortable with PayPal's other objections. "Dubious consent is a really big theme in mainstream romance," he says. "Where do you draw the lines? In mainstream romance, the woman may not want to have sex, and the man forces himself on her, and later in the book they're smiling and happy. 
Look at Gone With the Wind, where Rhett is hauling Scarlett up the stairway and she's yelling 'No, no, no!' To what extent can financial institutions regulate what people are allowed to imagine in the safety of their own mind?"

PayPal and Smashwords reached a truce in mid-March. “PayPal's worst fear was always that their payment systems would be used for illegal underage erotica and illegal underage pornography,” says Coker. “Once they learned of our prohibition against such content … they gained the confidence they needed to lift the proposed restrictions.”



Everyone's after his lusty charms?

The initial purge of erotica on Amazon may have passed, but according to several authors, their monster sex ebooks continue to disappear from virtual shelves on a regular basis. Given her initial success, Burkhardt says, "I was seriously considering quitting my job and taking up writing full time. I'm glad I decided to wait and see, because after Amazon started banning some of my titles, my sales dropped dramatically." 
Her monthly profits from Amazon went from over $2,000 in early 2013 to just $400 last month. "I can't really complain," she concedes. "It's still a great supplemental income. But I can't help but wonder how much I would be making if I was allowed to publish with Amazon some of the stories they have since blocked or banned."

Some of the genre's authors would like to give up on Amazon entirely, furious at the way they've been treated. But it's difficult to walk away from the world's largest online retailer, even if you're confident that you've got something readers want. 
"There is a growing audience for this type of literature," says Burkhardt. "And I wish Amazon could see that." [NS_Why not put the naughty titles in a special search area. They do sell video porn. You have to be able to read and imagine to get through erotic fiction.]
Of course, authors could sell exclusively with Smashwords, which offers mostly unlimited creative freedom and a better cut of the profits. But the platform doesn’t have nearly the reach. "Amazon is the big dog," says Emerald Ice. "They're well known, their books are easy to download. It's easy, and consumers want easy. Heck, I want easy. Smashwords is still kind of underground." 
Another option is following the path forged by E.L. James, who started out writing "Twilight" fan-fiction under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon before landing a major publisher and going on to earn something in the neighborhood of $95 million. But as Emerald Ice learned, even with a track record of sales, books about monster sex are hard to place with an established imprint. 
"Nobody wants to touch the taboo risqué alien books," she says. 
"They're just too out-there, I guess. I tried a few publishers, and it was the fastest rejection I ever got in my life. Within two days, it was 'Thank you, no, no, this isn't what we're looking for! Please get this off my computer!'"

We attempted to contact several publishers, asking if they'd ever been offered monster erotica. None of them responded. Literary agent Steven Axelrod, who represents Amanda Hocking — an author who made close to $2 million with her self-published paranormal romances, including "Hollowland" and "My Blood Approves" — says he has "absolutely no knowledge of 'horror erotica.'" 
A representative from Valerie Hoskins Associates in London, the literary agency that reps E.L. James, was apparently so opposed to being included in a story about the genre that they responded to requests for comment with "We know nothing about self publishing or erotica." (You read it here first: "Fifty Shades of Grey" has absolutely nothing to do with self-publishing or erotica.)
Judging a Book by Its Cover

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider
Erotic ebooks often feature close encounters with alien species.

Xavier, who when not writing smut works as a user-interface designer, has taken a different tack. Rather than argue with Amazon over content guidelines, she's looked for ways to make her books less of a target. "At its core, Amazon is trying to clean up the presentation," she says. "I think that's a good thing, because it keeps all the erotica online and for sale."

Ebooks featuring incest and rape tend to share a singular defining feature: sexually explicit and poorly produced covers. The way for monster erotica to survive, she thinks, is to "dress it up like fantasy." No more trashy illustrations. "My covers are pretty classy," she says. [NS_They block and cut these, too.]
"It's all a facade, of course. My plots are depraved. They're definitely not for kids or grandmothers. But I put it in a glossy package, so it doesn't offend anybody who's just searching through Amazon.”

Her book "Alien Seed" is a perfect example of this strategy. The cover looks like any mainstream romance novel, with the image of a reclining and scantily-clad model bathed in green light. But the image doesn’t even hint at the content (sample: “I was either in some ridiculous ... dream or aboard an alien spaceship full of robotic tools capable of delivering epic orgasms”).  

[NS_Which can be misrepresentation in sales. Which can be more offensive and actually illegal.]

"If you want to be a major player in this field,” Xavier adds, “you need to act like one.”




Many monster porn authors employ pen names. [NS_Most romance and erotica writers do.]
Virginia Wade has a different plan. "Writing monster erotica has become a hostile work environment," she says. "I'm tired of the BS. It's just easier to write in a different genre and avoid the scrutiny." She hasn't written a monster sex ebook in months, and has instead focused her creative energies on books that don't involve hirsute creatures or kidnapped campers. Even if censorship weren’t an issue, she's not sure if she has the inspiration for another sequel.
  
"I don't know where to go from here," she says with a sigh. "Each book was like another episode of a soap opera. I've already used the love triangle plotline. I've used the amnesia plotline. I've used the heroine-gives-birth-to-the-wrong-baby plotline, where the kid she had with Bigfoot turned out to be white instead of a little baby ape. I don't know where else I can take the Bigfoot fantasy. I'm out of crazy. I think I might be done."
She pauses, considering. "Well maybe one more," she concedes. "I have to finish up the series somehow. Give it a proper grand finale." She owes it to her longtime fans. Maybe something with genetically engineered Sasquatches, she thinks. Or just drop an A-bomb on Bigfoot and his love slaves and move on.
Fans of raunchy Bigfoot sex need not fear. Over the last few months, several self-published ebooks involving a certain hirsute sex machine have appeared in Amazon's Kindle store, with titles like "Boffing Bigfoot," "Savage Love," and the newly released "Bigfoot Did Me From Behind And I Liked It." 
"There's a lot of human heads being pulled off, eating human flesh and EXPLICIT SEX between Bigfoot and JESSICA," raved one five-star reviewer of the latter title. "Overall a funny read."
Eric Spitznagel is a frequent contributor to Esquire, Playboy, Men's Health, Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine, among others. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son. Visit him at ericspitznagel.com.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/monster-porn-amazon-crackdown-sex-fantasy-bigfoot-2013-12#ixzz2oQovkc2UAll book covers credit: Amazon

From alpha to ‘Betas’: how Amazon is rethinking the way television is made Can audiences help pick the next great TV series? By Bryan Bishop on November 26, 2013

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/26/5147796/betas-how-amazon-is-rethinking-the-way-television-is-made



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When Amazon Studios launched in 2010, it had a bold vision for reimagining the way movies were made. Writers and filmmakers could upload their work, the pitch went, and with the help of other customers could workshop their projects in the hopes of getting them discovered and made. 
In 2012, a year after Netflix had closed its deal for House of Cards, Amazon Studios announced it was going after television as well.
Betas is just the second series to come out of the studio, joining the John Goodman vehicle Alpha House which premiered earlier this month. Created by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, it tells the story of a group of friends in the Silicon Valley startup scene, but more importantly, it represents Amazon Studios taking its crowdsourced-feedback concept and applying it to the traditional model of making TV shows. 
By combining Amazon Instant Video viewing data and user reviews, the company is betting it can take some of the guesswork out of the creative process, allowing it to produce shows that will have ready and waiting audiences right out of the gate.
You can just see what's working on the site, and then that gives you a little context.Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios, says that the company is able to guide its efforts by looking at what Instant Video customers are already responding to and pursuing more content in the same vein. 
"You can just see what’s working on the site, and then that gives you a little context, you know? That these things are resonating," he says. 
The popularity of comedies, for example, influenced the decision to start with that genre rather than the hour-long dramas that are proving so successful on cable (Amazon’s next wave of pilots, including Chris Carter’s The After, should arrive in the first quarter of 2014). There’s also a clear preference for serialized storylines, Price says, which made a project like Betas a better fit than a typical sitcom.
It’s the same kind of research that Netflix used when contemplating the casting of House of Cards, and allows streaming services to pinpoint precise viewer trends rather than rely on abstractions. "Demographics are a way to speculate about what people might like to watch, but if you actually know what they like to watch that’s more important than the demographics," Price says. 
"If you’re 21 years old but you love Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife, then that’s cool. We should be developing Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife for that person."
The TV and movie industries tend to be maybe a little more spontaneous.
"They’re very analytic in a tech way," explains executive producer Michael London (Sideways, Milk). Amazon brought its own experience in the technology world to the table, pushing for a more realistic portrayal of the startup scene, while its creative executives went over every story and character decision in incredible detail. 
"Sometimes that’s a little crazy-making, because the TV and movie industries tend to be maybe a little more spontaneous and fly-by-night," but London says the project benefited from the focus.


The traditional model with a layer of user input
Perhaps the biggest shift in the entire Betas journey was the pilot process itself. For years, television has worked just like Samuel L. Jackson explains it in Pulp Fiction: when a network likes a prospective show, it commissions a single episode. Those that make the cut go to series, while those that don’t… don’t. 
Netflix has tried to gain an edge with creatives that may have been burned by the pilot process by forgoing them altogether; House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were ordered straight to series, no pilot required. But Amazon Studios is using the traditional model with the added layer of user input.
When Amazon decided to walk down the original-content path, Price explains, it made sense to leverage the vast number of people visiting Amazon.com as well as the Amazon-owned IMDb. "We thought clearly we should bring customers in the process, and basically develop with them and ask them what they’re responding to," he says. 
That meant soliciting user feedback on its pilots, and when Betas went up earlier this year, its creators found themselves in the unique position of watching the internet react in real time — knowing that the fate of their show could hang in the balance.
I know we were called pornographers at one point."
"Oftentimes you make a pilot and no one sees it except for like, 40 people in a focus group, and you don’t know what happened," Josh Stoddard says. "In this case you knew you had thousands and thousands of people weighing in." 
Obviously a large portion of the responses were positive — the pilot currently sits at 4.5 out of 5 stars — but the internet being the internet, some reactions were rather heated. 
"I think Evan was pretty good at blocking those things out, but for whatever reason I was refreshing that page and I’d read ‘em all."
"I know we were called pornographers at one point," Endicott deadpans, "and that made my mom proud."


Of course, the question remains just how much that user feedback really plays into Amazon’s decisions. 
"I think it’s big," Price says. "It’s not entirely mechanical. It won’t just spit out a stat-ranked list of shows where you can automatically greenlight the top two something. That would make our job a lot easier," he laughs. 
But what it does do is provide a general framework for Amazon Studios executives to work within, pairing their own creative gut calls with hard data about what audiences are responding to. 
"So I would say it winds up being kind of a hybrid, but the data is super helpful for framing the decision."
"They're not looking to make things on a conveyor belt."
Television history is filled with shows that didn’t resonate with viewers at first, but became beloved classics over time. Looking to the audience so early in the process could conceivably result in a watered-down slate of programming, but both London and the creators of Betas are quick to emphasize that they never saw data trends factor into creative decisions themselves. "Being inside the company, they’re actually remarkably clear-minded about that," London says. 
"They want to know what their viewers like and they want to please people, but they’re not looking to make things on a conveyor belt the way you might a vacuum cleaner." 
In fact, Endicott and Stoddard say they never even received any breakdowns on the consumer response to their pilot until halfway through shooting the full season — and that was only because they asked the marketing department.
With both shows now out in the wild, the focus turns to how well the experiment has performed. Amazon is playing things close to the vest when it comes to its own metrics for success — "If it makes Prime more valuable and people are responding to it, that would be the good outcome," Price says — and the creators themselves don’t seem to be working with much more.
"They keep that pretty opaque," Endicott says. "It’s in a pretty experimental phase, and I think they’re figuring out how to get eyeballs on this stuff. How does it translate into things, like if it’s about selling Prime or building a brand… maybe it’s all of these things." 
There’s also the issue of the user-submitted project concept. 
While Price says the company has no specific expectations, just two of the 25 pilots Amazon has produced thus far originated from scripts that had been uploaded to the site — and neither made it to series.
"If these guys had existed five years ago, 'Arrested Development' wouldn't have gotten cancelled."
In the meantime, the fact that companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu are edging their way into original content means there are more opportunities for show-creators — and more opportunities for great shows to emerge, regardless of the development process. 
"I think if these guys had existed five years ago, shows like Arrested Development wouldn’t have gotten cancelled," Endicott says. Fans are hungry for more than traditional prime time entertainment, and streaming video services have the potential to provide it. 
"I think they’ll have room to do different kinds of programming, and I hope that’s what they continue to do."
The first three episodes of Betas and Alpha House are available now. Prime customers can watch new episodes every Friday. Related Items development roy price creative amazon instant video amazon studios betas alpha house evan endicott josh stoddard michael london Amazon