Ep 198: Children of Blood and Groan

Ode (@thatsod.e / @thatsod_e) and Mo AKA Kid Licorish (@licorishislegit) open this episode of Black and Snerdy examining Tomi Adeyemi's public statement distancing herself from Paramount's film adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone. They walk through Adeyemi's account of the toll the production took on her, weigh comparisons to prior creator-versus-studio conflicts involving The Witcher and Mark Hamill's experience writing Luke Skywalker for The Last Jedi, and discuss concerns about the film's Nigerian setting being flattened into a broader continental aesthetic compared to Black Panther's Wakanda.

They close the topic by noting Adeyemi's upcoming novel, Siren, and where each of them personally lands on watching the film once it releases. The conversation then turns to a report that Anthropic destroyed millions of physical books after scanning them to train its AI models, with a rundown of related legal cases including Authors Guild v.

Google, Bartz v. Anthropic, and Kadrey v.

Meta. Comparisons are drawn to Fahrenheit 451, the Superman villain Brainiac, and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower while questioning whether digitizing a book justifies destroying the only physical copy.

From there they break down Tuskegee University's new dress code under president Dr. Mark A.

Brown, weighing it against dress norms at Howard University and Georgetown, before covering a Howard University enrollment controversy involving roughly five hundred students and closing with updates on Law and Order's expanded run on Peacock and Netflix. Connect with the Snerdy CrewWatch, Listen, or Sponsor the show: ⁠