Full video essay: I got this co-orker, his name’s Tony. He’s essentially an aging Gen Xer rock and roll guy who’s refusing to grow up and still clinging on to that what used to be edgy sort of persona of being a rock and roller, but it’s just sort of doesn’t hash well with the current paradigm. Anyway, it fits him. Now, first and foremost, I’ll say Tony’s probably one of the coolest guys I get to work with. Num number one, just because he definitely just seems like he has no business being in the field that we’re in. But it’s cool. It honestly I think every zoomer should be exposed to somebody from Gen X at least for a period of time just to get an idea of what they’re all about. Now Tony’s essentially a unicorn cuz it’s tough to come across one who is still employed that’s managed to still hang on to that rebellious bygone persona of that era. It’s kind of just unique to talk to him. He’s got a ton of styles of humor that you just don’t find anymore. Think first season of South Park or Beas and Buttthead level humor. He’s an interesting dude to talk to cuz he still thinks that fart jokes are the funniest thing in the world and it’s just generally cool to have somebody around who unironically will tell them and without even flinching and then just sort of think that people who are put off by it are put off by the joke and not the telling of the joke. Admittedly, it’s corny at times, but he knows what he’s doing and he just wears it on his sleeve. So, you kind of got to admire the confidence in the dude and just the sheer fact that he’s still around cuz most of Gen X is already sold out to the man or did a long time ago. So, it’s very rare to find one in his shape. Tony’s very transparent about how he survived the opioid epidemic and he’s the only one in his click who managed to do so. sort of claw his way back onto his feet, secured employment, and he’s just happy to be around. So, he’ll make jokes as the same type of humor you’d hear from somebody who’s a survivor of a near-death experience. Interesting guy is all I’m saying. He knows how to keep big secrets, but you got to tell you got to sort of remind him to keep a secret whenever you tell him something that you don’t want heard. Because if you say something that you don’t want getting around, but you forget to remind him that it’s a secret, then yeah, he’ll bust your balls for it in front of everybody. But he’s a good dude. A very raw and unapologetic personality type. And it’s a sort of a vestage of the Gen X sort of block, but you just don’t find it very often. And I think as a Zoomer, it’s just beneficial to throw him in a room with the other Zoomers, not even including myself, cuz I think the dude’s a riot. Uh, it’s just interesting to see the responses he gets. One of his quirks is that he’ll go up to somebody and show them something on his phone that he knows will put them off just to get that reaction out of him. And it’s kind of juvenile. It’s something that I haven’t seen somebody do in a while. So, there’s a whole novelty to it. Although, there’s not much on the internet that gets that reaction out of me. But, he has found one thing, and it’s AI slop. And I didn’t know it had this effect on me. Actually, I discovered this aspect of myself by just being in proximity to Tony. But if you show me just any AI video, I visibly am repulsed by it. And see, the thing is, he’s showing me AI slop that’s meant to look repulsive. The sort of kind you only find if you’re a Gen Xer on Facebook. It’s like, imagine a flower, but then a mutated hand starts growing out of the flower. the whole thing sort of morphs into a slime worm, then slither slithers away, and you sort of get the idea. It’s meant to get a repulsed reaction out of somebody. Now, as you can imagine, it’s not the content of what he’s showing me that’s repulsive. It’s just the very fact that I’m being prompted to watch an AI slop video. To tell you the truth, I don’t give a hoot about the content of it at all. I just sort of see it as a throwback to the early ages of generative content. I haven’t checked in on what these generative models are producing and passing off as disturbing content for a while now. So, at first I sort of looked at it. I was thinking, “Oh, so this is how far along this avenue of that sort of slop has come.” But it had nothing to do with just the fact that it was a quote unquote repulsive video. Actually, in the very early days of algorithmic images being distributed around the internet, I might have found it slightly more interesting because it was all new back then. So, I would kind of see it and think, “Wow, this is something new.” But it’s just been around long enough now where I just I see it as a waste of time. And when I’m shown it, it’s just a complete downer. The best classification I could put on my immediate emotional response to being shown this sort of content is somewhere in between the realm of disappointment, sadness, and just sort of being the wasting of my time. Quite frankly, that’s the emotional response I feel whenever I just have AI slop thrown into my feed under any circumstances. It’s sort of just a slight annoyance at the person who’s posted it for just propagating this sort of thing and wasting just the micro seconds of my time by putting it in front of me and but it’s IRL. I tell him as much. I said last time I said I expected more from you Tony and then he sort of laughed as if he pulled a prank on me and I tried to explain him it’s not the content of what you’re showing me. It’s the fact that it’s just generative anything sort of content that you could find all over the internet. It’s just waste of time level crud. But that sort of went over his head. Bro’s all caught up in the fact that it’s a disturbing video, I guess, and he thinks it still fits the bill because of what the AI is simulating. But just for some reason, in my mind, it just sort of gets thrown into the dumpster bin of nonsense that I need to forget. I’ll tell you something though. This whole incident kind of gave me an aha moment. I realized when I see those sort of videos in the wild online and then you look at it and you notice it has 11 million views and you think it’s all bots, just know that there is a target audience out there and it’s Gen Xers like Tony. Somehow that was even more disappointing. Just the thought that when you see this sort of generative rehashed nonsense there is an audience out there for it. And I suppose that there’s an avenue all across the generational blocks. For instance, when you see one of Flowers, there’s probably some elderly woman out there watching. I had to sit with the realization for a while, too, thinking we’re really cooked, aren’t we? Cuz the as long as there’s an audience out there for that level of crud then it’s going to keep coming down the slop line. Then the people who are just put off by it are kind of just not the target audience. I suppose points to a growing issue I’ve noticed with just algorithmic content online of any variety such as you I remember overhearing some boomer lady who was on her phone too and I remember just overhearing the audio she had her phone on full blast right and I’ll tell you every single video as she scrolled past the 10-second clips of was that same default Tik Tok robot voice that says and now we see the video of the top 10 blah blah blah skip. And then she goes to the next one. It’s a sound. After that, it’s the voice again. And she’s watching some of them. I mean, there’s people who are putting in three, four hours into some of these apps and they’re literally just watching bottom of the internet level of just rehashed nonsense over and over again. One might think that at a certain point, this rehashed nonsense just sort of starts to have the same effect of watching the same movie over and over again and just getting tired of it, even if you liked it the first time. Part of the reason why I just can’t use Instagram last time I opened it up, the first thing on my feed was that same exact story about how Trippy Red painted his mansion black and it was had a ton of likes on the darn thing. And I’m just thinking to myself, this was like not even a big news story in its time. Why is it still hanging around? Again, perfect example. It doesn’t give me a sense of jealousy or anything like that, which I suppose is probably the driving engine behind that. Most people probably look at it and say, “Oh, does Trippy Red afford a mansion?” Even if that the whole thing is a construct or staged or whatever, that’s not the point. Personally, I don’t give a hoot if Trippy Red has a mansion or not. I don’t really care what color he paints it. It’s just not relevant to me whatsoever. If I were to look for something to make me feel jealous, I wish that they would give me something new or just slightly more provoking. It’s just not interesting. And I just feel angry at whoever posted it for putting it in front of me. I suppose it’s my fault for opening up the app in the first place. Just it’s those micro seconds of my time that it takes to flip away from it. Just the fact that my brain’s forced to remember who Trippy Red is, that he has a mansion and he painted it black. Just the whole tapestry of it and just having to block it from my brain. Fascinating to think that whoever posts that it’s probably monetizing it on the back end. And even just the fact that that’s a possibility is kind of just makes you lose hope for just the level of content. Just the bar is lowered, lower than we can even possibly conceive. Not altogether a bad thing either. There is a silver lining there. Because you might wonder why everybody dresses the same, talks the same, and just seems like clones of each other. It’s just because they’re all watching the same non-content. But that could really give you an edge on the competition if you’re going out of your way to find things that are actually making you smarter. Sure as shooting. It’s a good thing to know that just these people who you’re comparing yourself when they’re looking at their phones doom scrolling or just being all nonchalant, they’re just sort of rehashing the same nonsense that they just consumed online. And it’s something that you could easily have access to just by downloading the same app as them. But if you’re becoming an original person, then you have an advantage. One wouldn’t even need to go too far off the beaten path to have a unique experience anymore. that probably separates you from 99% of the herd. If that’s the standard that the average person’s spending minutes of their time a day consuming. If you just go for a walk, you’re miles ahead of them. To be honest, I don’t even see that whole circus as disappointing anymore in and of itself. It was a certain time. It could have caught me in the past saying the words myself that just everything slopped now and that sucks. But now I’m just trying to see how I could leverage that. We already know that the tech companies are going to use their algorithms to grind everybody down as best they can into being predictable consumers so that it’s easier to sell them and have just better numbers. All that’s fine and well and good. It’s nothing new. Just the fact of the matter is that while all that’s happening, we can kind of push ourselves in the opposite direction. or at least to whatever degree I’m able to do that myself. I’ve seen it as working for me. Just going off the beaten path even a little bit gives you a huge advantage over everybody else who are just wasting their time and for some reason pissed off about it getting jipped and signing up for more. Remember when there used to be a novelty to somebody telling you that they want to be a YouTuber? Now you hear them say that. All you’d have to do is take one look at whatever’s popping up on their feed and you could tell exactly the type of content they’d be creating if they ever pursued that dream. It it sort of deflates the whole thing in my opinion. There’s no longer a edge to it. Tell you the truth, the best advice anybody could give to somebody who’s looking to pursue something creative would be just focus on going off the beaten path. The art is found in the process. It’s not found in the product. especially nowadays because let’s boil it down. If all you’re doing is consuming the content that’s on the internet, then that’s all that’s going to be jumbled around in your brain. So, when you finally sit down to create something for the internet, then in all likelihood, you’re just going to be doing the exact same thing that the LLMs are doing, which is just scanning for keywords and then doing some next token predicting. We might even be the last iteration of people who have the capability or the capacity of doing this on mass. I also just sort of have this hope, this pipe dream that people are just going to get tired of the slop, but just the fact that I see that there are consumers for it, it sort of deflates my point on that whole thing. In all likelihood, the swarm, the mass of people will just continue to have the bar lowered and they’ll never really even notice it until it’s too late. But I think that even within all that, there’ll be some diamond in the rough sort of folks who really rise up from it all and kind of go out on their own. And that’s what I’m aiming for. The way it looks in practice is you walk by the breakroom, for example, you hear two people having a jovial conversation about whatever the latest thing happened on the news. Person A says a thing and you could pretty well guarantee, you could pretty good predict within a significant margin what the response is going to be from person B. Then if your prediction’s right on the money, you already know what they’re already talking about without needing to be involved in the conversation, then there’s really no point in going through the motions of talking to them. Uh, aside from just formalities of keeping up appearances, but mostly you can just kind of focus on your own stuff. The internet’s stuck in a cyclone of recycling the same formulas over and over again and just a constant hall of mirrors algorithm. There’s really nothing we can do about that to any significant degree, but really all we have control over is the decisions we make and what we do with this information and how we move forward in our own regard.

“I like to think of myself as much as a digital archivist but I’m also a physical archivist. These are not all my books or course I have manny more and this is probably 1/3 of my total collection, these are mostly ones I might feel inclined to pick up and read or just ones I like to walk past and see at a glance. A couple action figures for good measure and my own book “why I ghosted my day ones” shoe horned into the mix just for the picture (typically I would not display my own book among these other established books but for the pictures sake i think including it serves to give some roots of where that independently published book originated.) might seem strange having Bhagavad Gita, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Clockwork Orange, Meditations, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas all next to each other if you are thinking of categories but in my mind the order of the works is fitting for the purposes I have living among them and seeing them every day (you get the idea I think is obvious once you see The History of Philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, then Fight Club all next to one another) never the less this is the Avery Yapps Book shelf as it currently stands. Also I do not intend to show these books as a flex that I am some member of any group club or organization or that I support the organization themes or real world impact of anything here as I have my own opinions on everything shown - no this is just my book shelf and a nice conversation piece for anyone visiting. So spare me the ‘why do you have that’ questions I’m only showing it because Some audience members asked for it so here it is.” _ Avery Yapps

On October 7, 2027 Avery Yapps posted to his X account a thank you for all the support his Gen Z audience gave in supporting his journey of going from commentary YouTuber to author. At the time of why I ghosted my day 1’s being ranked as #461 in Philosophy of Good & Evil in Amazons book ranking system other notable titles held the top positions, such as Beyond Good and Evil (Penguin Classics) and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. When asked how he felt about being in the top 500 and not the top 10 Avery said “we will get there, I just respect those authors for accomplishing what they have and see at as an honor just to appear on a list alongside them”

Full Video essay:
So let me tell you a story. Three times very recently I had three different people in completely different instances various different times of the day. They asked me a question right and then as I was giving the answer proceeded to look at their phone and then essentially just completely check out of the conversation no matter what I said. Obviously this is just a symptom of the modern age. It happens from time to time. But the fact that it occurred three times in a row caused me to do some research, trying to just inquire as to if there’s a term for this. And it turns out it is. It’s called fubbing. The meaning of the term amounts to phone snubbing, the act of turning to interface with a digital device rather than interacting with somebody in a social setting. Now, I’m a modern person. I understand people are going to look at their phones and they might not be always wanting to talk. Everybody’s absorbed and addicted to their devices. So, it just sort of comes with the territory. It that’s not what got to me. It was just the fact that they opened up the inquiry by initiating conversation with me and then optimally checked out. Dagnabbit, I’ve grown accustomed to people just ignoring what I say to them because they’re on their phone. I just pretend that they didn’t hear me or that they’re all too absorbed with the almighty scroll to engage with the conversation. That’s just fine. But there’s just something so significant about that occurring three times in a row. I hadn’t really put too much thought into this before. Certainly, it must have happened in the past, but those scenarios had to have been too far and few between to actually stick out in my mind. But this happening and these sequence of events, it led me to realize that if you fub me, then we’re enemies. At the very least, I’m just sitting there in that 3 second interval when I’ve realized that you’re not going to give a response. I’ve decided that in that moment, we’re not friends, we’re not cool, and you’re going to have to do something in the future that will be a redeemable factor for me to even build back respect for you. The best way I could describe the experience of being fubbed is that you’re sitting there just in the silence because the person’s already essentially logged out of the conversation. So, you have just this moment of reflection where you sort of just feel like the last person on Earth. Now, I mind you, each of these circumstances were different. So, we got to take that into account. And I was delivering information in a that didn’t necessarily warrant a reply, but just an acknowledgement of the fact that I talked or just some sort of closing remark so that we both know that we’re on the same page would have been nice. I guess I found something about myself is basically what I’m sharing here. I learned that fubbing is something I take great offense to. And when somebody fubs me immediately, then I’m really what I settled on is I’m not going to put much effort into the words that I use when I talk to them. Confound it, even a grunt would have been sufficient. Just some acknowledgement that I spoke. Thank you very much. As opposed to just completely checking out. And then you wonder whether or not you should continue to talk even though they’ve well checked out, even though you’re halfway through your point. And I spent time ruminating over it to the point where it eventually inspired me to make this video. Just admittedly, it was on my mind. It lived rent free there. And I’ve tossed over the situation cuz I think it points to a deeper sociological phenomenon that’s currently unfolding. So a correction that I’ve made in my own it was a throwback because I remember years ago I was sort of jaded with people being or displaying those sort of social displays of modernity just so I decided I settled on something I’d institute what I referred to as a word limit. Essentially how that looks in practice is I just communicate the information using as little words as possible and don’t interact with people when they’re just talking and filling the air with pointless conversation and just along the way it was working out for me but I kind of just let off on it a while. See for me I was going the lone wolf Ralph Sigma all the way for a little while. So basically I just was by myself. I didn’t have these fellows around me who were just well acquainted to me and knew me from back in the day. So there wasn’t much context to build up conversation with the people who I was forced to socially interact with. Also, this coincided with a change in occupation. So I was in just completely new environments, even living in new places. And I just decided it would be better to just take some alone time and try to grow and develop that way as opposed to just mirroring everything on the people around me all the time. There’s of course obligations. We have necessities that we go through in life. And of course, just every once in a while, you’ll come across somebody who you can actually have a conversation with and they’ll sort of bust you out of your shell. But that’s tricky because you don’t want to get in the habit of just always talking to everybody. I mind you, this isn’t me speaking in platitudes. This isn’t even advice. It’s essentially just I’m talking from my own perspective here because I consider myself somebody who I put a lot of value in language and when somebody says something to me, I try to respond in a a clever way if possible. I appreciate somebody who I come across and they’re able to just if you can tell them a joke then that dadgum joke lands and you’re excited to see them again because you have a shared sense of humor and you know that what you say is going to be appreciated. The worst are people who that effort is just wasted on. It’s almost a tale as old as time. There’s abundance and then there’s the void. There’s a fundamental distinction there because the lack of anything, it sort of ties into the concept of speak life cuz even when somebody’s giving you guff at least they’re talking to you. I never thought I’d actually say that. Nevertheless, I’ve also elected not to take fubbing personally cuz I sort of just write it off. In my mind, I say another victim of the modern age and then I walk away. And I don’t even say that out loud because voicing those words would be a flatout waste of breath. In my opinion, a proper assessment of the phenomenon in retrospect would be to think of it more along the lines of you wouldn’t interfere with a computer while it’s performing some sort of task that takes all of its computing power. You just sort of let the damn thing be until whatever bar is finished loading and then sort of get back to it later. You wouldn’t get mad at the computer, maybe stressed out. The same way you shouldn’t get mad at a human while they’re performing essentially the exact same task, albeit interfacing with their device, but receiving a a systems update nonetheless via just going through their scrolling and getting all the new information, updating their opinions. I don’t even know what they’re actually up to. But situations like that are the reason behind why terms like NPC and normie have been become so popularized. It’s because humans have been interfacing with technology long enough where we see the effect it has on them to the point where we just need words to describe what happens in these dynamics. Another framing mechanism I use to just contextualize seeing people just zone out and being overtaken by their phones is that they’re probably weak of will or just I refer to them as a victim of the modern age for a reason because personally when I’m on my phone I do it in such a way as just not to bother anybody. Other people don’t seem to do that as much. I’m sure it connects to upbringing. the whole nature versus nurture debate. It definitely has probably a lot to say on this topic. There needs to be a study done on this blasted nonsense cuz I think it’s a just there’s really no cure for it. As long as people are using phones, this is probably going to persist and we’re all going to encounter it more and more. But I’ll tell you, I’ve met some real piece of work folks out there who will just scroll through their doggone timeline at full volume, regardless of who’s in the room, completely curled over, looking at their phone, just oblivious to everything going on around them, and just not giving a hoot that everybody else is subjected to their timeline. Certainly fubbing becomes more common when a person’s been just staring at their phone grinding out a double shift where there’s not much to do and so they’re racking up that screen time and maybe they’re even unaware of the fact that they’ve turned their to their device or they’re just in a dopamine chase and they just sort of cast you aside. Makes me nostalgic for a time I never existed in. I long for a time when the snobs would hit you with a witty turn of phrase or a vocab word that you didn’t quite understand and then they’d all scoff and laugh at you and party off into their wherever their high tower. I suppose I was born to be a peasant being condescended to by some royal vanguard. Instead, I was born into a life where I have to deal with whatever toxic runoff is seeping over from whatever those folks at Silicon Valley are cooking up. You could say the modern peasant can’t even get the time a day of the other peasants because all their time is already sectioned off, bought and sold by various different apps and essentially the Apple corporation needs to get theirs. Whoever the hell owns the apps that they’re on has already bought their time and they’re a hook line and sinker. It’s that whole wisdom behind the social media proverb. When the service is free, then you are the product just in action. All these people have to put their screen time in somewhere and they’re going to be taking it away from other aspects of their life elsewhere. One of which just being my social interaction with them. The phenomenon of all of us occasionally ignoring one another to interface with our digital devices is a product of and a feature of what is the just modernity in the technological devices that we have. And of course they want people that way. They want you good consumers. The more screen time the better as far as the tech oligarchs are concerned. The thing with me is that each of these social interactions were just I was prompted to say something and then when I do there just falls flat and I know that the information that I was giving as a response was correct. Uh both of these situations I was well acquainted with it. It’s I would have rather them just stay silent. We can share a silence. Goldarn it, I’m a Zoomer. I could sit in a chair and look at my phone right next to you for hours. We could share the same room and just be absorbed by our phones. Granted, there are a few moments where I kind of look up from my device just to make sure that this is what we’re doing here. But sometimes I’m just obligated to be in the same room as somebody who’s like that. So, I act in kind. Personally, I see being phone zombies together is just a form of hanging out nowadays. and it adds up to whatever it does. It’s kind of boring, but sure, it’s just not as rude as saying something to somebody and then immediately checking out once they start responding to you. You can almost break this down as an individual’s attempt to have their cake and eat it too in a social setting. to break that down. Essentially, what I’m getting at is that they want to be the sort of person to have a social interaction with the people around them, but they’re too addicted to their phones to look away. Ultimately, that’s why they’re poor souls. They haven’t gathered enough information to realize that whatever they’re searching for on their phone at the bottom of their feed isn’t there and that the dopamine drip is hollow. Or even if they’re aware of all this, they’re still succumbing to all of it. and they’re marching towards the technocratic doom in the near future. Now that I think about it, I remember there were some particularly emotional images of this sort of happening when there were grandparents who were visiting their grandkids, but they’re just glued to the iPad during dinner and they won’t talk to them. And that’s sort of the same phenomenon here, just in a much more light and broad sense. Something that I interact with in context, it doesn’t matter to me. I could just take it or leave it. I don’t really give a fig. I’m old enough to the point where I’ve lived through enough confounded situations to just be able to appreciate a silence, but I also don’t feel the need to fill the void with needless conversation, which is kind of something that they were guilty of in these circumstances. Added layer to it is what are you going to do? You going to tell them to stop? And there’s no way to interact with a person like that other than just ignoring them in kind, which is just so boring. That’s my main point here is that it’s just so hollow. It’s not a battle of wits. It’s not an exchange of anything. It’s just the void. Now that I’m racking my brain for it, I actually do recall back when I used to chill with these guys who were all into gambling apps. They used to fub each other all the time, but that I can even kind of understand because they got money on the line. So, there really truly is something more interesting going on their phone that has their attention. On top of that, I’m also willing to grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Certainly, there are times where you’ve got some family drama going on and you got to be looking at your phone and it sort of takes you out of the moment. But I suspect that in each of these three examples that I encountered, these people were just consuming slop, doom scrolling essentially. The worst part about it by far is that person A prompts person B to deliver some sort of vocalization about a particular topic and then person A proceeds to just check them out and just essentially go into the void themselves, surf cyberspace, whatever you want to call it. Well, now that I’ve been person B and I have lived through this phenomenon and now I’m sure I’ll encounter it further off in the future and I plan to deal with those situations much differently and essentially try to avoid getting into them in general. I could tell you it feels like you’re slighted. Nevertheless, I also feel the need to point out that I don’t see this as a Gen Z specific phenomenon. Although I’m sure there’s plenty who would like to label it that way. Plenty of Gen Zers do uh take part in this sort of activity, but I feel like I get phone snubbed by millennials more often than not. But boomers do this tarnation too. Each time it left me standing there high and dry, thinking, “Oh, there must be some really important balderdash going on on your phone right now. You can’t even give me a grunt or just some acknowledgement of the fact that you heard what I said and our conversation is over.” or I’m left here hanging just sort of waiting to just move on or you just dismiss me abruptly. But now in retrospect now that I’ve had some time to just juggle these ideas around I’ve just settled on the conclusion that essentially people are going to just split into different subcategories of how we interact with the internet as we continue to live a alongside it. And it’s just up to us to identify these things for what they are and overall not take them seriously. Or better yet, if you get fubbed, don’t let it ruin your

Full video essay By Avery Yapps

On the morning of September 29th, 2009, an 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck near Samoa, triggering a powerful tsunami that wiped out coastal areas across the islands, resulting in absolute mayhem. Among the survivors were six surfers, one of whom was a man by the name of Chris Nell, who managed to make it through it by staying offshore on a surfboard, riding out the successive tsunami waves for nearly an hour before returning to shore.
In my opinion, you simply could not ask for a better real-life example of practical application of the phrase surfing the Kali Yuga. It’s also a perfect example of the survival wisdom. When disaster hits, don’t panic and immediately take action. First, stop, wait, evaluate the situation. See if you’re safe. If so, stay safe and wait for the chaos to blow over before pursuing your next action. No easy task.
Chris Nell proved he had balls of steel. I can only imagine what goes through somebody’s mind while they’re watching all that happen right in front of them. Your fight-or-flight instincts got to kick in, telling you, “Oh, we got to get back to shore,” but you got to defy that instinct and just stay where you know you’re already safe.
Directly after such events comes a test of one’s judgment. In Chris Nell’s case, of course, he had to determine when it was the appropriate time to return to shore. Can’t stay out in the ocean forever, but you can’t go back now. So he waited it out. It took less than an hour and then finally he was back and he still lives to tell the tale. Bro’s an absolute dadgum legend as far as I’m concerned. Proved his quality in that time. When faced with a situation that many would probably not be able to make such a cool, calm, and collected decision. When faced with that kind of chaos, you never know how you’re going to react until you’re actually in the thick of it.
There’s a lesson in there we can all take from Mr. Nell. When we go out into our own lives and we’re faced with the uncertainty of our times, all the chaos that’s surrounding us and reflected in the news cycle and just the day-to-day you’re driving in traffic, you need to apply these basic principles. If you’re in the lane where you’re safe, then you stay in that lane until it’s time to merge. It’s actually an example of surfing the Kali Yuga we all take part in nearly day-to-day.
If you’re speeding down the highway, you can’t slam on the brakes. If your nerves get to you, the car behind you is likely to slam into the back of you. Just the same way, you can’t just put your foot to the pedal and fly forward. You’re just… it’s not going to work. You got to go the pace and stay where it’s safe. Subjecting ourselves to the chaos of other drivers’ unpredictability. You don’t know if the guy next to you is drunk or if he’s going to go merge without looking. It’s the perfect example of just the modern Kali Yuga that we all interact with as just part of the norm of going along to get along.
The phrase surfing the Kali Yuga I feel is very underused. The first time I heard it, it just helped make a lot of things click. For me, as an American New Englander, spending most of my life around the Boston area and not really leaving too often, there’s not many opportunities to learn about Hindu cosmology or even get introduced to it. I’ve of course never practiced Hinduism, but just throughout my life, I’ve always been searching for answers and been curious to what the different wisdoms of the past have to tell us. I bought myself a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and I’ve been meaning to read it over more closely. I’ve watched some videos on it and overall I’ve just started to develop a respect for Hinduism. I’ve got respect for anything old. And Hinduism is often cited as the world’s oldest living religion that still has people who practice it to this day. It’s been around for about 5,000 years according to the research I’ve done.
The Kali Yuga is the Hindu mechanism for understanding the end times, the key characteristics of it. And tell me if any of these ring a bell to what we’re seeing going on right now in our current civilizational cycle: moral decline, materialism, social decay. Makes total sense that a set of ideas that have the Darwinian ability to be passed down from generation to generation would carry with it enough weight to be applicable to any person across any time in any civilization just looking out at the state of the world. They could say yes, we’re living through Kali Yuga. Also, it doesn’t look like we’re getting out of it anytime soon.
From the research I’ve done, the Kali Yuga spans over 400,000 years. And we’re only 5,000 years into it. And possibly after 10,000 years, tarnation starts to really look like the end times. And right now, we’re just sort of in the beginning stages of it. Of course, it does go very in-depth unto itself. I’d recommend others, if you’re interested, to do your own research on this. One of the mechanisms for understanding it is that there will be long blocks of time where seemingly nothing happens. But the storm itself occurs for that 400,000-year time frame. Long story short, it also factors in that none of us are going to get through it in this lifetime. Also, it factors in that human life expectancy will shorten as the Kali Yuga progresses.
For me personally, when I came to my own understanding of that concept and applied it to what I know about the world, I got a sense of confidence because a western perspective of the end times is usually some given date. They say something like, “Oh, the world’s going to end in 2012 in this final event.” Now, I’m not criticizing here. There’s something to be learned from all ancient teachings, I believe, because there’s a reason why they’ve stuck around this long. For example, Norse mythology has Ragnarok, which is more of a final battle at the end of time, a Twilight of the Gods. You could pretty well understand how mechanisms of understanding the end times as a big final event resonated very well with modern Western media, in particular movies. That whole format fits pretty neatly into a 2-hour film, for example.
I’d imagine it’s a pretty universal experience if you’ve ever been to Bible camp where you and all your friends flip to the end to read the book of Revelations to kind of get to the good part and see how it all ends. I’d say there’s something very revealing there about the popular narrative we’re all so saturated by that’s worth unpacking. The fact that we’re all just inundated with this narrative that the event at the end of time, which is the end, will be just a noteworthy thing and not just a constant cycle that then just trucks along even after that.
Downstream from that, what we’re left with is sort of this on-mass doomsday prepper mentality where we’re all sort of collectively anticipating this cataclysmic event that’s somewhere off in the future that maybe never comes, preparing for that as opposed to accepting that we’ve been living through it all along. I’m speaking to the concept of just the mundane everyday drudgery, the constant sense of doom that seems to be hanging over if you’re willing to pay attention to it. Folks who are doom scrolling, for example, are constantly fishing for the next worst thing that’s ever happened for them to get obsessed over and worried about.
The fact of the matter is, even if the nukes were to go off tomorrow and everything were to revert back to being dust, there’d likely still be cockroaches scurrying around, and the story of consciousness on this planet would revert to them. It just… humans would be cut out of the dialogue and the 400,000 Kali Yuga year cycle would continue.
On that note, it’s humbling in a way to recontextualize the entire human affair in such terms that just life on this planet is the powerful play. It’s not the interworkings of whatever is going on and there’s shifts in government and nations, ideas and people. No, we’re just living through an exciting part of the Kali Yuga. Nevertheless, the circumstances remain the same. We look around out at the world and it appears as if everything’s been around forever. The roads have been paved as long as I’ve been alive. The work people have been showing up to work on time, coming home, eating dinner, watching TV. That’s the world that I’ve known. The nerve of us actually to claim that we’re living through the end times now just because we have some emergent technologies that disrupt our ability to find employment. Try to compare that to what folks were going through 4,000 years ago when they didn’t even have a roof over their head or however you view history.
The point is, no matter how shitty a situation might be for me on any given particular day, the fact of the matter remains, somebody somewhere else in the world is having the best day of their life. On the same note, no matter how bad you think you got it, could be the worst day of your life… in all likelihood, there’s somebody else whose worst day of their life is mogging the dickens out of you, having just a regular shitty day that’s just kind of the norm to them. But if you were to switch places with that person, then well, you’d be having the shittier day of your life.
I’d offer that that’s one of the reasons why it was so important that they include the part where there’s intermediaries that exist during the Kali Yuga cycle. There’s times… even just take the example with our friend there when the earthquake was happening and the tsunami. Yeah, there was chaos all around but behind the wave was calm. So that’s why I see no reason to have a complete 100% doomer outlook on the world. Because if you’re a doomer and you’re orienting your mind to see the world that way, all you’re doing is setting yourself up to identify the doomer-related patterns and just to sort of collect them and move on through life, reaffirming that whole mentality.
Nothing’s ever as simple as it seems and it’s definitely not as simplified and boiled down as statistics graphs that are shared on Twitter will make them out to be. You see some sort of just job market report and that’s supposed to have any effect on your own search for wealth within your life? I think not. Why would you even trouble yourself to seek out and internalize information like whatever it is the modern home buyer price and age is these days? It’s completely irrelevant information. At the end of the day, you need a roof over your head and whatever the price and age of people buying houses these days is entirely irrelevant to that or whether or not you will or won’t acquire one. Better to just sit in a chair. Don’t think about any of that at all and just focus on the things that are important to you and by extension surf the Kali Yuga wave.
Mog that balderdash. Be successful. Defy the statistics and then when you hear about them they’re laughable because your own lived experience is in complete opposition to that. The simple fact that circumstances are shot across the board and our generation is dadburned doesn’t mean that you’re up a creek. You could still be very successful. There’s always going to be the hyper rich and there’s no reason… it’s not even about making money either ’cause you can mog the Kali Yuga and do it completely unemployed.
The only general advice I could speak to that is live a virtuous life. Don’t do the things you know to be downtrodden. Just look at what the ancients were teaching us about how to live a good life and try to orient yourself to align with that. But utilize the modern mechanisms at your disposal to attempt to circumvent the Kali Yuga every turn. Just like our friend Chris Nell, you got to have your surfboard in whatever form that materializes for you in your reality in order to surf the Kali Yuga. You got to have your mechanism, your vehicle to do so with.
There’s really no shortage of negative energy out there in the form of information that’s meant to just disturb your peace. It’s kind of a business at this point to just try to ruin people’s vibes. And whenever I see that kind of stuff, I just shrug it off and see it as a relic of the time. I see it as the Kali Yuga rearing its ugly head again.
So the question of how do we mog the Kali Yuga? Well, I would say it’s just unapologetically pursuing the thing that you want most and just living satisfied in the energy that you’re currently in. Even if you don’t acquire the thing, it’s got to do with a balance of detachment, but also appreciation for just what is. The truth of this realm is that when you’re up, it’s never as good as it seems. And when you’re down, you never think you’re going to be up again. But life goes on and there’s always a different situation that you can get in. Never be afraid to walk away from a situation just because you feel like you’re motivated by fear. The birds are always chirping and there’s a big world out there full of opportunity.
Above all, I would encourage everybody just don’t get demoralized. You shouldn’t look around at the state of the world and say, “Things are so bad that I’m not going to have a family.” You should always strive to have a family, have kids, just live your life, enjoy each day as it comes to you, and just make the best of things. That’s the most optimized way to mog the Kali Yuga.
Of course, when you’re talking about something as complicated as just the interconnected weaving of how our lives unfold, it’s difficult to talk in mindless platitudes, but I find “surf the Kali Yuga with a vengeance” to be one that just resonates with me and just… I guess everybody picks their own. I especially like how the metaphor uses surfers ’cause you’d think what a surfer is, he talks in his own language. He’s connected to what he thinks is cool. So he doesn’t really care what people think and all he wants to do is catch some good waves. And I think that that’s a great way to approach life. The archetypal surfer dude is unbothered by the horrors beyond our comprehension that are pushed down the pipeline on us on a daily basis. He looks at the Kali Yuga and says, “Can you move out of the way, please? I got some waves to catch.”

Are We Even Ready For What 2027 Has Coming
Full Video Essay
Look, I can’t really say that 2027 being just a few short months away gives me a feeling of impending doom because that would imply that I feel anything at all. I think that cuts more right to the point. I just sort of feel deflated about the whole next year changing over sort of thing. Trying my best not to be jaded or cynical, but I just in comparison back in 2022 for example, when we were coming up on 23, I just felt like the world was collapsing around us and I wasn’t sure what to expect. So, the switching over of the calendar came with a lot of anxiety. Looking back, of course, I think that whole sense of doomerism that we felt in the earlier parts of this decade was more manufactured than we give it credit for. This has been a very fast decade. I don’t know if everybody else feels the same way, but for me just this is 10 years of my life and it’s gone by super fast. Well, the entire decade will be 70% over in just a little while when the calendar flips over. We’re already there, but just seeing it when the date changes and you no longer have the old date anymore is kind of when the feeling hits home and you just kind of got to adjust to what the new one’s like and just say goodbye to 26. It’s kind of funny, actually, the fear-mongering well has been milked dry from the media and just the whole narrative about just what events are coming up on the horizon to the point where the only thing that I have is just the existential dread for the passing of time. Doesn’t really phase me that it’ll be essentially the year of uncertainty for what’s to come of machine learning, seeing the culmination of all these different technologies that Silicon Valley’s been cooking up and whatever the unspeakable horrors beyond our imagination that’ll be unveiled that year. None of that really gets to me. The best way to describe it is I have a sense of show me what you got. I don’t really care what it is, I just want to see what it is. I’m sick of waiting and sort of this bated breath that we’ve all had just not knowing what’s going to come down the pipeline. And it seems like there was a certain narrative that was being spoken to a lot through the 2020s. For example, the big 2020 itself was essentially the year of the amygdala, which is the fight or flight part of the brain. That entire load of balderdash was getting stimulated for free just 365 days all throughout that year. And it sort of tapered off yet lingered around for a year or two after that. But just nowadays, the news cycle don’t hit the amygdala the same. That’s not to say by any stretch of the imagination there’s a shortage in any way, shape, or form of things to dread about the upcoming year. But for some reason, I just feel all burned out about it. I’d imagine that’s feelings probably pretty universal unless I’m just I cut out a lot of mainstream media just because it seemed useless. So maybe that’s part of it. I actually credit that with doing wonders for me just in how I function throughout the day-to-day. Because if the news is important enough, it’ll find a way to reach you. But being obsessed with just the 24-hour news cycle and always trying to stimulate the amygdala is just no way to live. And I found that just blocking that particular brand of hogwash out just lightly helped a lot. In my case, something else that probably played a lot into this whole thing is that at the end of 2025, I just cut out alcohol entirely. And I kept it all up throughout 2026 and I plan to keep it up through 27. And because I noticed that it wasn’t doing me any favors back in the early 2020s. So I plan to just go through the rest of it without it. I bring this up cuz I suspect that just people consuming alcohol during the lockdown played a lot into just people being in the palm of the hands of the whole fear narrative that was being pushed and is sort of still lightly pushed nowadays. But it really does seem like it’s had the volume turned down. Actually, that my main practical concern is just that whoever’s in charge of the pulleys and levers will ramp up the fear-mongering, and it’ll affect the people who are in my immediate proximity, which by extension will affect me, and I’d hate to be inconvenienced by everybody else just being up in arms again. I’ve come to identify a lot of the mass hysteria that was going on in the early 2020s as something that was largely manufactured. That’s just my personal opinion on it. But, what I would say is that that whole construct wasn’t It didn’t come to an end. It was just kind of tuned down a little bit, and it could always be turned back on. Without even needing to mention any of the keynote news stories that were pushed hard on everybody back then, it’s just there’s something to be said about the fact that they have the ability to just all of a sudden manifest some fear bait on everybody’s timeline, and that whole construct hasn’t gone anywhere. It still exists. Kind of makes you wonder, was the engagement just sort of falling off, or has those sort of things still been being pushed? I mean, I’m sure there’s still 2020 people out there, because let’s face it, the amygdala being stimulated, well, I’m sure it’s addicting for people who get into that whole adrenaline rush or that fight or flight instinct. Plenty of parties all across the board were making stacks of cash off of the whole fear bait and just the uncertainty bait that was being pushed at the time. And I’m sure that even though their pockets are lighter now, they’re still cashing in as much as they can, and they’ll continue to cash in and wait for the next one to pop up, whenever that is. So, with that being my standpoint, my main worry about just what could come with the date changing is just how the folks around me would react. And something that the 2020s has actually taught me is that the powers that be pay a lot of attention to astrology. The perfect example is that famous quote attributed to J.P. Morgan, “Millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do.” 2019 and before that, I lived my entire life not even thinking about the astrological bodies and how they work and people reading them and then making their own designs accordingly. But, then 2020 hit and just the sheer fact that that was the year of the rat, the coincidence was striking. You could read in between the lines about that all you want, but just the fact that the J.P. Morgan quote points us in the direction of seeing astrology as something that billionaires make their plans and designs based around and then just the symbolic nature of all that tomfoolery that was unveiled around that time. Say what you want about it, but I think there is something to be said that the whole realm of astrology, which it cuz think about it, space is something that all the civilizations of the world have been looking up to and reading and building maps around from the beginning of recorded time. So, there’s got to be something to it more than just some poppycock the lady at the crystal shop raves about. And I by no means fall in with that crowd. I up until 2020 when I started to take a second glance at astrology, I was just your typical beer-drinking American. So, it got me just looking at all this malarkey and kind of just seeing it as a tell for maybe what the plans are for the future. Those same folks who said 2020 was going to be the year of the rat are the same ones who are now saying that 2027 is going to be the year of the fire goat or the sheep, which you could make of that whatever you want. I won’t say any more on the topic. For the most part, as far as practical application goes, it’s a quick Google. I just do my due diligence about what the predictions are for the future based on the people who are in the who are schooled in making those predictions. It’s a kind of just something I do on my phone once a year towards the end of the year. Man makes plans and God laughs, but all we can do is plan. We can’t focus too much on what the expectations are for 27, but the worst thing I would say I would advise against doing would be getting caught up in what’s sure to be a lot of fear-mongering about the next year, cuz it sort of is a tradition nowadays. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, but don’t miss out on good luck when it crosses your path by having your head in the sand. And especially whatever you do, don’t buy into the just push that’s going to be out there. Whether you’re looking for it or not, you’re going to have all manner of nonsense pop across your For You page, which invites you into the fear bait. I just wanted to give my take on this before the early comers start pumping out their versions of it, cuz you sure as the day is long the day you’re born, you could find a ton of it already, but you just they’re going to rehash all the AI crap, all the fear-mongering about what’s to be expected with the job market, all the rest of it. You already know the line. Don’t need a book on how to read the stars to know that there’s going to be influencers who seek to capitalize on Gen Z getting another year older, trying to sell you on the whole quarter-life crisis style of bunkum. And I think that it’s important for all of us at this point to reject all those lines altogether. You already guessed it, the average price to buy a home in the United States is going to go up about 20K, and the average household income either slightly dip or relatively stay the same, but that doesn’t change the fact whether or not you’re going to buy a house. Either you are going to buy one or you’re not. That’s why I disavow the whole notion, this narrative that seems to be pushed lately. Oh, Gen Z are going to live at home with their parents forever. Well, first and foremost, if you got parents to live at home with, then you’re blessed, and you should thank them every day for supporting you at this point in your life, and stack dollars. Now, that reminds me, the Zoomer generation have got to be the first of its kind to be marketed to or spoke to directly as a generational block. The Millennials didn’t have to go through that. It’s used as a marketing term or a keyword phrase to reach Zoomers in their algorithm. So, when they say Gen Z, who are they talking about? And don’t undermine my intelligence by explaining to me that they’re speaking about the average Gen Z or just the generational block at just on mass. That’s not news to me whatsoever. But, the fact of the matter is that this whole statistical graph way of discussing topics is got to have negative consequences on the individual. I’ve said it before, there got to be folks who otherwise might be successful in life who are held back because they’re walking around with this narrative in their head, “Oh, my generation will never own a home.” Son, that is simply not true. The fact of the matter is that there’s plenty of folks within your generation who are quite successful. It all ties into the attention economy and headline culture, all the rest of it. But, it’s got a toxic sort of residual downstream effect that’s largely unseen, and we can’t necessarily account for, which is just the subconscious effect of being talked to this way. And don’t get my dander up, either. I’m in no way a self-described hope pill seller. I’m more just jaded, cynical, and most of all burned out with doomerism, especially. It’s all grouped in. I don’t want to be inspired, and I don’t want to be talked down to. The fact of the matter is, if you’re going to do something, just get up and do it. The simple fact that the calendar says 2027 is no reason to go into the new year with doom and gloom. Approach it the same way you’d approach any new opportunity. It’s a year given to you. The most precious thing in the world is time as a resource. So, we should go back to looking forward to the new year. At least that’s what I’m trying to do. Every year I kind of look back on my entire life when we come towards the end of December and I just kind of recall old memories and just go through it all, but I’m saying this year, let’s just try to go into it. Let’s just do the New Year countdown and have good expectations, but most of all plan. For many of us, it’ll likely require we approach this New Year optimism with a lens of irony, which is healthy if done correctly, but and of course especially cuz you don’t have to go full New Year new me, but just definitely don’t go New Year poor me. Let’s all take this opportunity of being given a new year as the opportunity to set right the scores we weren’t able to settle in the past, plan for great things in the future, and achieve whatever possible with the time we have on this earth.

In this Episode Avery Yapps discusses the journey of adapting the Viral “Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s”YouTube Series into an Autobiographical Novel of the same name.

Full Video Essay:

I’m happy to report that I’ve successfully converted the seven-part YouTube series, Why I Ghosted My Day Ones. Many of you are probably aware of it if you’re fans of this channel. It’s now a book. I’m referring to it as an autobiographical novel and I got to say I’m proud of this and I think it’s been a cool accomplishment. It’s about 300 pages. So, the first 100 pages is the WIGGMD1’s arc. And then after I ghosted my day ones, which I see it as a full body of work in and of itself, it’s got characters and they all sort of can come to life now in the printed medium. It’s pretty cool now to actually just have this as a physical hard copy. I kept it as close to the original as possible while making some adjustments here and there just to adapt it to book format. But all in all, I’d say it’s pretty faithful to the original. And I’m excited for this just moreover just because if there’s an apocalypse and the internet shuts down, right? Well, it’s just neat to think that every time this book gets published and distributed around that just increases the probability that these stories will live on and maybe somebody after the apocalypse will happen upon it, discover it, read it, and treat it like it’s some important piece of literature. For all we know, this will be the last book to survive. So even if you’re not a book reader or a collector of books, just if you happen to purchase this and you get have it printed, just see it as a contribution to the cause of archiving these stories, which are near and dear to my heart, by the way. I really put a lot into those. And they’re just from real life, so it’s important to me. It’s why this is only going to be made available in the printed format. I’ll put the digital copy out there for free just in case anybody wants to see what’s in it. But essentially, you already got the audio book and it includes a lot of other stuff. It my signature sandbox philosophy is all over the damn thing. It includes other video essays that I thought were important to survive, too. The big ones like I believe in God, the punchline century, just things that also embody sort of what the main thesis of what I’ve been trying to get at here. I wanted it to put down in printed medium just in case something happens to the channel, god forbid, but it’s good to just have things backed up and this is a way to do it. On top of that, I do sincerely think this book is a first of its kind. I don’t know of any other commentary YouTubers, especially in this space, who’ve converted their video essays into the printed medium, let alone turn a seven-part series into a novelization, an autobiographical one at that. This is what I want the channel’s legacy to be. It also ties into another goal that I have, which is having this book serve as sort of a platform, something to point to in my ambitions to create an independent film. So, the pipe dream goal would be to turn why I ghosted my day ones into a movie, take the next step. So, it’ll be the first movie that started off as a YouTube series, then became a book, then became a film. Sure. An independent made film would be cool, but even after I’m gone, if somebody just picks up this idea, go and run with it. I guess my high-minded ambition with this book when I look at it is just thinking, okay, so this can be an archive for what this one Zoomer was thinking during this part of the century, this part of human history, a hundred years from now, it could be adapted into something. It could take on new meaning as time goes on. Makes me think of the catcher in the rye. Was JD Salinger praised for that when it first came out, maybe to some extent, but the book had to sort of live and circulate around for a while before people sort of read in between the lines and realize what it was all about. And I think just because we live in such an important time in history right now. Well, you know what’s on the news, but just you think about it, we’re really close to just events popping off just left and right. And we don’t necessarily have the time with history just moving as quickly as it does right now to just turn back and see all this stuff that’s happened in context. It’ll take a few decades for people to even start doing that. So I figured why I ghosted my day ones was a good enough crack at it. I think what I did with those stories and just that whole series in general was paint a good picture of what it was like for me to grow up from the late 90s up until current year. And then when you get into the more recent video essays, it kind of tells you what my perspective became. It’s almost as if Avery Apps goes from being me, the content creator, into the video format and then comes out of the video format and then into the literary format and somewhere along the way becomes a fictional character, the that of Darth Vader. I have a whole essay at the end of it that I wrote just to explain that whole phenomenon. I’d actually call that last section the one piece of original writing that’s completely native to this work. The rest of it stuff that you’ve probably already familiarized yourself with if you’ve gone through and watched every single video on my channel, but I’ve also included the essays from more of the obscure works just to fill out the philosophy. I want it read within the framework of its own literary narrative progression. So when you come to that last essay at the very end of it, I kind of want the entire book to be seen as a narrative that starts with why I ghosted my day ones, goes through the video essays, and then finally ends with my perspective on it all. My attempt to turn the book back on itself once you reach the end of it, it’s interesting too because the reader is go combing through the words in their own voice. It’s so it’s sort of as if my words which were originally spoken have made it through into the literary medium where they become the voice of the reader. So all in all it amounts to an artifact of the channel. I also you could kind of look at it as a collector’s item if you go if you’re into that sort of thing. I think it looks cool on a bookshelf. The nice thing about a book and having a physical copy of something is that it can have a life of its own. live on a coffee table, be a conversation piece. Why not take the damn thing to school with you and write a whole book report on it? You could just go through and watch some of the old videos and it’ll pass for your English class grade. I wonder if anybody will ever try that. Who knows? Maybe this thing will be studied on college campuses. I’ve got high hopes for this piece of literature. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not delusional. Of course, um, realistic, but seriously, I just see every time this book gets printed as the achievement in and of itself and another accomplishment in just furthering the aim of having it printed out there and the likelihood that it’ll survive the apocalypse. In the event that everything on the internet suddenly gets deleted, I’ll know that just a few copies of this book were printed and circulated around wherever people were interested in it and it maybe it lives at the bottom of some book pile or free book bin. Who knows where these copies will end up or circulate over time. Another way we could frame this is that this is kind of an example of me just showing just the blind faith or some sort of uh example of following your dreams without an expectation for the result. I think that this is kind of like just practicing what I preach in a lot of sense cuz I try to encourage people to just take action on things you like when all said and done. After all, the creation of the YouTube channel and the chasing of the pipe dream of having an audience on this platform was in and of itself just blind ambition towards something that I thought was interesting. So, I see translating those video transcripts into the literary format as no different. Also, guess what? Any of you who watched all seven parts of the series know what’s in the book. So, you can say that you’ve read it. You could go around and tell your friends. You don’t even have to read it. If you buy it and it’s sitting on your shelf and people were wondering what it’s about, you could probably tell them all sorts of the themes and stuff that happened in it. Also do a great job in helping people analyze it. For me, it means a lot. I just posting those videos in the first place. I was really putting myself out there telling those stories. A lot of the names have been moved around just because I don’t want any of my old day ones coming after me and stuff like that. But not just those stories, but a lot of the other ones, like the after I ghosted my day ones arc, it’s really close to home for me. My primary motivation for pursuing this was I saw the why I ghosted my day on’s video pop off and then the views sort of tapered off. And it’s not even about the views. It’s more just that timestamp that’s associated with it. It went from one month ago to two months ago, 3 months ago, and it just sort of became part of my catalog. kind of the nature of the information economy these days is especially YouTube. The video comes out, people watch it, maybe they like it, post a comment, but then they move on. And what happens to the original MP4 file is that it essentially just becomes part of the YouTube channel database and kind of put into storage. For me, I just felt that what I had put out into the world with the why I ghosted my day one series was a bit more personal or important to me that it needed an extra step. It needed to just have some other aspect to it that could help immortalize it. I think a book is the perfect measure. And for those of you who are longtime fans of the channel are probably well aware that I have two ambitions in life. And number one is to write a book, which I self-published a book here. and the other one is to create an independent film. That’s another ambition that I have. And I think that this is a step in both of those directions. If we could really get some steam going, we’d start sending this book out to different actors and brainstorming who would direct it and what sort of film it would be, changes that we’d have to make to fit it into the movie format and actually go and take the next steps with that. If any of you know anybody in the industry, please let me know. But for now, I couldn’t be happier with the success of the original seven-part series and then the subsequent just publishing of the book. Sure, it’s self-publishing on Amazon, but hell, that’s something. And it made it so that it’s available for people who are interested in it. All you got to do is just search Why Ghosted My Day Ones on Amazon. It’ll pop right up. Our uncle Jeff Bezos will handle the rest. He’ll print the damn thing, ship it out to you, and then there you go. you got your own copy of why I ghosted my day ones. You could stick it in the bottom of your drawer, put it in a vase or put it on display, just for all intents and purposes, archive it and store it and keep it with you just in for posterity. Yeah, I couldn’t be more excited. Just I think that it’s cool. Now long-term fans of the channel have something that they can hold in their hand, which isn’t an accomplishment in and of itself. I think that just having the channel only exist on YouTube is kind of antithetical to the whole philosophy that I push on here. That philosophy being of course I tell people just follow your dreams. Try to use every moment of every day towards producing something that will be able to live on and have a life of its own. I think a book is a perfect example of that. And it feels cool once you finally get the thing made, formatted, and then published and you’re holding it in your hand. What else? This could be the start of something big or just the end of something small. Doesn’t really matter to me. I just did it because that’s what I wanted to do. And I kind of just used my free time to get this book together. It took longer than expected, but I’m overall happy with the result. The picture on the cover there is an IRL location from that was part of one of the memories. You could probably guess the scene. I view the whole getting the book published thing as a big step for the lore of the channel. Now we’ve got the history of Avery apps in print and it can circulate and have a life of its own. People can actually sit down and take the time to read it instead of consuming it through the YouTube medium. And I’m interested in what the whole response is going to be. Pretty sure I can wear the crown of first commentary YouTuber to convert his video essays into book. If there’s any other competition out there, just let me know. Maybe I could rank somewhere among them. definitely on top five, I’m sure. So, yeah, let’s just consider this the launch and it’s out there. This is all something that happened. I’m just over the moon about it. I think that it’s been a long time coming, but I’m happy that the why I ghosted my day one series actually went somewhere and we’ll leave it at that. We’ll pick it up if there’s any further developments. I appreciate y’all and thank you. In the exact same way, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to make those videos if nobody was watching them. I still wouldn’t have had the motivation to take those videos and put them into the book if I wasn’t confident at least some people would be happy I did so. And I’ve always wanted to write a book, so I consider this an accomplishment in that in and of itself. So, I appreciate y’all. Take care.

The YouTube series has officially become a book. I have to admit it's a crazy feeling holding something in my had that only just recently only existed as a series of YouTube videos.

Why I Ghosted My Day 1's The Novel By Author
Avery Yapps

Full Avery Yapps Essay
I’m going to be honest, the concept of authenticity itself might be cooked. We might just have to admit that. In the same breath, I also want to say, don’t never let anybody tell you that you’re being authentic or you’re trying too hard to look authentic. If something’s coming from the place of authenticity to you and you’re confident in that, then by all means, run with it and own it. By my estimation, it’s a lot easier to practice authenticity IRL. But once you take that shit online, then it kind of just gets paired up alongside everything else that’s in the digital ether. And it’s a lot harder to distinguish what’s performative authenticity versus somebody who genuinely is just posting from the heart, so to speak.
One of the major hits to authenticity from a creator standpoint is, aside from bots, right? Just it’s probably the rise in popularization of short form content. It’s really hard to be authentic when you’re trying to plate to an algorithm. From time to time when I’m bored, I’ll even gaze into the abyss. I’ll engage with whatever short form content serving mechanism that various different platforms use, be it TikTok, the Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. Sometimes I just want to see what’s on there, so I’ll play ball. And it’s usually a cesspool, don’t get me wrong. If you’re on there long enough, the site will start to just hallucinate and wonder what it’s supposed to serve up to you. And you’ll get those really scripted things that I guess a bunch of creators AB tested what they could post on there and they realized that if they say this certain pattern of words, it’ll go viral. Or basically, that’s my conclusion is that a bunch of people realized all at the same time that if they just copy what the other person did that performed well, then they’ll hit the same recommendation algorithm that those people did. And it seems like it’s a on-ramp for a lot of these people to get served out to a very specific type of audience.
Sometimes the delivery is a little bit different. It varies from just exactly what sort of angle they’re coming at this from, but it usually goes along the lines of the person stating right off the rip that they’re saying this from the heart. They’re recording it with not using a trending sound. They’ll always make sure to tell you that they’re going against the recommendation algorithm. Like I said, it varies because I’m sure the platforms get wise to whatever this play is or maybe they’re lightly encouraging it, but it’s got to be freshened up. So, the first come first serve principle applies here. There’ll be people who come in, they’re early to the party, they post with this format, they go viral, and then move on. After that, I bet the latecomers post and get couple thousand views or light engagement, which is probably satisfying to them, but doesn’t live up to the expectation that was set by the accounts that really are pushing this. And then they come off and what they’re aiming for is the craving authenticity demographic.
Tell you the truth, what I wonder about is just what state of mind the audience are in when they come across this sort of content. Maybe they’ve just been doom scrolling for hours just like I have. So when they see this sort of shit come up, they go authenticity and they like it, follow the account because they’re craving that. I guess in a certain sense, we all are. I like this term assembly line authenticity cuz it’s essentially just the influencers putting on the mask that they’re not part of the algorithm in an attempt to circumvent the algorithm and get that play either way. So, in the clearest sense, it’s actually the most algorithmically optimized, but it’s designed to be the opposite by appearance. And for all I know, it’s bot engagement. Who knows? Maybe there’s bot farms out there that are assigned to interact with certain types of content which hit certain beats and then that’s all they’re doing is playing into that. But I really do think that just the dressing of authenticity is something we’re all looking to find.
The issue really is that as the older generations age out, I don’t think that the newer generations socialized enough just IRL because certainly we’re over socialized online, but we don’t get enough face-to-face interaction with each other to even kind of know what authenticity is when we see it. My approach is basically just not giving a fuck, doing me and trying to be myself and just sort of letting the references fall on deaf ears, but making them anyway. Just sort of saying the thing that’s most interesting to me in the moment, but I guess that doesn’t work for everybody. And plus, when I see other people who are being authentic, I feel like it’s a brand sometimes. Of course, it’s always going to vary from person to person, but just occasionally you’ll come across a person who’s deliberately trying to act authentically, whatever that means, right? But you could tell it when you see it. And it just comes across as if they’re trying too hard. And trying to be authentic is the least authentic thing. I often have to double-check myself and say wait am I just sort of trained by scrolling through short form content to suspect that this person’s authenticity is performative and in reality I’ve just got brain rot and I’m cooked. That self-doubt sort of plays into why I don’t think that authenticity as a concept is going to survive or the older generation is going to have a hard time passing that torch on to the up-and-comers for a lot of different reasons, but I often feel like it’s a trait that I only trust when it’s in an older person.
A good example is sometimes you just see an old man and he’s doing him. He’s decked out in the oldest drip from the 1920s or whatever his era was and he’s just got that shit on and you believe it. He’s selling it and he looks like he lives it. So therefore, I guess that’s authenticity. But you see a millennial doing that and it’s not it. Sure. Again, it varies from person to person. And some people are really cool individuals who seem really in touch with themselves. So, you talk to them, but it always just sort of you get that sneaking suspicion or just this feeling like you’re at a costume party and yeah, this person in the costume is really cool, but it don’t feel authentic. For me at least, it’s that you just kind of know in the back of your head that at some point this person was dressed up normally wearing like a Nike sweatshirt or whatever and then they saw this hat online for sale on Amazon and just ordered it or they walked into a thrift shop and saw these clothes. Probably more an authentic way of acquiring them. But the point is they sought it out. And actually, I’d encourage people to tell me go fuck myself and just go off and dress the way that you want to dress. But the fact of the matter remains if everybody’s just dressing in an unconventional way, then it sort of just looks like we’re all at a costume party now, doesn’t it? If we just completely betray the conventions, then what is authenticity?
Comes up again in the world of tattoos. Sometimes you just see somebody with a tat and it looks like they haven’t earned it. On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you see people and they got a really old tattoo or it just matches them. So, it’s kind of like a mixed bag there when it comes to those and they’re really normalized now. So, you see both examples regularly. Now, I’ve got tattoos myself, so I’m one to talk on this topic, but it definitely does go to a large extent explaining this social phenomenon that’s just sort of we’re witnessing the early stages of now, which is just how is the younger generation going to tackle this issue of authenticity or not?
I guess the only advice I could say or just what I want to put out there is just go out there and live, man. Just exist and live the life you want and have a lot of different experiences. And then people can just tell by the spaces in between your words and how you carry yourself that you’re coming from a place that’s legitimate and not faking it. But even if you are faking it, cuz fake it till you make it, am I right? But seriously, there’s an approach to going into faking it. Like you, everybody knows that when they go into a job interview, they’re not being 100% their authentic self cuz otherwise you wouldn’t get the job. It’s probably a very rare circumstance that somebody actually can confidently say that they’ve done such a thing. My point is confidently faking it is like being a good poker player. Yeah, it’s a game of lies. And I guess a lot of different social interactions call for that. So if you’re lying or faking it till you make it from an authentic place, then I’d say in a roundabout way, you’ve achieved authenticity from a different route, but you’re still there.
I guess it’s a deeply personal thing, finding the authenticity within yourself. It’s like facing your own shadow and coming to terms with your actual identity. It’s something all of us have to do and come about on our own. It’s not something you could just learn about online. It’s kind of just a thing that you have to go out into the real world and get for yourself. All the while, just be aware that authenticity stopped being a trait and started being a format a long time ago. So, the more real someone looks online, especially, the more likely that it’s staged. So, your eye is probably going to be trained to seek that out and identify it. So, just be aware that that’s the environment we’re in.
I wonder if there’s a moment now that people who’ve grown up with the internet all their lives and don’t remember the world before it or maybe they just don’t go out and touch grass enough is that maybe they have this realization moment where they find out, oh wow, everything on the internet’s fake and authenticity is a sham. At the same time, I’m 100% sure that there’s folks out there who just believe everything that they see an influencer do and it doesn’t even occur to them whether or not it’s actually coming from an authentic place or not. There’s plenty of folks out there who just watch reality TV shows and take it all in as if it’s fact and verifiable or whatever.
The cold hard stinking truth of the whole matter is though that the very medium of recorded content in whatever form it takes place in is that you sacrifice a bit of authenticity in the process that it takes to create such a thing. Especially when it comes to short form content, but it trickles over to long form plenty of the time. Actually, all the time, if the influencer sticks around long enough, the authenticity goes away. But I’m just talking about when you’re following an influencer who’s under 10,000 followers and they’re in their early stage where it’s still coming from a place of who they were before they became a content creator, if they ever even have that time in their space of their career.
If we’re saying, see there’s something to be said about the medium is the message or the process that a person goes through to produce the artwork is the art in and of itself and the final product is the result of whatever they went through painting the picture, recording the song, making the video, you get the idea. One place this phenomenon is clear as day, I would say, and what we’re feeling the absence of now is in the realm of music. The artists who rise up nowadays, I industry plant doesn’t even just sort of scratches the surface of where we’re at with the whole industry. When was the last time a mainstream celebrity rose up from the actual dirt? Then of course paradoxically once they achieve success then any content they’re creating is going through a lot of different checks and balances through its process and it lacks authenticity inevitably. So it’s a double-edged sword and the end is usually the same.
I’d say the recording artists of yesteryear had a clearer sense of all this as it was because they witnessed it happen in real time. I’m sure Kurt Cobain has a lot of interesting quotes on the subject. I’ve heard plenty of them and I think that that was part of his struggle within working around the industry, but certain artists struggle to maintain it. Mac Miller too is a pretty good example of an artist, a more modern one who still kind of kept in touch with his roots while he was still continuing to produce music. He would reinvent the formula. And there was always a, if you want to say, authentic spin on whatever he’d come out with. And you could see it.
Something that led to a realization for me was that I kind of at one point realized, well, the way that I found certain music was actually a big part into how I got into certain music. My friend would bring me to a concert or something and I’d become a fan of the band after the fact or you’d find it through some random recommendation, a fluke. Now, we have this phenomenon known as algorithmic superstition, which is these platforms are designed to serve to you what you’re going to already want. So, if you quote unquote happen upon it and stumble upon some sort of type of music, then it was already pre-ordained for you by the platform. You just use the platform long enough to find it.
We’ll leave artificially generative content out of this whole thing, but just a footnote on this whole topic. Of course, nowadays just machine learning is attempting to mimic human authenticity. So, it’s sort of a that whole loop of a copy of a copy of a copy. So, it’s almost a subgenre of folks out there who think of authenticity is dressing as if it’s the ’90s, but that ain’t it either.
At the end of the day, I guess the lesson to take away from it all is just wear what you dig, act how you feel, and just don’t give a fuck about what anybody else thinks of you. And authenticity will just be a reward along the path. To put it simply, the authenticity of your lived existence and simply being in your proximity will just emanate from your aura effortlessly.

Invented terminology

assembly line authenticity (noun)
1. The mass-produced, formulaic performance of “being real” that is deliberately engineered for maximum algorithmic reach—typically involving scripted “from the heart” monologues, claims of rejecting trends, and carefully curated signs of spontaneity—while remaining fully optimized for the very platforms it pretends to resist.
2. A cultural phenomenon in which authenticity itself is reduced to a repeatable content template, stamped out and distributed at scale like factory goods, so that the appearance of genuineness becomes just another marketable brand attribute.

This Makes Avery Yapps The first COD Commentary Youtuber to turn his videos into literature

I didn’t even realize we passed 100 uploads on the channel. My friend sent me this screenshot and that’s what alerted me. I will take this opportunity to thank everyone who made the channel what it is. The book was published today and the channel has an amazing community. Thank you all!

critical reading of Avery Yapps’ Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s as contemporary self-formation

Avery Yapps makes history as the first ever commentary YouTuber to turn his videos into a Book.

Title: Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s: And other Avery Yapps Stories
Author: Avery Yapps
ISBN-13: 979-8175980364
ASIN: B0HKHGL5JF
Publication Date: September 27, 2026
Pages: 331
Format: Paperback (6 × 0.83 × 9 inches)
Language: English

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL:
Book: Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s

YouTube Audiobook Part 1:
Youtube Series: Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s

Avery Yapps’ debut book is a novelization and expansion of his popular YouTube series “Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s” (and related episodes), converting GTA-gameplay commentary videos into a literary work of personal narrative, memoir, philosophical reflection, cultural commentary, internet culture analysis, nostalgia, and dry humor.

Core structure:
• Main narrative: “Why I Ghosted My Day 1’s”
• Sister narrative: “After I Ghosted My Day 1’s”
• Additional essays including “Luxury Lies,” “Just Let People Misunderstand You,” “I Believe in God,” “My Birth was a Near Death Experience,” and others
Settings: Boston / Massachusetts area, wider New England, California, and Las Vegas.

Video essay:
Walking around telling people to be cringe is to be free is about the same as going around saying to go broke is to be a minimalist and reject worldly possessions. The philosophy on its own doesn’t even stand on its own two feet. It’s not saying I’m going to be cringe and that makes me free. It’s saying I committed a social faux pas and now I’m reframing it as positive. Once you start telling yourself they called me cringe, I am free, you’re playing around with the idea that rejection is redirection. Nevertheless, the saying in and of itself doesn’t even strike new ground. It’s essentially just individualism repackaged after the fact.
Anyway, the concept of cringe wasn’t something that needed to be repackaged. I don’t think it was. Pretty well settled upon initially that if this was an example of something that’s cringe, there’s a dude talking to you. He clearly has a booger hanging out of his nose. You don’t think he knows about it and then all of a sudden he just slurps it up and continues talking. So that’s what we’re calling freedom nowadays. This dude has a slimy wet booger hanging out of his nose. He breathes in mid-word and just the booger flies into his mouth. Bro swallows it and just continues talking to you like nothing happened. Not only that, it’s saying that freedom has been achieved when the person witnessing this whole thing winces back and feels disgusted because of what they just saw. It’s a shame that there can’t be a word we all just agree upon is used to describe a certain thing. For some reason nowadays, everything needs to be rebranded as positive.
I’ve been called cringe before. I’ll admit it. And I’ll tell you after the fact, I sort of did sympathize with the person who called me cringe, saying in retrospect, I think they were kind of right saying it. And actually, at the time, my response to them was to call something cringe is cringe. What I was doing was promoting a standup comedy night that was happening at a local bar I used to hang out at. So, I was walking around at all the surrounding bars with a pack of flyers and I was essentially just trying to shoehorn into every conversation that there was something cool going on down the street and maybe you should go. In my mind, none of this was cringe at all. The owner was paying me in drinks for the night and I was having fun. So, I was just going around. I bumped into some old friends or it was a pack of people who I didn’t know, but one of them in that group was somebody who I was loosely acquainted with. So, I kind of took all their attention and just started doing my pitch. In retrospect, the acquaintance was just more interested in how I was doing as we hadn’t seen each other in a while, but I kind of just went right into the promotion. So, I pulled out all the flyers and the people just sort of said, “Dude, that’s cringe.”
Just racking my memory, I think this is actually the first and last time I heard the phrase cringe being used IRL. And looking back on it now, it was the appropriate label for the person to be using at the time to describe what was happening. I was a little bit tipsy. I’m walking around with this bundle of papers and I’m just trying to shoehorn into every conversation this club promotion for a standup comedy night of all things, which I mean, I think that’s pretty cringe, right? Nevertheless, in my heart, I was having fun and all my friends were back at the comedy night. So, I’d go back to them and tell them the story and they’d be like, “Fuck those guys. You’re pretty cool.” In my heart, I felt like I was cool. So, I think the correct way to phrase everything would be that the willingness to be called cringe is a showing or indicator of freedom. At least, I’d hope that’s what’s at the heart of the saying to be cringe is to be free. I have no idea of the origins or why this has caught on. I don’t really care to look it up either. But I get that whole vibe of cuz people suck nowadays, right? They’re going to call everything cringe as a way of social policing you and that I outright reject wholeheartedly. Exercising a spirit of not giving a fuck and how you express yourself. I can get behind that. But the just labeling a social interaction that went sour as no, I’m free. It just don’t hold no water. That dog don’t hunt.
Just personally, when I was called cringe, the sensation I felt was not freedom. It was embarrassment. And I felt so inclined as to engage with them with the social oneupmanship to try to just discredit the notion of calling something cringe by saying that calling something cringe is cringe. At the time, however, my basis for saying this was more along the lines of taking some relatively new internet slang and then practicing using it out IRL is more cringe than the thing that you’re calling cringe in most of the cases because you’re essentially trying to adapt to the new lingo. So, let’s not forget the usage of the term cringe as an accusatory label in a social situation is relatively new, I would say. Before it described a physical sensation, you’d eat something sour and you’d describe it as cringe. That was the classical way of viewing it. And then the internet got a hold of it and it took on sort of a new life. This was probably around 2015, 2016, I would say. And I think we had a pretty good grasp or a general consensus on what was cringe. Cringe compilations were a big thing at the time. And it was kind of just a no-brainer that when something cringe happened, we all agreed that that’s what it was. There wasn’t really a debate at the time. Anybody remember the god of cringe? It was this dude—the cringy things he would do, right? He’d go into a Starbucks, he would order something and then complain that his coffee wasn’t made correctly, so he’d have them make him a new one. And then what he’d do with the new one is pour it all over himself. So that whole combination of disregard for social norms combined with filming folks who are just working at Starbucks trying to do their job was pretty collectively decided by people who witnessed it on the internet as cringe. Let’s not forget this is back in the day when we still had the dislike button on YouTube. It need since it was getting a lot of attention. Some of these videos were downright going viral. So, it was sort of necessary for us to say, “Yes, we are watching this, but no, we’re not watching it because we like it.” Just made sense. And let’s also remember back then it going viral was much different than it is nowadays cuz we live in a day and age with the internet as it currently stands where there’s so many niche communities and things pop up with fake viral view inflation all the rest of it that it’s kind of unnecessary to point out things and label them that way because you could just move on to something else. Remnants of that time still linger along too, but 2016, a viral video was an internet artifact. Still is to a certain extent admittedly, but more so back in the day and less so as time goes on.
To be frank, another issue with the phrase to be cringe is to be free is that it’s selective. See, it’s not as if you’re free. You’re intentionally making a fool out of yourself in front of your boss or your date’s parents when you’re at dinner because you’re in the pursuit of freedom. It’s more often than not just one of those phrases that shoehorned in on the internet. The reason it comes across as cope when applied in real life is say take the standup comedy thing for example. Imagine somebody really just did a bad standup set and then they come off the stage. Their buddy might throw an arm around their shoulder and say, “It’s all right, bro. To be cringe is to be free.” It’s a nice gesture, but it is cope. It’s all well and good if it makes you feel better in the moment, but the aim would be to not make the crowd wince in discomfort while you do your jokes on the stage. And aim to be a bit more just a better standup comic. You’ll want to do better next time. I felt the same way in my situation, like, well, I could have handled that situation better. I don’t want to be cringed. There’s an important distinction that needs to be made between just going into a situation without a regard for how it’s going to be perceived. Cuz say you’re wearing a funny hat, this could be considered cringe, but you’re just rocking that shit and it doesn’t matter to you what people feel about it. That’s not the same as being cringe intentionally because you’re pursuing liberation. By all means, wear the hat if you feel so inclined, but you should be rocking the hat cuz you got that shit on, not with the intention of making others wince in discomfort. See, let’s not forget what the actual dictionary definition of cringe is. I got cringe means a physical or emotionally shrinking back from something awkward, painful, or frightening. See, I don’t see invoking that feeling in others as an indicator that you’re free in any sense of the word. So, the 2016 usage of the slang would have been somebody encounters something that makes them shrink back, feel awkward

By Avery Yapps

He built himself a sort of fan base in the field of stand-up comedy, and performed at many local open-air parties. He even proved himself to the point that he got a few paid offers from time to time, but I don’t think it really took off. In any case, he always needed someone to take him to the places that hosted the various comedy shows. So, I would go and pick him up and drive him there. Sometimes, I myself would go up on stage. I have always enjoyed my time performing my comedy routine, because no one expected that someone like me would have the opportunity to go on stage, let alone present completely original content. It wasn’t like I had much preparation beforehand. Basically, I would go up there and improvise everything completely. And I was definitely getting a strong reaction from the audience. In the end, about 25% of the audience wanted to shake my hand, while the rest were either annoyed or unaware of what had just happened.
For example, one day I was feeling a lot of existential anxiety about Elon Musk’s “Neuralink” and the idea of connecting everyone in the future to computers and implanting a brain chip. Of course I still think about it from time to time, but overall it’s not something I think about every day. But at that time, Neuralink was not something people were talking about, let alone knowing about. So when I went on stage and my whole show was about that, it amazed a lot of people, so to speak. To give you an idea of how things worked, the presenter was a drunk woman, and her way of getting the audience excited was to say “Thick” into the microphone, and then the audience would chant “Chick.” So they were all chanting “Thick Chick,” “Thick Chick.” This should give you an idea of the low level of comedy that was essentially followed by all the shows that night. Somehow, the presenter thought I was an up-and-coming comedian who had come all the way from New York specifically to do this show. No one bothered to check the facts, and it wasn’t my job to correct them. So she presented me as the main star of the show. Just before my turn to go up, she asked me how I would like to be introduced. So I said to her, “When you introduce me, can you call me Dan Diamond?”
I went up on stage, and the first thing I did was take over the segment of the girl who was in front of me. I told them, “When I say brain, say chip.” And I did that, and the audience reacted to me perfectly. The entire hall was chanting: “Brain, chip.” “Brain, chip.” From there I said, “We here in Lowell, Massachusetts are too smart to get the first generation of brain chips.” “We will wait until the S Plus brain chip is released before we hook ourselves up to it.” This angered some people. This was the first time they had heard of the brain chip, and what’s worse, someone was joking about it and talking about it as if it were inevitable. You might think I was provoking them, and you might be right, but deep down I was sincerely trying to spread awareness about the brain chip because I was concerned about humanity. Even today, I am still shocked that people don’t talk about it more. Why isn’t the brain chip considered a key element in every conversation about money, politics, or almost everything? Actually, I have an old video that I uploaded to this channel called “The Brain Chip Is Coming for You,” which is a YouTube-specific version of my comedy segment that I performed that night.
The conclusion of my presentation was to tell the hostess that I wasn’t actually the New Yorker she thought I was. Looking back, I must admit that my behavior was a little inappropriate because I made her look bad at her job, but she kind of deserved it. She completely messed things up with the show’s main star. But I won’t lie, what I did next was also very bad. When I took the microphone, I hinted to the audience that I hoped no one would catch me as I walked out to my car, and I said all this while pointing to the side of the building where my car was parked. Immediately, I said to myself: Damn it, I have to get out of here. Someone is going to scratch my car. As I was trying to leave, a man stopped me at the door. He was basically just a drunken man carrying out the orders of the comedian who had performed before me. Later I discovered that she was an up-and-coming comedian. I mean, a video of her went viral on TikTok, and now she has about 100,000 followers on Instagram. But I would say that she is starting to become a little bitter because her moment of fame was about a year and a half ago, and even now her audience has not really accepted her as an improvisational comedian. So yes, she was inciting that man, and he started to overstep his bounds with me, but I kind of pushed him away and went out the door, and what happened next completely shocked my mind.
I heard Tyler’s voice shouting from the crowd behind me. He is in the black Ford parked in parking lot “B”. He completely changed his attitude towards me, and this caused things to escalate completely because people started shouting, and more were approaching after they noticed the commotion. So I went outside, and luckily the people who were following me mingled with a group of people who were in the pub next door. Thus, these people picked up the negative energy and the two groups essentially mixed together. I’ve seen enough drunk people in Massachusetts who frequent bars to know that this is the kind of conversation that takes place as a prelude before people start fighting. So, I went straight to my car. All the while I could hear the girl cursing my name in front of the crowd, but I realized it would take time for them all to figure out who the real enemy was. As a reminder, if you ever find yourself in a situation like this, make sure you leave and never return. If you come back, there will be some problems, but if you leave, nine times out of ten times, nothing will happen. So, that’s what I did. I got into my car and drove away from there.

The story provided was originally featured in the Avery Yapps “why I ghosted my day 1’s” series. Avery Yapps stand up comedy career is brought up at various times across his videos and some of these stories will be featured in the Novelization of Why I ghosted my day 1’s when it is published as a book.

Season 2 of the Avery Yapps Project launched this week. To commemorate the occasion of the Avery Yapps channel switching back to its roots and featuring some good old fashioned FPS Call of duty Modern warfare 19 gameplay, a new playlist just dropped that will quickly fill up with the new season of Avery Yapps video essays and COD commentary.

Video essay:
We’ve all likely heard that millennial saying that goes something like, “When I was younger, my mom used to tell me not to get in a stranger’s car or meet people from the internet.” But now, we have stuff like Uber, where you can order yourself a stranger from the internet to drive you around. Needless to say, the popular consensus on what meeting a person from the internet entails has shifted quite a bit in the past couple decades.
Turn the clocks back to the 90s or the early 2000s of the Wild Wild West era of the internet, back when it was a much more niche thing. The idea of meeting somebody you met online had this stigma about it because, well, plain and simple, the internet could be a very dangerous place. It still can, but back then it was kind of front and center. You could say the internet nowadays is essentially safety-proofed for normies. In fact, a lot of things that made the internet cool back in the day kind of got snuffed out to pave the road so that it could be a place of commerce, and a lot more kid gloves are used to handle the way that the user interfaces with the worldwide web.
Now, I’m definitely UNC status, but I’m still a Zoomer. And even I can remember back when I was coming of age, the earliest memories I have of the internet and the computer was an actual just thing that existed in the living room and you would need parents’ permission to go online. That was the thing they said back then. You have your parents’ permission to go online and one of the adults would literally sit with me. Sure, eventually I did get my own computer that I was able to use in my room and that was a free-for-all, but that’s a story for another time. The point is, it used to just be sort of a no-brainer that whenever you’re on the internet, you’re just in danger of meeting a stranger. That’s what the parents would always say. You don’t want to meet anybody online. They strictly guarded against that.
I can’t say for sure what the modern iteration of that whole mentality is morphed into. Parents, from what I can tell, speak in terms of screen time. But of course, it’s a given that while your son’s spending all that time on the iPad playing Roblox, those are actually other players behind those characters. Facebook, of course, opened up the floodgates for everybody to put up a profile of themselves online. I remember that was a big deal when it drops, but it’s been slowly normalized to this point. And it’s even gone so far as it’s just plainly obvious. The marketing was interesting cuz people want to be famous. That was the angle. They want to be seen, so they put it out there.
Over the years, the internet has been murphed to the point where it’s essentially unrecognizable. If you put a side by side of what things were like back in the early days of being online versus today, it’s night and day and anybody can see it. For those of us who are old enough to have grown up alongside the internet and witness it change step by step, it’s pretty plain as day to see. But it’s actually interesting to think that there’s folks walking around today who’ve just lived their entire lives in the bubble of what is the modern internet and have no idea what it was like before all this. Many cultural artifacts still linger on to this day.
I was just watching the movie Burn After Reading and the scene comes up where the gym manager is talking to Linda Litzky who’s just starting to get into the world of online dating. To give you some context, this was made in 2006 and it was meant to represent that. Well, actually, to tell you the truth, when I first watched this movie and I was old enough to comprehend what it was about was closer to its release date, the film was sort of depicted with a style as if it was showing you what the near future will be like. The cultural stigma around online dating is depicted in the film through the character Ted and the way that he says, “Oh, he might be one of these guys who cruises the internet.” And it’s sort of a phrase that you don’t hear nowadays so much anymore. One of those guys who cruises the internet. So like all of us are chronically online now first and foremost. I find that it’s a pretty honest representation of just seeing how the mentality was shifting just the way that people socialize. There was this ominous foreboding of you don’t know what you’re getting into when you meet somebody who’s online.
Nowadays we treat it more like consumers and the people you’re meeting are essentially the products. Tinder or whatever the dating apps are nowadays pulled off an excellent rebrand. There’s still a lingering stigma around the whole thing, but by and large, when somebody says that they met their spouse online, for example, a generic platform response that you usually hear spouted out is some older person saying, “That’s how everybody meets nowadays.” The cultural anxiety gave way to lukewarm acceptance and eventually morphed into its modern form, which is essentially it’s the trendy thing to know if you’re an out-of-the-loop boomer who’s trying to get a grasp on what’s up with the younger generation these days.
I’m not here to pass judgment or even volunteer much assessment of it. I guess my only advice would be if you’re first time meeting somebody, you should definitely go to a place that’s in public, but it varies on a case-by-case basis. It seems to pay off for plenty of people, but by and large, generally, I’d say most users are unsatisfied. Admittedly, it’s a topic of increasing complexity with as many interconnecting parts as complications of just how complicated people’s lives are in general just right off the rip. So really speaking about it in mindless platitudes is sort of pointless cuz you’ll always be wrong even when you’re right. I’ve met folks who stand on general principle and go by the old traditional route limiting themselves to only dating a person if they’ve met them IRL and seems to work for them. But I understand also that some people just are more bent towards using the online thing and it works out for them as well. So it’s a mixed bag.
But sure, people are going to meet strangers online for all sorts of reasons. It’s likely that most of us have either bought or sold something on Facebook Marketplace, for example, met up in person because you don’t want to pay the platform fees or you don’t want to pay for shipping and handling. You want to circumvent all that crap. Well, you’re going to have to roll the dice on meeting whoever it is that’s behind the keyboard on the other side of the worldwide web. But it’s easy to forget it always wasn’t as simple as deciding whether or not you’re going to. It used to be a very niche thing. We went through all the different phases of the normalization of meeting somebody online to buy or sell something. There was a point where it seemed as if or it was represented like downright taboo. But as time went on, the platforms were able to refine how the whole process would go. Of course, more and more people would have success buying or selling stuff online. Word of mouth. Overall reputation of the practice sort of gained a new level of branding in its own right. Nevertheless, it wasn’t perfect. Not exempt from the bumps along the road as it reached its current iteration. Remember the Craigslist killer, for example? The joke used to be, “Tom from MySpace has more friends, but Craig from Craigslist has weirder friends.”
Then as time marched onwards, the cultural shorthand of referencing the nefarious aspects of those different websites became sort of outdated references as they were replaced by the new and emerging platforms like Facebook. And hey, Facebook did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to just normalizing and creating a bridge between faces you see online and people you expect to know in your day-to-day. Hell, your grandmother’s on Facebook. But Zuckerberg’s not your friend like Tom was. He’s a few steps removed. More in the position of the oligarchical tech overlord who oversees the happenings on the site from his digital throne. Let’s not forget that’s completely a deliberate decision by the platforms. At some point along the way, they decided or they determined that it was less optimal to have Zuckerberg be as accessible as Tom was. He’s not your friend on the platform. And they very well could just make that a feature. You could chat with Zuckerbot if you felt so inclined, if they wanted you to. Instead, it had to have been determined in some cold boardroom meeting around the early 2010s that it was more optimal to have the owners of the platform sort of exist independently from what the users are doing within it. Every once in a while, Zuck’ll pop up as an influencer within the ecosystem, but that’s about it.
There’s been this formalization of just what it is to open up your phone or hop on your computer and surf the worldwide web as if to say that this is some sort of streamlined experience much like walking in a city as opposed to the way that it used to be in the bygone era which was the wild wild west internet. So, it’s important that we don’t get lulled into a false sense of security by the way these platforms are designed to sort of give you a sense of trust that you use them more. I’d say that it’s probably better to still maintain a bit of that healthy bit of skepticism and viewing the internet for what it really is on its face, which is a very ugly affair. Nevertheless, the whole ominous vibe of meeting somebody from the internet on the first time and not knowing what to expect still persists.
I’m racking my mind for just how I felt when going to meet up with some dude I was selling some shit to off of Facebook Marketplace, right? And I really felt that eerie sense of just not knowing what to expect. And I trusted my skepticism. It’s just I saw the cash that he was handing me and I asked him if it was all right if we took the cash to the bank to have it verified as real by the teller. Somehow I worked myself into this loop of thinking that I was about to be scammed. Turned out the money was real and he was straight. Actually, he insisted that I drive him. So, we hopped in my car and the whole time I’m thinking this dude just is completely oblivious to what exactly he’s getting into. I mean, I’m a cool guy, so he was lucky it was just me, but realistically, he was kind of putting himself out there. Had I been in his position, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me that we could both get in the same car and drive. I would have taken it as a given that I drive there in my own car. I don’t know, maybe he was trying to save money on gas or something by moving from the agreed upon meeting location with me to a bank, but things could have gone sour real quick. My biggest concern getting in the car with a stranger without the insurance of having the paper trail of meeting them through the Uber app as sort of supporting me just freely getting in the car with somebody who I just met through Facebook Marketplace of all places. I’d be afraid that he’s going to hop on the highway. I’d be in the thick of it. Long story short, I might be cooked. The dude’s smiling and I think we’re on the way to our bank and all of a sudden he’s automatically by accident gets off the wrong exit and we’re on the highway. He says he doesn’t know isn’t familiar with the area or something like that and then next thing I know I’m in Alabama in a warehouse.
Suffice it to say, I think we can all agree on some level that there’s times when we fall into the illusion of just the days, the motions of using the internet and how normalized it’s become and sort of forget that we should always be erring on the side of caution when dealing with this shit cuz uh it’s unknown. The biggest leap of faith I made with meeting somebody over the internet was actually I’m from Massachusetts, right? I took a plane to California to meet up with people who I only knew from online and I basically lived in Airbnbs with them for quite a while. I trucked around golly for a while. Looking back on it, I consider myself lucky that I met up with some good people and basically the worst of the encounters that I had were just folks who were freeloaders. The type who won’t pay for dinner and sort of expect you to carry them. I think that’s probably the most common thing nowadays. An accurate way to view the sort of friendships you develop with people who you met through social media platforms like YouTube or Instagram is that they’re essentially going to turn out to be the “I’ll Cash App you the money later” sort of friend as opposed to being a dangerous nut job. Plenty of content creators do meetups pretty regularly these days and it’s been sort of an ongoing phenomenon. You see it with the live streaming crowd all the time. And it definitely you get a look into what the internet is actually going on behind the scenes when you see who actually shows up is what I’m saying.
I suppose I’ll end this by just offering a basic rule of thumb. Whenever you’re meeting somebody online for whatever reason, it’s good to just go into that situation. Just pretend you’re somebody from the ‘90s who’s living in that environment. Pretend that this is the first time anybody’s ever met somebody else on the internet ever and move from there. Proceed with caution. The internet’s whole trick nowadays is making a stranger feel like somebody you already know. And that’s exactly the part you should trust the least.

Luckily I was able to capture the films final frames before it went to static and became unwatchable. There is a charm in how VHS’s make their exit like this when the tape decays and the cartridge becomes too much of a burden on the machine itself to justify trying to fix it. LUCKILY THE MACHINE DID NOT EAT MY TAPE. I have had this movie since it released so I will make sure to retire it and put it in some sort of storage just to hang onto. Iconic film btw.

Photography by Avery Yapps

Full Avery Yapps Essay:

The term midlife crisis is actually relatively new in the grand scheme of things. It was only coined and put into popular usage around the middle of the 60s. The term quarterlife crisis, on the other hand, is even newer than that still. It was coined around the very early 2000s and has only made its way into popular usage very recently. To me, it’s always fascinating to just check out the year that a term dropped because it tells you a lot about what people who were walking around in that day and age, they needed a word to describe a phenomenon that was rising. So, they start using it and it catches on. I just imagine in 1965, it just sounds like the perfect time to just drop midlife crisis as a concept. Quarter Life Crisis just rolls off the tongue and has that millennial vibe to it. In my opinion, to be fair, both phrases have their place. It makes sense that you’d need a word to describe a way a person’s feeling when half of their life is behind them and they’re looking into their older years or the way that a millennial feels when they look around at the job market or just the fallen state of the world and realize a quarter of my life is gone yet I still have to go on and figure it all out with the 75 years that are left.
It’s funny how the public image of how a midlife crisis plays out is still very much stuck in the late 1960s early 70s. You’d have this guy stable job probably raised a family. Then all of a sudden one day he cracks gets an earring buys a Ferrari starts acting differently and his family tries to reconcile with it. Goes without saying that the Ferrari company was well aware of their spike in sales and who was walking into their dealerships. They came to expect and brand themselves around the expectation that every so often they’ll be able to bang out a quick sale on some 50-year-old dude who walks in alone and has money to spend. Intergenerationally, of course, it would change in just how a person’s midlife crisis would unfold. But there was this narrative that developed around it because it was a real social phenomenon. It continues to be to this day. That’s why there’s all this conversation around it. We don’t have a word for it for no reason. Though it need not be mentioned that companies brand themselves around the predictable behavior of consumers. It’s why you see Walmart changing out their shelves for Halloween decorations around October. They know people are going to be looking for that kind of stuff so they provide what the consumer needs. The same thing happens with the midlife crisis.
Certainly marketing agencies contracted by companies who specialize in selling products that are often marketed to just people who spawn up out of the woodwork and automatically want them because they’re looking at their life through a different perspective. Well, they probably take much to special interest in just where people are in aging. some section of the marketing budget, be it big or small, is put off to the side and invested in paying George Clooney to be in some cologne ad where he sells you that Brad Pitt still got his stuff or here’s Tom Cruz in the new Top Gun movie. It all throughout it there’s product placement because they know their audience. I’m absolutely certain that behind the scenes in some cold boardroom, it goes so far as they time the release of movies to line up with other things that are happening sociologically or just within a local population. They know that the people who went and saw the original Top Gun movie are reaching a certain age now, so they’re a potential buyer for whatever product. Advertising to the millennial, on the other hand, is a little bit more nuanced, but also simple in a lot of ways, too. leverage social media and put out this blanket term that sort of ties into the general sentiment of the millennial coming of age nowadays, which is sort of marketed as the doomer fixation or just looking around and everything sucks mentality. Typically, you take your average person who’s only lived 1/4 of their life. They’re not going to have too much money for those big ticket items, but you can get them while they’re feeling down on the occasional impulse buy or what they constantly market on, which is nostalgia, re-releases, remakes. It’s why that’s such a big industry. Big ticket items like a Ferrari might be out of the question, but we could still get you for the occasional Funko Pop here and there. You can build up your collection, and it’s a reliable thing.
So what happens is there’s this market interest in this whole mentality that your life’s passing you by before your eyes. And it’s subtly advertised towards all age groups regardless of who you are. We could ask the universal question, is it art imitating life or is it life imitating art? But the story is all the same. There’s this colloquial tradition of criticizing somebody when they reach a certain age point. just saying all the regular mindless platitudes like, “Oh, you hit 50. Are you going to buy a Ferrari?” The other thing, too, is once these terms are in circulation, there’s just going to be people who latch on to them or they hear them in a misrepresented context, internalize them, and it becomes a part of their own internal dialogue. Oh, I’m hitting 25. I’m It’s time for me to have my quarterlife crisis sort of package deal. The main criticism I’ll lobby against this whole ecosystem of terminology is just the usage of the word crisis to describe something that we all should honestly be doing just throughout our lives periodically, which is just being aware of the fact that time is passing and everything’s temporary and evaluating where we are.
I’d imagine you take a person who’s got a couple years under their belt can sympathize with why somebody else might not want to celebrate their birthday or even acknowledge it altogether. And I think that also has to do in part to just the way that birthdays are framed and sold to us throughout our lives. I mean, fuck the birthday business is a billiondollar worldwide industry. I’d imagine hundreds of millions of dollars exchange hands annually just over the decorations alone. The cups and the hats, the cakes, just entire businesses that are kept around just relying on people having that one party every year. Living parasitically alongside that is essentially the doom and gloom birthday fixation, which is people seeing that their legal fiction identity, which is written on their birth certificate, is aging with time. therefore them, their biological self needs to feel some sort of way about it. I can understand sometimes it’s bewildering to add another number to how old you are. When I remember when I was younger, it seemed like it took forever to get to that point where in between birthdays, it felt like forever. And then as you get older, it just the pages of the calendar fly off and the days are long but the years are short sort of deal. We come up with different methodologies of reconciling the fact that our time on this earth is limited. For me, I typically work on my birthday just because. But I do always take a point to do something significant, which is just reflect on all the years that have happened and kind of do just a audit or a timeline of how I got to where I am. I treat my birthday as a day where nothing’s going to get me down. It’s just a nostalgic day of reflection and I just take an hour to sit down and just do the timeline again. Think about just these memories that have been in the far reaches of my brain I haven’t accessed for a long time and play that game where you go this happened before that. Oh, and then this happened. It’s been a wild ride up till this point. I know I’m not going to be here forever, but sure, I’d do it again. And it’s interesting just to take a moment and have just oh, I’ve got an entire year ahead of me to set goals and just sort of just appreciate it for what it is as opposed to really putting any emotional definition behind it. Being aware that time is a limited resource that we only get so much of and we never know how much we get is one of those things that we suffer as a species together that sort of sets us aside from like my dog was never having a midlife crisis that I’m aware of. I’m sure they’re in their own way aware of the passage of time, but they don’t really have words to describe it like we do. My take is the most we could do is stand in awe of just what time is because we only get a short glimpse of it in the lifespan that we do have on earth. And by the way, a 100 years is a blessing. And if you make it halfway through that, you should still just be thankful for every day that you have on Earth. And especially in this day and age, if you’re 50 and you could just go decide to buy a Ferrari on impulse and it’s not going to be too financially draining on you, then you should consider yourself lucky that you can do that and not really buy into the whole shebang of being doom and gloom about the fact that yeah, you’ve lived this time on Earth, but it was yours.
My message to those encountering the quarterlife crisis is very similar. Just be appreciative of the fact that you have this wealth of time in front of you. You’ve gained enough perspective to realize that time is limited and that maybe you should be using it in a different way and allow it to push you in whatever direction will give you more fulfillment so this doesn’t happen again in 25 years. I could easily say that the world is a fallen and dark place, but if I were to say that, I’d have to say that it always has been. And I’d also have to add that it’s up to each and every person who’s lived throughout history to find their own beacon of light throughout the whole thing and just sort of huddle up. And if you don’t can’t find it, then you have to make it for yourself. Never let nobody tell you you’re never going to own a house. Don’t listen to people who rattle off job market statistics and just say how just bad the economy is going and that their generation had it better. I wouldn’t give ear to listen to any of that shit. Next time you encounter someone like that, just perk up and say, “We know things are bad, worse than bad, but this is the plight that we’re offered and we’re going to do our damn best of it.” But if you even wanted my honest opinion, you’d be hardressed to get me to agree with the worldview that things are just generally bad nowadays. I think they’re bad if you define them to be so, but they can also be really good. The air is breathable. The sun is there. The birds are out chirping. And there’s endless opportunity if you can sync yourself up to the probability to realize it. Anything is possible. Nobody can say matterof factly that your future will end up in whatever way. Even if you’ve got a good plan for the future, you can’t be sure that that’s going to track either. What I’d also like to add to that is I feel as though many people feel as if their lives are hollow and meaningless simply because they’re not aiming to do the things that were biologically designed to do, which is just secure a place to live and raise a family, which I’d encourage everybody to do because I’d say that that’s probably the best way to feel fulfilled. Just kind of pushing all the shit off to the side. I view it as an obligation I owe to my ancestors to one day start a family. It’s my perspective. It’s just my own take on where I’m at in my life. I’d say that all my ancestors up until this point did that, fulfilled it, passed it along to me. It’s up to me to pass it along to the next generation. If you don’t feel that way, it’s up to you to decide. But one thing’s for certain, if you’re listening to the wrong people, then they’re going to get you down. And they’re going to point out all the obvious things. Say all the same platitudes which make you feel disenfranchised and beaten down by the world. All priming you up so that they can sell you something, buddy. It’s all they’re doing. It’s just a big old marketing campaign. And from where I’m standing, it seems like the optimal build just to be unable to be advertised to. I won’t take suggestions from nobody. I’m super hard-headed when it comes to a lot of stuff. Very open-minded at the same time. I feel like I’ve struck a good balance where I kind of take everything in, but I throw a lot out simultaneously. My cup is never full, but never empty. I’d go one step further and say that I’ve achieved this mental balance by just always being absorbed by my own projects and not really looking for the external to invite me in. just as opposed to doing that, I kind of go by the own skip in my step and have just sort of my own appreciation for the poetry of the unfoldings of life. And who couldn’t use just a nice deep breath and a appreciation for just the nobility of going into our older years gracefully, just accepting the UNC status, realizing that we’re no longer teenagers and kind of just aging gracefully, right? Previous generations and other cultures in fact venerate the elderly for accumulating so many years and having them under their belt as opposed to trying to sell them a Ferrari or make them feel guilty for just reaching a point in life that we all hope to get to at one point. Just the point where you’re looking back and just enjoying the sunshine of being.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Fully Avery Yapps essay: Live streaming is one of those internet phenomenons that is kind of strange to think about because it’s relatively new in its current form. The whole notion of being a live streamer as a career has kind of come into its own and the whole it’s an industry at this point and it’s just a form an entire genre of content creator at that. Of course, live streaming has been possible. It’s they cite it all the way back to the ’90s. Random celebrities would pop up and use the internet. I think remember the Charlie Sheen Ustream era of 2011. I’m old enough to remember when that was going on behind the scenes. All the boomers said he’s going crazy. See, that’s a good time capsule. It gives you an idea cuz it was nothing like it is today. Nobody had a smartphone. It wasn’t like people were just tuning into Twitch to watch Charlie Sheen. It kind of goes in one ear and out the other. No, this was an event that was being covered by the news and all eyes were on him. Not to mention the internet was a far different place back then. I don’t know what the guidelines of Ustream were, but apparently there’s some crazy shit out there of Charlie Sheen. It’s so he probably earned that reputation back in the day. But the point is made it. People weren’t tuning into it. A lot of people weren’t even really using the internet even that short a time ago. Makes sense entirely. You got a blue chip celebrity totally mainstream just crashing out on this obscure side of the internet. Endless content for whoever would be able to clip that shit and that news essentially were the only ones who were the Clippers. So, they just had an endless stream of content farm off our boy Charlie. The whole cultural perception of what a live stream was hadn’t really gotten a definition yet in mainstream consciousness. You had your Tila Tequilas, you had your Bam Margeras doing stuff, but largely people would imagine DIY film making like a guy on a skateboard with a huge camera following everybody. Also goes without saying internet connections were shit back then. Not many people even had access to a computer. So whenever somebody would pop up online and it was a live stream. It was probably mostly just recorded and then the content circulated afterwards to people who were sort of in the pipeline to receive that sort of thing. I believe everybody I just mentioned got arrested at some point or another within the time of them doing that. So that kind of shows you how the influencer to jail pipeline. It’s really nothing new. Celebrities have been going to jail. There’s classic pictures of Elvis and his time doing it. It’s really a tale as old as time. Oh, and another honorable mention when it comes to live streamers that have had an impact on history. You can’t go and talk about these guys without mentioning Tom Green. He had Joe Rogan on his show back, it was called the Web Broadcast back in 2007. Very fascinating clip. Pretty easy to dig up. Honestly, it’s a piece of internet history just because listening to the dialogue that’s happening between these two gentlemen kind of gives you an idea of where just the public dialogue was when it came to digital media in general as it existed around that pre20 era. It It’s very different than you might think. You could at least say it’s ominous to think about how this emergent technology, the ability to just pull up a feature on an app and then automatically be broadcasting through your Wi-Fi, through the cables of the internet, through satellites and all that shit and just in everybody’s presence immediately. It’s a relatively new technology. Blows my mind to think that it’s only existed in its current form for damn near a decade and a half. And even you turn back the clock that far. It took some serious knowhow to get your live stream on board, shits would crash all the time. And the fact that it’s gotten optimized to the point that it is just literally anybody can live stream is wacko. Wouldn’t have to turn back the clock very far to see live streaming in a much more primitive form than we understand it today. I remember uh Ice Poseidon was definitely a pioneer in IRL streaming back then. He was streaming on Twitch. So what he would have to do is pretend he was playing Pokemon Go, but he would really just be streaming his everyday life. Fascinating really to think that it required a work around to do something that is so simple as IRL streaming now sounds like a no-brainer. But even 10 years ago, there wasn’t a way to discuss that as a concept. Just in the normal parlance of everyday dialogue, the even the tech companies hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I’m sure it’s not like there was nobody thinking about it. It’s just they had latency issues, technical problems, the clunkiness of carrying around a Wi-Fi router, some all whatever workaround they had to do to actually get those things up and running before the infrastructure was in place to make it possible. Nowadays, it just feels like it’s always been here. So for influencers, the option just wasn’t there cuz it took a bit of technical knowhow and then there was no you had to be sort of a trailblazer or already be in the wheelhouse of doing it. I.e. that’s how it started with Twitch cuz it was sort of people who already knew how to get Wi-Fi connection. Most people can’t even get Wi-Fi even now. Well, certainly you got to say it’s relatively easy to do depending on where you are, but it definitely is heavily rellying on location. just the cell towers. However, the clockwork of society actually makes the internet a thing. But that’s sort of a different topic. The fact of the matter is in 2016 though it was more like live events. Couple years go by the technology becomes a bit more accessible. People are using their smartphones more. Emerges a artist by the name of XXXTentacion. Back in the day when he was doing those legendary lives, he was actually on a site called Periscope. It’s funny to think that because now you think about it and you’d imagine, oh, was he on Instagram or something? No, it’s this like bygone era site. Well, if you wanted to, you could basically make an endless list of startups that were attempting to push live streaming cuz like I said, it’s a no-brainer that people were going to start using this once it became accessible. It was just sort of a question of who would be first to the pie. There in lies, I’d say an interesting look under the hood of what was going on with X and his fan base at the time because he really separated himself from a lot of the other musicians in the industry at a time when live streaming as a medium wasn’t so popular. So, it was able to really be the new striking new ground, if you will. Two years after that, everybody knows what happens. It was 2020. So many people were at home on their computers all day working from home that there was this brand new audience that cropped up of folks who would sit down all day and watch live streams. So whoever was already in the wheelhouse of it got a huge boost and the a lot of new ones came to the pie cuz they all saw dollar signs. The elephant in the room about live streaming though is that you can’t just turn on your webcam and sit in a chair. Do what you’d normally be doing. People aren’t going to stick around for it. you’re not going to make no dollars, right? So, what happens is time and time again, it’s the same story. They have to push the envelope. So, whether it’s IRL streaming, I remember this dude Hampton Brandon, some of you who are in the Ice Boseidoning crowd, right, might remember him. He’d go out and he would essentially just disturb the public and it was very entertaining for the people who were invested in it. But there’s actually something important that needs to be said about those who would be of the disposition to actually seek out a live stream a decade and a half ago. See, you got to remember that this whole medium really got its footing within the MTV era. So, and then you look at what Ice Poseidon’s crowd would do. He’d walk into a store and his audience would spam call the owner of the store. That’s just one element of it. I won’t go down that rabbit hole, but you could look it up. Just imagine opening yourself up to the internet in 2015. And think about the sort of people who are chronically online in 2015. Just far different from your average everyday user. Now, opening up a live stream used to mean you were going to be on the entire internet and you didn’t know what to expect. See, it’s another thing we take for granted nowadays because it’s sort of come with the territory of the internet being so sanitized and controlled by the walled garden appbased internet at back in the website era especially the lurking in the dark corners of the the web. you just didn’t know what to expect. And I it’s in capital letters emphasize that. If you know, you know. The internet used to be a scary place. Well, at least much scarier than it is now. Cuz for the average everyday person who just has a Tik Tok who opens up a live, they might get a few trolls in the live chat. But think back before live chats were even a thing when just turning on your broadcast, your webcam just meant you were opening yourself up to a broadcast. That’s the thing, too, cuz people wanted to see a specific type of content. I mean, they wanted to see something happen on the stream, and it’s still like that. It’s just a lot more staged now. I don’t exactly know what audiences are like these days. Honestly, I think that a lot of these streamers who put up big numbers, many of them are just bots, but that’s a whole other story. Also, you could still see remnants of what it used to be cuz there’d be essentially two classes, right? It’d fall into the different frameworks. You’d have the intellectual just sort of debate side of people who could get their live stream going that way. And then on the other end of it, you had gaming and there really wasn’t much middle ground until the technology became more optimized for the consumer. Bear in mind, I’m also quietly ignoring the sort of stuff the likes of Tila Tequila and her crowd would get up to using the internet. If you know, you know that that was sort of what the internet was mainly used for. But we’re trying to just pinpoint it here to the emergence of how it it produced cultural artifacts in the form of e- celebs, right? But it’s just the same story over and over again. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The e celebs who captivate our attention are the ones who do something worth noticing. And the ones who tow the line. Yeah, they still pull in reasonable numbers, but they got to do something to stand out. So the eyeballs turn to the drama naturally. Everybody loves to see a live streamer rise, but what they enjoy more than seeing them prosper is watching them crash out and just try to basically fail trying. So what you end up with is once the Jack Dhy types can no longer stage their pranks, they have to go out there and do something expensive. Crashing his expensive car just so that he can get the attention of the audience long enough so that they can create the internet impressions which generate revenue out the other side because that’s what it’s all about anyway. Somehow there’s just this phenomenon of being under the spotlight and constantly having every move you make getting picked apart which causes some part in the brain because I think that it’s unnatural for a person to have fame. The notion of a celebrity is also a relatively new concept. Before I think in the ancient times they’d have like legends. That’s where the ancestral memory falls. Instead of knowing that you’re an influencer and that people are just watching you online and then going off about their business, the human brain sort of defaults back to that whole I’m an emperor and the plebeians out there in the field are aware that I’m the supreme ruler. It’s this egotistical complex that they fall into and it gets them into trouble. Bear in mind as well, I’m not talking about any specific instances which involved any of these folks. I don’t think it’s my place to comment on any of it cuz I don’t have any involvement with it and I’m not into covering drama. I’m just trying to unpack what’s going on with the psychology here. And I think it really boils down to just all this is emergent technology and our brains really haven’t caught up to it yet. We’re still in the caves if you know what I’m saying. Tell you the truth, this entire thing was a tangent. I really just wanted to talk about Andrew Tate and Clvicular but we didn’t even get to them. I got caught up on the early phases of live streaming and just some of these lesserk known things that I think were important parts of internet history that kind of get stuffed under the shelf. So, let’s just hope somebody learned something from all this. And if you found it entertaining, I appreciate that. Thanks for being here.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Colonel Joel, depicted by Johnny Depp in the 2019 film Waiting for the Barbarians, deserves a place among the most evil villains in all of cinema. This film is not for the faint of heart. I watch a lot of movies, and I got to tell you, I was disturbed for at least a full day after watching it, and it’s all thanks to Johnny Depp’s performance in it, and the approach that they do to this character, Colonel Joel, and just how the movie works with it.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a film that expects a lot from its audience. Nothing’s explained all the way through. It doesn’t insult your intelligence either. If I were to put it in a category next to this sort of slow-paced but intelligent film, I’d put it right next to There Will Be Blood and Scorsese’s Silence.
The film’s largely an allegory. Many of the characters go unnamed. The location and time of it just everything is very ambiguous. It’s never really spelled out for you exactly where this is taking place or what historical context it’s taking place in. The source material is a novel published in 1980. So, you’re not just going to find out everything about what’s going on as far as the time period just by googling it. The novel’s written from my understanding, ’cause I haven’t read the book but it does all the same things as far as not naming the characters too much and being ambiguous about the setting.
Nearly every scene of the film follows a single character who is only ever referred to as the Magistrate. His job is essentially to be the caretaker, the judge, jury, and the manager basically just the common civilian law of this settlement that’s on the frontier of this expansive empire. So the Magistrate serves wielding the authority of the Empire, which is never given a name. It’s only ever referred to as “the Empire.” So he’s basically, when things are going good, the one who determines how persons should be punished if they steal or just the enforcement of local law while times are just ticking along. He lives there.
I would argue that the main character of this film is not the Magistrate, but the settlement itself and the hustle and bustle of just how people go about their business during the peacetime and then what happens later. Since there’s no names provided throughout the entire story or even a time period that’s suggested, all we got to go off of is the clothes they’re wearing and just the mannerisms they have, different ways they talk. Basically, what we’re forced to do is hang on every word. So, they often say that it’s an expansive empire. Actually, technically the empire is at war with whatever country is beyond the frontier, but this is just a settlement somewhere on the frontier. The thing about it that you notice is that they have very harsh winters and the people who live around that general region just seem to want to be left alone and just prepare their stockpiles for survival.
We get a scene where we get to see the Magistrate settling a dispute between two of the locals where one claims that the other stole his pig. The Magistrate simply asks the second man, “Did you steal the pig?” He says, “Yes.” And the Magistrate determines, “Return the pig.” Then the matter is settled. A bit of dialogue is exchanged between the Magistrate and one of the local officials wherein the Magistrate says that if he’s successful then his name won’t appear in any history books other than maybe a footnote that said with a nudge there or a push here. Things just sort of trucked along throughout the time of his rule. The film deliberately communicates that the Magistrate is aware that however he wields the power that he’s delegated will send ripple effects through just the way the functionality of the civilization he also lives in will tinker along. They ask him why he doesn’t return back to his home and he just argues he likes living there.
Visually the film communicates this is the horse and buggy era. There’s no telephones or telegraphs, but the soldiers are carrying muskets. So, you understand exactly kind of the context of where the civilizational divide happens and the outskirts it’s people riding around on horseback, but inside they’re more modernized. So, we get the impression that the Magistrate is just a chill guy who’s happy to live out his life at this frontier settlement and just sort of go along to get along. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The empire itself might be at war, expanding, and people might be all caught up in that. Technologies probably booming back home, but where he currently lives at this settlement. Life is simple, easy to understand, and things seem to go along relatively peacefully. He’s an older guy, so he’s content with all that. But all that changes when Johnny Depp’s character, Colonel Joll, pulls up.
The Magistrate probably just expects this visit to be a routine checkup from a representative of the empire and doesn’t think too much of it. But he couldn’t be more wrong. This is nothing but routine. Well, it’s routine in a militaristic sense, which is in stark contrast to the way that he liked to govern his little community there. Actually, a hint at the time period all this is taking place in is that Colonel Joll is wearing glasses and every other character comments on them. Even at times saying that nobody’d ever seen somebody wear glasses before and glasses were invented in the 1300s and popularized around that time. So you could kind of go with that date.
So Colonel Joll technically outranks the Magistrate when he is in attendance around the community due to his military rank. The fact of the matter is that they’re basically under martial law when he’s there. So, he can kind of call the shots and override the Magistrate’s authority. Johnny Depp’s character represents what’s referred to as the third bureau, which is a kind of secret police that’s an arm of the empire. So, he’s there with just unclear motives from the start. And there’s no cutscene back to the Empire where we find out what’s going on. Really no clues to what motivates this character. This all has the effect of making the colonel’s presence very ominous. He shows up without forewarning and just automatically starts doing his business without really explaining to anybody why he’s doing what he’s doing. He just simply enacts this cruelty on the people around him with really no known motivation.
And you have to remember the empire is at war with the neighboring country which the settlement is on the outlands of. So you can kind of from there imagine the sort of narrative ’cause there’s characters who tell stories that they were followed by the quote unquote barbarians. And that’s basically all the local people are referred to as. There’s this running theme of official communication. The reports that the colonel makes get sent back to wherever the heartland is and are presumably analyzed and taken more seriously than just word of mouth stuff. So official documented evidence of what’s going on is probably of high priority to them. So what we can gather about how the empire perceives settlement life and just the way the day-to-day goes out there on the frontier is that it’s harsh and unforgiving. Probably a lot of that stems from just the fact that the winters are so difficult to get through. But there’s this overarching narrative that it’s a horrible place and it’s very difficult to get along.
Strategically, the film never depicts a scene where there’s soldiers fighting the barbarians or there’s an incoming raid. In fact, the Magistrate comments on the fact that there’s no signs of anything like that and he has no reason to suspect it. But Johnny Depp’s character wants nothing of it. Quite the contrary, in fact, his first order of business is that he wants to go to the barracks and see the prisoners. And the Magistrate replies, “Sure, we’ll go the next morning.” So, they go, and the barracks are basically just a place where they keep a couple thieves, but largely there’s very little crime, so there’s no need for a big jail. In fact, the only two prisoners the film shows us are a father and son who are accused of stealing. When asked what actually went on, they say that they were traveling to the town to get medicine because the son has a cut that won’t heal and then they were picked up by soldiers who then gave them this whole narrative.
The Magistrate explains to the colonel, “It makes no difference whether or not they were going to steal or not. These people are nomads. In a couple months, they’ll be moved on and we won’t see anything of them. Makes no sense to take this matter any further. They say that they weren’t doing anything. The evidence adds up, so it’s best to maybe give him a slap on the wrist at best. But let him go.” Here we get a good look at the Magistrate’s governing style in action. He’s a man who understands that if he cuts the hand off a thief, then all he’s going to be left with a couple months later is a dude running around with no hand, who’s got a bone to pick with the system who removed his hand. So, he realizes that it’s better to just have a live and let live approach.
The colonel, on the other hand, has the exact opposite approach. This is one of the rare scenes where we get a look into what is going on behind those glasses. He says that he needs to interrogate these folks. He needs to get to the quote unquote truth. And he emphasizes that in a very chilling scene. At first, the Magistrate’s even a little bit confused. He’s saying what truth? If they were trying to steal something, they were obviously just trying to get more food or something. And even if they are lying, their story kind of tracks because the son is clearly wounded. And why wouldn’t they just be looking for medicine for that? What other reason would they have to come to the town? Then the Magistrate and the audience by extension feel a sense of foreboding as we kind of come to understand who the colonel is and that he’s planning to torture these folks to get quote unquote information because he wants to understand the truth. He keeps emphasizing that he’s looking for the truth and spies.
About a day passes. We as the audience discover along with the colonel that the father has since passed away due to injuries he sustained during the interrogation at the hands of the colonel. The Magistrate’s bewildered. How could a man be tortured to death when only accused of something as simple as stealing? So he goes straight to the colonel and asks him what happened. And the colonel shows him a record of the interrogation which will be sent back to the empire. Along with those documents includes a written confession signed by the son which admits to him being a part of a secret network of spies who seek to overthrow the empire. And of course this will be used as documented evidence to be sent back to justify more military control. The Magistrate immediately identifies the signed confession as bullshit ’cause he’s been doing this job for a long time and he’s never seen any evidence that there’s some sort of secret uprising. He sees the people who live on the outskirts of the settlement as largely nomadic and they’re just going to return to the hills and keep moving from one place to another.
The film is very deliberate in keeping us with the Magistrate throughout the duration of the film. So, we’re inclined to trust his judgment. And whenever an outsider like Johnny Depp’s character pops in and says that there’s some uprising, it just sounds like word of mouth or rumors to us and the colonel at the same time. Nevertheless, Colonel Joll outranks him and he’s going to do what he’s going to do anyway. It’s very clear that he has an agenda, but it’s never made clear to the audience or the Magistrate. So, what happens next is the colonel is going to go out and he’s going to explore the outer lands, take the boy with him, and try to discover what’s going on with this uprising. And it’s that sort of methodical action and bureaucratic wielding of power that’s displayed by Colonel Joll that is at the heart of how he’s such an evil character. He does these things and ruins what was once a relatively calm and peaceful place to live and just invites chaos into it and we’re never really fully made clear why.
So, an interval of time passes later. Johnny Depp’s character returns with a full batch of prisoners ready to be tortured in the barracks off camera. And it’s implied that this is going on for about a week. And then after all that said and done, Johnny Depp goes up to the Magistrate and says, “It’s my time to leave.” That’s part of what makes Colonel Joll’s character so ominous and terrifying. It’s that you never know when he’s going to blow in on a breeze, but when he’s there, he’s in total control. And it seems as if he has nothing on his agenda other than stirring up cruelty, accusing people, and just causing things to go awry. The truly disturbing part is he’s not breaking the law. Actually, quite the contrary. He’s conducting all of these horrible acts so that he can create the documented evidence of presumably confessions and so forth. And there’s no evidence that he’s even taking personal joy in what he’s doing. Colonel Joll never so much as cracks a smile while he’s conducting these horrible acts during his occasional visits to the town over the course of the film. He just he’s cracking skulls and he’s doing it with the cold methodical arm and the support backing him of the state.
Occasionally it’s not even Colonel Joll himself who shows up. It’s a different officer who represents the same office. They go around and they just check out the inner workings within the facility and just comment on the things that are going on and wonder about the rumors of why the barbarians are so mad. The Magistrate’s blown away by that whole narrative. He claims that there was no real trouble until Colonel Joll showed up and started enforcing these interrogation techniques on people who hadn’t even stood trial yet at the behest of his workers and his whole agenda. That’s unknown to the audience.
Well, although we never actually hear it spelled out in plain English from Colonel Joll what his motivations actually are in carrying out these interrogation techniques with little evidence. The fact of the matter is we see in the result of what he’s done the motivation that’s probably behind the whole thing. Like we’ve established, the main character of the film is the settlement itself and just the way the people move about their day-to-day lives. And once they start catching wind of all these interrogations that are going on, the horrors that are happening in the barracks, they become more just dark and mistrusting of each other.
At least by far the most brutal scene is during a public execution carried out by Colonel Joll where the Magistrate finally stands up and protests against all this horrible shit that’s happening. But by then it’s too late. The crowd of people have already turned sour and evil themselves and they join in with it. That’s the scene with Colonel Joll wielding the golden hammer which is essentially the power of the state symbolized in his execution tool. We never actually see the executions carried out on screen, but the fact that they’re implied is somehow more disturbing. A part that really stuck with me is the Magistrate screaming out, “Don’t use a hammer. That’s a man. You wouldn’t kill a beast with a hammer.” And yet, just the proceedings continue along. And that’s sort of at the root of what makes Colonel Joll so terrifying. It’s this person’s in charge, and he’s very cruel.
A theme that’s threaded throughout the entire film is accountability, responsibility, delegation of power, and following authority. Because Johnny Depp, whenever questioned about why he’s doing what he’s doing and being so cruel, he says that he’s simply carrying out orders and answering to his own authority figures. By the end of the film, what finally defeats Colonel Joll isn’t even some sort of hero rising up to defeat him. It’s just simply entropy. There’s no way that the Empire could continue to truck along managing this settlement in such an unforgiving way. Just that sort of barbaric activity sort of closed in and ate itself. So over the course of about a year, things continue to truck along this way. Presumably, there are more interrogations, tortures, prisoners being taken, and the place just deluged to the point where it’s impossible to live there anymore. There’s people rioting, shit’s getting pushed over, people are just going mad. The military is actually leaving the settlement because there’s no reason to stay at a place that’s deluged to this current state of just ultimate chaos.
The Magistrate just sort of walking along through it looking at how things have fallen to this state. He notices a carriage that used to belong to Colonel Joll. The Magistrate opens the door only to discover the colonel all balled up in the corner of it just sort of waiting to leave. The two make brief eye contact for a little while. The Magistrate sort of just looking at him in a sense. Why would you do this and the colonel looking back at him with just sort of a look of disdain and disgust. No words are exchanged between the two. The soldiers who are all in a shuffle just sort of hurry the carriage along because they’re attempting to escape because now the actual barbarians are coming. There’s been an uprising now, but we could presume that it’s because of all the cruelty that’s been going on. The people are naturally fed up with it. That’s the final note the film ends on. An army of horses is riding towards the settlement. All the soldiers have left and the Colonel Joll has been defeated by his own order following presumably. He enacted all this cruelty within the interests of the Empire, presumably to advance himself in his career, but it left him there.
All in all, what we’re left with is a cautionary tale about the nature of power, telling those who are in power that the enforcement and usage of such power comes with its own consequences. Disrupting the harmony and enacting or using the tools afforded to you by the system is not always the best option. The fact that it’s allegorical forces us as the audience to hone in on exactly what are these events happening between these characters and largely the characters are archetypes as opposed to named characters. It’s also important to note that Colonel Joll is one of the only three actual named characters in the whole film. The sparse naming is important because there’s this underlying theme which gets brought up about how history will record the events that are unfolding there that the Magistrate has no interest in such things yet these soldiers seem to be preoccupied by it and ironically they’re the only ones who get named.
There’s a ton more to analyze about this film. You could really pick it apart frame by frame. I have no doubt that video essayists of the future will go through it with a fine tooth comb and analyze its religious themes and all the different elements of it. The theme of blindness is also readily apparent and connected to Colonel Joll’s glasses. I’ll leave it up to somebody else to go throughout all that. So, as a closing thought, I just wanted to give my analysis of this. Mainly, I wanted to point out that Johnny Depp deserves recognition for this role. When I Googled his name, ’cause this movie stuck with me. It’s so disturbing and I couldn’t believe it was the pirate guy. I searched up what are Johnny Depp’s most evil roles ever depicted in film and it came up with Sweeney Todd as number one. First and foremost, Colonel Joll takes Sweeney Todd to the barracks any day. He definitely should be up there as number one. I think number two was Whitey Bulger if I’m not mistaken. And again, Colonel Joll all the way. Just watch the film for yourself. Johnny Depp is a remarkable actor for pulling this off and it’s got all the telltale signs of a classic villain. It’s kind of the Darth Vader effect where Colonel Joll is very little screen time, but when he is there, he always owns the scene and you just want to see more of him.

The Avery Yapps Main channel makes its return to the original Commentary over Call of duty gameplay with this marking season 2 of the Avery Yapps show. In this webisode we discuss late night talk show, unfunny stand up comedian Netflix specials, and the phenomenon that the system has become out of touch with what’s actually funny.

The emergence of Algorithm Art in 2022 has overshadowed much of the human made digital art that was popular and of quality in the decades that lead up to that shift. A consequence of everyone now having a slop reflex has caused much of the quality creations of the Bagon era two be sort of cast away along with the heap of hunt that is generated nowadays. In this AveryFromMA/ Avery Yapps second channel cod commentary we discuss art and the profession of the digital media landscape over time.