For starters, it is not my job to advance AI, but I am taking it upon myself to have my take on its implications for society. CRISPR could create real hardcore anti - aging options for people. While other forms of AI could impact the arts in ways that are involved in writing, movies, etc. Happy Gilmore 2, a box office success, already featured full scenes organized by AI. Without real actors, the movies we are used to become something different. The way I see it, in using AI we are proving just how capable some humans really are – of course this is by differential from actors to AI actors.

To start this essay I wrote that I have so many questions. Here are some of them: why is AI expected to expand so rapidly? Why can’t its growth be a slow burn? Doesn’t the slow burn approach seem safer? Doesn’t it especially seem safer in the light of the concerns of AI professionals?

Now this might seem a little bit silly to try and demand a ‘slow’ growth in a field that is so ambitious. But really what we need to look for is moral and ethical realism. What this means is we need a way of ensuring that growth spurts in AI production are managed with care such that we are not writhing away our sorrows once the AI takes over and creates a Matrix - like apocalypse. This is the said ‘risk’ in AI development. The philosophical realism – moral and ethical – is the ability for the people that manage the AI system as a whole to be introspective. This could be misunderstood so I am going to make a distinction. The AI system being introspective does not mean that the AI can think through its own thoughts in an introspective way. What it means is that the AI world is built such that it thinks inwardly and analyzes itself in a way that is akin to introspection. When I do acts of introspection, what I am doing is thinking inwardly and all of that. This is what the AI world has to do as a whole in order to reap the benefits of its potential.

Before we tackle the idea of how unforeseen consequences can come from movies, let us take a quick trip to explain what an unforeseen consequence actually is and how that can relate to anything at all. Then, we will go into how these particular unforeseen consequences can arise from movies.

An unforeseen consequence is very literally a consequence that comes or results from a process that was not previously foreseen. Unforeseen consequences tend to exist and come from any given thing that has a result. If a thing exists, and it has a result, then it has the possibility of having an unforseen consequence arise from that result.

Now, let’s talk about the typical results of a movie. From the movie maker’s point of view, the movie gets made, they have a job, they typically make money, and they probably have some fun. From the viewer’s perspective, they watch the movie, they might go to a theater, they enjoy food and beverages, and you know the rest. This might sound great, and it is great for the vast majority of movie-related experiences. However, some unforeseen consequences, in the past, have arisen in the realm of movie violence.

For starters, it is important to acknowledge that the violence is obviously intended to be fake violence. And if any real violence does ensue from this intended to be fake violence, it is from the actors, who are signing up for this job, and does not affect the greater population at large. However, this is just one way that the problem of violence in movies can manifest. Unfortunately, there are more ways than one.

Many people are victims in this world and are left with minds or brains that are slightly messed up. When these people watch a movie, and they see violence in the movies, they see it differently than the normal person sees it. Not that movies can’t sometimes be gruesome (they certainly can be), but the fucked up person (for lack of a better term) would or might think to act on this messed up nature of life. This is the main reasoning against violence in movies.

In explaining the case for violence in movies, I want to provide you with an opinion that shreds open your idea of the face value effect that movies have on social psychology and other forms of psychology. I want this essay to portray the interesting, complicated and sometimes seemingly convoluted effect that movies have on some of us – maybe all of us, but I cannot speak for all – but movies do in fact have this effect.

The first case for violence in movies is actually pretty simple, people like the violence in movies. People, very literally, like seeing violence in movies. In movies, violence is literally fake. From this standpoint, one could reason that there is nothing wrong, since the portrayed violence is not real. If the movie makes them feel a certain way, by some stretch of the imagination, again one could reason, from this new standpoint, that the fake gore is actually good. One example of this could be this: people see fake gore and are reminded about how there is real gore in the real world yet they are not looking at it. This, for some people, is actually an incredibly healthy thing, though some could cite abnormal psychology, others would talk about tolerance to dangerous ideas. This means that some people have different outlooks than others on fake violence.

In reality, there are some people who have fucked up minds and would interpret movie violence as inspiration. From there, then other people will inevitably reason that if these people have any power they would act on their violent psychological exhibitions and then reason and interpret movie violence as bad. Even though these interpreters of the psychologically messed up people’s version of the movie are perfectly fine, they would still think movie violence is immoral because they are weary of insane people’s actions. This is a real chain of thought in psychology - cinema relations (Psychology - cinema relations being a term I made up).

Another idea that remains important in interpreting movies, is understanding that once you enter the movie realm, then everything is up to your imagination. It is no longer a real thing, even if it is based on a real thing. This separation from reality is actually good for people, as it provides insight into something called escapism.

I hope this serves as a great testament to why violence in movies is actually completely OK. In my next essay, I am going to highlight why the movie industry might not be benefiting as much as they think they are from the violence they are not caring to upend.

But for now, let’s ignore the court of public opinion, and let us stick simply with the notion of whether or not the idea of violence in movies is moral, or if not, let’s talk about why it may be immoral. Many people consider the opposing view – that violence in movies is immoral – because they may see it as affecting people’s psychology in a way that is considered abnormal. This abnormality can be considered a liability. To propose a hypothetical, one actually does harm somebody and then later claims the movie inspired his own violence, this could later be a detriment to the movie industry. This was just proposed as a hypothetical, but in fact this problem has occurred, and as a result the writers were reprimanded. The extent of their punishment is not public. This anecdote and the hypothetical would support the claim that violence in movies is not actually moral.

But some, including prime movie makers, would disagree with this. Movies are an art, the risk with creating an art is that art can influence people. But the beauty of making an art is that it pleases people. Many people would then suggest that the benefits of making a good movie outweighs the risk of a psycho seeing the violence in the movie as inspirational. This risk is not enough to slow down the true artful movie makers in the world.

When the movie makers sit down to write a movie, some of them might be looking forward to letting their inner fuck ups out on the screen. Regardless of if they see it as an inner fuck up being projected outward, they still see it as a way of communicating an art form – I hope. So, naturally, they are not shying away from including violence in their movies. This is – of course – not to say that all movies include violence, but a lot certainly do. And I tell you, in my opinion, I like it.

But hey, still, if someone approached me and told me that violence in movies is immoral, I would hear them out. Given that I, in this essay, have already established that violence in movies has multiple different angles and that I would personally take the angle that violence in movies is moral, I would be wondering why I would even reconsider this if someone approached me with the idea. This is why I would hear them out. But first, I want to establish that when I am hearing them out, I am hearing them out with an open mind, all while maintaining a firm stance on my philosophical standpoint.

Now, why would I hear them out? Is it for a good conversation? Or for a possible change of heart? No and no. The answer is for consistency. I want to test my own opinions. And the best way to do that is to find someone that disagrees with you and talk to them. This, unfortunately, might be uncomfortable. But it seems important to prevail.

I took a quick digression there – but what is it about violence in movies? Is it ultimately immoral or moral? Now, before I reestablish my opinion, I want to say in another fashion what I said before, which was that I am trying to form an opinion based on objectivity. Not on subjectivity. This means I am collecting a lot of information from a number of different angles and finding the best thing that works, as opposed to saying that my favorite movie might be The Shining and that has violence so that makes violence moral (which is not objective).

So, I think that violence in movies is ok and moral because the vast majority of people are not going to be negatively affected by the violence in movies. And if they don’t like the violence for whatever reason then they don’t have to watch the movie. What do you think?

Accelerationism states that the way that the capitalist market is right now should in simple terms “accelerate” to produce more things for the world. This is the basis for much talk about accelerationism. Some people might think to themselves, this is great, all we need is more stuff for the world and so forth. People are dying of hunger, this capitalist acceleration might help them. This idea forgets that capitalism tends to be selfish, so it is not that we just need more stuff for the world, it is that we need the right stuff for the right people. Especially for the people that need to meet the bare minimum requirements, this is great.

If you are wondering how to get started with accelerationism, I want you to leave this essay thinking about this, ok, here is what to do. Just for starters, accelerationism is not a personal thing that you do, it is something that the higher ups of the world initiate. And I want to start with a way of saying, so, this is how it works, but that is so hard because it relies on so many different large scale principles. But, if I were to go up to an executive and say, so, this is what to do, and proceed to tell him about how to accelerate his business, that would be a daunting thing to do. For several reasons this would be daunting: A) Status B) I don’t know how to accelerate his business. This is a little bit funny.

But essentially, this is how it works. What to do, if you are wanting to produce for accelerationism, is understand that the government funds a lot of things, so leveraging the government is a good starting place for an idea. Another, regarding what to do, is leveraging large companies. However, for a lot of these companies, there is no public say in the way this works. But for the government, this public saying has its place. Great success.

So let’s say that we want to compliment accelerationism, then what helps all of this occur? If we get the right people in high places to make the right decisions, then we can do it. Great job.

So that lists a lot of good things about accelerationism, however, let’s look at some of the downsides to its height and leverage. Accelerationism costs a lot of money. Now where to get this money, what to do about this, this is a concern for a lot of individuals. Chances are, at the rate our country progresses, we don’t need something that risks losing what we already have. Might as well not force anything, yes, and not use the plight of accelerationism when we do not have to. We can, instead, just grow at the typical rate.

Another thing is that you might believe things just tend to accelerate as they are, but in reality, accelerationism might mean stretching out resources thin. And so how do we prevent this? Well, more money of course. That seems easy. This question of, and so how do we prevent this large scale economic problem seems easy to ask, but does not seem easy to actually understand in theory. But, in practice, we seem to have a grip on it, as accelerationism does not seem to be gaining any major traction in our economic country wide playbooks. Some say this is the way it should be. Some say, the world needs more stuff.

Most meditation programs and applications are really low quality and expensive. Not to mention, once you have meditated once, it is then really easy to get the vibes of meditating. So you don’t really need the program. But if you think about it from the other perspective, once you get the vibes of meditation, you would think it would be really easy to set up the meditation program. This is true, yet, still, somehow, the mediation programs are terrible. They are terrible for a few reasons. One is pricing, the pricing is over zealous, meaning they expect people to idolize the effects of their meditative state in a way that constitutes a crap ton of money. This effect tends not to be true. A good argument could be made that states that people are better off meditating on their own, without this influence of a guidance voice that the program provides. Some people are willing to pay the money because they like it, or they want to outshine their own meditative experience. Mindfulness – in the past, present, and likely the future – is sold as a productive means for improving yourself.

I, personally, have used these mediation programs before, only because I am a particularly bad meditator and would personally like the help. I only know there is a differential between meditating with and without a program because I have done and analysed both and how they both affect me as a person. My advice if you are new to meditating, get yourself going meditating without using a program, and then once you really understand what you are doing, start taking the advice of professionals. At first it might be hard to follow but have yourself settle into it and relax so that you don’t waste your own time.

Now that we have gotten past the potential pitfalls of meditating, we can progress into the real effects of what meditating is. What mediating is doing for you is clearing your mind and having your conscious experience follow a specific line of thinking that you can easily be mindful of and from there, improve your conscious experience on a daily basis. When you meditate, your mind is going through an unfamiliar process, like a kind of cleaning, or reorganizing that ultimately yields a result for your time after you have finished. You are slowly chipping away at the potential locked inside of your subconscious.

The natural effect of meditating is you becoming more of a human. You get to use more of your brain effectively.

In statistics, a trend must be something that can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively, and tends to catch on, in the sense that many people start doing the thing. This statistical understanding essentially creates the criteria for defining a trend. In defining the idea of a trend, we can then, in some ways, start to talk about what trends do. In other words, what the side effects are of trends.

It is not a trend to write about the ideas that govern trends, though if it were, people might be more cognisant of the problems that come along with certain trends. Not all trends have problems, but when a trend does have a problem, it is an inherent product of it being a trend that is a problem. Not that all trends have problems, some are actually quite helpful, hence the effect of the ice bucket challenge raising money for ALS.

However, if people understood the nature of a trend, and how trends exist, they might be more cognisant of what could go wrong. For instance, a trend that went wrong is planking. The TV show “The Office” dutifully recognized this. People get hurt, and ultimately, planking is immature. It is unlike other adrenaline filled activities, many of which take real skill. Planking is a lazy form of making yourself more vulnerable and putting yourself in a dangerous setting with no real reward. Factoring in risk to reward is always helpful in these trendy situations. To do this you should ask yourself… is this really going to help me? Or… could this be harmful to me? Use common sense from here on out to decide if you should be doing the trend or not.

Physical trends are one thing that gets a lot of recognition, but what about psychological trends? What about the fact that you grow up in a certain area and are constantly feeding off of the people around you and what they tend to say. Not all people are like broken records. But if you spend time around the same people a lot, you might then hear a lot of the same things. In some ways, this can constitute a trend. And it is not even an official thing. But then, you must think that there are some elements of psychology in every trend. You would be correct if you thought that. No one in their right mind pours ice water over their head for no reason at all. Some reasons to do this could be health, or the ice bucket challenge. But no one does it for no reason at all. This implies that there is an element of psychology.

However, let’s isolate this as a thought experiment. What if someone did pour ice water over their head for no reason at all? Would that seem a little bit insane. See, it is all about perception. If there is a reasonable context or cause to the situation, almost anything can seem rational, even if it is patently ridiculous.

What are these roadblocks? Is it writer’s block? No, I don’t have writer’s block, but I certainly have moments in my writing where I am in a groove and then an idea hits me and I have to sit back in my chair and think about what I am getting myself into.

Another idea of a roadblock could be when I write and find myself not confidently entering the idea that I want to write about, such that I question myself. It sounds insane, and in some ways it is insane. This is what writing – creative free writing – can do to the conscious experience. Other kinds of writing are structured and methodical, but creativity can drive your mind to different extremes, causing god knows what to happen. When I say that something happens, I am referring to two different things. I am talking about the conscious experience of the writer, and I am talking about what happens within the writing, that is then digested by the consumer.

The art of making something that will be digested and understood well by the consumer is the entire hard part of writing. How do I know that my writing will be liked? Well, some people would argue that it is best to get past this completely. Thinking that this might hinder the ability to write in the first place, arguing that this thought process is just another thing to have on your mind that could distract you from your creativity is not a foreign idea. But realistically, some other people in the creative fields choose to harness this need for their stuff to be liked. They use this as a reference point to know that they have not gone crazy in their own creative burst. They like to think that they are doing this for the people, when in reality it is a combination of motivations about doing their endeavor for themselves and for other people. Of course, without these other people, there would be no one to entertain. This means there must be some drive to do this entertainment and ignore the ego of winning over yourself.

Finding something to write about is the biggest deal of all. Once you have honed your craft, doing the writing is essentially the easy part. Finding the long stretch of ideas that you just happen to find yourself obsessed upon, is the hard part.

On podcasts, in youtube videos, in articles, I hear a lot of Bukowski, Bukowski, Bukowski, and people don’t really go into it about what it means to be reading a Bukowski book, but I actually know what is up, and here is what I have to say.

I read four of his books and I enjoyed each of them. His books are like poetry – he also writes poetry – and one idea flows to the next in a way in which one idea compliments the next. This is a difficult intellectual trait to master and he tends to understand the plight of its usefulness.

One thing that is necessary to do in writing as an author to have a good book is to be able to sway the reader in certain directions to be able to display different points that each connect to create the bigger picture. But also being able to display different little pictures and pockets of ideas within the bigger picture is important to build up to the big idea. Some books are reliant on a big idea. Bukowski, is an author that does not usually rely on big ideas but rather on a bunch of smaller ideas that are relatable to people, serving as able to sway the audience based on personability.

Sometimes the idea is something as simple as a guy getting the shit beat out of him and nearly dying, and we are supposed to infer the bigger picture, being that it is about mortality or something like death. Typically though, Bukowski, or rather his character, Hank Chinaski, which is his own alter - ego, that part I don’t need to go into. Chinaski is beating the shit out of somebody, and we are supposed to infer, based on a very little aspect of the story, what the whole idea is. This is what creates his ethos within his writing.

Chinaski is a great character. Ultimately, Chinaski is doing what Bukowski never got to do, and wished he got to do. He writes down on the paper all of the great women that he got to be in love with for whatever it costs to be the poet that he is. This is something that the character gets, but the writer does not live through.

Besides the pulp and porn, he is actually a good writer for reasons that are literary, and I do not just think this because he writes about content that I enjoy consuming. It is easy to become biased in how good you think the writer is when you like what the writer writes, after all you might be hooked on the subject not just on the actual greatness of the writing. Realistically, what you want is both. You want a writer that captivates you in literacy terms and also in terms of the subject. This is what draws people into great literature.

Bukowski writes in a way that emphasizes the efforts of the bullshit that he likes, AKA the pulp and porn is emphasized. Now, let’s talk about that pulp and porn. People, depending on the book, get their shits kicked in and out of them – pulp – and Chinaski also finds himself with a number of women which leads to what you know as porn. That is simple enough, eh? A lot of what he writes – and this depends on the book – is a bunch of short stories as opposed to the book being a continuous novel. Now let’s talk about some of those stories. Or at least we will enter the realm of general prose.

Like many short stories, there is usually a main climax or main event in which the peak of the reader’s interest is in reference to the story. With the specification of the author we are talking about – Bukowski – it makes sense to say that some of his stories obeyed these unwritten ideas and some of them took things to a literary extreme. Within this literary extreme, it was either underwhelming or overwhelming, in other words, it may have been that too many things happened or not enough things happened. But all being said and done, it is all a part of his style.

You might be thinking about these extremes and thinking to yourself, I understand the extremity of too many things happening, but what about what happens when not enough happens. The ‘not enough happening’ is to create tension and set up different ideas that may be utilized throughout the rest of the book. Though there is not a lot of action, you still better pay attention, because you are not going to want to miss what follows.

Something I find in his writing, regardless of if it is actually relatable, is that I find relatability. I will reiterate that point for future clarification. Even if I have not found the thing perfectly relatable, I have not lived through the thing, I still find aspects of relatability in his writing. The motivations, the things that are irritating to him, the things that are luxurious to him, and the things he gets rewarded by, are all versions of things that I find to have parallels between his character and my character. I hope some of these things never come to light, for instance his irritable factors I would prefer to remain below the surface, but other things such as luxuries I would be ok with having seen through some of these things. That is a matter of how I feel about my own character, not a reflection of a book.

How I feel about my own character is out of the question for right now, I was only comparing. But I find there is a way to evaluate character other than comparing it with my own – which I just did. I will tell you another thing. I have read plenty of books, some of which are fiction much like the Bukowski books I have referenced. In those books you see what they like and you see how they progress as people. This is how I know what I know about these people and this Bukowski character specifically.

I have come a long way since kindergarten, as you might be able to notice from my being able to write well. I am just trying a little bit harder based on a little bit more information and headspace that I did not have when I was in kindergarten. This bit could be in my comedy routine. About being stupid as a youngster and then growing up and learning.

Anyway, writing is a hard thing to progress at, the act of progressing at any skill takes time. But this skill of writing, boy, is it one thing after another.

Upon reflecting upon my first writings, that my parents dutifully kept, I noticed that occasionally, once per paragraph, I would find something that I, even today, would still write or say. Some could say that the early signs of high potential were there even in kindergarten. Or maybe, if you liked it or found some kind of high education in it, then you would think that it results in the notion of high potential, but if not then you would think it is just writing or worse, bad writing.

Now my writing is smarter, but some people consider it boring, and say it lacks taste. To those people I push back and say, what is your writing like? Is your writing any good? Chances are they are projecting insecurities. In other words, their writing is bad, and they are seeing themselves in my writing, and disregarding the greatness of my true writing. The need to discount things is a factor of a mental filter of what is familiar. If you find something familiar, it seems like you should focus on those details and disregard any stray details. But in this case, you are thinking about your own shit writing while reading my miraculous writing because you see false signs of failures in my writing based on your own writing.

As I have read many authors, and read many of their works throughout their careers, I can see patterns in their writing that prevail through time, and other patterns that are not great that tend to fade over time. This is the way it works. Good ideas get filtered into thought processes and bad ideas get questioned and it depends where they go. They could go to another idea and pop up somewhere else, or they could just disappear. It depends what your subconscious and unconscious mind deliberates they should go regardless of what your conscious mind thinks. This subject of conversation is greatly interesting to me.

What the mind does when it is writing is greatly interesting in general, not just that it is interesting in relation to myself and my own writing. The mind when writing is basically filtering through the ideas whilst ordering them in a way that is designed to target someone else’s persuasion circuitry in their brain. They are trying to persuade without talking, a weird idea. Since kindergarten, and through lots of practice, my mind has done more of that, and gotten better at it.

I think when I was young I did not understand that the purpose of writing was to sway people and persuade them to think certain things. I think it was just that I was reading for entertainment and not attempting to learn that embedded me with the mindset that there was no real persuasion in writing. I never thought that there was no persuasion at all, I just did not think that there was persuasion. I did not think about it when I was that young. That idea though, started to develop as I grew up. Yet it may be true that there is persuasion in writing, it is not purely persuasion. Some writing is artistic. This, I always understood.

Since there is so much comedy, it can’t all go away. Even if a comedian gets cancelled here and there, comedy in an art form prevails in some way or another. In other words, maybe some comedy could go away, but not all of it. I hope, for the sake of the art form, that comedy as a whole prevails so that more funny people have the jobs they want, ideally those people find the jobs in comedy. So now we are not worried about the comedy going away. One reason comedy can’t very completely go away is because there are so many funny things in the world. And we see this in the variety of different things that get humorous indications near them online and even in person. The ‘variety’ being the key idea, so many different things.

We see many comedians have formed their own style within comedy. For instance, some styles are things like dark humor, storytelling, misdirection, and a number of things that fit in with those other ideas. These comedians have honed a craft. That sounds cliche, I know, but not all of this can be done easily. Some of these comedians are practically born to tell the jokes they tell. Not because god demanded them to, but because they genuinely found their niche. These comedians are smart too. They could have found themselves a job doing anything else, but they CHOSE comedy because comedy is precious to the world.

One way in which comedy is precious is that it gets people together and they have a common ground to live and think within for a specific amount of time. This explanation of standup comedy may sound like a dumbed down and kind of ridiculous version of just going to the show, but both are true. This is good and it is important for mental health on top of that.

I heard of a story from Jimmy Carr which is about how he talked to someone and found out that someone was going to kill themselves and then laughed so hard at one of his jokes that he decided not to kill herself, which is exactly how the story goes. This is just one of many examples that show just how valuable standup comedy is. Not because it is inherently meant to be a lifesaver, but just because it improves people’s lives on a day to day basis in many ways that can even be so minor. A laugh here and there can boost mood and happy neurotransmitters and all that.

As someone like myself who studies psychology mainly, and does writing on the side, I find so many different psychological ideas hidden in the writing process, but also in the performative process. If you are perceptive enough you might find them too. The next essay might be about that so think ahead.

At first when you watch this you are thinking, jeez this is really basic for the horror genre, and then the whole plot escalates into the supernatural and you are wondering why can’t it just be so simple. The supernatural is expected given that it is a King story. A lot of the weird and creepy things that you can expect in the supernatural realm occur and reoccur in this movie.

The weirdness of this movie is said by me to be relatively unmatched. There are points in which you might think, what the fuck is this? or I hope that’s not real. Certainly, in this earthly realm, you don’t see this stuff day to day. But we all know this is just a movie so we can all relax.

You start thinking a lot about partway through this movie, What could possibly happen next? Having this idea in your head – though it might sound confusing – is actually a good thing because you are wondering about what happens within the universe and when you do that you start to reach psychologically to the next idea. Reaching psychologically is when you start to think ahead and extend your psyche to the subsequent piece of knowledge. This is good to do in a movie watching setting because it allows your mind to understand the creativity of the art of the movie displayed in front of you.

What leaves you on the edge of your seat is not just the supernatural fucking up of the universe but the reality of plot that is threaded through the supernatural. Of course, the laws of physics and chemistry and science exist regardless of if Stephen King wrote the book or not, but some things become circumvented within the fiction of the story. To this, we allow our minds to live within that creativity. This wonder about the unknown leaves us on the edge of our seats, waiting to find out what happens next.

On the downside, some of the scenes or sequences or whatever were completely boring. On numerous occasions the main character (Mike Noonan) went on a run, and I found those scenes to be sleep inducing. But hey, who cares about a couple of bad scenes when the movie as a whole was actually quite good.

Some things about the movie were just great. Imagine being in your girlfriend’s house when you two are hugging and she gets shot through the window, then you leave the house and chase down the guy who shot her and beat him up. Great story idea. Of course, that would be a rough real life event and a sad death, but we see that hardness in the character. It was so obviously meant to be cinematic that I never felt wrong about it. Well written.

On another occasion, a woman was killed in the woods. I realized at that moment that even if something is not supernatural, the writer still has a way of making it seem really creepy and messed up and this makes the story so real to some people. This supports the thread of reality in the dose of the supernatural. Even if the real elements in the story did not actually happen, in a way the real ideas are real things that can happen. This is in a sense meta - real. It is a real takeaway from a non real thing.

In conclusion, even though I am not here to sell you this movie, I am telling you to watch this movie. It is so fucking weird.

As a good standup comedian gets on stage, I can sense the difference in overall poise that they have in influencing the crowd compared to a failing comedian or even a pretty good amateur comedian. Sometimes this effect is apparent even before they have opened their mouths to speak, or in some cases, they yell. This effect is because of a few different things. When evaluating the effect a standup comedian has on a crowd, consider their career, their reputation and other common sense things that affect crowds.

Now we are past the point where they have stepped on stage and it is time for them to go into their material. The literal material itself is not something that we are going to talk about, but rather the vibes we get from the material is what I like to think about. Sometimes the vibes are rather whimsical and sometimes it is gruesome, but no matter what it becomes something that is considered funny. There was a time in my life when my current favorite comedian (Louis CK) was considered by myself to be “too gruesome” to listen to. Oh how much I have changed. I have now accelerated past that and have listened to all of his specials and I even bought his book, which I admit I have neglected to read past the first chapter. But nonetheless, the vibes are something to base this take from.

Something I learned about standup comedy, which was a key takeaway from the show Kill Tony, is that comedy is not always all about the big guys. For context, the show Kill Tony takes amateur comedians and gives them the chance to make it big. In this way, they are supporting the people who are talented at the craft of comedy, but still sit lower on the totem pole of comedy. The bad part of the show is that sometimes these amateur comedians flop pretty hard and it is embarrassing, but occasionally they find a real go-getter that proves himself and accelerates his or her career. In fact, that happens more often than it may seem like it would.

I started this essay by talking about how comedy contains a lot of potty and bullshit jokes. And so I just wanted to add that comedy can really be about anything. As Ricky Gervais said (I paraphrase him), comedy is something that tickles the mind. If we assume that this is the only criteria for standup comedy, then comedy can really be anything, as long as it is a unique take on life that so called, tickles the brain. This must be in part why the standup comedy exists so successfully, because everyone, on some level, has had something strange happen to them. This world is strange. Everyone has a story. Granted, some people are better at telling stories than others, but the interpretation of the story is so real and understood by even people on the outskirts of life.

Good standup comedy does the unthinkable, it connects people from all over the place. That is just one characteristic of good standup comedy. Of course there are many good characteristics of standup comedy and of course, many forms of life can embody these characteristics, but laughing is universal.

There is something inherently embarrassing and revealing about standup comedy. You are essentially sharing the ridiculous thoughts you have, not in a smooth toned conversation, but in a revealing manner on stage in front of people you might not know. Everyone knows this, but no one seems to think about it as it were. People just take the idea of standup comedy for granted as it seems to be.

As it were, I was not the only bad standup comedian at my random lounges that I attended. I saw with my own eyes, people that were so committed to the act of standup comedy that they were really trying very hard and received nothing in return. Sometimes they did not even receive an ounce of laughter. Laughter being the primordial being of comedy. In a nutshell, some bad comedians try really hard and still no one laughs at their jokes.

What does it take to be a bad comedian? The TV show that won an Emmy award called Baby Reindeer followed a failing comedian as he tried to make people laugh while being stalked. Forget about the fact that he was being stalked that does not really have anything to do with this. And surprisingly, it takes a lot to be even a bad comedian. That is just how the show was formatted, but does the show reflect real life? The show, in my experience, does reflect real life. So why are these people so obsessed with comedy in spite of their lack of success? Well, there is something addicting about the rush of being on stage. This is true. When I say addicting, I do not mean strongly addicting like the way a drug is addicting, I simply mean that there is a rush and thrill to being on stage that sticks with people after the experience.

This thrill pushes people past their common comfort zone and has them sticking to experiences that would otherwise be uncomfortable and unnecessary. This is the reason bad standup comedy exists.

You might think that naturally, bad standup comedy would fade away due to the natural selection of talent. Actually that is wrong, bad standup comedians, such as myself, keep going due to all sorts of personal reasons that are difficult to understand. Overall it is just a fun thing to do. That stands for standup comedy in general. Not for bad standup comedy specifically.

The truth is, being bad at standup comedy is like being bad at anything else. Until you practice it and learn how to do it correctly, you are not going to be any good at it, regardless of if you find it fun and fulfilling to do. This is a truth about mastering a subject that need not be questioned. Nobody can truly walk into something unpracticed and make noise. They must be practiced in order to accomplish and maintain some level of success in this world.

If you want to get good at standup comedy, study jokes, listen and learn from the best, that is truly the only advice I have. There is no secret.

Even in terms of very specific margins, for instance a one page reflection about writing, which I have done several of, you find completely different things in each of them. This is important to note, but for what reason? In living through the writing and discovery process, it is necessary to go through the journey of doing real life research on an idea that you so desire to have seen be written on paper and shown to the world.

Once this pre-writing process has been completed, yeah you guessed it, it is time to write. Boring. But even though this process is boring, it goes from the relative 0, or starting point to a relative 100 percent effort, or maximal effort, surprisingly quickly. When writing, I find the starting 0 point to be relatively normal and simple, and then the ideas become large in my mind and the effect of the communication of those ideas becomes as if they are a drug.

From here, I find the relative use of the information to be at a maximal effect. In great detail and resolution.

As Steven King says, I will paraphrase the quote because I don’t completely remember it. But I will paraphrase this of what he said, he basically said, allow yourself to be entranced by your own writing as you are writing it.

That is honestly a great piece of writing advice not just because it helps people write better, but because it is true about any obsession in life. Obsessions are a key to productivity in life. If you allow yourself to become obsessed by something you are allowing your mind to negate all friction that is in front of and keeping you from the main goal. How easy to understand.

So great that writing can be a zero to one hundred like experience. That is great and all, but is writing always like this? Writing is hard enough that sometimes it can be slow. If that is true, and there is disparity in the trajectory of your writing (example: sometimes it can be a 0-50-70-90-100 experience instead of 0-100 exactly) then how can I manipulate my writing experience so that I reach the writing goldilocks zone, in which I do not progress to fast, nor bore myself by writing too slow, but progress at just the right trajectory.

Everyone might have a different writing goldilocks zone, Stephen King’s might involve reaching light speed and whatever while yours might be nothing all that great.

Science tells us that when our body is pushed to a relative limit we can have impending results on the mind. That can mean encountering something as great as navy seal hell week or as mild as entering a sauna for an extended period of time. Both can do great things for the mind, as well as allow the mind to enter some serious mental stages. It is not just the active aspect of doing a thing, it is the negative aspect of doing something, which can be something like boredom or sleep deprivation. Boredom and sleep deprivation can over long time spans push the mind to a limit it was not prepared to confront.

So, the mind is pushed to a limit if or when the body is pressed to a limit. That is the conclusion of the previous paragraph. How great is that to know? That helps so the next time you are working out you know not to destroy your body because the destruction of your mind will follow.

To form a counter argument for this, you could cite that “whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” This could mean that once you are done destroying your body and mind, they both recover and you end up stronger than you were before. Though, if you want to become stronger, you can actually do that in a better way. You can moderate your progress so your mind and body are growing in concordance with how they should be growing. No matter what, the process of getting stronger is hard, and thus is going to be a burden in some way or another. This is like the process of bettering yourself. When you better yourself, you become a new person. This newness, in some ways, will contradict some of your oldness about you. Overcoming this contradiction will be hard.

From this, an existential crisis can emerge. I am not asking for an existential crisis. You can’t administer those. Though that would be funny if you could.

Talking from experience: this one time I found myself in Iceland in a sauna on a farm. Yes, you heard that right. After I exited the sauna, I found myself in a miniature existential crisis. This was not harmful for my mind in the long run, but rather it was simply a confused state of mind. My body had just been pushed to a limit. Being the heat of the sauna. And my mind was following what it thought it should be doing, trying to find a way out. Because the mind did not know that the sauna effort was supposed to be healthy. I found myself thinking of leaving and then not leaving on a dozen accounts. And then staying for about twenty minutes and talking to a few strangers. In the sauna my mind went crazy, and I kind of liked it, all knowing that there was no real harm being done, if anything this was healthy. Once I left the sauna I sat down on a bench and recuperated. This served to undo the effects of the existential crisis, or at least the feeling of one.

Everyone before becoming professional was unprofessional at the same thing that they became professional at. This is weird to think about. When I think about Lebron James, I think about how he is one of the greatest basketball players that has ever lived. I never thought about him as an immature little kid in his early days of playing basketball. That aspect tends to go right over our heads. This is because we don’t admire this about people. We don’t care for the bad things that come up in their lives, we filter them out, we wait for the good things then we talk about that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are always bad and extreme things that get reported on. Not everything about life is all fairies and rainbows or however the saying goes. There are shootings, there are genocides, there are wars, there are all sorts of things that go against standard moral codes. But we don’t think about these things all of the time, because if we did we would be different people, our mental health’s would be different, or psyche’s would be different, our interests would be different and so forth. This goes to show that the bad things that happen in ours and other’s lives can shape them, even if it makes them a great person in the long run.

Informal writing is fun. Informal writing is fun because when we do it, it becomes like an activity as opposed to a strict and structured process, which is as opposed to formal writing which IS strict and structured. Great logic that is.

When I write, I find myself in a structured form of thought that leads from one idea to the next idea in a logical manner. This is the penultimate test of human thought – writing. If you think about something, you have no real proof that it can be materialized until you try one of two things: verbally articulating it, or writing it down. Or if you are smart you will try both of them. One of these two things can actually prove your idea. How much better is that concept of proving an idea than just thinking about it. Great success.

That all sounds funny, but in all seriousness, why write fiction? Everyone knows this cliche but I will state it anyway that in works of fiction real things still exist. Whether it be thematic, or religious, or a fanciful application of a truth to something unreal, we find it all fake in the end anyways, even if there are still glimmers of truth.

Since I don’t want to beat this cliche into the ground, I am going to move on to another point. What about fiction anyways? Like who reads it? Well, I think it is geared towards people that look for an escape from reading simple shit about people that lived a long time ago. Those are really the two options for readers, simple fiction or biographies about President Polk. So read fiction to escape, got it. Though in a weird contradictory way, the escape is an escape that exists within your own mind. So really, you are actually just going deeper into your own head, which sounds like the opposite of escaping. Except, the information allowing you to do this is fake information which makes the mental trip less purposeful and stressful, therefore it still constitutes an escape.

Some good fiction writers are people like Kurt Vonnegut and Steven King who really understand what it takes to set the scene for something that requires the imagination to build. In setting the scene you now know what is going on in the situation provided by the text. Who the characters are, where they are, when they are, and maybe if you are perceptive, what is going to happen.

This is all great for the notion of literacy. I am of the opinion that people learn how to read and talk and act by reading and talking and acting. All acts of literacy.

Immediately as soon as we find out instantly that Gregor Samsa has been woken up as a cockroach, the reaction in the psychology of the reader is of embarrassment. I found myself embarrassed for the thing that is now a creature. Of course, if I were in the characters shoes, I would find myself embarrassed for myself, or who even could possibly know what that scenario would be like. The idea of the premise is in and of itself a thought experiment. You could pose the question, what if this happened to me? What would happen? Are the events that transpired in the book relevant to what I think would happen? I neglect to answer this thought experiment because it is not completely realistic. Which makes the book what? It makes the book an absurdist fiction, some may think it is more than just that.

This story is unique in its own right for various reasons. So it is a story in which not a lot of interesting details are revealed or plot points unfold for the main character, who is a cockroach the entire time. A few things happen to the family as they deal with Gregor who is now a cockroach and as they live out their daily lives. A few other things happen with whoever else they interact with, but as for the main subject of our story, he is crippling in bed and crawling the room, walls, and ceiling as a cockroach. This is the bulk of the story. Worrying. Gregor worries about his whole life passing by as he involuntarily spends time as a cockroach. This is the main sub - cause of his existential crisis.

If one really examines the text and the situation that Gregor Samsa is in throughout the story, you may find more reasons to suspect he lives in an existential crisis. In fact, most of the text is him going through his fucked up days as a cockroach. At some point he becomes hopeless, he does not continue to lose his mind because he has nothing to hold onto, his mind has nothing to lose.

At some point I started to wonder what the point even was. I was basically reading a guy trying to calculate how to get out of bed in the morning, and this was only a struggle due to being a cockroach, something he did not choose to be. This all seemed so silly, not just for Gregor Samsa, but for me as a reader. It felt silly because I was not quite sure what I was reading. I was reading something so bizarre that my mind was not prepared by any real life previously known information. It was as if I was making the story up to myself as I was reading it in order to communicate the story to myself so I could understand it further. This all seemed insane. At some times it sounded like a drunk rant or rather like trying to follow the thoughts of a smart person on DMT. This is not advised, this is simply a thought experiment. This itself might sound insane, but that is because the story is insane, not because I am insane.

Nevertheless, the point was this: sometimes people in the real world get seemingly spontaneously thrown into a very real and very confusing situation that they simply have to deal with, and depending on how this situation plays out, that person may end up in a terrible spot. Not necessarily as a cockroach, but just generally a terrible spot. This is, in my opinion, the practical application to the story.