Flexing (aka “bone breaking”) is a fusion street dance style that incorporates contortion with various other styles. The dance group in the video is the NextLevel Squad, and the music is by B’zwax. It was filmed by Yak Films, who have done hundreds of urban dance videos.
(via Boing Boing, thanks to Trevor)
Top 5 Most Common Regrets of the Dying
The Westboro Baptist Church is (Probably Not) a Scam
Technoccult Interview: Douglas Rushkoff On Kicking the Consensus Reality Habit
Trailer for Cronenberg’s Movie on Freud and Jung
A Bitcoin-based E-Bay for Illegal Drugs
Top 10 People to Follow on Twitter
Selections from The Dream Manual Artist Michael Skrtic – Technoccult Interview
N-Back Training Exercise Still Holding Up in Tests
Free Online Artificial Intelligence Course from Stanford
Supergods, Grant Morrison’s Book on Super Heroes, Gets a Cover
John Plotz writes for The New York Times:
By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself, or do a little charity work. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?
This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck.
New York Times: Their Noonday Demons, and Ours
(via Adam Gurri)
Acedia was also considered a precursor to the deadly sin of sloth.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, apparently fed up with not being able to raise funds from traditional sources, is appealing directly to fans to raise money for his next film, the autobiographical Danza De La Realidad (“The Dance of Reality”). Here’s the Google translate of the official site:
We invite you to participate in financing the film “The Dance of Reality,” directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean artist and director.
With your donations we can make this project real. The people involved will have their name printed on the film. Donations totaling more than 100 USD will receive a certificate of ownership of an exclusive DVD of the movie version.
You can donate here.
(via Twitch film)
I might be courting a SOPA charge by linking to this, but someone’s made the entirety of the defunct Grey Lodge Occult Review available for download.
Psychedelic Heroin: Grey Lodge Archives
The rest of the site is worth poking around in as well. For example, here’s a collection of spoken word snippets from various thinkers that Technoccult readers may be familiar with.
Hump Jones Interview by Rev.R4D4
Justin Boland, aka Hump Jones and about a bazillion other aliases, was recently interviewed by Rev. R4D4 for The Thermonuclear Bar on KZSU Stanford. You might know Justin from his sites Brainsturbator and Skilluminati, his contributions here at Technoccult or from his various hip hop projects on World Around Records.
Mike Lynch, a private detective hired for an Italian documentary on Titor, suggests that Haber’s brother, John Rick Haber, is Titor. John Rick Haber is a computer scientist who would have known about the IBM 5100 and Unix 2038 problem, with a post office box application later linking John Rick Haber with the John Titor Foundation. Lynch believes John Rick Haber to have the computer knowledge and wit to perpetrate the Titor hoax.
i09: The Man Who Told the Internet He’d Come from the Future
David McRaney writes:
The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
If you pay people to complete puzzles instead of paying them for being smart, they lose interest in the game. If you pay children to draw, fun becomes work. Payment on top of compliments and other praise and feeling good about personal achievement are powerful motivators, but only if they are unexpected. Only then can you continue to tell the story that keeps you going; only then can you still explain your motivation as coming from within.
Consider the story you tell yourself about why you do what you do for a living. How vulnerable is that tale to these effects?
You Are Not So Smart: The Overjustification Effect
Interesting stuff. I wonder if this is part of why self-employed people are happier even though self-employment is far more stressful than working for hire?
(Photo by Bo Nielsen)
A long range surveillance drone developed by the Moran Office of Maritime and Port Security
The Sea Shepherd crew has intercepted the Japanese whaling fleet on Christmas Day, a thousand miles north of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
The Sea Shepherd ship, Steve Irwin, deployed a drone to successfully locate and photograph the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru on December 24th. Once the pursuit began, three Japanese harpoon/security ships moved in on the Steve Irwin to shield the Nisshin Maru to allow it to escape.
This time however the Japanese tactic of tailing the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker will not work because the drones, one on the Steve Irwin and the other on the Bob Barker, can track and follow the Nisshin Maru and can relay the positions back to the Sea Shepherd ships.
Sea Shepherd: Sea Shepherd Intercepts the Japanese Whaling Fleet with Drones
A Parrot AR drone, which is what Occupy Wall Street is using.
Also, Occupy Wall Street acquired a surveillance drone to monitor police activities.
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