Category: Rants

The incredible power of (conscious) Dance

First I will give you the very simple recipe:

1 – Rhythm music for 30 minutes at least, 1 hour or more recommended.
2 – Total silence besides the music, no talking, no distractions (no drinking, no smoking, no interaction with friends or other people besides movement). NO PHONES.
3 – Focus on the music. Focus on the rhythm. Move freely and let the music guide you.
4 – Dance bare foot (optional) and with other souls around you doing the same (highly recommended).
5 – Again NO F TALKING. God is in the dance.

Many moons ago, maybe fate, maybe serendipity, who knows? I discovered this by complete accident. I can tell you that self discovery night passed like a bullet train and felt like pure bliss. And boom… this so simple experience had a profound spiritual positive effect on me. Of happiness, of connection, of grounding.

This conscious dance thing is so simple, yet most people will carry on with life without ever actually trying it. Some may say: “but I go out at night many times to bars and discos!” Sure, but every single time you get distracted, with interruptions, to grab a drink, to socialize with your friends, to look at your phone, to smoke, by some strangers fainted conversations, by whatever.

and in this time of age that more and more anti-depressants are consumed, yet people are sadder and sadder,

So, my invitation is just to try it out, for sure i t will be beneficial to your well being. And if you are stressed out, unhappy or depressed, then please I make you a deep call to action, because this has an incredible power, the power of healing. And in this time of age with anti-depressants consumption almost tripling in the last 20 years12, yet people feeling sadder. Maybe, you know just maybe, the answer is not more pills and psychologists..

Search for conscious dance online (google, instagram, facebook) and for sure you will find groups around you. Some more guided, some less guided, some more party mood, some more formal mood, but at the core all are following the same recipe above.

The same recipe followed since ancient times by generations of dancers from different cultures all around the world:

European Shamanism, Greek Anastenaria, Turkish Sufi whirling, Cuba Santeria, Brazilian Candomblé, Caribbean Shaktism, Moroccan Gnawa, India/Western Psytrance Raves, the San from the Kalahari desert of Namibia and Yoruba of Nigeria, California 5Rythms and Ecstatic Dance movement, the Hadra ritual danced by Moroccan women, Benin’s Fon, Korea Kut ritual etc, etc, etc….

Sign in, pick yourself up and go. In the worst case you loose a couple of hours and a bit of coin, in the best case it will change your life for the better.

  1. https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/09/09/europes-mental-health-crisis-in-data-which-country-uses-the-most-antidepressants ↩︎
  2. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/antidepressant-use-by-country ↩︎

Warning – Don’t touch Wagerr.com

In my mind there is no doubt the future of betting is on the blockchain. Anonymous, transparent, fully verifiable, trustless, without banks or governments interference.

As an investor I’m doing my homework, testing and benchmarking several crypto betting projects, and sure enough one of them is wagerr.com the “private, no limits sports book”. Brainchild of David Mah, it has some intriguing tokenomics and value coupling, but yet some red flags (very few updates in GitHub probably the biggest red flag of them all).

In the benchmarking process I’ve come across with the capital sin for a betting project, wagerr.com doesn’t conform to the events outcome. So, you can bet in a sport event and even if you predicted correctly there is the possibility it doesn’t pay the winnings.

I staked 10000 wgr at 1.25 odds on Islam Makhachev win vs Alexander Volkanovski. It was a successful prediction, as indeed Makhachev won the fight, yet the wagerr network deemed this as an Event Refund ?? You can actually check this in the wagerr blockchain explorer:

https://explorer.wagerr.com/#/bet/event/121018

Other big no no of wagerr.com is the long time it takes to settle a bet, it can be days, weeks or some times simply indefinitely, your bet funds get locked and you neither can’t cash in or use them for other bet.

Here it is an event, UFC 283 where I placed a bet on Gilbert Burns vs Neil Magny and as by this writing (one and half month later the event took place it’s still not settled), still waiting for oracle, so the funds of that bet are locked and can’t access or use them. Again we can confirm this in the blockchain explorer:

https://explorer.wagerr.com/#/bet/event/120014

UPDATE:
this has now actually been payed, curiously 3 days after publishing this post, so an event on the 21 January, was payed after 46 days, with the funds retained on chain all this time.

There are other problems identified with wagerr, but these are horrible and total showstoppers. I have used the traditional support channels, discord server and twitter, to get help about these with no success.

Expect in the following weeks a post with the crypto bet projects wild wild west benchmark and concluding recommendations. But, my simple advise for both bettors and investors is: DON’T TOUCH WAGERR.COM, not even with a 10 meter pole, you will only loose.

UPDATE 2:
This project as gone belly up. Coin has lost 99% of value

wagerr.com domain is listed for sale

Hope this warning was useful to someone dodge this bullet.

Best 3 products

In the last couple of years the best 3 products that I bought (and I do buy some stuff…):

Xiaomi A1, Xiaomi Robot Vacuum, Xiami Band 3.

There is clearly a pattern here… and all of each are great products when compared to the best brands, not the usual chinese low quality crap. I guess this is a trend that will only grow bigger.

Go socialism (or communism, or new democracy, or savage capitalism, or what the fuck the chinese are running on) !

Body image – cultural brainwashing

Look at this picture:

gijoefigureThis is the “evolution” of the GI Joe action figure from the sixties to the latest iteration. From an average Joe, to a well toned Joe, passing trough the bodybuilder Joe and ending in the extreme Joe.

This was all good if it was a all about the toy, the problem is that the toy is a reflection of the society. And is not only the toy, but also in movies, advertising, sport and general media. There you go, the collective cultural brainwashing of a dis-formed body image as a society imposed goal.

I say dis-formed because (for the 99,99% of us mortals) it’s either unachievable, or achievable trough unhealthy options, long term unsustainable, and just non functional bulky body. In the information age, is rather sad to see most of young guys at the gym training hard for bulk and mass, not for health or functional gains.

Now you mix this set of mind, with the fast pace “I want it now”, there is no time to loose, Internet age, modern world. A time that hard work, wait for results, seed, feed and wait to grow are all old-school. And is the perfect formula for substance abuse. First things first, protein supplements in form of powders, bars, gels. This is a $11.5 billion (USA data only) industry in 2012 and could well deserve a post on its own… then you figure out that the big guy holding the can is using other stuff: steroids, human growth hormone, insulin, etc…

Come on, why not do it? Most of the cool guys at Fast and Furious do it, Rocky did it, Conan did it and was California governor, and even a couple of the big guys at the gym do it. And they look somehow alike GI Joe extreme, and it’s cool, and big is better, and they get the anorexic girls, and they are popular, and, and, and…

At the information age, smart and well educated persons are willing to risk their health in the name of this cultural imposed body image model. In my opinion (well, this is my blog) is just time to break this non-sense, to start an awareness campaign, kind of the anti anorectic girl campaign in the 90s. To promote an healthy and achievable body image and stop this collective brainwash backed up by the supplements industry.

Personally i choose life. I’m more and more into crossfit exercises, functional lifts with compound movements, own body weight exercises, catabolic anabolic balance, deep breathing and relaxing. Will trade, anytime, anywhere the superficial muscle grow for long term balanced core strength.

The not so quiet revolution

How many times did i hear… the “ahh…good old times” rant. Sure, sometimes the world as we know it now is complicated, sometimes unfair and even cruel and bad. But if you stop and zoom out a bit, like 20 years (don’t need to go all the way to the dark ages), one realizes the leap forward. And in technology the leap is nothing short of massive – thank you Mr. Moore. I’m really glad and lucky to be apart of this.

You can get a Raspberry PI a fully functional (and power efficient) computer running Linux for about 30€. You can get a TV stick running Android OS for about 50€ (there are Linux distributions for this kind of device). Linux is free, BSD OS family is free. Most of the SDKs are free. MySQL is free (as other fully capable Relational Database Systems). Many compilers are free. Open Office is free. Heck, even Adobe CS2 can be freely downloaded from Adobe…

Transit Price Drops

Also the price of bandwidth and networking has gone South over the years as the speed and quality has gone North. I remember to dial-up with a 28.8 kbps modem, downloading a single mp3 file was task for one hour, loading a simple webpage was eternity, etc… and in the end of the month the phone bill was obscene… Nowadays, i can download pristine high resolution full movie (in Itunes or other payed service of course) in less than an hour for a fraction of the cost that the mp3.

Documentation, tutorials, examples, e-books, howto’s all over the place. Information (for all levels) is freely available to anyone, you just need time and the right mindset, to read, test and educate yourself about any technology that you want to learn.

So in the web business capital is not the main factor, it’s knowledge and labor. The funny thing is that capitalism did this, an industry that moves billions of dollars and for start capital is not the most important factor (by far). Some kid can (and probably is) somewhere in some room build the next big website or mobile app costing him (or her) nothing more than time.

There is a bright future in this model. You don’t need some guys in suits that are sitting on top of the money to believe in your idea. You are the only one that needs to believe (can you picture the scared faces?) and learn, learn, learn:

Personally i wish i had much more time and piece of mind to learn and thinker with new technologies and projects because now is the time.