13 Tricks to Motivate Yourself

The other day I started to make a link to the original post of this on lifehack, but someone else has kindly made it into a scribd document:

Mystery

Speaking of Mystery, Jezebel has an amusing interview with the guy. I'm not a student of speed seduction (I much prefer the slow kind), and I haven't read The Game but I'd agree with this statement:

That's what this whole pick-up thing has been about. It's not about trying to pick up a girl so you can get laid. It's about building trust in someone, whether it's a sushi meal or an orgasm, at the same time life is just about experience.

In other words, and I think a lot of men may have a misconception about this (most women, though, I believe get it, at least subconsciously), is that the art of the pick-up has nothing to do with controlling or changing women, it's about imbibing the lives of the shy dweebs drawn to this stuff with just a little bit of goddamn passion and adventure and maybe making contact, however briefly, with another person.

Although, I admit that hat has got to go.

David Jacobs

This student newspaper has an interesting (if rough) interview with UFO and alien abduction researcher David Jacobs.

Here's Jacobs on the right and wrong ways to hypnotize an alien abductee:

David Jacobs: Let me just say that everybody in hypnosis, in abduction hypnosis, is an amateur. There are no professionals. My colleague Budd Hopkins and I are as close to professionals as you can get, and we're not professionals. We have trained hypnotists and psychologists and psychiatrists how to do hypnosis for abduction, because everybody can do hypnosis. You can do hypnosis. It takes place in the person you are hypnotizing' mind. If they want to be hypnotized, they will, and what you say can be skilled, can be unskilled, but whatever it is, you can still hypnotize. If they want to be.

Interviewer: Right. Is it like they show on TV, with the laying down, and the calm soothing voice, and the pocket watch going back and forth?

David Jacobs: No, that they don't do. But it's usually just relaxation techniques. But the fact is that, people tend to say things that are not true in hypnosis, all the time. And you've got to be very careful. It took me a long time...it didn't take me a long time to learn that, it took me a long time to separate out the wheat from the chaff. There are ways to do that. A competent hypnotist will do things like ask purposefully misleading questions that sound right, but aren't, things that we've never seen in the abduction phenomenon. And ask that question in a leading way, to see if they...

Interviewer: "Oh, so there's a gorilla standing in the corner of the room, what's he doing?"

David Jacobs: Or say something like, well, you know, people have reported that there's always an alien dressed as a gorilla that stands in the middle of the room, in every abduction we see that gorilla. What's he doing?

interviewer: And if the guy says, no, there's no gorilla there, that lends credence to what he is saying?

David Jacobs: Yeah, exactly, if they're suggestive. And if they say, yes, that gorilla is there, everything that they say afterwards, you have to be either disbelief or you have to be super careful with. Because they just said yes to something that was not true. 99.9% of the time, they say no, I don't see any guy in a gorilla suit. Then you ask things like, as you're laying on the table and you look up, can you see where the ceiling meets the walls, at the corner, something like that. And they'll say, no, it's curved, there's no corner. That's a direct misleading question, and I am doing it for a reason. There's a lot of them. There's a million of them that we can ask. If they say something I've never heard before, I put it on the back burner and wait for confirmation...

Dr. Jacobs' site, The International Center for Abduction Research, can be found here.

Archives of American Psychology

Boing Boing
has this link to a fascinating article in the New York Times about the Archives of American Psychology in Akron.

Pictured here: the Skinner Aircrib. Buy one today!

Derren Brown's Magicians' Products

Derren Brown is one of my favorite contemporary magicians. I find him a little more palatable than those other phenoms, David Blaine, and Criss Angel, who are both very talented, but who, nevertheless, can get a little cheesy.

Brown's website contains a not-so exclusive 'Magicians Only' section where, after answering a question, you may purchase a video or Mr. Brown's two books, Pure Effect and Absolute Magic.
Both books are rare and highly collectible (they don't have ISBNs).

I'm not going to tell you the answer to the question (although it's as easy to a magician as a burger is to a chef), but some of you may be interested in ordering his books. I was bidding on one on ebay earlier this year and the auction was shut down, I assume by Brown's lawyers. The links above are those provided by Mr. Brown's site.