What Is ‘Aura Farming'? This Tween Will Show You.
The video has been overlaid with various songs, imitated by countless creators, commented on by celebrities and, most recently, led to Dika being named a tourism ambassador for Riau, the province in Indonesia where he lives.
While many of the videos featuring Dika have amassed millions of views around the world, his popularity in the United States — and the explosion in use of the phrase 'aura farming' — has come despite relatively little information being available about him or the race he competes in.
What is aura farming?
According to the website Know Your Meme, the expression was popularized in 2024 largely in reference to anime characters and various celebrities. It generally refers to someone who does something repetitive to look cool and build, as Gen Alpha would say, aura.
Dika, who seems preternaturally calm on the bow of a thin boat, dressed in black and wearing sunglasses, uses a series of repetitive movements in his dance, making him a perfect fit for the term.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
Man throws darts at world map, visits whichever country he hits: 'Are you crazy?'
A man has made travel an unpredictable adventure by throwing a dart at a map of the world while blindfolded — and visiting whichever country his darts happen to hit. Sorin Mihailovici, 48, a small business entrepreneur, started the journey in 2012 after telling a friend he wanted to "wake up one morning and throw a dart at a map and go there." Mihailovici began by visiting far-flung places like the North Pole, Russia and Indonesia, originally taking annual trips but now traveling to up to 16 destinations a year. The trips were initially funded by his savings and later through partnerships with companies, per SWNS. He doesn't travel to the exact spot where his dart lands, but begins in the country's capital because some nations, such as Uruguay, are too small for precise targeting, said Mihailovici. Mihailovici's favorite countries so far include Iceland, Argentina and Thailand, while Madagascar ranked "hands down" as his least favorite, he said, due to a "misconception" shaped by the animated movie sharing its name and locals who "didn't have the best intentions." Praising Vietnam, Mihailovici, a Canadian, insisted its cuisine is "the best street food I've ever had," and noted it was the cheapest destination that he's traveled to, SWNS reported. Some countries, especially in Scandinavia like Norway and Sweden, and places like Switzerland and the Maldives, can be quite expensive, he pointed out. Mihailovici's travel show, "Travel by Dart," features footage from his trips. He began editing and publishing the clips during the COVID pandemic, eventually selling the concept to a distribution company, as SWNS reported. "While we were at home, I started editing all those materials from every country and created a season of 13 episodes," he said. "Most of the time it's just me on location. I hire a local videographer, film and create episodes for YouTube — and over the years, I've started doing a show for Amazon Prime." Despite the unpredictable nature of his travels, Mihailovici said he isn't afraid of dangerous destinations. He was in Iraq recently, he said. "People said, 'Are you crazy?' Maybe it was not safe, but nothing happened to me. We went to Baghdad and Babylon. It was great. I was eating camel every day," Mihailovici told SWNS. He admitted he was "a little scared" about going to Iraq given the political situation, but was determined to follow through with wherever the dart suggested he go. "It was great. I was eating camel every day." "The idea is to visit the whole world, each and every country by dart," Mihailovici said. "I did all the big ones that are larger on the map," he said. "The smaller ones are hard to hit, and I'm also blindfolded [while throwing the dart], so I can't pinpoint it to a certain continent." Mihailovici said he hopes to continue expanding his travel list. He said Australia and Spain are his next dream destinations, though he admits they're "hard to hit" and plans another dart throw in August, according to SWNS. Among the countries he's traveled to so far are Easter Island, Indonesia, Bermuda, Portugal, Cuba, Thailand, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, Iceland, Greece, Japan, Antarctica, Germany, Vietnam, India, Turkey, South Korea and Yemen, SWNS reported. Mihailovici said hotels sometimes offer gratuities to be featured in his show, per SWNS.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Robot Tries to Bust Dance Moves, Flames Out in Epic Disaster
Braving the dance floor in broad daylight — or even just when the overhead lights are on — frequently does not end well. Your clumsy moves, weird facial expressions, or catastrophic blunders will likely be captured by someone with their phone out, who will then quickly deliver the footage to potentially millions of eyeballs online. On that note, we now report that a robot has eaten dirt after trying to show off some of some dashing choreography — and seemingly had its soul sucked out of its corporeal form in sheer embarrassment. If androids dream of one day becoming Gene Kelly, this one just had those ambitions shattered. The dance floor tragedy was captured in a video that recently went viral on social media, though its original source is unclear. Thankfully, it's a robot, so we don't have to feel bad for laughing at it — because, reader, you will laugh. Note our doomed reveler's oversized clothes and its wide-brimmed hat. The hat was seemingly the robot's mojo; when it falls off, the robot suddenly stops dancing, takes a few hesitating steps like a dazed cartoon character that got walloped over the dome, and boom: ass meets floor. It can happen to anyone. But then the mechanical humanoid then goes completely haywire and starts flailing like a roach flopped on its belly that's also being electrocuted, freaking everyone out in the process. The onlookers gasp. One kid recoils in terror. And of course, laughter eventually emerges. This was one robot that couldn't take failure. "It's feeling real human pain. Unimaginable pain," wrote one commentator. "He'll have the rest of his life to grapple with this," replied another. "It's hell." The robot appears to be a G1 model built by the Chinese robotics company Unitree. They've become popular little companions, at least as far as $16,000 consumer robots go, and are the subject of a growing wave of humorous stunts filmed for social media. They charm with their diminutive, four-foot stature, and impressively human-like gait, and can be pre-programmed to perform whatever wacky stuff you imagine. Earlier this year, Unitree started playing up the G1's dancing prowess after releasing an update that improved their ability to keep moving — and keep their balance — even when interrupted. This was demonstrated in a video shared by the company in which a human rudely keeps whacking a G1 with a broomstick. Unitree also showed that the bot was capable of whipping out kung fu moves. They may be capably agile, a few momentary interruptions of balance notwithstanding; everyone fails. But clearly, the bots have a long way to go in the composure department: another video that recently went viral showed a Unitree G1 suddenly start thrashing so violently that it causes the crane that it's suspended from to crash to the floor. More on robots: Tesla's Optimus Robots Have Reportedly Run Into Severe Trouble Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
3 hours ago
- Fox News
WaPo editorial admits entertainment is destroying society, calls Trump 'a one-person digital diversion'
An opinion article in the Washington Post admitted that society is "choking on screens" and being poisoned by entertainment, but lays blame on President Donald Trump for being part of the problem. "Neil Postman would know better," Ryan Zickgraf, a columnist for UnHerd, whose op-ed was adapted for the Post, wrote in the recent piece entitled, "The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold." The piece highlights the 1985 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman, which talks about the consequences Postman saw when politics and the media became entertainment. "Forty years ago, the cultural critic wrote 'Amusing Ourselves to Death,' a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of algorithm-driven political hysteria," Zickgraf wrote. "Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn't trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell's '1984,' but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World,'' Zickgraf said. "Postman was right. Democracy was in danger of being not overthrown but overentertained." The columnist for UnHerd argued that social media and the like have become what Huxley referred to in his book as the fictional, recreational drug "soma," or the "opiate of the masses," which takes the place of things like alcohol and religion. "If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our version of Huxley's addictive Soma drug comes in the virtual variety: TikTok's infinite scroll, cryptocurrency speculation and content streams designed to blur time and lull us into a flow state," Zickgraf wrote. "Every flick of the thumb offers a micro-hit of novelty, outrage or reward. Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, but we killed God and began worshiping the murder weapon instead." But Zickgraf laid a sizeable amount of blame on Trump, calling him "a one-person digital diversion who doesn't even try to conceal anything: He haphazardly posts to social media war threats and private conversations with world leaders while friends and enemies alike hang on his every word, however nonsensical or contradictory." The 47th president, however, according to Zickgraf, doesn't fully have what it takes to be an "effective dictator" because "he's ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations." If Trump were to decide to become a dictator, Zickgraf speculated, people might not even notice because they would be too distracted by their phones. "To be fair, there's plenty of dissent in the streets, but it's the paper-thin kind that's designed to be shareable online," Zickgraf said. "These protests don't hint at emerging mass movements; they mask the lack of them. The great majority of Jan. 6 protesters weren't trying to stage a coup: Once they breached the U.S. Capitol, they opted to take selfies, not power. Last month, millions took to the streets in 'No Kings' marches that seemed designed to wrest attention from President Attention and little else." Zickgraf says that a sign of hope that he sees are some members of Gen Z who are choosing to "abstain" from the media deluge. He even highlights that some, especially young men, are choosing faiths like Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity for their "ritual." "This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few encouraging signs in a culture otherwise largely anesthetized by its tools," he wrote. "Unlike the millennial generation — which largely absorbed technology as destiny, first in its techno-utopian promises, later in its gigified disappointments — these Gen Z refuseniks are not trying to reform the system. They're walking away from it," Zickgraf added. "That's why the 'No Kings' rallies often look like the world's largest retiree convention. This new group's politics, to the extent that it has any, are not oriented toward revolution or regulation, but toward restraint, retreat and restoration. They want silence. They want limits. And if there is any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet, it might lie with them. We can only hope."
