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The Grand Rapids Lipdub

“This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a “dying city.” We disagreed strongly”. Holy shit. (via)

Pinboard, the service I use to collect links and publish them here, had its server taken in an unrelated FBI raid. It’s working, but still at reduced capacity, so the RSS feeds this site slurps aren’t publishing. If you go to my pinboard page, however, you’ll find everything I’ve been liking this past week.

Elzhi – Halftime Video

God damn. There’s also a video for It Ain’t Hard to Tell.

Conan Mocks Final Cut X

Final Cut Pro X

I haven’t bought it yet, but will at some point. The internets are aflame with upset Final Cut editors – “pros” who see FCPX as a dumbing-down of the program. It brings necessary updates (64-bit, background processing of renders etc.), but eliminates crucial pro workflow features (XML, EDL, tape support, dual monitor support, 3rd party hardware support etc).

Fair enough. But really? Since when do pros update on the first day?

Granted, the fact that it can’t even import old projects is pretty crazy. And the way the Mac App Store works isn’t helping, as people can’t try a demo or anything, so some must have paid $300 just to discover a crucial feature is missing. The obvious answer is that FCP 7 still works great, and the solution for now is to use both, whichever one works best for the project at hand. But Apple screwed up by pulling Final Cut Studio from their stores, making it hard for some to do just that.

I’m very happy with the new direction though. Even though the Final Cut we’ve all known and loved for over a decade brought lots of welcome innovations that Avid is still trying to copy, it was nonetheless based on a tape-to-tape / film editing metaphor. That metaphor needed to get chucked – the whole interface needed to be rethought. Who better to do that than Apple?

LA Noire

At this point, I buy one game a month. That I bought LA Noire this month indicates that I wanted to like it. A few hours in, I was really into it. But now, a few cases from the end, I have no desire to even finish it. What went wrong?

Now that is a mystery I can solve.

LA Noire has a great story. It draws on hard boiled crime fiction both old and new (it owes a particular debt to Ellroy’s Black Dahlia) as well as the filmic corollary film noir. There’s a rich back story having to do with WWII, a string of murders, civic corruption involving the police, and a hard-working yet flawed and unlikeable protagonist. The characters are well-drawn, if not exceptionally detailed. The remarkable motion capture technology, which renders facial expressions with a liveliness not yet seen in games, is to be commended.

On the surface this looks like Grand Theft Noir – free roaming, large city, lots of car travel. But in reality it’s not that sort of game. It’s got one central mechanic that really works: the crime scene investigation mode. It’s a cross between third person and point-and-click adventure game. It’s well-balanced, fun, and most importantly represents something this game is adding to the noir tradition. It’s a reason why this is a game and not a movie.

Unfortunately, the other central mechanic, the interrogation of suspects, is a disaster. I’m not sure exactly why this mode fails so badly. Maybe real human interaction cannot be simulated when one party has only three stock responses to everything. Perhaps the facial animation isn’t quite good enough to pin a mechanic upon. Maybe the acting or writing wasn’t consistent enough, maybe it was but needed a tutorial. Maybe the lack of challenge makes something uninteresting – it’s near impossible to fail this mode, perhaps a tacit admission that the mechanic doesn’t work.

But the game cannot survive a core mechanic not working. The interrogations become glorified cutscenes that take up half the game, the other gameplay modes can’t compensate and the whole thing starts feeling like repetitive drudgework.

I am definitely excited by what LA Noire represents. It’s an adult game in the “real characters, real storytelling” sense rather than the swear words and gore sense. I am excited by the technological advance of real facial animation. I hope for great future things. I just don’t want to play it any more.

Reaction to Game of Thrones S01E09

Warning! Big spoiler if you haven’t seen the episode.

What a show, man. Those of us who like genre fare but also great storytelling have this conundrum, where something moves from “good for fantasy / scifi / anime / whatever” to “just plain good”. I would say Game of Thrones passed that point about half way through the season, but really, it was there all along, but had to spend the first half putting pieces on the board and getting them into position.

Only now am I noticing that one of the main men on this show, David Benioff, wrote The 25th Hour. Okay he also wrote Troy and Wolverine, so there ya go.

E3 rundown

Here’s an encyclopedic, bitter and hilarious summary of all that E3 had to show this year. I am looking forward to Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Bastion. Yeah, I suppose the latest Jenova Chen game and probably Dark Souls (although I haven’t finished its predecessor, even though I liked it).

As for the hardware? I want very much to like the PS Vita, but after what I wrote here, you’ll understand if I’m not too optimistic about its chances. And the new Nintendo Wii U? Looks pretty great, I guess. I mean, it could be. I don’t know. They are so vague with the details that it’s hard to really know, doncha think? At least it’s a reasonably new idea. I know there are no new ideas, but that’s especially true of the video game industry.

The shit going down in Apple land seems a lot more interesting, and a lot of that wasn’t super-new (Lion’s features had already been promoted, and a lot of the iOS improvements are “inspired by” competing mobile OSes). iCloud seems to have an awful lot of small print, so I am waiting for it to get closer so we can resolve its details. But still. Cord-free syncing? I’d punch a Wii U in the face to get that TODAY.

Lucas Strikes Back

Camera Talk

The%20AF100

Man, look at this badboy. Sitting there all pretty-like. Causing drool and wallet problems.

No, I’m not buying one, but I’ll be working on a project with it, which is exciting. I feel a camera phase coming on, as presaged by the photos that have been cropping up here again, which is a side effect of me actually taking photos, after what seemed like a year-long break. What can I say, these things go in cycles.

I was tempted by a lens though, a lovely Olympus 12-60mm f2.8-4. I’ve been looking for a faster zoom, as my camera’s kit lens is nice but slow. This one is a beaut. Here’s a shot I took with it on my camera:

P1050342

Would be nice to have something that wide (24mm equivalent) with a pretty blurry background like that.

The GH2 is out, which should tempt me to upgrade, but I’m more interested in new lenses, as the new body doesn’t seem crazy better.

Quite the Election

Fascinating bit of analysis from John Duffy:

The NDP may be in first place, or pretty darn close to it.

Let me explain. The Nanos research poll, probably the heaviest covered of the campaign, this morning reported national voting intentions of Conservative: 37.8 per cent; NDP: 27.8 per cent; Liberal: 22.9 per cent; BQ: 5.8 per cent; and Green: 4.7 per cent for the period ending April 26. It takes a little arithmetic with this three-day rolling poll, but when you isolate last night’s numbers, you get the NDP in first place with 36.2 per cent; the Conservatives second with 35 per cent; the Liberals with 17.5 per cent, the BQ with 4.4 per cent and Greens with 6.9 per cent.

That’s right. Nanos’s April 26 sample had the NDP in first. This is not definitive; it has a high margin of error; it must be handled with great care. But add to that today’s Forum Research poll, which showed a mere three points separating the Conservatives and the NDP, and it’s pretty clear what is happening. The NDP either has closed, or is close to closing, the gap with the Conservatives.

None of this means that Jack Layton will be our new PM. In fact, as NDP support tends to hurt the Liberals rather than the Tories, there is a risk that a modest NDP surge will hand Harper the majority he has been begging for.

But it certainly does mean we’re having an exciting election, with an uplifting campaign from Layton, desperation from Ignatieff, and delicious fearmongering from Harper and others. At this point I’d expect a bit of a pullback in the NDP surge, with the end result being a Harper minority with the NDP as official opposition, which would most likely spell the end of the road for Ignatieff. But seeing as the weekend will be busy with weddings and hockey and such, who knows.

That all-bets-off feeling sure is fun, isn’t it?

What the World Needs Now is 1500 Words About the iPad

All the things that make a laptop better than a desktop computer are true about the iPad compared to a laptop – it’s lighter, more portable, more personal. And the things that make a laptop worse are mostly true, as well – it’s not as powerful, and there are input and screen size limitations, so it’s not the best way to do processor or screen intensive work.

But at the same time, it has these things it does better, things that computers have never been crazy great at. No one thinks a computer is the best way to look at photos or watch movies. You certainly would never choose it as the best way to read a book. The iPad performs these tasks amazingly. I still prefer my Kindle for books and a big ol’ TV for watching films, but the iPad beats any computer, including a laptop. And you often turn to it because it’s the thing that’s already within arms’ reach.

That’s because of the iPad’s single greatest feature: its battery. 10 hours means I don’t think the battery has ever been dead when I wanted to use it. My previous laptops all got about 2-3 hours when their batteries were still healthy. So you’d have to think about how long you had, where the charger was, etc. The fact that you don’t have to think about that with the iPad means you grab it instead.

When laptops were still relatively rare, and WiFi a new thing, I remember explaining to people why it was a great setup: use your computer from anywhere in the house, to look up stuff on IMDb while watching a flick, catch up on email in bed, heck, watch a movie in your back yard. These are all things I now use the iPad for. A 15-inch laptop seems archaic to me now. I lust after the Air of course, as the biggest downside of the iPad is the lack of a keyboard (no, I’m not saying they should stick one on it, and yes, I’m aware you can use a bluetooth keyboard with it – I have one, and have used it once).

The iPad is the perfect couch computer. It’s nearly the perfect travel computer. At some point in the future, it may be the perfect computer period.

Just a big iPod Touch

I probably don’t have to address this, do I? I also may not be the perfect person to do so because my iPhone is ancient (3G) and totally slow as shit compared to the iPad, so I always choose the pad when it’s available. But I imagine others do this because of the extra screen real estate, which makes it better at anything that displays content or has a fair amount of interface elements.

But running the same OS and all, the phone and pad do have a lot in common. There is this feeling of newness and optimism still. When you turn to these devices and ask them to do something, they’re like, “sure! I mean, I’m just learning how to do that, but here’s some attempts! Is a dollar too much?” Where a PC would say, “that will cost $200, and take you a few weeks to learn.” That’s why the App store is so integral to these things – you go there to see what new things are being tried, each success adding new capabilities to your gadget.

Not everyone who has a smartphone needs a tablet as well. I’ve found that the roles I ask of my devices change a lot. I use the iMac when I want to edit, design, type a lot. The iPhone is great for music, texting, twitter, email notification, and mobile reference. And the iPad…

iPad Apps I use the most

Reeder. It could still be improved upon, but this is about as good as newsreading gets, and makes the iPad my preferred way of reading feeds.

Safari. This is a damn fine web browser, still missing some power features, but it has enough that I’ve never bothered downloading any of the other available browsers. And I’m a real browser enthusiast.

Instapaper. I probably don’t have to explain why this is so good.

Maps. I think the maps app is the best existing interface for dealing with google maps. Pinch-to-zoom just makes it all worthwhile, bro. Google Earth is pretty sweet too.

Plex and Netflix. I have a longer post about Plex in the works, so I won’t go into it here. Anyway, these are the killer apps for portable movie & TV watching.

Remote and VNC Viewer. Lumped together because they are for controlling computers, Remote for iTunes, and VNC for the whole deal. Remote is my preferred way of choosing music.

Kindle. I have an actual Kindle that I use 90% of the time, but I love that the read position is synced to the iPad app so I can use it at night, screen inverted, when my lady is asleep.

Evernote. I’ve been using Evernote for a while and while the service has plenty of downsides, it works very well on the iPad. I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately, and the method that seems to work the best is keeping recipes in evernote, and calling them up on the iPad in the kitchen. That way I can save them from any website, edit them myself, and always get at them from anywhere. There are some slick note-taking apps out there that sync to dropbox and are super full of awesome, but I love the web clipping aspect of evernote and that keeps me using it for general research and writing as well.

Games – it’s a great platform for gaming, but still immature. Here are some I have dug on though: Scrabble, Pinball HD, Osmos, Infinity Blade, Galaxy on Fire 2, Robokill, Plants vs. Zombies, Civ Rev, Supremacy Wars, Strategery, Ascendancy.

Please fix this

The problems with the iPad are all problems with iOS. I do hold out hope that things will improve with time.

Sync. Apple’s solution is so backwards it blows my mind. I am sure they are working to fix it, but it’s still crazy. The iPad should not need a computer to do things for it. Jobs said computers are like trucks, and people still need trucks, but most of the time people buy a car. So imagine you make them own a truck just to tow their car home.

File system. So people never really understood files and file systems, yeah, yeah. Still not a good reason for why I can’t click on an mp3 on the web and download it into my music library. At the very least, why can’t they do for files what they did with photos, and allow you to save into a big catch-all bin?

Lack of hardcore apps. I’m thinking of this in the sense of hardcore games – there are plenty of casual games on iOS, but few hardcore ones (that work well anyway). Likewise there are plenty of casual apps, but few good hardcore ones. Apple itself is just now getting iMovie and GarageBand onto the thing. I am already impatient for Final Cut, Aperture, Ableton Live.

OK, one hardware complaint, but not about Apple – the lack of a good keyboard case. Seems like a no-brainer: a good case with a built in keyboard that makes the iPad into a netbook. Yet I’ve been following all the models released thus far, and they all seem to suck it.

Summation

So that’s where I’m at after eight months of tablet action. I’d say the iPhone has had way more impact on my life, but the iPad has already taken root and has far more potential. It’s already making other things feel obsolete. You ever try and touch a screen that’s totally not a touchscreen? That’s how you know these tablet things are here to stay. And I’m okay with that.

Microworld

Bieber

I expect him to fizzle out any day now. But no, it just gets worse – recently I saw two twentysomething males on the streetcar sporting Bieb hair. (Yeah, twentysomething.)

However, his recent showing at 299 Queen St. drew disappointing crowds. It was because of the weather alert; presumably the parents of the would-be throngs had prioritized blizzard avoidance over temporary satiation of their tweens’ crush glands. The barricades ran crowdless down to Richmond. Pay duty officers stood around, bored. The storm never materialized. It was the opposite image of what was required: what good are your fans if they won’t stand around for hours in a blizzard? Especially a pretend one?

Perhaps that was the moment Bieber began his inevitable substance abuse problem – an exploratory first lungful of delicious hair product.

Portagame

The big lesson of the past generation of games consoles, both portable and non-, is that casual beats hardcore. Simple, low-tech, accessible games will do better than complex, expensive, fancy ones. The DS was the best-selling portable system, and the Wii the best-selling TV-attached one. Both had lower specs than their competitors, but more accessible control systems.

In the portable market, a dedicated games system can no longer position itself as casual. iOS and Android are games platforms in and of themselves, but as games platforms that run on generalized devices such as smartphones and tablets, they are already dominating the casual market. Only the hardcore will spend an extra $200+ on a portable games system when they already have a smartphone. In fact, even the hardcore may be satisfied by iOS. It was significant that EA brought a version of Dead Space to iOS, but not to the DS or PSP¹.

This is not to say Sony and Nintendo’s new machines won’t sell a substantial amount of units. The Kindle, a dedicated reading device for hardcore readers, is still selling well despite the e-book capabilities of the iPad. But the Kindle’s sales are a fraction of that of the generalist device: estimates put it at the low millions over the lifetime of the Kindle, versus 14 million iPads last year. And note that the Kindle starts at $140 now, compared to the iPad’s $500.

The Playstation Suite for Android indicates that Sony realizes what it’s up against and is hedging its bets. The Suite is a games market full of old PSone titles and some new properties that will run on compatible Android handsets. One of those handsets will be a gaming-oriented phone from Sony Ericsson, the Experia Play. The fact that they haven’t announced a price for the NGP, though, which means it’s probably high, makes me worry for Sony’s plans. The 3DS’ $250 price tag is a giant misstep – the DS debuted at $150 in 2004, before the smartphone market took off.

The future may be full of battles like this. A few years ago, people like myself were buying PCs to hook up to their TVs to stream video from home libraries and from services like Netflix. Soon the games consoles added similar features. Now the TVs themselves are getting smart – I’ve been looking for a new TV, and the top-of-the-line units now have Netflix and suchlike built in. How long until they start carrying games stores? How long until Apple opens the AppleTV up to third party applications? It’s just a matter of time.

Well, at least Sony kinda has a leg up in the TV set business.

¹ One article I found estimates Apple sold 120 million iOS games in 2010, compared to 130 million for the DS. And sales of iOS devices are going up dramatically, while sales of DSes and PSPs are going down.

The Detroit Ad

From the Superbowl, via Broken City Lab (despite the fact that I was theoretically watching said Bowl):

Whatcha think? I think it’s too bad the message had to be about luxury and not simply good quality. Hearing comments about luxury mixed in with stuff about Detroit’s troubles is a bit jarring, no? On the flip side, perhaps 40% reality is better than 0%.

Penny Arcade and the Dickwolf Saga

I’ve always loved black humour, and have run up against people taking offense before. So my initial reaction was in support of the comic. If rape jokes are not allowed, are then murder jokes forbidden? And then jokes about old people, men, women, Jews, Asians, etc. etc. Better to live in a world where anything can be made fun of. Humour isn’t something we use to escape from reality. It’s something that should actively criticize reality.

But then, I’ve also been aware that power is an issue with comedy. As with any exercise of power, it’s different to make fun of the powerless vs. the powerful. Context, and nuance, are important. Imagine a Jewish comedian making self-deprecating jokes about Jews. Now imagine an anti-semite making horrific jokes about Jews.

There are a lot of interesting points being made in criticism of the comic, Penny Arcade, and those who defend it. The concept of rape culture figures prominently. Also, the context of gaming is important to understand. I don’t play against online strangers because I do not wish to hear constant rape, fag and n-word talk. And as for the murder comparison, the specific thing the offendees are bringing up is that rape jokes are a trigger, and no murder victims are likely to be triggered by murder jokes. Furthermore, as this astute comment points out, “most conversations about murder trials don’t begin with speculation about whether or not the victim might have faked their own death.”

My dad died recently, and from having spent so much time in nursing homes in the year leading up to his death, I find myself getting prickly when I hear jokes about dementia or even old people in general. But I reserve the right to make jokes about it myself – I still need humour to help cope with big, scary things in my life.

It’s clear at this point that the reaction is worse than the initial incident. This is so common that I’d love to make a larger point about it, but I’m afraid it’s out of scope at the moment. I don’t think I’ve made up my mind which “side” is “right”, and I really hope not to (reducing things to sides and assuming only one is right is the beginning of a whole ball of hurt). That’s perhaps the takeaway point – use things like this as an opportunity to better understand issues from different perspectives, rather than a chance to get angry because of one’s principles. (As I write that I become aware that it is clearly targeted at one group and not the other – the idea of telling a rape victim not to get angry makes me sad.)

I sent this draft to my friend Ÿ and he commented, “it seems like so much of this action on the internet arises from people not being able to see the hurt in other people’s eyes.” We should remember that.

UPDATE This post, summarizing an older version of the “pratfall” timeline, originally stated that speakers had pulled out of PAX. This is incorrect. I’d also like to point out this post from Geek Feminism Blog as a good defence of the original comic.

Oscar Gold

Some people overcome this by engaging with the Oscars purely as a wagering opportunity, and I would have thought I could get behind that. Why not study the ill-formed critical patterns of the unemployed actors in the Academy voting bloc, and grimly profit in your office pool? But once you read this piece by the AV Club’s Noel Murray and Scott Tobias, you’ll have trouble doing so. As Tobias says:

When a film gets deemed “Oscar-worthy,” it’s the furthest thing from critical advocacy. All it means is that a particular film has qualities that Oscar voters traditionally find attractive—a middlebrow sense of grandeur, a message that seems risky without actually being provocative, name stars emoting like crazy, and the potential for at least modest success at the box office. If the [Oscar Prognosticators] have any effect on the process, it’s really to enforce (rather than challenge) the status quo: Instead of doing something good for humanity, like asking voters to consider some movie or performance that really moved them, they’re filtering everything they see for the same “Oscar-worthy” qualities that have made the awards such a useless barometer for cinematic excellence throughout history.

So Oscar Prognosticators (critics and other pundits who obsess over which films will do well at the Oscars) are not just harmless fools who can be ignored. They are diverting attention away from more worthy cinematic product, toward well-made but ultimately forgettable Oscar-bait projects (often before anyone has seen the films). Which in turn leads the producers and distributors of film to concentrate on producing Oscar bait.

Consider the inevitability of The King’s Speech and its 12 nominations this year. The first thing any of us rubes hear is the marketing campaign, which is already crowing about the film’s Oscarworthiness, quotes supplied by the Oscar Prognosticators. We go see it because of this.

Yes, I watched it the other day, despite my aversion to Oscar bait. I watched it perhaps because I enjoy being that crank who will spit on the film you loved the most this year, and tell you all the things you should have watched if you were a real cineaste like myself. Perhaps I watched it because conversations about the merits of films that all parties present have seen are more rewarding than those where the parties exchange lonely lists. (But then again, I can’t force you to watch Dogtooth.)

Yes, it is very well made, with great direction, a great script, and excellent performances. Yes, it is the uplifting tale of a courageous Oscar-nominated protagonist triumphing over adversity with the help of a quirky, Oscar-winning supporting actor. And of course I loathed it, unfairly but inevitably for what it represents, and for what it lacks – challenge, experiment, provocation of thought, hard truths that are not immediately resolved, openings into which our thoughts and feelings might seep and mix in new ways.

Only in the most Forrest Gumpish world could this be considered the best film made this year. And of course any film we choose to watch is a choice to not watch any number of films, films that may actually be the best film of the year.

But we will never know.

You see what I mean about bitterness.

Flow

The flow state depends on the goals of the individual matching the situation in which she finds herself. The task itself must have clear goals and immediate feedback. It must also be matched to the individual’s abilities. If the task is too hard, stress is the result; if too easy, the subject gets bored. As the author states:

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives … A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.

The book spends some time talking about autotelic personalities, the type of person most likely to enter flow frequently. These are essentially self-starters, those who are motivated intrinsically rather than by external rewards. While anyone can enter flow, the autotelic person has the ability to order his own consciousness – to choose how to focus attention. This kind of person is thus able to enjoy situations that would break other people. Csíkszentmihályi brings up many examples of prisoners who survive their ordeal by coming up with games and other activities to keep their minds busy.

That’s an underlying theme to the book – that happiness is something that is produced by the mind, not by external situations. If you think you have to wait for certain situations to happen for you to be happy, you’re missing out. I was actually surprised at how concerned this book is with happiness; I suppose I expected more of a science-of-consciousness approach, which is definitely present, but a lot of discussion of happiness occurs.

There are also many, many examples, no doubt gleaned from the thousands who were interviewed. But I found it a bit much at times, and the book felt a bit padded. Once you get the general principles, you don’t necessarily need to have examples of flow in teenagers, children, poor people, crazy people, bankers, the blind etc. etc. I guess I realized early on that in the terms of the book, I’m an autotelic personality who is in flow quite often. So maybe it wouldn’t seem so obvious and familiar to other readers.

The other flaw is the author’s rather judgmental tone, especially with regards to media. Reading is a great source of flow, apparently, along with art, music etc. But watching television is the anti-flow boogieman, brought up whenever Csíkszentmihályi needs a counter-example. It makes the book seem dated: maybe in 1975 (when some of the original research started), TV was a wasteland of unchallenging trash, but in the era of The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men it seems a foolish generalization.

To take it a step further, my post about focus had some mention of of attention restoration theory and the necessity of involuntary attention – an undirected, relaxed state which is apparently necessary to recharge directed attention. Although the article it was from mentions TV as perhaps “too absorbing” to qualify, it would be interesting to hear attempts to integrate flow theory with that of attention restoration.

It’s a decent book, and the theory at its core is true to my experience anyway. I’m interested in pursuing this line of research further, so I’ll be reading more about attention, and presumably reporting back. Attention seems worthy of attention.

LISTMAS – Best Movies of 2010

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Perhaps Banksy’s greatest work of art yet? This obviously provoked some thinking on my part . Interestingly, it’s an excellent film whether it’s true or not, which isn’t something you’d say about most documentaries.

Dogtooth

Saw this at the festival last year, but I guess it counts as having been released this year, blah blah. Anyway, it’s endlessly inventive, a surprisingly versatile parable about social control of belief.

Enter the Void

Same as above with regards to the festival. This is a frustrating film as its formal rigour is paired with subpar characterization and plotting. But the technique alone makes it one of the most memorable films of the year.

Restrepo

Theory: the best films about war this decade have been documentaries. Restrepo isn’t an issues doc – it’s verite with some great interview footage mixed in. The subject is a single platoon of US soldiers in a particularly hostile valley in Afghanistan. It’s extremely powerful, and thought-provoking as a result of its immersiveness rather than any undue provocation by the filmmakers.

Winter’s Bone

This will haunt you. Ostensibly it’s about a poor teen in Missouri trying to find her deadbeat dead, and thereby finding crystal meth corruption everywhere in her extended family. But it evokes feelings of America’s decline. Perhaps the first US post-apocalyptic film set in the present.

Shutter Island

It was a strong year for psychological thrillers and also mindfuck movies, and Shutter Island is a masterful example of both. Scorsese is the shit, yo. Also, the music selections are absolutely fantastic.

Carlos

This is pretty riveting. In scope and topic, it feels similar to Sodeberg’s Che films. However, the Carlos story is less a war movie than a spy thriller.

A Prophet

Damn, son. This one is rough. It’s not as bleakly prisonish as the first 20 minutes’ murder-during-hash-for-blowjob exhange would have you believe, however. It’s really more of a mob movie, and certainly one of the best I’ve seen in the past decade.

Cyrus

This was definitely my favourite comedy of the year. It’s technically a rom-com, a genre I hate, but it leaves out all the emotional manipulation and just feels honest. Which I felt was quite an achievement.

Two films that I either grudgingly like or amiably begrudge

The Social Network – as I posted earlier, I admired it as expertly crafted, a near-perfect film that totally missed the significance of its subject.

Inception – Enjoyed it greatly during the watching, but thinking about it later it gradually fell apart. It’s a film about dreams that feels nothing like dreaming. I wanted to say “it’s a film about explaining rules” but that’s unfair as it is certainly not as bad as that makes it sound. It’s a good film that appears great on first watch.

Films that might be on this list had I seen them

Marwencol, Tamara Drewe, Another Year, Blue Valentine

Focus

honestly, I do believe, the single most important thing educators can do is to teach breathing techniques that regulate the autonomic nervous system and help up regulate parasympathetic response. This is at the heart of attention, social and emotional intelligence, and contributes to cognition. Further, educators can consider how reflection time might be integrated into the school day.

Then, there is this article from The Globe that in order to explain how nature makes kids learn better, gets into the difference between two kinds of attention:

The dominant idea about how nature helps kids learn is called “attention restoration theory” and is based on evidence that humans have two different kinds of attention. One is directed and takes effort and concentration. It is what students use when they do long division, what adults use to get a memo written at work.

“You only have a certain amount of it,” said University of Michigan brain scientist Marc Berman.

Directing our attention to a task is very different from having it captured by something in the environment, a butterfly flitting by the window or a car speeding down the street. This is involuntary attention […] Engaging the involuntary system allows the directed-attention system to rest and recover, and getting outside in a natural setting is a very good way to switch from one system to the other. Nature offers “soft fascination,” he said. It is interesting enough to engage us, but not riveting enough to absorb us. Urban settings aren’t as restful because they require more vigilance to avoid cars, buses or other hazards. Television, movies and computer games may be too absorbing to allow the circuitry involved in paying attention to recharge.

We have at least three mental states being discussed in these articles – directed attention, or concentration; partial attention, or multitasking; and involuntary attention, or just chilling out. None of these are new, but perhaps a good question is whether modern technologies are exploiting weaknesses in the human brain. From another fascinating Times article:

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

A few thoughts, perhaps not as thorough as I’d like (who can string an essay together anymore?). One, we have a sort of ecology of attention here, with concentration needed to perform tasks, but a lack of involuntary attention decreasing our concentration time. Two, we have new stressors (technology-enabled ‘alerts’) also interrupting our direct attention, exploiting weaknesses in how the brain perceives threats.

On the one hand, I’m wary of blaming technology for our own failures of self-control. The teen who blames Facebook for the fact that he can’t do homework only deserves sympathy for his failings in understanding and managing his own attention, a problem we all face – and have all faced for quite some time.

On the other, as we race into what some have termed the attention economy, it’s clear that some of these new attention sucks are rather cleverly designed to distract us. Cable news outlets slap ALERT on everything because it keeps eyeballs on their channel; game designers aim for addictiveness; application designers strive for stickiness. Commercials and trailers are stuffed with tits and explosions.

The storm of media we all brave every day is ever-changing, and we must adjust ourselves to it. But there will always be distractions. To counter them, we need to understand our minds better, and learn how to cultivate them – and it’s not easy work (that’s sort of the idea). Try this exercise:

We begin working on ourselves by counting the breath, counting each inhalation and each exhalation, beginning with one and counting up to ten. When you get to ten, come back to one and start all over. The only agreement that you make with yourself in this process is that if your mind begins to wander – if you become aware that what you’re doing is chasing thoughts – you will look at the thought, acknowledge it, and then deliberately and consciously let it go and begin the count again at one.

It’s hard at first. But it gets easier after a couple years.

Wonder what will happen when people figure out how to string two or three together.