Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Book Review: Leviathans of Jupiter - National Space Society

https://space.nss.org/book-review-leviathans-of-jupiter/

Even on long voyages between worlds and on isolated scientific stations in deep space, humans can’t escape the reach of politics and power. In Leviathans of Jupiter by Ben Bova, young microbiologist Deidre Ambrose travels from her home in the asteroid belt to Jupiter to take advantage of an opportunity that will provide her a scholarship to study on Earth afterwards.

Unfortunately, she becomes a pawn in a political game being played by a power-hungry heiress who plans the downfall of her perceived rival, the director of the Jupiter station who hired Deidre.

The director, Grant Archer (from Bova’s book, Jupiter) longs to prove that the leviathans, giant creatures discovered living deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere, are intelligent. To do this, he plans to send humans on a dangerous mission to study, and possibly make first contact, with the leviathans. The crew includes Deidre and Dorn, a cyborg from one of Bova’s earlier novels. The heiress places everyone in danger with her attempts to stop the mission.

The descriptions of life in the atmosphere of Jupiter are superbly creative and showcase the imaginative talents of the author. The technical details of the ship and station added immensely to the story — almost becoming characters in their own right.

Space enthusiasts will especially enjoy being immersed in water with dolphins being used in a test of a new communication system, in perfluorocarbon to withstand the high pressure inside the ship, and then deep in Jupiter’s mostly hydrogen atmosphere where the leviathans live. Experiencing these new worlds without the actual danger of going there is one of the true joys of a good science fiction read.

The only thing that somewhat spoiled my reading experience was the use of viewpoint shift to explain what was going on in an almost omniscient way instead of allowing me to figure things out with only the information available to the main characters. However, the story proceeded in a logical fashion and came to a satisfying conclusion.

Leviathans of Jupiter is the 18th book in Bova’s Grand Tour series and well worth reading. The book provides a great escape into a future where humans continue to find ingenious ways to survive in strange and challenging environments, even while enduring the seemingly unavoidable politics involved in all human endeavors.

ICO: The Forgotten PS2 Masterpiece

Whenever I talk to people about the masterpieces of the PS2 era, rarely do I hear people mention ICO, the first game created by the developers who went on to release Shadow of the Colossus. Today, I want to talk about this forgotten gem.

Monday, August 28, 2023

Now reading Time magazine Special Issue: Japan (August 1, 1983)...


The Stanley Kubrick Meetup — NYC

https://skm-nyc.tumblr.com/post/86610622257/the-cat-stays-in-the-picture-center-photo-from

"The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have." Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999)

Stanley Kubrick’s  “The Aristocats”

A lifelong subscriber to “Cat Fancier” magazine, Kubrick adopted all unclaimed cats from “A Clockwork Orange”.  He later planned to feature them in a live-action version of “The Aristocats”; with Scatman Crothers reprising his role as “Scat Cat”.  The script, by Terry Southern, was based on the notorious shaggy-dog-story/dirty joke, “The Aristocrats”.

The project was canceled when Kubrick became concerned about the safety and comfort of the cats during a prolonged production.

Later, he cast some of the cats (and Scatman of course), in “The Shining”, but their scenes were cut after the film’s opening weekend. Traces of them remain, however, such as when Ullman asks Jack if his luggage arrived ok, you can glimpse the cat carrier sitting amongst it, in the big pile by the door.  And there was another scene where they cause Wendy to burn some toast, and Jack has a fit about it.  

“He was mainly interested in making movies, and feeding his cats when there was a break,” says Vincent LoBrutto, his biographer (in a Movie Geeks United podcast).

“His favorite cat used to sleep in a small climatized room and I had to take him Evian water and fresh grass to eat every morning.” says Emilio D’Alessandro, his chauffeur and all-around assistant.

The writer Alex Ross, in “Stanley Kubrick Was My Friend, Too”, tells of Kubrick’s next attempt to combine his two loves:

Stanley always had trouble with actors, and he had the idea of casting this [new] film entirely with his favorite cats and dogs. I struggled mightily with the limitations that this plan placed on my style. Each page of the script had to be submitted to his very favorite cat, Ophuls, who was only mildly amused by the material. The project gradually ran out of steam.

Below is “Polly”,  who appeared in “Eyes Wide Shut”.

“Polly loved Dad.  She would sleep on his chest if he let her.  I painted the picture of her for his 60th birthday.” (Katharina Kubrick, quoted in The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick)

Thursday, August 24, 2023

The costs of camouflaging autism

https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/costs-camouflaging-autism/

Many girls hide their autism, sometimes evading diagnosis well into adulthood. These efforts can help women on the spectrum socially and professionally, but they can also do serious harm.

Except for her family and closest friends, no one in Jennifer’s various circles knows that she is on the spectrum. Jennifer was not diagnosed with autism until she was 45 — and then only because she wanted confirmation of what she had figured out for herself over the previous decade. Most of her life, she says, she evaded a diagnosis by forcing herself to stop doing things her parents and others found strange or unacceptable. (For privacy reasons, Jennifer asked that we not use her last name.)

Over several weeks of emailing back and forth, Jennifer confides in me some of the tricks she uses to mask her autism — for example, staring at the spot between someone’s eyes instead of into their eyes, which makes her uncomfortable. But when we speak for the first time over video chat one Friday afternoon in January, I cannot pick up on any of these ploys.

She confesses to being anxious. “I didn’t put on my interview face,” she says. But her nervousness, too, is hidden — at least until she tells me that she is tapping her foot off camera and biting down on the chewing gum in her mouth. The only possible ‘tell’ I notice is that she gathers up hanks of her shoulder-length brown hair, pulls them back from her face and then lets them drop — over and over again.

In the course of more than an hour, Jennifer, a 48-year-old writer, describes the intense social and communication difficulties she experiences almost daily. She can express herself easily in writing, she says, but becomes disoriented during face-to-face communication. “The immediacy of the interaction messes with my processing,” she says.

“Am I making any sense at all?” she suddenly bursts out. She is, but often fears she is not.

To compensate, Jennifer says she practices how to act. Before attending a birthday party with her son, for example, she prepares herself to be “on,” correcting her posture and habitual fidgeting. She demonstrates for me how she sits up straight and becomes still. Her face takes on a pleasant and engaged expression, one she might adopt during conversation with another parent. To keep a dialogue going, she might drop in a few well-rehearsed catchphrases, such as “good grief” or “go big or go home.” “I feel if I do the nods, they won’t feel I’m uninterested,” she says.

Over the past few years, scientists have discovered that, like Jennifer, many women on the spectrum ‘camouflage’ the signs of their autism. This masking may explain at least in part why three to four times as many boys as girls are diagnosed with the condition. It might also account for why girls diagnosed young tend to show severe traits, and highly intelligent girls are often diagnosed late. (Men on the spectrum also camouflage, researchers have found, but not as commonly as women.)

Nearly everyone makes small adjustments to fit in better or conform to social norms, but camouflaging calls for constant and elaborate effort. It can help women with autism maintain their relationships and careers, but those gains often come at a heavy cost, including physical exhaustion and extreme anxiety.

“Camouflaging is often about a desperate and sometimes subconscious survival battle,” says Kajsa Igelström, assistant professor of neuroscience at Linköping University in Sweden. “And this is an important point, I think — that camouflaging often develops as a natural adaptation strategy to navigate reality,” she says. “For many women, it’s not until they get properly diagnosed, recognized and accepted that they can fully map out who they are.”

Even so, not all women who camouflage say they would have wanted to know about their autism earlier — and researchers acknowledge that the issue is fraught with complexities. Receiving a formal diagnosis often helps women understand themselves better and tap greater support, but some women say it comes with its own burdens, such as a stigmatizing label and lower expectations for achievement.

Because so many more boys are diagnosed with autism than girls are, clinicians don’t always think of autism when they see girls who are quiet or appear to be struggling socially. William Mandy, a clinical psychologist in London, says he and his colleagues routinely used to see girls who had been shuffled from one agency or doctor to another, often misdiagnosed with other conditions. “Initially, we had no clue they needed help or support with autism,” he says.

Over time, Mandy and others began to suspect that autism looks different in girls. When they interviewed girls or women on the spectrum, they couldn’t always see signs of their autism but got glimmers of a phenomenon they call ‘camouflaging’ or ‘masking.’ In a few small studies starting in 2016, the researchers confirmed that, at least among women with high intelligence quotients (IQ), camouflaging is common. They also noted possible gender differences that help girls escape clinicians’ notice: Whereas boys with autism might be overactive or appear to misbehave, girls more often seem anxious or depressed.

Last year, a team of researchers in the United States extended that work. They visited several schoolyards during recess and observed interactions among 48 boys and 48 girls, aged 7 or 8 on average, half of each group diagnosed with autism. They discovered that girls with autism tend to stay close to the other girls, weaving in and out of their activities. By contrast, boys with autism tend to play by themselves, off to the side. Clinicians and teachers look for social isolation, among other things, to spot children on the spectrum. But this study revealed that by using that criterion alone, they would miss many girls with autism.

Typical girls and boys play differently, says Connie Kasari, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-led the study. While many boys are playing a sport, she says, girls are often talking and gossiping, and involved in intimate relationships. The typical girls in the study would flit from group to group, she says. The girls with autism appeared to be doing the same thing, but what was actually happening, the investigators learned, was different: The girls with autism were rejected repeatedly from the groups, but would persist or try to join another one. The scientists say these girls may be more motivated to fit in than the boys are, so they work harder at it.

Delaine Swearman, 38, says she wanted badly to fit in when she was about 10 or 11, but felt she was too different from the other girls in her school. She studied the girls she liked and concluded, “If I pretended to like everything they liked and to go along with everything, that maybe they would accept me,” she says. Her schoolmates were avid fans of the band New Kids on the Block. So Swearman, who says she had zero interest in the band, feigned a passion she did not feel. She made a few more friends, but felt she was never being herself. Swearman, like Jennifer, was not diagnosed until adulthood, when she was 30.

Even when teachers do flag girls for an autism evaluation, standard diagnostic measures may fail to pick up on their autism. For example, in a study last year, researchers looked at 114 boys and 114 girls with autism. They analyzed the children’s scores on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and on parent reports of autism traits and daily living skills, such as getting dressed. They found that even when the girls have ADOS scores similar to those of boys, they tend to be more severely impaired: The parents of girls included in the study had rated their daughters lower than the boys in terms of living skills and higher in terms of difficulties with social awareness and restricted interests or repetitive behaviors. The researchers say girls with less severe traits, especially those with high IQs, may not have scored high enough on the ADOS to be included in their sample in the first place.

These standard tests may miss many girls with autism because they were designed to detect the condition in boys, says lead researcher Allison Ratto, assistant professor at the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C. For instance, the tests screen for restricted interests, but clinicians may not recognize the restricted interests girls with autism have. Boys with autism tend to obsess about things such as taxis, maps or U.S. presidents, but girls on the spectrum are often drawn to animals, dolls or celebrities — interests that closely resemble those of their typical peers and so fly under the radar. “We may need to rethink our measures,” Ratto says, “and perhaps use them in combination with other measures.”

Before scientists can create better screening tools, they need to characterize camouflaging more precisely. A study last year established a working definition for the purpose of research: Camouflaging is the difference between how people seem in social contexts and what’s happening to them on the inside. If, for example, someone has intense autism traits but tends not to show it in her behavior, the disparity means she is camouflaging, says Meng-Chuan Lai, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Canada, who worked on the study. The definition is necessarily broad, allowing for any effort to mask an autism feature, from suppressing repetitive behaviors known as stimming or talk about obsessive interests to pretending to follow a conversation or imitating neurotypical behavior.

To evaluate some of these methods, Mandy, Lai and their colleagues in the United Kingdom surveyed 55 women, 30 men and 7 individuals who are either transgender or ‘other’ gendered, all diagnosed with autism. They asked what motivates these individuals to mask their autism traits and what techniques they use to achieve their goal. Some of the participants reported that they camouflage in order to connect with friends, find a good job or meet a romantic partner. “Camouflaging well can land you a lucrative job,” Jennifer says. “It helps you get through social interaction without there being a spotlight on your behavior or a giant letter A on your chest.” Others said they camouflage to avoid punishment, to protect themselves from being shunned or attacked, or simply to be seen as ‘normal.’

“I actually got told by a couple of my teachers that I needed to have ‘quiet hands,’” says Katherine Lawrence, a 33-year-old woman with autism in the U.K. “So I had to resort to hiding my hands under the table and ensuring my foot-tapping and leg-jiggling remained out of sight as much as possible.” Lawrence, who was not diagnosed with autism until age 28, says she knew that otherwise, her classmates would think she was strange and her teachers would punish her for distracting others.

The adults in the survey described an imaginative store of tools they call upon in different situations to avoid pain and gain acceptance. If, for example, someone has trouble starting a conversation, she might practice smiling first, Lai says, or prepare jokes as an ice-breaker. Many women develop a repertoire of personas for different audiences. Jennifer says she studies other people’s behavior and learns gestures or phrases that, to her, seem to project confidence; she often practices in front of a mirror.

Before a job interview, she writes down the questions she thinks she will be asked, and then writes down and memorizes the answers. She has also committed to memory four anecdotes she can tell about how she met a challenging deadline. The survey found that women on the spectrum often create similar rules and scripts for themselves for having conversations. To avoid speaking too much about a restricted interest, they may rehearse stories about other topics. To hide the full extent of her anxiety when she is “shaking inside” because, say, an event is not starting on time, Swearman has prepared herself to say, “I’m upset right now. I can’t focus; I can’t talk to you right now.”

Some women say that, in particular, they put in a great deal of effort into disguising their stimming. “For many people, stimming may be a way to self-soothe, self-regulate and relieve anxiety, among other things,” Lai says. And yet these motions — which can include flapping hands, spinning, scratching and head-banging — can also readily ‘out’ these people as having autism.

Igelström and her colleagues interviewed 342 people, mostly women and a few transpeople, about camouflaging their stimming. Many of the participants had self-diagnosed, but 155 women have an official autism diagnosis. Nearly 80 percent of the participants had tried to implement strategies to make stimming less detectable, Igelström says. The most common method is redirecting their energy into less visible muscle movements, such as sucking and clenching their teeth or tensing and relaxing their thigh muscles. The majority also try to channel their need to stim into more socially acceptable movements, such as tapping a pen, doodling or playing with objects under the table. Many try to confine their stimming to times when they are alone or in a safe place, such as with family. Igelström found that a few individuals try to prevent stimming altogether by way of sheer will or by restraining themselves — by sitting on their hands, for example.

For Lawrence, her need to fidget with her hands, tap her foot or jiggle her leg feels too urgent to suppress. “I do it because if my brain doesn’t get frequent input from the respective body parts, it loses track of where in space that body part is,” she says. “It also helps me concentrate on what I am doing.”

All of these strategies call for considerable effort. Exhaustion was a near-universal response in the 2017 British survey: The adults interviewed described feeling utterly drained — mentally, physically and emotionally. One woman, Mandy says, explained that after camouflaging for any length of time, she needs to curl up in the fetal position to recover. Others said they feel their friendships are not real because they are based on a lie, increasing their sense of loneliness. And many said they have played so many roles to disguise themselves through the years that they have lost sight of their true identity.

Igelström says some of the women in her study told her that suppressing repetitive movements feels ‘unhealthy’ because the stimming helps them to regulate their emotions, sensory input or ability to focus. Camouflaging feels unhealthy for Lawrence, too. She has to spend so much effort to fit in, she says, that she has little physical energy for tasks such as housework, little mental energy for processing her thoughts and interactions, and poor control over her emotions. The combination tips her into a volatile state in which “I am more likely to experience a meltdown or shutdown,” she says.

Lawrence says that if she’d been diagnosed as a child, her mother might have understood her better. She might have also avoided a long history of depression and self-harm. “One of the main reasons I went down that route was because I knew I was different but didn’t know why — I was bullied quite badly at school,” she says.

The vast majority of women diagnosed later in life say that not knowing early on that they have autism hurt them. In a small 2016 study, Mandy and his colleagues interviewed 14 young women not diagnosed with autism until late adolescence or adulthood. Many described experiences of sexual abuse. They also said that, had their condition been known, they would have been less misunderstood and alienated at school. They might have also received much-needed support sooner.

Others might have benefited from knowing themselves better. Swearman completed a master’s degree to be a physician assistant, but ultimately stopped because of issues related to her autism. “I was actually very good at what I did,” she says. But “it was too much social pressure, too much sensory stimulation, a lot of miscommunication and misinterpretation between myself and supervisors, due to thinking differences.” It was only after she stopped working that her counselor suggested she might have autism. She read up on it and discovered, “Oh, my gosh, that’s me!” she recalls. It was a major turning point: Everything started to make sense.

It’s only after a diagnosis that a woman may ask, “Which parts of myself are an act and which parts of me have been hidden? What do I have that’s valuable inside myself that can’t be expressed because I’m constantly and automatically camouflaging my autistic traits?” Igelström says. “None of those questions can be processed without first getting diagnosed, or at least self-identify, and then replaying the past with this new insight. And for many women, this happens late in life after years of camouflaging in a very uncontrolled, destructive and subconscious way, with many mental-health problems as a consequence.”

A diagnosis leads some women to abandon camouflaging. “Realizing that I am not broken, that I simply have a different neurology from the majority of the population and that there is nothing wrong with me the way I am means that I will not hide who I am just to fit in or make neurotypical people more comfortable,” Lawrence says.

Others learn to make camouflaging work for them, mitigating its negative effects. They may use masking techniques when they first make a new connection, but over time become more authentically themselves. Those who feel that camouflaging is within their control can plan to give themselves breaks, from going to the bathroom for a few minutes to leaving an event early or forgoing it entirely. “I learned to take care of myself better,” Swearman says. “The strategy is self-awareness.”

Jennifer concedes that knowing about her autism earlier would have helped her, and yet she is “torn” about whether it would have been better. Because she didn’t have a diagnosis, she says, she also had no excuses. “I had to suck it up and deal. It was a really difficult struggle, and I made loads of mistakes — still do — but there was simply no choice,” she says. “If I had been labeled as autistic, maybe I wouldn’t have tried so hard and achieved all the things I’ve achieved.”

She has achieved a great deal. During our video chat that snowy afternoon in January, it’s clear that one of her most significant accomplishments has been finding a balance in life that works for her. Her camouflaging skills allow her to put on a warm, personable exterior, one that has helped her build a successful career. But thanks to a few friends and a husband and son who love her for who she is, she can let that mask drop when it becomes too heavy.

WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos (Windows)

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/warcraft-iii-reign-of-chaos-g59

There's no better introduction to help summarise what Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos means to PC gaming than disclosing this simple tidbit: 4.5 million initial orders. This game was already a bestseller the day it was announced, seeing as Blizzard Entertainment is truly the only development studio in the industry that can sell games on its name alone.

Curiously beginning life as a cartoon-style point-and-click graphic adventure that followed the story of a young orc raised by humans, practically all of the work put into the game's original design was scrapped back at the turn of the century. Blizzard instead decided to revert to Warcraft's roots and the very thing that made the company huge in the first place: real-time strategy. The concept of the orphaned orc Thrall was salvaged, though, and this particular character plays one of the many key, "starring roles" in this summer's PC blockbuster.

Blizzard has two enviable luxuries when it makes its games: first, the designers can spend as long as they damn well please on them, and second, they can work in a bubble, ignoring much of what is happening in the industry all around them. 3D engine aside, when you first load up Warcraft III, you could almost believe you're playing its 1995 predecessor. Same screen layout, same space-hogging interface, same vidscreen with animated unit portrait, same keyboard shortcuts. Of course, this makes sense. It's believable that a majority of the large anticipation of sales is coming from gamers still hooked on Starcraft or even the re-released Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, though arguably superior titles have released since.

This is not to say that there aren't improvements - there's plenty! Climbing the evolutionary ladder from Starcraft's three unique races, the game now features four very distinctly different sides whose balance has been fine-tuned in that inimitable Blizzard way. There are the familiar humans and orcs, plus the ghastly undead scourge and the tree-lovin' night elves.

The interface and controls have also enjoyed some tweaking, including the ability to set spellcasters to auto-cast, peons to auto-repair, quick-select idle workers, use smart formations (range attackers stay behind melee), and the most useful of the bunch: subgroups. You can group units in the usual CTRL-# way, but now hitting TAB cycles through the unit types in your group for quick, easy access to different special abilities.

But all of these changes are minor in comparison to the additions of heroes. Okay, commander units aren't exactly a new idea, but they've been implemented well in Warcraft III, specifically in the single-player campaign. Every controllable hero is a character that gets a lot of screen time and dialog in the game's story, so you'll always have at least one unit on the battlefield whose motive is clear and well-being you want to protect. To use the Star Trek analogy, it's the difference between killing off Kirk and killing off a Red Shirt (you'd actually shed tears for the Red Shirt).

You also get a small but significant say in how you want your hero to develop. Heroes gain experience in battle and eventually level up, acquiring skill points to assign as you wish. Ultimately, they'll have access to everything anyway, but the climb up is always fun. The RPG element is accentuated further in that heroes have a six-slot inventory for items you find either from slain creatures, inside crates (yes, crates!) or even to buy at merchants scattered around the maps. Items either passively increase your stats when held or can be cast to summon help, award health or lay traps. Blizzard were able to pull this off to make it more than a simplistic gimmick, but not too complex to be worthless in the fast-paced combat of RTS.

All the races have a greatly different set of units, but generally function in the same way to be easy enough to pick up. They all have their form of workers that gather gold and wood -- with the only difference being the night elves "spiritually" capture the resource from the trees without chopping them down -- all have a "farm" structure to increase population limit, and all have various barracks to produce military. None quite differ as much as the Zerg did in Starcraft, who had units as farms and no barracks, just auto-spawning, morphing larvae. The undead are restricted to building on blight around their base (Zerg version of creep) and summon in new structures instead of building them (like the Protoss). Night elves' structures are all living trees that can be uprooted and fight when the base comes under attack.

While the advancement of the campaign is completely linear, the missions themselves follow Starcraft's trend of unpredictability. In-game cutscenes interject game action frequently, yet not intrusively, and usually end with new objectives given - or "quests" as they're called here, swaying again towards the RPG camp. Many missions also include hidden subquests that are optional but always reward you with something that can either help achieve the primary goal or offer trinkets to keep until you need to use them.

The style of play required is also unusually diverse for a real-time strategy game. Around a third of the missions actually have no base building in them at all, and become almost Diablo-like in nature, as you "dungeon crawl" the terrain with a handful of units, breaking down gates and doors, ransacking for treasure and trying to keep your party alive. The unit exploration missions were a trait of Starcraft, of course, but it's advanced upon by often featuring two completely separated areas of the map where you have multiple parties with their own objectives; for example, in one mission, you have to prevent your base in the bottom-right from being overrun, while your hero and his group on the left has to advance upwards to retrieve a special artefact of typically insane power.

One of Starcraft's most unique and praised qualities was its sequential campaigns that advanced the storyline, while giving you the perspective of every warring side. Warcraft III does it again for all four races, and again features tales of betrayal and corruption. It's amusing that despite their titles, many of the main cast end up as anti-heroes, but that's what makes the whole campaign so fascinating to see where the story turns next and understanding everyone's motives. Like any fantasy yarn, the rules are obviously made up as you go along, but so few games in this genre manage to get you even remotely interested in the characters, so it's a definite triumph.

Warcraft III's 3D graphics engine isn't quite the cream of the crop with some rather blurry textures and jagged, low-count polygon models. Zooming up close to the action isn't anywhere near as bad as Empire Earth, but it's surpassed by Dungeon Siege, and we could do with a good deal more freedom with our camera axes.

But what Warcraft lacks in technology, it makes up for with the flair, imagination and careful attentiveness from its art designers. Anachronox springs to mind as another example of a game providing original and shockingly good aesthetics with an ageing engine. Environments are lush, colourful and alive with ambient creatures, running streams, moving trees and great weather and night/day effects. There are some huge, fantastic creatures like the upper level demons and gigantic flying dragons that are breathtaking. The overall style continues the cartoony tradition of its predecessor, especially in the bouncy manner that creatures are animated.

Productions values have become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy with Blizzard. People expect it a certain way, they produce it that way. There's the film-quality CG cutscenes between campaigns that started with Starcraft and Diablo, wonderful voice acting and rousing musical scores. Blizzard trademarks are present, such as the exploding sheep and the usual helping of offbeat, pop culture referencing humour that so starkly contrasts the deadly serious, sweeping epic Lord of the Rings-style fantasy storyline. (You go from lines like: "Only there can you combat the shadow and save this world from the flame," to a dwarf ranting: "And this one time, at bandit camp...")

We've actually figured out exactly what has delayed Warcraft's release the past few months: the hilarious end credit cutscenes that would make even a laborious game worth finishing. This company is full of quirky talent; they desperately need to make a comedy of some sort. Remember, no vertices were harmed in the making of this game.

Multiplayer setup is as flawless as ever and a shining example of what every game should provide out of the box. Click "multiplayer", click "battle.net", login to free account, click "play game", choose a game type, map and race and incredibly within seconds you're matched up with a player or players of equal skill who made the same or similar choices. Never has entering a peer-to-peer multiplayer game been so joyously easy. The random opponent matchmaking also serves as the perfect method for keeping the ladder ranking system honest. And for those who like to play with friends, you've got a buddy list built in and everything laid out simply to get a game going with minimum fuss.

As for the multiplayer action itself... well, even factoring in the new elements like upkeep (limits resource intake as your army grows), creeps (powerful neutral creatures often placed near unclaimed gold mines), merchants, heroes and the game speed reduction, it's still a frantic game of claim the most resources and be the first to make a bigger, badder, "rushable" army. But that's RTS, that's what makes Starcraft the most played strategy game online and that is undoubtedly the formula that will probably make Warcraft III supersede it.

In the bizarre dimension Blizzard has created for itself, a parallel world where development time is irrelevant, you have 4.5 million raging fans breaking down your door and you only need to reuse the best features from your own games to please them, Warcraft III is the ultimate succession to its series. Sure, they fixed only a few micromanagement issues and ignored outside ideas hailed as innovative in the genre over the last five years. But so what? Conversely, an endless supply of wannabe clone makers ignores Blizzard by pumping out games with no style or personality, so they're just as much to blame. With a lengthy, compelling campaign, challenging and diverse missions, fascinating heroes and races, and trustworthy multiplayer, Warcraft III is a yet another winner. Unless you're severely opposed to Blizzard's style of fast-paced, small skirmish oriented RTS, then its latest creation is worth adding to any fantasy strategy gamer's collection.

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Just finished watching Cutter's Way (1981) and Miracle In The Rain (1956)...





Christopher Nolan’s Martyrdom of Saint Oppenheimer

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-film-review

Oppenheimer ignores the darker sides of the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer in order to deliver a crowd-pleasing, blockbuster spectacle.

If you like film at all, you’ll no doubt be seeing Christopher Nolan’s epic three-hour biopic Oppenheimer. Considering the cinematic doldrums lately, why wouldn’t you go for this hugely hyped, wildly praised spectacle, which is bound to be given every known award? You’ll spend the hours studying legendary physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, in vast close-ups, especially if you see the film in IMAX, which makes Murphy’s face seem as tall as skyscrapers and his wide blue eyes as big as swimming pools.

The attempt to understand “what made Oppenheimer tick” is as old as the A-bomb, and this film tackles it afresh, clearly with the assumption that it’ll all be news to the younger generation. If you’re already convinced of the dangers of nuclear war, superseded only by the ongoing end-times series of rolling climate catastrophes that now seem more likely to kill us all, this film is going to lack a certain urgency, however.

Still, all of the Nolanisms beloved by his fans — who are legion after such career hits as The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk — are represented. Nolan’s traditional, emotionally melodramatic Hollywood movie tendencies are, as usual, dressed up in intricate flashbacks, narrative trickiness, pyrotechnic editing flourishes, and pounding soundtrack bombast.

And because Nolan can now stack his casts with famous actors as yet another aspect of his sky-high production values, you’ll have the repeated experience of registering celebrity faces as characters are introduced. And so many characters get introduced, scenes sometimes play like handshaking parties. There’s Matt Damon as Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, who brought on Oppenheimer as the head of the secret mission to win World War II by creating an atomic bomb! There’s Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission! There’s Tom Conti as Albert Einstein! There’s Kenneth Branagh as Danish physicist Niels Bohr! There’s Benny Safdie as “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller! There’s Josh Hartnett . . . and Rami Malek . . . and Casey Affleck.

I’m hinting in my subtle way that I don’t particularly like Christopher Nolan films in general, so that’s something to note as you read this review. I also don’t like this film in particular. But, of course, there are innumerable rave reviews of Oppenheimer, so mine stands as a rare dissenting opinion.

The film is constructed in a way that suggests trying to pull together the fissured strands of Oppenheimer’s personality even while acknowledging that there’s no way to arrive at a sensemaking whole when contemplating his visionary brilliance, his vacillating politics, his turbulent love life, his triumph and tragedy as the “modern Prometheus,” and his interludes of swaggering hubris combined with his interludes of guilt-ridden reticence. Ultimately, Oppenheimer is treated as an oceanic mystery of a man raised to the sky in public opinion for (in the view of the majority) saving the Allies from the ongoing horrors of fascism and World War II, then cruelly pilloried on trumped-up anti-commie charges. But the real punishment is his awesome guilt in leading the effort to unleash the horrors of nuclear war upon us.

Nolan deploys a Citizen Kane–like model of narrative fracturing to convey Oppenheimer’s dizzying complexity in the crucible in which he found himself. Orson Welles’s original title for Citizen Kane was “American,” and he makes Kane’s material circumstances a vital issue in his film. Born into the hardscrabble working class, he becomes incredibly wealthy overnight through access to vast American natural resources — in his case, literally striking it rich with the “Colorado Lode” mining bonanza. This makes possible his ascent to fame and “great man” status while hollowing him out at the same time, catastrophically cutting him off from his own family and community.

Like Welles, Nolan embraces the idea of the final unknowability of the character. Early in Nolan’s film, for example, you see the incredible incident of the deadly poisoned apple that the resentful student Oppenheimer gives his professor. This turns out to be based on something that really happened while Oppenheimer was studying at the University of Cambridge. Nolan represents Oppenheimer with aching sympathy as a lonely boy genius, homesick and further isolated from his peers by his obsessive visions of structures underlying the teeming chaos that seems to make up the world. He’s shown to be pitifully self-conscious of his own incompetence in the lab, which doesn’t exactly match the real Oppenheimer’s superior tone in describing his Cambridge education to a friend: “I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything. . . . The lectures are vile.”

Nolan based his film on a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography that also regards Oppenheimer with tender pity, attributing his act of poisoning to his recurrent depression. “Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him,” write the biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. “Consumed by his feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he ‘poisoned’ an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk.”

Oppenheimer injected an apple with some toxic substance that was perhaps not as lethal as the cyanide represented in the film, in which a remorseful Oppenheimer is portrayed as waking up in the morning, shocked at his own murderous act. He races back to the professor’s office to retrieve the apple from his desk. To his horror, one of his idols — Niels Bohr — is just about to take a bite out of the apple when Oppenheimer snatches it away, with the breathless explanation, “Wormhole!”

Wormhole, get it? Little science joke there.

That’s not actually what happened in real life. Accounts are a bit vague, but they agree that somehow Oppenheimer’s poisoned apple created no casualties but still got found out by the authorities at Cambridge. Oppenheimer’s father had to hurry to prevent young Oppie from being expelled, in part by guaranteeing his son’s regular visits to a psychiatrist.

Not-so-young Oppenheimer went on to further acts of reckless hubris. According to a review of another recent Oppenheimer biography, “As a young professor in California, he crashed his car while racing a train, an accident that left his girlfriend unconscious. His father made amends by giving the young woman a painting and a Cézanne drawing.”

Why not include Oppenheimer’s far more cinematic daredevil race against the train in this biopic? It’s every bit as telling of what comes later as the highly symbolic poisoned apple incident is. (Oppenheimer gave all of humanity a poisoned apple, but he failed to snatch it away again, see?) The “womanizing” Oppenheimer is shown to be an unintentional but nevertheless total disaster to the women in his life.

Though, admittedly, he seems drawn to dark, depressive, humorless women who happen to be members or former members of the Communist Party. His longtime love, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) commits suicide when Oppenheimer ends their lengthy on-and-off affair. His long-suffering, alcoholic wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), is shown to be curdling into ever-angstier meanness during their marriage and repeatedly rejecting motherhood in the harshest way.

But there’s no way to make the starker, weirder, more shockingly arrogant aspects of Oppenheimer’s personality conform to the portrait that Nolan’s building here. You’ll wait a long time for an American biopic to make a serious effort to tell the harsher truth. It’s a terrible genre for that reason. The more interesting, insightful aspects of famous lives are almost inevitably censored.

Drawing on Cillian Murphy’s pitiful thinness — which he achieved through dramatic weight loss he could hardly afford — and the softer possibilities of his pink-mouthed, big-eyed face, Nolan presents us with a perpetually distracted, endearingly eccentric, brainy naif who gets carried away with his own visions and enthusiasms until it’s too late to reckon with the crushing consequences of what he’s done. There’s little sense, especially, of Oppenheimer’s well-known, towering ambition.

It could certainly help account for some otherwise puzzling behaviors of his, such as his insistence on appearing before the kangaroo court assembled to remove his security clearance and tarnish his reputation in ways potentially fatal to his titanic career. This was well into the McCarthy era of blacklisting leftists for far less involvement in communist politics than Oppenheimer had, however scattershot his actual activities were. By 1954, the likely consequences were obvious. Einstein himself warned Oppenheimer against appearing, and then, when Oppenheimer refused to listen, dismissed him in a cutting remark to his assistant: “There goes a narr,” which is German for “fool.”

Oppenheimer’s refusal to dodge the hearing is credited to his heartfelt patriotism, but surely his sense of self-importance and untouchability was a part of it too.

As the film demonstrates, once on the receiving end of the commission’s attacks, Oppenheimer became soft and cagey in a way that infuriated his wife, who wanted him to put up a strong fight against the forces of American government behind the blacklist. Nolan represents this as a kind of “martyrdom of Saint Oppenheimer,” but a certain amount of crass careerism could’ve been portrayed as kicking in more overtly here, when his wife shrills, “Why won’t you fight?”

After all, he had a lot to lose. As Nolan’s film demonstrates, postwar Oppenheimer was famous, considered the top scientist in America and maybe the world, celebrated on the cover of Time magazine. His conviction that he could help guide the government’s handling of nuclear weapons along more humanely concerned lines really did get him dismissed by Harry S. Truman as a “crybaby,” but the fact is, he was actually getting consulted by the president and every other important suit on down the line.

Nolan’s is the kind of film that features an ahistorically dramatic line delivery and a pause for a shudder of horror from the audience when someone mentions the name of “Los Alamos,” the obscure desert location of Oppenheimer’s secret atomic bomb building and testing site. There’s exactly the same kind of ahistorical frisson in Gone With the Wind (1939), when Rhett Butler mentions the battle shaping up in a tiny Pennsylvania town that might decide the fate of the entire Civil War, called — weighty pause — “Gettysburg.”

It’s corny as hell, but it’s always a crowd-pleaser.

There’s also, more than once, the intoning of Oppenheimer’s own famously hammy quote from the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita, in reaction to his work on the ultimate weapon of mass destruction: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” In real life, Oppenheimer’s detractors noted that his pretentious quotes drawn from extensive if eclectic reading were among his more maddening rhetorical traits, but there can be no humorous eye-rolling at such pronouncements in this film.

Which makes me appreciate even more the wild and funny “Barbenheimer” mash-up memes making the rounds about the incongruous yet oddly Cold War–compatible same-day opening of Barbie and Oppenheimer. My favorite one shows an eerie, distorted black-and-white image of the face of real-life Oppenheimer with the caption, “Now I am become Barbie girl, in Barbie worlds.”

But the anxious would-be profundity in the handling of the film’s subject matter is part of the typical Nolan strategy of informing the world, and the members of the Academy and other award-giving entities, of the importance of his chosen subject. Nolan is making the press rounds saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer is “the most important person who ever lived,” so it logically follows that his film is crucial viewing and that all of his seriously considered directorial choices are also terribly important. Critics take down the information about these choices like publicists and report them faithfully to a duly impressed public — such as Nolan’s surprising decision not to show the Japanese victims of the atomic bombings. Instead, we see Oppenheimer merely imagining the effects of the bomb on members of his rapturous American audience.

But the absolute lack of physical reality given to the results of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the refusal to portray mass annihilation — is one of the film’s more stunning glossing-over effects. It’s ludicrous, the idea that Oppenheimer’s imaginings, safe in the United States, of the flayed skin of a few people in his audience who are applauding his speech, and a charred body impeding his path as he takes his triumphal march away from the podium, is somehow “more effective and chilling.”

Not showing in any memorable or realistic way the ghastly consequences of Oppenheimer’s biggest achievement is a safe-playing strategy, once again, to preserve audience sympathy for the hero, which you generally need if you want a big blockbuster hit. And Christopher Nolan always wants a big blockbuster hit.

Friday, August 18, 2023

Just finished watching The Sure Thing (1985) and Justice League (2017)...







At the intersection of autism and trauma

https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/intersection-autism-trauma/

Autism and post-traumatic stress disorder share many traits, but the connection between them was largely overlooked until now.

Having autism can sometimes mean enduring a litany of traumatic events, starting from a young age. And for many, those events may add up to severe and persistent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Before Gabriel could even talk, his father’s girlfriend at the time told him his mother had abandoned him. At age 3, he was sexually abused by a cousin. He was mercilessly bullied once he started school, showed signs of depression by age 7 and by 11 began telling his mother he did not want to live. About three years ago, while at summer camp, he almost drowned. Shortly after that, he experienced life-threatening heatstroke when he went to get his Legos from the car trunk and accidentally locked himself in. Six months ago, just after his grandmother died, he attempted suicide.

“He’s been hurt and had so much disruption in his life that he’s having problems realizing that he has stability now,” says his mother, Kristina. (Kristina and Gabriel’s last names have been withheld to protect the family’s privacy.) “The world is chaotic and crazy for typically developed people. For him, it’s overwhelming and confusing.” Gabriel, now 13, started seeing a therapist about five years ago and last year was diagnosed with PTSD.

Gabriel’s autism was a contributing factor in most of the harrowing incidents he went through. Clinicians suspect that the condition increases the risk for certain kinds of trauma, such as bullying and other forms of abuse. Yet few studies have investigated that possibility or the psychological aftermath of such trauma, including PTSD.

“We know that about 70 percent of kids with autism will have a comorbid psychiatric disorder,” says Connor Kerns, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder are all known to be more common among autistic people than in the general population, but PTSD had largely been overlooked. Until a few years ago, only a few studies had delved into the problem, and most suggested that less than 3 percent of autistic people have PTSD, about the same rate as in typical children. If that were true, Kerns points out, PTSD would be one of the only psychiatric conditions that’s no more common in people with autism than in their typical peers.

One potential explanation, Kerns says, is that, like other psychiatric conditions, PTSD simply looks different in people with autism than it does in the general population. “It seems possible to me that it’s not that PTSD is less common but potentially that we’re not measuring it well, or that the way traumatic stress expresses itself in people on the spectrum is different,” Kerns says. “It seemed we were ignoring a huge part of the picture.”

Kerns and a few other researchers are trying to get a better understanding of the interplay between autism and PTSD, which they hope will inform and shape treatment for young people like Gabriel. The more they dig in, the more these researchers are finding that many autistic people might have some form of PTSD. “We’re all just trying to put together the pieces and recognize that it’s an important area that requires further study,” she says. “It’s been a call to arms for the field to start looking at this.”

These researchers have their work cut out for them. In the typical population, PTSD is fairly well defined. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, psychiatry’s guide to diagnoses, PTSD usually develops after someone sees or experiences a terrifying or life-threatening event. After that initial episode, any reminder of it can trigger panic, extreme startle reflexes and flashbacks. Beyond that, however, there’s a wide variety in the way PTSD manifests: It can lead to hypervigilance and anger; it can cause recurring nightmares and other sleep issues; or it can lead to depression, persistent fear, aggression, irritability or difficulty concentrating and remembering things.

“If you do the math, according to the PTSD criteria in the DSM-5, you can have 636,000 different combinations of symptoms that that describe PTSD,” says Danny Horesh, head of the Trauma and Stress Research Lab at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Given all the traits in people with autism that may overlay these permutations, “you have a lot of reason to think that their version of PTSD might be very different,” he says.

Preliminary studies are just beginning to confirm that idea and to show that what constitutes trauma may be different in people on the spectrum. Together with Ofer Golan, an autism expert at Bar-Ilan, and others, Horesh has begun investigating where PTSD and autism converge. The group has recruited upwards of 130 participants, including students and some people diagnosed with autism, and tried to determine where they fall on the spectrum and whether they have any traditional signs of PTSD.

Abuse, sexual assault, violence, natural disasters and wartime combat are all common causes of PTSD in the general population. Among autistic people, though, less extreme experiences — fire alarms, paperwork, the loss of a family pet, even a stranger’s offhand comment — can also be destabilizing. They can also be traumatized by others’ behavior toward them.

“We know from the literature that individuals with autism are much more exposed to bullying, ostracizing, teasing, etc.,” Golan says. “And when you look in the clinic, you can see that they’re very sensitive to these kinds of events.” Among autistic students, Golan and Horesh have found, social incidents, such as ostracizing, predict PTSD more strongly than violent ones, such as war, terror or abuse, which are not uncommon in Israel. Among typical students, though, the researchers see the opposite tendency.

Given these differences, and the communication challenges autistic people often have, their PTSD can be particularly difficult to recognize and resolve.

“It’s so absurd that there are such excellent treatments for autism today, and such excellent treatments for PTSD today, and so much research on these interventions. But no one to date has connected both,” Horesh says. “How do you treat PTSD in people with autism? No one really knows.”

It can be difficult to treat autism and PTSD separately in people who have both conditions, because the boundaries between the two are often so blurry. And that may, ironically, be the key treating them. In other conditions that overlap with PTSD, as well as those that overlap with autism, researchers have found that it is most effective to develop therapies when they look at both conditions simultaneously.

PTSD and substance misuse, for instance, often co-occur, but for decades no one understood the dynamics between them. Once clinicians began to develop and study treatments for both at the same time, however, they were able to create a tailored and effective program that eases both conditions. “This is our model,” Horesh says. “Prove that something is co-morbid, determine why, and then develop interventions for this specific group — good interventions, accurate interventions.”

The researchers are uncovering some important overlaps between autism and PTSD in their studies. In a group of 103 college students, for instance, they found that students who have more autistic traits also have more signs of PTSD, such as avoiding sources of trauma and negative changes in mood. “The highest-risk group of one was also the highest risk group in the other,” Horesh says.

The researchers also found some unexpected trends: The association between PTSD symptoms and autism traits is, for as yet unknown reasons, stronger in men than in women, even though typical women are two to three times more likely to develop PTSD than are typical men; that gender bias might eventually inform treatments. And people with more autistic traits display a specific form of PTSD, one characterized by hyperarousal: They may be more easily startled, more likely to have insomnia, predisposed to anger and anxiety, or have greater difficulty concentrating than is seen in other forms of PTSD. Recognizing this subtype could be particularly helpful for spotting and preventing it, and for developing treatments, Horesh says, especially because the same traits might otherwise be mistakenly attributed to autism and overlooked. “We know that each PTSD has a different color, a different presence in the clinic,” he says.

Given the low reported rates of PTSD in people with autism, Kerns questions whether the DSM-5’s criteria for PTSD are sensitive enough to detect its signs in this population and wonders whether clinicians need to be on the lookout for a different subset of both causes and features.

Kerns and her colleagues are interviewing autistic adults and children — as well as guardians of some less verbal autistic people — to find out more about what, for them, constitutes trauma. So far, they’ve interviewed 15 adults and 15 caregivers. What she’s learned, she says, is that it’s necessary to check any assumptions at the door. “You want to be cautious about applying neurotypical definitions — you could miss a lot,” she says.

In speaking with participants about causes of trauma, she has heard “everything from sexual abuse, emotional abuse and horrendous bullying, to much broader concepts, like what it’s like to go around your whole life in a world where you have 50 percent less input than everyone else because you have social deficits. Or feeling constantly overwhelmed by sensory experience — feeling marginalized in our society because you’re somebody with differences.” In other words, she says, “the experience of having autism and the trauma associated with that.”

One parent Kerns spoke with had moved to a shelter with her autistic son to escape intense domestic violence. Her son had witnessed the abuse but seemed more affected by the move, the change in his routine and sudden loss of the family pet, which had to be left behind, than by the violence. He began to hurt himself more than he had before, and to ask repetitively for the pet, Kerns says. “Three years later he was still asking for the pet,” she says, “because the pet was one of the few relationships and connections with another being that he had.”

In another instance, a 12-year-old boy she interviewed refused to go to school and was hospitalized for threatening self-harm; the root of his trauma turned out to be ear-piercing fire drills. For a 53-year-old woman she talked to, crippling, traumatic stress resulted from the paperwork she needs to fill out every year to qualify for housing and other types of assistance.

How PTSD manifests in autistic people can also be unexpected, and can exacerbate autistic traits, such as regression of skills or communication, as well as stereotyped behaviors and speech. Based on these observations, Kerns and her collaborators plan to create autism-specific trauma assessments to test on a larger scale.

This line of research is still in its earliest days: It is still difficult to tease apart correlation from causation. In other words, does autism predispose someone to post-traumatic stress, or are people with autism more vulnerable to experiencing traumatic events? Or both? Scientists simply don’t know the answers yet — although some studies do indicate that autistic children are more reactive to stressful events and, because they lack the coping skills that help them calm down, perhaps predisposed to PTSD.

Even when trauma is known and documented, however, treating someone on the spectrum is easier said than done. When children are nonverbal or simply view the world differently, practitioners can struggle to find the most effective way to help them work through their experiences.

“There’s some evidence that children on the spectrum tend to interpret questions differently, and in a more literal way, or that they tend to be more avoidant of questions about their trauma than typically developing children,” says Daniel Hoover, a clinical child and adolescent psychologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress in Baltimore. “So they need measures that are more suited or adapted for children on the spectrum, which don’t really exist or are in development.”

One of the most effective treatments for PTSD, at least in children and adolescents, is trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. This treatment takes a multi-pronged approach that involves both children and their parents or guardians in talk therapy and education: All of them learn what trauma is, how to navigate potentially tricky situations, and about communication tools and calming techniques for moments of distress. Clinicians prompt the affected children to talk through the traumatic experience in order to help them take control of the narrative, reframe it and make it less threatening. But in children with autism, who may be less verbal than typical children or simply less inclined to delve into the memories over and over again, such an approach can prove especially challenging.

“There are a number of core features of autism that make usual psychotherapies somewhat more complicated,” Hoover says. Typical children tend to be reluctant to talk about their traumatic experiences, but they generally give in because they know it’s good for them, he says. “Children on the spectrum are often less willing — because they’re exceedingly anxious, and because they’re not able to see the forest for the trees.” He notes that autistic children can be so keyed into the present, and so tied to routine, that they have a difficult time participating in treatment that intensifies their anxiety in the moment, even when they know it might help in the long run.

In working with these children, clinicians have also found it particularly tricky to separate the child’s understanding of a potentially traumatic event from that of their parents, who can walk away from an event with a completely different interpretation. To peel back these layers, Hoover and his colleagues at Krieger have developed a graphic, interactive phone app to help children — even minimally verbal children — use images to report experiences and the emotions associated with them. (The group is now in negotiations with a publisher and hopes to make the app publicly available within a couple of years.)

Children on the spectrum also usually take far longer to show improvement than their typical peers do. “It takes them longer to buy into it and feel comfortable, and takes them longer to integrate the concepts,” Hoover says.

That has certainly proven true for Gabriel. He is slowly making progress under Hoover’s care, Kristina says, but it has taken a long time for him to open up. “There were days when he’d sit in that chair at stare at Dr. Hoover and didn’t answer him,” she says.

After the death of his grandmother earlier this year, Gabriel became intensely afraid that Kristina might die too. When Hoover tried to talk with the boy about it, Gabriel shut down and wouldn’t engage. But just the other week, his mother says, Gabriel finally opened up. “He and Dr. Hoover bounced ideas off each other: How can we deal with these thoughts? How do we redirect them?” The dialogue showed Gabriel was gaining mastery over his story, transforming it from an overwhelming memory to something more manageable.

Just a few weeks ago, Gabriel told his mother that he worried he might try to kill himself again, and asked for her help. “Before, I had to dissect what was going on, but now Gabriel is using his words,” Kristina says, “It is a huge improvement from where he used to be.”

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Now listening to Thankful by Natalie Cole and The Golden Touch by Cerrone...



On Robson Street in Downtown Vancouver. Summer of 2018.



















Robson Street is a major southeast-northwest thoroughfare in downtown and West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Its core commercial blocks from Burrard Street to Jervis were also known as Robsonstrasse. Its name honours John Robson, a major figure in British Columbia's entry into the Canadian Confederation, and Premier of the province from 1889 to 1892. Robson Street starts at BC Place Stadium near the north shore of False Creek, then runs northwest past Vancouver Library Square, Robson Square and the Vancouver Art Gallery, coming to an end at Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park.

As of 2006, the city of Vancouver overall had the fifth most expensive retail rental rates in the world, averaging US$135 per square foot per year, citywide. Robson Street tops Vancouver with its most expensive locations renting for up to US$200 per square foot per year. In 2006, both Robson Street and the Mink Mile on Bloor Street in Toronto were the 22nd most expensive streets in the world, with rents of $208 per square feet. In 2007, the Mink Mile and Robson slipped to 25th in the world with an average of $198 per square feet. The price of each continues to grow with Vancouver being Burberry's first Canadian location and Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood (which is bounded on the south side by Bloor) now commanding rents of $300 per square foot.

In 1895, train tracks were laid down the street, supporting a concentration of shops and restaurants. From the early to middle-late 20th century, and especially after significant immigration from postwar Germany, the northwest end of Robson Street was known as a centre of German culture and commerce in Vancouver, earning the nickname Robsonstrasse, even among non-Germans (this name lives on in the Robsonstrasse Hotel on the street). At one time, the city had placed streetsigns reading "Robsonstrasse" though these were placed after the German presence in the area had largely vanished.

Robson Street was featured on an old edition of the Canadian Monopoly board as one of the two most expensive properties.

Monday, August 14, 2023

Captain Marvel (2019) - Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden | Review | AllMovie

https://www.allmovie.com/movie/captain-marvel-vm993582602/review

Captain Marvel crashes into the big screen with a flurry of explosions. The titular superheroine (Brie Larson) embodies the toughest bruiser imaginable as she fistfights, flies, and shoots her way through the stratosphere without so much as a glance over her shoulder to watch the carnage. This endless action ride pauses momentarily only for laughs and character development as new friends bond.

Sandwiched between two epic intergalactic films that tie the entire Marvel Universe together, Captain Marvel incorporates the first female lead in a Marvel film, focusing on the story of the origins of the superheroine. It weaves several different epic superhero stories together, throwing them into a universal battle of good vs. evil, ultimately deciding all their fates, as well as everyone in existence. The stakes are astronomical.

The film requires a healthy attention span along with plenty of focus. The element of being thrown into the 1990's could throw off devoted fans of the series. But in so doing, we discover that the infinity war may be connected to Captain Marvel's alter ego on Earth, Carol Danvers.

Being thrust into this infinity war is a lot for one woman to bear, no matter how heroic she may be. But Captain Marvel gets some early advice from her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) to keep her potentially dangerous emotions in check. The humans think differently, suggesting that these feelings are what make you a hero. There are plenty of opportunities for her to develop emotionally upon discovering that she may have led a significant life on Earth prior to becoming a fighter pilot for the Kree (alien good guys).

Captain Marvel contains cutting-edge special effects so realistic, it's hard to distinguish what's real from what's been altered. Of note are the younger visage of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) with both eyes intact, as well as a full head of hair, and a scene-stealing CGI alien/best friend/copilot/cat, aptly named Goose.

Captain Marvel struggles with two very tough cinematic challenges in addition to her numerous foes. First, this film falls between the two other major Avengers Infinity War movies. With so many new characters mandatory for her to befriend, it draws focus away from the story of her provenance. Second, Marvel sometimes dips into "Superman territory," where the protagonist is so invincible that the audience isn't emotionally invested because there's no way for the character to die.

To spice up the mix, writing and directing partners Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar) bring their indie film brand of mixing comedy and emotion to a genre traditionally void of these things. Although it broadens its appeal to a wider audience, the frenetic action is non-stop. Adding the pop grunge soundtrack including: Nirvana, Garbage, and No Doubt is a sly trick to tie together 90's cultural themes in Captain Marvel's coming-of-age story.

Ultimately, with so many thrills, laughs, and terse combat scenes, the lack of any romance is a breath of fresh air. This fierce girl-power flick could be a stand-alone launch for the new Captain Marvel series, and it's an absolute must-see for fans of the Marvel Universe.