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March 22nd, 2012Top Story Train Your Brain for Monk-Like Focus By Thorin Klosowski The moment you get effortlessly lost in work goes by any number of names: focus, concentration, escapism, flow, and countless others. It's the point where you're able to blur the world around you and calibrate your brain to pay attention to one single task. It's your sweet spot. It's when you Get Things Done. Your entire cognitive effort is concentrated on one task and when you're in that moment the outside world disappears. We all struggle to maintain focus in our daily lives. Endless distractions keep our brains from focusing on a task as we struggle to get things done at work and complete projects around the house. But what's actually happening in your brain when you're lost in a project? And more importantly, how can you train to induce that focused state in yourself? To get a better understanding of how focus and concentration work, I talked with Susan Perry, Ph.D, a social psychologist and writer for of the Creating in Flow Blog at Psychology Today. It's important to know what's happening in your brain when you're focused on something and what happens when you get distracted. From there we can look at minimizing those distractions and training your brain to focus better. After all, focusing is a skill and takes practice to develop. What's Happening in Your Brain When You're Focused (and Distracted) To start, let's look at what's happening in the brain when you start to focus on something and then what causes you to break that focus. It turns, both processes are intertwined. The Two-Step Process: What Happens When You Focus The brain goes through two main steps when it's focused on a task. It's thought that selective focus is controlled by the top-down attention system. This system is under your control and asks a simple question, "What do you want to focus on?" When you decide to focus on something, the brain goes through two steps to sort and understand the information. Visually, you take in all information in a scene and start processing the information to find what you need to pay attention to. Picture the process like a blurry photo that slowly starts to come into focus. The second part involves focusing on one single aspect. As that same photo comes into focus, the attention starts to zoom in on the one aspect you want to pay attention to. This is the same essential process for voluntary and involuntary focus. When you're focused your perception of the world around you changes and you have a heightened ability to ignore things around you. This is being in "the zone," or "the flow." It's when you're focused and don't notice events around you unless something initiates your bottom-up attention system (which we'll get to in the next section). From a psychological standpoint, Dr. Perry describes these moments: From what I've studied, it seems that both the right and left brain are working efficiently together, but able to screen out peripheral distractions. Time seems to disappear and you and the thing you're doing feel as though they've become one. Such flow states have aspects in common with trance states, though it's tough to do MRIs of someone writing a book or playing a game. Photo by Mike Warot. This Is What Happens in Your Brain When You Break Focus The root of breaking focus is an evolutionary system meant to keep us safe. Where selective focusing is reliant on top-down attention, breaking focus comes from the involuntary bottom-up attention. You cannot control this because bottom-up attention is hard-wired into your brain as a passive process. Bottom-up attention asks, "What is happening that needs your attention?" Two outside events cause us to break focus: bright colors or lights, and loud noises. Your focus is drawn to things that might be dangerous or rewarding, like the growl of an animal or the sound and lights of a police siren. Once the top-down focus is broken it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to a project. Each time it's broken, you restart the process and use up your brain's resources. Essentially you're slowly growing exhausted by distractions. Picture your attention system like a glass of water. When it's still, it's easy to see through the glass and concentrate on one thing. When you hit it everything is disturbed and takes a while to calm down so you can see clearly through it. Over time, the water evaporates and by the end of the day you're left with nothing. This brings us to the ways to pinpoint those evolutionary distractions and remove the triggers so you can focus on what needs to get done. Photo by Quinn Dombrowski. Pinpoint What Breaks Your Concentration and Remove Those Triggers Nobody is totally the same. It's likely at some point in your life you've met that one person who can enjoy reading with a TV on in the background or who has no problem concentrating on a task while blaring death metal. To help yourself focus when you need to, it's important to pinpoint your own triggers and get rid of them for blocks of time. Let's look at the two distraction triggers science has proven cause you to break focus. Minimize the External Distraction Triggers We All Have For external distractions, two prime candidates break your concentration no matter how involved you are in what we're doing: loud sounds and blinking lights. Minimizing these common distractions is a sure way to ensure no outside forces will break your focus. A lot of different ways exist to easily block outside influences. Entire businesses and apps are built on the very idea. Here are a few simple suggestions to help you minimize the risk of outside influences breaking your focus. Wear headphones or earplugs: If loud noises are the biggest cause of distraction then the most logical approach is to remove them from the equation. Noise cancelling headphones or earplugs can do this easily. The important thing to remember is that distraction doesn't come from just loud noises that are directed at you (someone shouting your name) but loud noises in general. That includes the car bumping Cyndi Lauper, the fire truck screaming down the road, and even a loud furnace turning on. All of these are enough to break your focus. If you want to get really hardcore about blocking your outside sound cues, consider recording your entire day on a digital recorder to find where and when those sounds are coming so you can reschedule your day around them. Strap on your digital blinders: Seeing as how you probably don't want to literally wear blinders when you want to focus on a task, the next best thing you can do is remove the visual cues from your environment. For most of us, this means blocking audio and visual notifications. We've mentioned before that notifications are evil and since they typically come with both distraction triggers, audio and visual, they can wreck serious havoc on your concentration. You can set up timed internet blocks that block the likes of email or Facebook, use browser extensions to keep you on track, or if all else fails, simply close down your email, throw your phone in another room and get to work. Your solutions will vary, but the point is you want to block those notifications that call attention to anything other than the task you're working on. Creating a private little noise and light-free cubicle is a good for blocking the outside influences neuroscientists have pinpointed as the cause of distractions, but what about the all-too-familiar internal distractions we all deal with? Photo by Chris. Pinpoint Your Internal Distractions and Stop Them Before They Start We all get distracted by different internal things throughout the day. Those thoughts might be about what you're eating for dinner, why the girl at the coffee shop didn't want to go out on a date, or that stupid thing you said to you boss. You can, however, limit those brain wanderings when you need to focus on a task by simply putting the brakes on the thought process. Dr. Perry notes: You can set up your environment to diminish distractions, decide on a routine or ritual that feels to you like a good way to begin your focused work. But in reality, our minds are so busy multi-tasking and keeping track of so many inputs that it's going to take a genuine decision, a commitment, to make that transition from "all over the place" to "right here, right now." Author and teacher David Rock describes this as paying attention to your attention. He suggests it's not easy to do, but it's possible to stop those thoughts from overwhelming you: To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold. It turns out that, like the old saying goes, timing is everything. Once you take an action, an energetic loop commences that makes it harder to stop that action. Many activities have built-in rewards, in the form of increased arousal that holds your attention. Once you open your email program and see the messages from people you know, it's so much harder to stop yourself from reading them. Most motor or mental acts also generate their own momentum. Decide to get out of your chair and the relevant brain regions, as well as dozens of muscles, are all activated. Blood starts pumping and energy moves around. To stop getting out of your chair once you start will take more focus and effort than to decide not to get up when you first have the urge. To avoid distractions it's helpful to get into the habit of stopping the wrong behaviors early, quickly, and often, well before they take over. Learning to deal with distraction is great, but what's more sustainable in the long term is training your brain to focus better. Let's see how you can do it. Maximize Your Focus with the Power of Science Learning how to focus takes training. If you maximize your environment and train your brain, focused moments are easier to come by when you want them. On top of the above examples for creating an environment conducive to focusing, here are a few ideas for training your brain to kick into focus mode without as much effort on your part. Increase the Relevance of the Task You Need to Complete The idea here is pretty simple. Our attention system is a top-down priority list (and distractions are bottom-up). This is the key feature in any to-do list. The most important thing is at the top, the least important is at the bottom. If you've ever managed to cram a homework assignment into a single evening, you know that a deadline is crucial for forcing yourself to focus. The same is said for any task you need to complete. In an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers suggest that you can override your attention system to maintain focus provided you have a good working memory, which is something you can train yourself. To increase the relevance of a task, assign a due-date (if one isn't assigned) and tap into the reward center of your brain and offer up a reward for completing a task. For instance, "When I finish writing this article, I get a cookie." Prioritize with a to-do list, organize everything, and focus only on the top-most goal. The goal is to add weight to the project you want to focus on so that it's easier to do so. Meditation as a Focusing Boot Camp Early research from UCLA suggests that meditation can build brain tissue around areas of the brain associated with attention. Although the study looked at long term effects, the most interesting part is that the brain is malleable and trainable. In this case, meditation is used to train your brain to focus better. Before you get worried about learning all about chakra's and omm's, it's good to note we've talked about the practical ways anyone can meditate. One of the first steps in meditation is concentrating on your breathing and blocking out your thoughts. As pointed out above, putting the brakes on wandering thoughts is one of the key ways to keep yourself focused. The very first step of meditation teaches you how to do this. It's a trick that applies at nearly any moment and is worth training yourself to do, even if you don't follow through with the entire meditation ideal. Train Your Brain the Easy Way: Get Lost in a Good Story Focusing on something productive triggers the same parts of the brain as focusing on entertainment. Using entertainment as a training program is a great way to teach yourself to break free of distractions, enjoy a good story, and learn what it takes to focus. Dr. Perry suggests getting lost in a story isn't all that different from getting lost in something productive: It's not easy to differentiate the sensation of being lost in something with a productive flow state. After all, there isn't any objective difference between one kind of absorption and another. You can be reading actively, watching a movie actively, or creating something or working toward a work goal actively. During any of those activities, you can go from engaged to bored and mentally drifting at any point. I think we all know when we're reading or watching something that requires no effort (what I would call media for the brain dead). You're in flow when you're slightly challenged, rather than bored, riding that line between too hard and too easy. You can use any type of entertainment you like, but the key point Dr. Perry points out is that it's challenging and you're doing it actively. Television doesn't work so well because ads break focus, but books, movies, and games are all ways to utilize your escapism as a means to calibrate your brain to focusing. The key is that you actively pay attention and absorb what you're consuming. That means no Twitter breaks, phone calls, or anything else. Turn off the lights, huddle up on the couch, and enjoy your media without distractions. These training exercises won't allow you to run off and start working on a big project without having to worry about distractions. Instead, they get you used to the feeling of being focused and that feeling transfers over across everything you do. Photo by niezwyciezony. When you understand what causes your brain to focus on something it's easier to train your brain to focus better and ignore distractions. No one-size-fits-all method works because everyone deals with (or even notices) distractions differently. But once you're focused, the last thing you want to do is let that feeling get away. Have some tips that help you maintain focus? Share them in the comments.

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March 22nd, 2012Top Story Why You Should Play Angry Birds Space, The Game Everyone's Talking About By Stephen Totilo The fourth Angry Birds game is upon us. It's called Angry Birds Space and it's actually a far more impressive and interesting game of Angry Birds than we've ever seen before. It's different. It's harder. And it's more expensive. Here's what you need to know. It's not Angry Birds 2, but it might as well be. For some reason, the Angry Birds people at Finnish development studio Rovio don't like putting numbers on their games, so after Angry Birds we got Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio. Seasons and Rio were just like that oldest bird: pure, simple video games that millions of millions of people could enjoy. They've changed the way Angry Birds plays big-time in this new one, and they're offering 61 levels for you to try with their new style. The old Angry Birds formula worked. It just got old. It was simple in those older games: you put a bird in a slingshot and fired it in an arc toward a tower of blocks. If your aim was sure, you would knock those blocks over and squash a few green pigs sitting on or under them. That was the basic challenge in level after level. You'd get a few birds in each level—birds that could split into multiple birds, birds that could suddenly accelerate into a speed boost, birds that could explode. For a while, it didn't get old. Shoot the birds. Crush the pigs. Do it in as few turns as you could and you'd get a high score, unlock a new level and play some more. You could play through a level in about 20 seconds and feel both like a master of complex trajectories and the recipient of the kind of lucky bounce that would earn a golfer a hole in one. Thankfully, this 'Space' thing is the literal game-changer. Angry Birds Space scraps some of the old rules. Yes, you still play level by level. You still have a set number of birds—birds of different types—that you'll slingshot at towers of blocks, hoping to squash some pigs. Click to view But now you're shooting your birds through space, from one planet to the next. Each planet has a gravitational field. Gone is the simplicity of just lobbing a bird in an arc. No. Welcome to the physics of the heavenly bodies. Shoot a bird into open space and it'll fly off in a straight line. Shoot one toward another planet and it'll get caught in its gravitational field and start orbiting the planet... or slowly descend as it encircles the planet to smash into the ground. And there are new birds. The new ice birds freeze structures, making them easier to shatter. Laser birds are like the old yellow birds, except you can re-aim them when you boost their speed. There's more. The whole game is more complex, but the payoff is better. If Angry Birds could made you feel smart or lucky before, Angry Birds Space will make you feel like a physics genius and a lotto winner. Just imagine firing a bird from one planet, getting it caught in the gravitational field of another, which whips the bird around that planet and into the gravitational field of another planet, which spins the bird around that world in the other direction, so it can finally smack a snorting pig from behind. Victory! This game may seem way more difficult than the ones before it. Yes, they've definitely made Angry Birds Space harder than its predecessors. You won't have that much trouble learning about how the gravity works. But you'll be scratching your head at some of these challenges early on. To compensate they give you an aiming guideline that shows where your bird will go before you fire it. They've even made the Eagle trickier to use. The mighty eagle used to be an insta-win in the other Angry Birds games. In this one, he generates a black hole. That's good! But it has its limits. The black hole will suck away part of the level but it won't give you an immediate victory if you activated it in the wrong spot. There are a few catches—catches that cost money. First of all, the game costs money if you're on iOS. It's only free for Android users. You can download an ad-supported Android app or pay 99 cents for the "full" (caveat incoming!) game. On iOS, you can pay 99 cents for a version that will run on iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, but if you want it to look good on your iPad, you need to pay $2.99 for Angry Birds Space HD, which, as far as we can tell, doesn't sync your progress with the phone version. So if you have an iPhone and an iPad, you'll have to decide whether you want to pay for this game twice—and play through it twice. There are also Amazon marketplace, Windows and Mac versions. Prices go up to $5.95. Unfortunately, a third of the game costs extra. However you get Angry Birds Space, whatever you pay, you're only getting about two thirds of the game. You're getting 30 levels of the first zone, 30 levels of a second zone, 15 5 bonus levels and then a planet of super-difficult levels that... you have to pay more for. Only the first level of Space's so-called Danger Zone is free. You have to pay 99 cents for the other 29 levels. That's the kind of hidden cost that pisses some people off, and it's one reason that Angry Birds Space has a few 1-star reviews on iTunes. (Note: the $5.95 PC version appears to include these levels for the base cost) Even once you pay, you'll still have to pay to unlock the Danger Zone levels. Warning: these levels are very hard. But at least they've got some good jokes in this game. Like a Super Mario Bros. homage. Angry Birds Space has 15 hidden golden eggs. Finding one and striking it will unlock a bonus level, each of which seem to be based on classic video games such as Space Invaders and Super Mario Bros.. Look for the Space Invaders egg in world 1-9. As we find more, we'll link to their locations here. Angry Birds Space isn't that expensive. We recommend it. Weird pricing strategies notwithstanding, Angry Birds Space is a far more interesting game than the older Angry Birds. Some people may not like how much more complex it's become, but if the old games bored you or lost your interest, this new one is the breath of fresh air we needed. Here are the numerous ways to get the game: Angry Birds Space [Android Free Version] Angry Birds Space [Android, 99 cents] Angry Birds Space [Kindle Fire] Angry Birds Space [iOS for iPhone and iPad, requires iPhone 3GS and/or iOS 4.0 and up, 99 cents] Angry Birds Space HD [iPad only, $2.99] Angry Birds Space [Mac, $4.99] Where To Find Angry Birds Space's Golden Eggs They're called eggsteroids now, okay? Like lots of other things in the latest version of Rovio's hit mobile franchise, the shiny collectibles in Angry Birds Space have changed. More » Angry Birds Space [PC, $5.95] Angry Birds Space Slingshots Its Way Into Gaming App of the Day You've read all about Angry Birds Space in our explainer article, now watch me play it as we officially give Rovio's latest and greatest a nod as our Gaming App of the Day. More »

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March 22nd, 2012Top Story Tune In, Recap, Drop Out: Why I'll Never Recap a TV Show Again By Rich Juzwiak Tracie Potochnik has recapped America's Next Top Model for Television Without Pity since its third cycle started airing eight years ago. Over the years, she announced recently, she has written more than 1,350,000 words on the show. That's more than two War and Peaces, but these volumes of work don't so much as have the honor of collecting dust. They are ephemeral by nature, tied to episodes of seasons of whole shows that are forgotten virtually as soon as they air. Recapping television, especially with the detail and craft of Potochnik, ultimately amounts to writing sandcastles—and yet it's become a beloved staple of the blogger's oeuvre. My time as a recapper stretches back to the summer of 2005, when I decided to write about Being Bobby Brown for my own blog. That led, funnily enough, to one of my first links on Gawker and the audience indication that I could have a voice in this weird online world. It was almost immediately rewarding and something like intoxicating. About a month after Brown's run, I started getting my fix from a show I'd adored from its start: America's Next Top Model. This I stuck with the longest, amassing 12 seasons' worth of write-ups. I also did two seasons of Project Runway, The Real World: Brooklyn and some Jersey Shore. Much of this was done during my free nights while being employed by VH1 from 2006 and 2010 to recap virtually all of its programming. I was a recapping machine, and this is my rising: No more recaps ever. No more thankless work that posits the writer as an entertainer while the readers demand accordingly. (The emails come regularly: "Where is it?!") No more being bound to the whims of a show that could at any moment take a turn for the shitty, and will, if nothing else, thwart my social life. I want to be a normal person who's watching TV, not some frantic note-taking instant replayer. No more regularly scheduled forced digestion in a period of time that gives my brain and writing cramps. It's fatigue, plain and simple, that comes from within but is informed from without. The limitless ubiquity of recaps makes writing them a challenge. Competition is stiff and deadlines are brutal, typically requiring just a few hours for turnaround to remain relevant. For this reason, formal and technical advances are few and far between: Typically, the biggest adventure a current recap can take is a shticky template tailored specifically to a show's format (as Vulture once did in its song-by-song breakdowns of Glee). The most you can hope for is that the blocks of text are broken into smaller blocks. Given the several modes of expression that the Internet affords, the time-crunch limitations are especially frustrating: We cannot use what is at our fingertips — images, gifs, videos, and sound files — because we do not have the time. The paradox of the medium is that with more recaps comes the demand not just to be faster, but also more distinct. The impossibility of this is frustrating enough to shut me down. I'm not entirely alone. I recently talked to Tara Ariano, a co-founder of the internet's premier recap shop, Television Without Pity, who seemed to suffer the same recapping fatigue as me. TWoP first began as a Dawson's Creek blog, but it quickly grew to cover all kinds of "guilty pleasure" TV and then all kinds of TV, period. Ariano says she's edited "a minimum of a thousand recaps," and they were long ones, sometimes stretching into tens of thousands of words. (Television Without Pity emerged when one could take his or her time on the Internet and still publishes full recaps days after an episode has aired.) She is currently recapping Justified for Grantland (she's filling in for Chris Ryan) in that formatted approach required by a tight turnaround. Ariano says she doesn't have the patience or work hours to read recaps of the shows she's already seen and doesn't care to read ones about the shows she doesn't watch. And with so many being grinded out, what would be the point, anyway? "If it's an overnight recap, I know the writer can't get too into it, because [he or she] wrote it in two hours, max, because there was a really short deadline to get it in. There's only so much insight you can get. I know because I turn around recaps overnight often." Mark Lisanti, also of Grantland and formerly Defamer, told me the change he's seen over years is industrial. "[Recapping] used to be a lot more niche, but now every outlet's got a full slate of recaps. They're unavoidable, especially on the big shows. It definitely used to feel like more of a fun thing blogs did." When did things turn sour? When did labors of love turn into automated grabs for pageviews? The recap already seemed like it was at the saturation point a year and a half ago, when the Observer wrote about the "Rise of Recappers" and reported that New York Magazine's Vulture blog (a blog!) employed 30 recappers. (A glance at the past two weeks of Vulture recaps found 19 unique writers). Twitter's role is crucial, as it has expanded and helped disintegrate the line between recapper and commenter –- anyone tweeting along to a show is essentially recapping it as it's happening. Talking about TV is no longer just for the anointed and employed Internet denizens. While democracy is a beautiful thing, it's also diluting what once looked like a bright new mode of expression. Tom Shales, TV critic for the Washington Post, dated the inception of the recap back to L.A. Law, NBC's courtroom dramedy that ran from 1986 to 1994. It wasn't covered as meticulously as your average modern-day show, but, Shales told us, critics would return to it repeatedly over the course of its seasons in admiration of its sophisticated storylines and characters, which marked a break from the then standard top-of-the-season, review-it-and-forget-it schedule. The most important early episode-by-episode engagement on the Internet was that of Daniel Drennan, whose message board explorations of the original Beverly Hills 90210 eventually ballooned to thousands of words on his own site, Inquisitor Mediarama. Those 90210 recaps influenced Ariano, Bunting and Cole to engage with Dawson's Creek, and that engagement spawned Television Without Pity, the unparalleled champion of Internet recapping for years. Any good idea will spread and be coopted, especially if it's occurring on the great facilitator that is the Internet. Other highlights in recapping included: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 – 2003) – Using the model Shales described, Stephanie Zacharek followed Buffy the Vampire Slayer closely on Salon, but would write about the show as its topics piqued her interest. She was not a weekly slave to Buffy. The result was filled with perspective and consequently adored. The Bachelor (March 2002 - present) – A recent New York Times piece praised comedian Annie Lederman's weekly video recaps for The Daily, as well as Leila Cohan-Miccio and Caitlin Bitzegaio's satirical stage show The Bachelor: Romance, Roses and Romance. While the latter is not a recap, it is a response to the show with creativity far more sophisticated than a knee-jerk. American Idol (June 2002 – present) – Formal exercises recapping Idol include Jim Cantielo's "Idol in a Minute" videos for MTV. However, the sheer amount of words shed every week on this show are a marvel, yet unsurprising: Something doesn't get to be a cultural phenomenon without being discussed ad nauseam and participation is written into Idol's format. Lost (September 2004 – May 2010) – Parsing out the show's mysteries became something of a sport for viewers. It was the rare show where no detail was too small, and thus made the meticulousness not just warranted but essential. The Real Housewives (March 2006 – present) – Richard Lawson's reality warping Gawker recaps are legendary. Bravo's requirement that its on-air talent participate online in the form of episode-response blogs was revolutionary. These talent screeds trumped outsider snark with insider insight (or, even better: further delusion), and extended the participatory experience of reality TV into a full 360 degrees. Mad Men (July 2007 – present) – Natasha Vargas-Cooper's Footnotes to Mad Men provided a service well beyond entertainment, exploring real cultural references struck by the fictional, '60s-set show. Gossip Girl (September 2007 – present) – How would blogs NOT cover the shit out of a show about blogs? This one had the bait written into it, insuring whatever played out on the web would have the delicious zing of the meta. Those examples are all of work that dared to go beyond the churn, something risky if not impossible given tight turnaround times. (The aforementioned stuff has spawned its own share of exhaustion, as Cantiello's routine all-nighters can attest.) The immediate payoff that comes from audience response and adoration is gratifying, but there's a greater good, too. It's a beautiful thing in an increasingly audio/visual world wherein TV serials are the new novels that writing can still be considered compulsively entertaining. Not all writers are entertainers, and certainly fewer entertainers are writers, but there is something thrilling about their intersection within the recap medium. It's a haven for stand-up comedians and critics alike. Despite (or maybe because of) that, recap has not replaced the traditional critique, and it likely never will. That's like saying Dancing with the Stars is going to replace dancing. By virtue of their widened scope, think pieces still get the most play and admiration — Ryan McGhee's sharp essay on The Sopranos's destruction of episodic TV for The A.V. Club is relevant beyond any specialized recap and spawned the smart rebuttals to prove it. For most people, perspective requires time (as does quality, according to the ethos of TWoP, which still posts recaps days after an episode airs). Very few people are capable of the "incisive commentary and wit" in "record time" that the A.V. Club's Steve Heisler credits to Alan Sepinwall, the prolific recapper formerly of the Star-Ledger. I'll never stop writing about TV. I'll never get over my love of minutiae and I'll never stop attempting to capture and describe the bigger picture. Recapping found me reveling in the former and unable to focus on the latter. It made me an unbalanced writer. The grind's minor rewards do not outweigh its burden. I cannot deny that my recapping built me an audience and had a hand in career opportunities. I always said that I worked so much on my blog, eschewing socializing on weeknights, because I preferred to have something to show for my time. My archives haven't gone anywhere, and while the idea of them is soothing, the actual contents are not. Those thousands and thousands of words I wrote are largely meaningless, pulled away from whatever significance they had by the tides of time. This is what it feels like from the rocks, beaten by my beat. Photo by Nerijus/Shutterstock.

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