- What's up, everybody? Peter McKinnon here, and I am back. Programming will return to its regular scheduled time. In honor of my return from abroad, today, we're talking about five tips, five tricks that you can do when traveling with your photo or video gear. Intro. (upbeat rock music) First things first. Pete, why is your face so red? Well, I'll tell you.
The wind utterly destroyed my skin whilst climbing the side of a mountain. Needless to say, I was in four countries yesterday. That's crazy. And I started thinking to myself on the flight back, what can I teach you guys that I learned on this trip that would be valuable to you, and I thought, well, this is a perfect example of things you need, things to do, things to keep in mind when traveling with your equipment, be it on assignment or vacation or whatever it is play casino games in Canada. There's kinda something for everyone. A little bit of a mixed bag, if you will. So let's start with bags and organization. Now, these are are the bags I use, these are the pouches I use, the things I use to keep my gear safe, organized, and efficient when I'm traveling to shoot. Or whatever it is, photo, video, assignment, pleasure, doesn't matter, this is kinda my system that I feel is a good one to implement if you wanna keep your stuff together. So, so many bags to choose from. There's roller bags, stroller bags, sling bags, backpacks, I've had 'em all. For me, the best thing... I'm come full circle back to the backpack. You can have your hands free if you're hopping a fence, if you're climbing under something. It's just the easiest bag to keep all your stuff on you without having that side bag flopping around when you're walking, or slinging it, it gets stuck, and all that weight starts hurting your one shoulder. You can't roll a bag up a mountain. Every bag is good for something, but there's just some bags that are better for everything. For me, that's a backpack. Specifically, I like a backpack that opens from the back. It doesn't matter what brand it is, but if it opens from the back, that protects it from thieves. Six days ago, I was in Venice, Italy, and we were shooting some footage and I put my back down to grab some equipment, and I noticed three guys sitting on a bench. The second I put my bag down, they looked at each other. One got up, circled around behind me, pretend to talk on the phone, magically had a phone call. The other guy went around to his other side, and they effectively formed a triangle around me, and the one guy on the bench was keeping watch. I know what he was doing, I know what they were doing, I looked up, and I gave 'em the nod. Yeah, nice little, nice formation there. Real stellar. And he looked over at his friend went like this, and that was kinda the signal to tell them I had caught on and then they all went back and sat down. The phone magically went away and that phone call ended, and I zipped up my bag and left. So, you gotta be careful when you're traveling anywhere because people, people wanna steal your shit. So you gotta make sure it's safe, secure, and in order, and nobody's getting into that bag, except for you. I love the Lowepro ProTactic 450. They're not paying me to say this. It's just a sick bag, because it opens from the back.
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Enjoy a movie under the stars in a New York City Park like Bryant park or have a dine-in theater experience at a retro-style theater like Nighthawk. Number 24 Wear whatever you want! Most New Yorkers do wear black but you can wear whatever you want even if you wear a rainbow colorful tutu, New Yorkers wouldn't give you a second glance! Number 25 have a night out on the town! It is called the city that never sleeps for a reason. Enjoy classy cocktails at a hidden speakeasy or dive bars that have pool, live jazz and ping pong, like one of my favorites Fat Cat. Number 26 go shopping or at least window shopping head uptown to 5th Avenue for some of these prettiest windows or go vintage shopping in Brooklyn.
Head to Soho for some more fun shopping and cobblestone streets. Also check out my video about Soho for more! Number 27 follow in famous footsteps there are so many iconic series and movies that are shot here in New York as their backdrop from Friends to Seinfeld to Sex in the City and Gossip Girl you can go on custom tours that follow all of these movies and series around the city. Number 28 stay somewhere unique! For convenience Midtown Manhattan is the best location to see Times Square, a lot of midtown Manhattan attraction and it's really close to the subway but I also highly recommend Airbnb. I have stayed in Airbnbs as staycations here in New York City and definitely loved that local authentic experience if you stay with a super host or just a really good host they will give you recommendations of places right near you and some of their local hidden gems. You can also use my code down below just get $40 off your first Airbnb you can stay in a modern skyscraper or a Brooklyn brownstone just like this one! Number 29 do something different! I wish I could include everything that is in New York City in this whole video but I can't so definitely look up your favorite thing and see if there's a museum or an exhibit or even a tour dedicated all to it. You would be surprised there are some really fun quirky, unique things that this city has to offer that you can't find anywhere else! Number 30 visit again in a different season! As New Yorkers think New York is the center of the universe you will likely want to come back again. So my favorite time to visit is definitely the spring when you can see the cherry blossoms and it is not as warm and crowded as the summer months which is the most popular time so my top recommendation is to visit during the spring in April or May or in the fall during September and October when you can hopefully see the leaves changing color which is so beautiful and the fall weather is much better than summer. If you love the holidays you will love visiting the city in December and January that is when you can go ice skating at Rockefeller Center or the less crowded Bryant Park. You can even enjoy beautiful window displays at Fifth Avenue and see the Rockefeller tree! I'm Jen thank you so much for watching the top things to do in New York City Guide, while you're here feel free to watch my other New York City videos and if you enjoyed this give it a thumbs up click the subscribe and bell button and if you know someone who might enjoy this video please click share! As always say YES to new adventures and I'll see you next time! Bye! 67 stories up we are on the Top of the Rock. I recommend definitely come here for sunset but come two hours ahead so that you make sure you get the right time slot! Number 16 go to touristy spots like Times Square even though some locals might warn you against it it is crowded for a reason is truly one-of-a-kind place and I remember when I first came to Times Square looking all around me it is so bright there are so many lights that you really have to check it out.
Even if it's a quick visit you need to come to Times Square just to see it at least once! number 17 go to a museum New York City has over a hundred museums. I recommend you travel uptown to the Museum Mile, a collection of ten museums including the Cooper-Hewitt, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you have a short period of time come visit my favorite Museum: the Metropolitan Museum of Art also known as "The Met." It has a really great Egyptian wing including the temple of Dendur, which was fully relocated and saved from the floods of the Nile, also they have seasonal costume exhibits at the costume Institute number 18 Go on an adventure! If you enjoy rock climbing you will love coming here under the Manhattan Bridge and you can climb and Boulder right here outdoors or on the actual rocks that make up Central Park. Number 19 go to a park! Even though it is called the concrete jungle there are so many wonderful parks here. You can enjoy a beautiful day in Central Park or even the High Line which is an elevated railroad tracks-turned park or even a park near you number 20 Watch the sunset or if you're an early riser watch the sunrise! Two of my favorite places for watching the sunset are here in Brooklyn Heights overlooking the pylons or in Gantry Plaza in Queens. Number 21 get lost in a book. If you love books you'll love the strand bookstore or the Morgan library or the New York Public Library, right next to Bryant Park. Number 22 See a show! Known for some of the best shows in the world you can see revivals and classics on Broadway and for more affordable shows go to off- Broadway or off off Broadway, the more offs the more affordable it is! Number 23 see a movie differently! In the early 1930s a man named Burrhus Frederic Skinner began to study psychology in a radical new way. See, before him we only knew how to condition reactions; we could condition a person to be terrified of pumpkins or hungry at the sight of office supplies. But Skinner theorized that you could go one further. He theorized that you could condition volition—that you could change the way that people make choices So why are we talking about it? Because a vast number of today's games are built upon Skinner's discoveries, and it's starting to become a bad habit. But, before I get ahead of myself, let's take a closer look at what Skinner did this website.
Skinner created a machine: a simple box with a button in it that he would put pigeons in. When the pigeons pecked at the button the machine would give them food. He then hooked the box up to a recording device so he could tell how often the pigeons pecked the button. Seems simple enough, so: why was this so groundbreaking? Because pecking the button is active. This wasn't just an automatic reaction to stimuli, it involved making a decision. So if Skinner could show that he could consistently change how often the pigeons peck the button, he could show that he could condition them to make a specific choice. This is called operant conditioning. Now there were two amazing parts to his findings. One, operant conditioning works on humans. Two, simply rewarding someone every time they do an action isn't the best way to keep them continually doing that action. Rather, if you provide a reward to a person after they perform the action a random number of times, or only give a reward once every so many minutes, these methods are far more effective at conditioning someone to repeat an action. Skinner often talked about operant conditioning in terms of gambling. Most gambling games are not rigged in the gambler's favor and, oddly enough, most gamblers are well aware of this, and yet they continue to gamble rather than perform an equally strenuous job that has a regular pay out with a higher net profit. Consider which activity people will tell you is more fun: spending eight hours in a casino playing the slots and ending up with a hundred bucks, or pushing a button in a factory for eight hours and getting a paycheck for a hundred bucks at the end. This is all compounded by another discovery of Skinner's research: he demonstrated that primary conditioners, or rewards that are fundamental biological needs— you know: food water sex etc.—have a diminishing effect once a person reaches "satiation," or the biological limit of their needs. But then there are secondary reinforcers: things outside the biological realm, like money or social approbation. These things generally don't hit a satiation point. You can probably see where we're going with this. Many of you have played Farmville or World of Warcraft well past the point where it was fun. Why? Because those games are very clearly built around reward schedules. The entire design of both of those games is to condition you to continue to repeat an action that has long since lost its novelty— that has long since become tedious. Actually, before we continue: quick disclaimer. Being conditioned to do an action and being addicted to something are very different. We're not gonna go into the addiction thing today but I just wanted to acknowledge the difference. All we're going to talk about today is how games can condition us. Okay, disclaimer over. So why is it a problem if games do this? For now let's ignore the questionable morality of using Skinner's theories to create games. The problem is that it's a lazy and cheap way to get someone to believe they're enjoying your product. Have you ever finished a game and then looked back a few weeks later and thought, "What the hell was I doing putting 80 hours of my life into that? That usually happens because the game used Skinner's techniques to create the illusion of engagement and extend playtime. RPGs, especially poorly-made ones, are a great example of this. Everything from loot drops to leveling is a very clear reward schedule that reinforces the behavior that gets you the reward. ever been playing late and getting sleepy but then decide that you're going to get just one more level before you go to bed Yep. But this isn't just an RPG problem, it's endemic. Almost anything with points uses this system. Ask your grandmother sometime why she plays so much Bejeweled. But it goes beyond points, too. It works with anything that has a clear and manifest reward. Solitaire the most played game in the world sets up the infrequent win as a clear reward Many action games use the same system to convince players to mash the same buttons for 12 hours straight. Even elements like the voiceovers in shooters that tell the player how awesome they are can be used as conditioning tools. It's also one of the main reasons every game is getting RPG elements these days. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with adding RPG elements if it's being used to create deep immersive systems for the game. I'm actually a huge fan of this trend when it's used to combine mental challenges and execution challenges like in Call of Duty or Dungeon Fighter. But too many games are using RPG elements as a crutch. Bland uninspired games will include reward systems simply to delay your realization of how terrible they are. My point is there are other better ways of fostering engagement, and those are the methods we should be demanding from our games, not simple Skinner box satisfaction. Here are a few examples. 1. Mystery. Human curiosity is a powerful thing. We like unraveling mysteries. We've all played a game that made us ask "what the hell's going on?" immediately followed by "I want to keep going to find out." 2. Mastery. The player can be engaged by giving him the opportunity to master a skill, and then utilize that mastery. You see this sort of thing in rhythm games fighting games sometimes even RPGs. This one's a little tougher to execute in traditional games but we already kind of talked about this in our easy games episode, so: moving on! 3. Mental Challenge. Oddly enough most of us don't actually get enough mental stimulation in a day. From the thought problems in Professor Layton or Myst to the logic stomping of a Civ game. Giving players a way to work their brains is a great way to keep people interested. 4. Narrative. You ever get lost in a world? Continued playing a game just because it was a place you wanted to be? This, as well as linear story narrative, is a great way to engage players. 5. Novelty. This one's hard to maintain but: human beings like new things. We're engaged by novelty. This is why brown shooters may wear thin but Planescape doesn't. 6. Flow. Games like "everyday shooter," N₂O or even a really good session of the original Alien vs Predator can bring a player to a sort of Zen trance. We've all been there at one point or another. Your eyes enter soft focus, your blinking slows, your breathing becomes incredibly regular, and you're just doing. There is no controller; you and the screen are one. You've stopped thinking in the ordinary sense of cognition and instead are working on some much deeper level. This is very hard to design for. It basically involves creating rhythm within play, and then slowly demanding the player to start performing actions faster, and faster, building momentum until they're performing the actions faster than they could possibly think through them. It's hard to pull this off as a designer but achieving this experience is deeply compelling in a game. Now this is just a small set of non-conditioning ways to make games fun, and no good game relies strictly on one; most of your favorites combine many of these elements. So to all designers and future designers out there: we have to get away from this increased reliance on Skinner box methods of compelling gamers to play our games. Engagement and compulsion are different things. Just because you can make an experience compelling doesn't make it a good game. Whether you’re in high school or in college, you will inevitably come across a time when you have to ride the bus. That may involve a short ride home, or it may involve a full road trip. Whatever the case may be, you will probably have to find a way to study in the midst of a bumpy ride. This is easier said than done. It is possible to study on a bus, but it is far from easy to do. If you are thinking about doing this in the future, the tips below will help you get through the process the best you can.
Read and Pause, Read and Pause Buses are always bumpy, so you can’t expect to get a lot of reading done when you ride on a bus. If you do have to read to study, you need to master the art of reading and pausing. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of getting a massive headache while you study on the road. That will inevitably worsen your chances of studying when you get home. Read a sentence or two, and then close your eyes. Repeat this process as often as you can to avoid staring at a shaky screen for too long. Study Beforehand Ideally, you need to reserve your bus time for refreshing information in your mind. This is not the time to actually buckle down and study. Try to have most of your studying done before you get on the bus so that all you have to do is review the information. You can make flash cards to look over on the bus, or you could have a practice test already filled out. Then all you will have to do is look it over when you get on the road. Drown out the Noise You will probably have noise to deal with while you are on the bus. The noise could be coming from the people in the vehicle with you, or it could be coming from the road you’re on. No matter what the situation is, you will need to find a way to drown out the noise around you. That will help you focus on your studying. I usually do this by listening to music that I’ve heard a million times over because I’m not tempted to listen to the words of the music. It’s just there to mute out everything else. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up No matter how much you try to study on a bus, you probably won’t get very far with it. Someone is going to rip a big fart in the bus, and you’re just going to have to make a joke about having an exhaust leak. Well, that may not be the exact situation that happens, but you get the idea. You can try to study on a bus, but don’t rely on the bus for study time. That you will probably need to take on solid ground. If you have a big test coming up in one of your courses, you may want to plan your studying around the bus trip – not on it. The tips above will just give you the best possible chance at maximizing your time on the road. Study dates are relatively popular in college because they allow couples to spend time with one another while they prepare for their courses. If you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you may be tempted to get together to study for a test you have coming up. While this is a nice way to spend time with your partner, it may not be the wonderful event you want it to be. Rather than setting yourself up for disappointment, you need to understand the pros and cons of study dates. Here’s an analysis of the process so you can determine if you want to go through with it.
“Study” or “Date”…Take Your Pick You can’t have a study date that is a genuine study session and a genuine date at the same time. You will either end up ignoring your partner to study or you will start making out right on top of your textbooks. No matter how committed you are to your date and to your course work, there is no way that you can focus on both of them at the same time. That is the main problem with study dates is that they aren’t a happy medium between the two sides of your life. In that case, they end up being a waste of time. It may be in your best interest to just pick one or other from the start to avoid the disappointment. The Embarrassment of Confusion You want the person you are dating to think you are the smartest person in the world you may tell people you don’t care about that, but you do deep down. If you’re struggling with your training, you don’t want your partner to see that. That will just make you look like a fool. Sure, your partner can be there to support your education, but he or she will then have to see you in your worst academic moments. Is that something you really want? Stress + Partner = Fight from Hell When you start studying for your classes, you are inevitably going to be stressed out. Stress is never good in a relationship because it can cause tension to build really quickly. I actually avoid talking to my husband entirely when he has to study because I know he has to focus. If I say something he doesn’t care to hear, a fight will most likely ensue. Assuming you don’t like fighting with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you may just want to spend time together when you don’t have the stress of an upcoming test looming over you. Then you can focus on actually enjoying the person you are with. Different Studies for Different Buddies You may not have any of the same classes with your partner, which means that you will have nothing to discuss while you study. If you have the same classes, great. Otherwise the idea of studying together seems a little absurd. My husband and I never studied together when we were dating because our college majors were vastly different. We just didn’t see a reason to sit in the same room while we learned different materials. If you and your partner have totally different schedules, you may not have a reason to study together in the first place. I would never discourage someone to study, but I would discourage him or her from having a study date. When you think about the pros and cons of something like that, it is hard to see the purpose behind it. Consider all of this carefully before you plan out a study date. It may not be everything you want it to be. Unless you’re going to a school where classes could go throughout the year, you are probably reaching the end of your winter break at the moment. This is an exciting time of the year because it gives you a chance to get away from school for a little bit and just relax. You could use part of the break to study for your classes, but you could also use it to rest and reboot for the new year. If you want to do well next semester, you may use these last few weeks to clear your mind and prepare for the workload ahead of you.
Here are some tips to help you regroup during winter break: Sleep as Much as Possible You won’t be able to get a ton of sleep during the actual school semester, so you might as well rest as much as you can now. If you don’t have to be into work until 2 PM, sleep until noon. If you get tired at 8 o’clock one night, head to bed grandma style. You need to do what you can to maximize your sleep time during the break because you won’t get it again for several months. Just make sure that you get back on schedule before school starts to avoid oversleeping for your first day of class. Catch Up with Friends College can make it nearly impossible to keep up with your friends because you have to worry about class, work, and studying. Why not use your break to meet up with some of the people you’ve missed over the school year? Call up a group of friends from high school and go see a movie, or get some of your sorority sisters to go ice skating with you. It doesn’t matter what you do. You just need to make the most of the time you have. You won’t get it again. Go to a Spa A good day at the spa is the perfect way to relax your body and regroup for the coming semester. Get an oil massage and a foot rub at a spa in your area, and you will suddenly feel renewed and rejuvenated. If you can’t do that, you should at least create a spa of your own at home. Take a nice, warm bubble bath and use a back massager to relax the tension you have built up over the fall semester. Then you can have a clear mind for the spring. Save Your Money Sometimes the most stressful part about being in college is coming up with the money to pay for your expenses. In order to avoid that kind of stress next semester, you may want to save as much as you can over the break. Try to pull some extra hours at work and put away any money you get for Christmas. Then you can have a little cushion in case something goes wrong in the semester. If it prevents you from using the emergency credit card to purchase Coronas and condoms, it’s worth the effort. Find useful online services Take the time to prepare for your studies. Make bookmarks of all useful resources, such as essay writers service, grammar checker or a forum of students of your school. You don’t get many breaks in the school year, so you have to truly latch onto the ones you have. Winter break is the perfect time to reset your mind and ready yourself for another semester in hell…I mean “college.” Try to use this time to plan ahead so you don’t get too overwhelmed next semester. Any relief you can provide yourself later will be greatly appreciated in the end. This is your opportunity to regroup, so make it count. |
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