Exclusive: NBC Developing Modern 'Wuthering Heights' With Greg Berlanti

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Exclusive: 'Gangster Squad' Director, 'Secret Circle' EP Sell Rodeo Drama to Fox

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Exclusive: 'L Word' Creator Ilene Chaiken Sells Crime Drama to CBS

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September 25th, 2012Top Story How Can I Make My Smartphone's Ringtones and Alerts Actually Useful and Informative? By Adam Dachis Dear Lifehacker, I have the same ringtone for calls and alert for messages regardless of what they are. I want to create my own and assign specific tones to specific contacts. How can I do more with my ringtones and alerts so they're actually informative and not just the same annoying sound? Sincerely, Two-Toned Dear TT, You can do a lot! Ringtone and alert settings, as well as third-party apps and hacks to do even more, have come a long way. Both Android and iOS have plenty of customization options that make your ringtones more useful. Let's take a look at what you do on both mobile operating systems. Create Custom Ringtones and Alerts Creating your own custom ringtones and alerts is pretty simple. On Android, all you need is an AAC or MP3 file, which you can create on your computer and transfer over to your phone. If you want to trim an existing song or sound, an app called Ringdroid does that for free. (For detailed usage instructions, read this.) Once you've created your specific ringtone or alert, you can set it as the default in Settings —> Sound —> Phone Ringtone. iOS requires additional work because Apple would prefer you paid extra money for ringtones and alerts through the iTunes Store. To work around this limitation, simply shorten the sound or song you want as your new ringtone or alert (if desired) and convert it to AAC format. There are plenty of apps that offer this functionality for free, such as Adapter, but iTunes can as well. (For detailed instructions, read this.) Take the converted AAC file and change its extension to .m4r. Add that file to iTunes, which will see it as a ringtone, and sync your iPhone. Note: If you simply want to set a song or other audio file as an alarm, you don't need to go through this process. iOS 6 alarms let you choose almost an audio in your music library when setting them up. Set Individualized Ringtones, Alert Sounds, and Vibration Patterns for Specific People Now that you know how to create your own ringtones and alerts for your phone, you can start setting specific ones for individual contacts. You could add songs that relate to the person calling or texting. You could record the person saying their name and use that as an alert so you'd know exactly who's contacting you. You could also create tones and alerts that escalate in urgency and assign them to contacts based on importance. Personally, I opted to just make my alerts more soothing because I found the defaults loud and annoying. When your tones are individualized, there are many ways to make them more useful and informative. While any of those suggested ideas work, figure out what you want to accomplish with your notifications before you move forward. Chances are you have a lot of contacts and so assigning custom settings for many or all of them takes time. Figure out an approach that provides you with the information you want every time someone calls or texts. Once you have your approach in mind, setting individual alerts is easy. On Android, simply edit any contact on your phone, tap the menu button, and choose Options. From there you can set a ringtone for that specific person. To do the same for text messages, you'll need a third-party SMS app and Handcent is the popular choice. From Handcent, simply open a contact, tap Settings —> Icon & Personalization —> Notification Settings. From there you can set an individual tone for that person. If you don't want an entirely new app for SMS, you can download SMS tone customizers like WhoIsIt Lite (Free) Custom SMS Tones ($1) instead. WhoIsIt ($2) can set custom vibration patterns, too. On iOS, open up the Phone or Contacts app and choose the person who's going to receive the custom ringtone and/or alert sound. Tap Edit, and your options will expand. Towards the end of the page, you'll find two tab: one starts with ringtone and one starts with text tone. Both are likely set to the default. Simply tap either tab to set a new tone. Along with tone options, you'll also find a vibration tab. If you tap that, you can set a custom vibration pattern for each contact. Apple offers a few preset options you can choose from, but scroll down to the bottom and choose Create New Vibration to make your own. From there you'll just tap on the screen rhythmically until you're satisfied. Save the vibration pattern and that's how your iPhone will vibrate when you receive a call or message from that specific person. Customize Alerts on a Per-App Basis Customizing alerts for specific apps requires a bit of extra work, but if you like to know which app is bugging you there are actions you can take. On Android, your options vary by app, by device, and by the version of Android you're running. Certain app settings may allow you to set custom notifications, so check there first. Certain devices provide various notification options, so you may also be able to change some app notifications from your Android's Settings app. Neither of these options can override everything, but previously mentioned WhoIsIt ($2) can offer a crazy amount of customization. It'll even let you set specific notification sounds for email contacts. UPDATE: Reader ShirinDirce suggested Light Flow, an app that can customize notifications to, perhaps, an excess. It goes beyond tones and handles light and vibration notifications as well. On iOS, you need to jailbreak and install a hack called PushTone. All it does is add a PushTone option to every app in Notification Center so you can assign it a tone just like any other setting. If you want to take this a step further, you can customize your notification system using an app called Pushover. It'll give you more control over what shows up on your phone and when. That's all you really need to do to customize your ringtones and alerts to make them more useful. Ultimately you'll have to decide on a system that works best for you, but the technical side of things is pretty easy if you know where to look. Love, Lifehacker Have a question or suggestion for a future Ask Lifehacker? Send it to tips+asklh@lifehacker.com. Photo by Vector (Shutterstock).

How Can I Make My Smartphone's Ringtones and Alerts Actually Useful and Informative? How to Find the Best TV Set Top Box and Ditch Cable Once and For All The Regret Fallacy Keep Debates Productive with "Plussing" Ask the Right Questions to Determine if a Manager Will be a Good Boss Before You Take the Job Instant Printing, Belt Hangers, and the Usefulness of Wristbands How to Opt Out of Facebook's Newest Attempts to Track Everything You Do, Even Offline More Stories on Lifehacker »

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September 25th, 2012Top Story Why Time Travel Stories Should Be Messy By Charlie Jane Anders This weekend belongs to time travel. We're finally seeing the long-awaited release of Looper, the Terminator-inspired gangster movie. And Steven Moffat is writing what I'm guessing will be another timey-wimey episode of Doctor Who. So now's a great moment to think about time travel, and what makes it especially cool. To a lot of people, time travel stories are cool when they're clever — when all the pieces fit together at the end with a delightful "click." To me, though, time travel stories are cool when they're messy. Because life is messy, and stories in general are cooler when they're rough around the edges. I've been thinking about how to say this for a long time now — I love time travel stories, but I don't love the kind of time travel stories where everything falls into place and you realize that the rubber duckie at the beginning of the story was actually put there by the guy at the end of the story. It's easy to be superficially clever with that kind of story, and to make the audience feel clever — but oftentimes, that sort of storytelling is not clever at all, it's just a mechanical challenge to put the pieces in the right place. One of the all-time classic time travel stories is Robert A. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," in which everything is a closed loop. The main character — spoiler alert — turns out to be all the people he meets, and the whole thing is just this guy going through the motions of acting out a series of fixed events that lead to him becoming the ruler in the future. This is pretty much the classic "everything fits together" story, and it's the one that everybody else is imitating, consciously or unconsciously, when they do this sort of thing. I always sort of feel as though Heinlein did it first and best, and there's no point in copying that particular story — plus it's the same sort of "aha" cleverness that you get from a story in which a man and a woman wind up on a deserted planet, and then you learn their names are Adam and Eve. Probably whoever came up with that idea first was also being super clever and original, too. Then there's the variation on that type of story — where it appears as though you can change history, but at the end we still learn that it was all a closed loop. This happens at the end of David Gerrold's otherwise-fantastic novel The Man Who Folded Himself, where Gerrold feels the need to tie everything off with a bow by having the main character give himself the time machine. Likewise, Moffat's best-known "timey wimey" story, "Blink," ends with Sally Sparrow giving the Doctor a detailed set of instructions, so that it turns out the Doctor was just Sally's puppet throughout the entire story and his apparent ingenuity was just following a detailed script. Your mileage probably does vary somewhat, but I often find these sorts of "tying everything off with a bow" endings actually cheapen the stories they follow. Four types of time travel So to be clear, there are a few different theories as to how time travel could work: 1) You can travel back but you can't change anything. If you try to kill Hitler, the gun won't go off. If you try to make even a small change in established history, you'll fail. This version of time travel always seems dangerously close to magic, like the notion that the physical laws of the universe would fail to operate, to prevent you from strangling Julius Caesar. It's also hard to dramatize time travel in which literally no effect is possible. 2) You can travel back, but you always did. In other words, you're predestined to travel back in time, at which point nobody has any agency and the story becomes just a set of pre-ordained events playing themselves out. (This is sort of similar to the Heinlein story, although there it's not clear if the main character can choose to deviate and just doesn't.) A lot of people seem to love this version of time travel stories — either because they feel it's more plausible, or because they feel like it's more clever. Lost notably played with this notion in its penultimate season, where Jack and the others were stuck in the 1970s and (apparently) already a part of established events. 3) You can change the past, and you'll instantly feel the alteration. AKA the Back to the Future rule. The moment Marty McFly inadvertently prevents his parents from getting together, he starts to fade from existence — and unless he ensures their coitus with a display of electric guitar bravado, he'll cease to have existed. We don't see this version of time travel often enough, which is too bad. 4) You can change the past, but you'll just create a brand new timeline. This mostly seems to be how Doctor Who plays it, despite the notion of "fixed points" that you can't change. Star Trek has also toyed with this notion — although Trek has done every possible theory of time travel multiple times. In this version, the time traveler becomes, in effect, a visitor from the "original" timeline, and the only person who can remember the pre-alteration version of history. All four versions of time travel cited above can be done well, or they can be done badly. But I'd argue the third and fourth versions allow for more agency on the part of characters and messier storytelling. It's like if someone offered you the choice between two stories: One in which everything is slotted together gracefully and characters behave in a predictable fashion to make the plot mechanics work — or one in which everything is messy and exciting and characters make tough choices and sacrifices. Which would you prefer? Exactly. Good stories are about the choices people make, and the consequences those choices have. Bad stories are about people being moved by the plot. So let's talk about time travel and plausibility. Some people would argue that a version of time travel where you can't change the past is more "realistic." As if there's anything realistic about time travel to begin with. Most physicists seem to believe that time travel is impossible, not least because of the insane energy needs. Other physicists seem to believe the whole concept of "grandfather paradox" shenanigans precludes time travel being achievable. In any case, we're talking about a fantasy technology, no more based on real science than dragons and unicorns. And there's the fact that "travel" usually implies being able to have an effect on the places you're traveling to. Otherwise, you're not traveling — you're just observing. There's plenty of scope for a good story about people who visit a hologram of the past, or observe the past via a time television or whatever. But if you actually go to the past, I always feel like it should be like going to Italy — you should be able to have ill-advised sex in the back of a Milan disco or throw a bottle at Silvio Berlusconi. Because travelers leave a mark on the places they visit. Who is John Connor's father? In The Terminator, Skynet is losing the war against the human resistance — so it decides to send a killer robot disguised as an Austrian bodybuilder back in time, to kill the mother of the resistance leader before she can give birth. The robot fails, and in fact the freedom fighter who goes back in time to defeat the robot winds up becoming the father of the resistance leader. Loop closed, man! (Imagine that last bit said in a Bill Paxton voice.) So it would seem that the Terminator universe follows schema #2 for time travel — you can go back, but you always went back, and nothing will have changed as a result of your travel. Except that, in order to justify further Terminator outings, the rules had to change somewhat. For one thing, Skynet wouldn't bother to keep sending robots back if all it was doing was getting resistance fighters laid. For another, the possibility of changing history — including preventing Skynet's creation — is what raises the stakes in Terminator 2. By the time you get Terminator 3, the date of Judgment Day has changed, and it's clear new timelines are being created every time someone goes back. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles plays with this notion further, implying that the future is a moving target — the future that Derek Reese came from is not the same one that Jesse Flores came from. They remember some key events from the future very differently, and John Connor is a very different person in Jesse's future than in Derek's. So is Kyle Reese the original father of John Connor? Or was there a timeline in which nobody traveled back in time, and someone else hooked up with Sarah Connor? We asked Sarah Connor Chronicles creator Josh Friedman a few years ago, and he said it was at least possible there was a "pre-Kyle Johnfather" — but then you have a radically different timeline in which Sarah Connor doesn't train her son to be the resistance leader, he just figures it out on his own. In any case, the Terminator series is Exhibit A for why messy time travel opens up more possibilities than "neat" time travel. The story of John Connor sending his own father back in time to become his father is a cute idea, but it doesn't open up a lot of possibilities beyond that one notion. It's a curio. It's a fancy clockwork sculpture rather than a wild adventure. And then there's the trope of "ensuring your own past," which is arguably why John Connor feels the need to send Kyle Reese, rather than Jesse Flores or whoever, on that particular mission. It's also a major part of "By His Bootstraps," and it's my least favorite time travel trope. In real life, nobody ever needs to ensure his or her own past. Nobody worries that unless they do this or that, they won't have been born. You know why? Because by definition, the past ensures itself. The past is fixed unless someone changes it — and if you're in a universe where the past cannot be changed, that's twice as much reason not to worry about it. The past is fine. If someone comes up to you and shows you proof that you're destined to travel back in time to the Middle Ages — your face in a tapestry, or whatever — just shrug and get on with your day. If you're actually destined to go back in time, then nothing you could possibly do will prevent that from happening. By the same token, you don't need to take any action to make that happen — it's already happened, right? The notion that you have to try to do something that you're destined to do has always seemed like the cheapest of plot devices — it's either destiny, or it's not. And that brings me to the crux of why predestination of all types, including in time travel stories, is less interesting than an unholy mess. It's interesting to watch someone attempt to thwart their destiny and fail — as the story of Oedipus, among others, proves. It's far less interesting to watch people attempt to fulfill a preordained set of events. In a nutshell: The best time travel stories are adventures. Adventures are messy and unpredictable. Therefore, the best time travel stories are untidy, rather than obsessed with providing the cheap "Aha! That's how it all fits together" moment. Life is a glorious, crazy mess in general — why should time machines make it any different?

Why Time Travel Stories Should Be Messy This is what the world's oceans would look like if the Earth didn't spin Did life on other planets originate from Earth? 8 Epic Heroes Who Committed Mass Murder How Barf-Inducing Vampire Sex Gave Me The Gift Of Literacy This concept art from the Shuttle Program's early days is gorgeous, deliciously retro Big Casting Updates for Spielberg's Robopocaypse, Thor: The Dark World, and More! More Stories on io9 »

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September 25th, 2012Top Story The Fall 2012 Games We're Most Excited About By Kotaku Staff Magical assassins. Two-dimensional plumbers. Japanese high schools. Those are just some of the nutty things you'll see in fall 2012's crop of eclectic video games. We've got big-budget blockbuster shooters, PC strategy games, and even a couple of handheld RPGs. Here at Kotaku, we've spent a great deal of time playing and digging for info on what's coming out this fall. Some of the games could be good. Some could be not-so-good. We don't know. What we do know is what we're really, really excited about. So each of us picked one or two games we think will be great. Here are the video games we're psyched to play this fall. Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief/PC Gaming Elitist Antichamber: The game's creator calls it "first-person Escher." It's a puzzle game. It's using some very unusual, non-Euclidian rules. It blew me away in 2011 and is supposed to be out this year. I loved both Portals, and this is in that vein. I can't wait. (2012, PC/Mac) Paper Mario: Sticker Star: I like lots of the Mario role-playing games, especially the Mario & Luigi ones, which are made by the folks at Alphadream. But this is by Intelligent Systems, creators of the original Paper Mario, the excellent Fire Emblems and Advance Wars as well as my current favorite 3DS game, Pushmo. The glimpses I've seen of the game's integration of realistic-looking items into Mario's made-of-paper world is tantalizing. This one better be awesome. (November 11, 3DS) Evan Narcisse, Reporter/Comic Book Guy Dishonored: What jazzes me most about Arkane's first-person title is the amount of freedom that you'll supposedly have to meet Dishonored's mission objectives. I'm hoping that the whole experience will feel like a series of improvisatory setpieces for me to cause all kinds of unscripted chaos inside of. (October 9, PS3/360/PC) Assassin's Creed Liberation: Liberation is exactly the kind of game that I want to play on a plane ride or a long commute. But full-featured action/stealth romps with engaging narrative are rare in the smartphone landscape, if they exist at all. I'm psyched to see how different the combat and strategy in this Assassin's Creed feels. (October 30, Vita) Jason Schreier, Reporter/JRPG Defender Paper Mario: Sticker Star: The peanut butter and chocolate of the video game industry, Mario and role-playing games are a match made in gaming heaven. Sticker Star is the latest entry in a long-running, hilarious string of Mario RPGs that have always been consistently awesome. And with its throwback world map, quirky humor, and timing-based combat, Sticker Star seems like it could be one of the best entries yet. (November 11, 3DS) Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward: Maybe Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors slipped under your radar. Play it. Now. It's one of the best games on DS, a visual novel adventure that's simultaneously horrifying and delightful. Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, the sequel to Nine Hours, adds 3D graphics, voice acting, and a whole new mind-bending story to explore. I can't wait to play it. (October 23, 3DS/Vita) Kate Cox, Reporter/Panda Lover Assassin's Creed III: As far as I can tell, Ubisoft has really done their homework not only with the locations and the history, but with Connor/Ratonhnhaké:ton and Mohawk culture, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that all plays out. (October 30, PS3/360/PC/Wii U) XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Because I've played it for a few hours and really want to keep playing it for many hours more. Hands-on time just plain sucked me in. (October 9, PC/PS3/360) Owen Good, Weekend Editor/Sports Guru NBA 2K13: No sports franchise consistently delivers the goods like this one. The game won't have a mode like the Jordan Challenge (2K11) or NBA's Greatest (2K12) but it is getting some much-needed control refinements and will reunite the 1992 U.S. national team—the Dream Team—for the first time in a high definition video game. It's one of the best for off-the-court roleplaying scenarios in its career mode too. Everything suggests another strong contender for Sports Video Game of the Year, provided they've solved their online troubles. (October 2, every platform) XCOM: Enemy Unknown: I never played the original, but my time with this game at E3 really struck a chord. Jake Solomon, the game's lead designer, is a diehard XCOM fan and communicated a sense of responsibility to the original and those who loved it. The previews have shown something that is console playable without alienating PC fans. I rarely play strategy titles, but I am drawn to this one's history and the mission of defending everything we have. (October 9, PC/PS3/360) Chris Person, Video Editor/Coffee Addict Assassin's Creed III: When you grow up on the north shore (prounounced "Nawth Shauwah") of Massachusetts, pretty much every school field-trip is about the founding of the United States. Now I get to be a be a badass half-Native American assassin in the middle of the Revolutionary War? Sign me up, man. (October 30, PS3/360/PC/Wii U) ZombiU: Games, horror games in particular, don't screw with people enough. The games I've played that have—Metal Gear, Fatal Frame, Eternal Darkness—are all games I cherish. I'm hoping ZombiU follows that tradition. (November 18, Wii U) Kirk Hamilton, Features Editor/Wandering Jazz Musician XCOM: Enemy Unknown: I knew about the whole "There's a first-person shooter! It sucks! It's delayed! Wait there's also a classic-style tactical game! It seems good!" deal. But I wasn't prepared for just how good X-Com: Enemy Unknown is. After spending a bunch of hours with preview code on my PC, I'm ready to say that barring some insane unforeseen development in the later acts, this game is going to be amazing. It's become one of my most anticipated games of the fall, if not the most anticipated one. October 9 can't come soon enough. (October 9, PC/PS3/360) Persona 4 Golden: I love my Vita. I do! I want to play games on it, but there are so few that I actually want to play. All I really want to play is Persona 3 Portable, which... yeah, that's a PSP game! But I know that Persona 4 Golden is coming, and I cannot wait. It looks amazing, is by all accounts even better than its predecessor, has enough content to keep me playing well into 2013, and best of all, it's a known quantity—it's one of the most beloved and critically praised JRPGs of all time. There aren't many portable re-releases that would take precedence over the fall's big AAA games, but Persona 4 Golden qualifies. (November 20, Vita) (Also, sorry Jason, I know you said only two, but: I gotta do a small mention for Far Cry 3, a game I'm finding myself surprisingly excited about, even though I still have doubts about that December release date.) Tina Amini, Reviews Editor/Tiny Person Dance Central 3: I'll probably be a minority here, but Dance Central has always been a beloved franchise for me. It's not just a well-designed game that gets me, it's the fantastic choreography that blows me away. Having spent roughly 10 years as a dancer of many styles, I can attest to the variety and creativity of the dance moves in the game. And what sillier game can you whip out at a party where all your friends are drunk and in the mood to be silly? (October 16, Xbox 360) Far Cry 3: Drugs, tigers and guns? Color me interested. The game looks as gorgeous as it does trippy. I like a game that can play with my head, and I love a good first-person shooter that gives me a deeper storyline and world to play around in than you'd expect. (December 4, 360/PS3/PC) Luke Plunkett, Associate Editor/Man Down Under Dishonored: I don't even care if the game sucks. It looks gorgeous, and I can't wait to explore its dark, grimy world. (October 9, PS3/360/PC) Assassin's Creed III: Assassin's Creed, only with more muskets, bears and cannonballs. What's not to get excited about? (October 30, PS3/360/PC/Wii U) Brian Ashcraft, Contributing Editor Straight Outta Nippon Assassin's Creed III: If anything, what has me jazzed is the setting and the time period. ACIII really seems like it stands out in that regard. The other main Assassin's Creed games have been great, so no big worries there. Excited to see how they pull it off. (October 30, PS3/360/PC/Wii U)

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