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Monday, June 11, 2012

ABC Files Detailed Opposition to CBS Request for 'Glass House' Injunction


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Emmys: Comedy Showrunners Tell All at THR Roundtable


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Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and When

June 11th, 2012Top Story

Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and When

By Adam Dachis

Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and WhenI'd bet that most of you have at least one email in your inbox that you could respond to in less than a minute, but that you've been quietly agonizing over for considerably longer. This is normal, but it doesn't mean it's necessary. We have a tendency to think too much or too little about certain problems, and end up making dumb mistakes as a result. Fortunately, a few simple mind hacks can solve the problem.

For the most part, we're smart people. Our brains are filled with knowledge and experiences that come into play every day to help us navigate the world. Nonetheless, we frequently examine our past behavior and find problems that are rooted in some incredibly dumb choices—hence the adage "hindsight is 20/20." In the moment, we waste our time or fool ourselves into believing we're making the right decision when we're not. This often occurs because we're trusting our gut when we should be using our head—or vice-versa. If you want your foresight to be a little closer to 20/20, you need to start examining your decision-making process and compensating for your common mistakes. In this post we're going to take a look at how both your head and your gut can work for you and against you, and how to use both to make better choices.

Prioritize Your Decisions to Stop Overthinking

Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and WhenThe Problem: The moment you start wasting brain cycles on unimportant details, such as which red tie you want to wear to work today, your brain has gotten in the way of your gut. For me, this happens most frequently in my inbox. I could often respond to an email quickly, but then I'd spend far more time nitpicking the wording to make sure I got my point across clearly and didn't say anything stupid. In an important email, sometimes a few small edits can matter. This is not the case with all email, but I didn't make the distinction. We all have this sort of problem in many areas of our lives. If you've ever spent more than a minute trying to decide what pasta sauce to buy—and with all the varieties, chances are that you have—you know how easy it is to waste time on a decision that ultimately has little to no impact on your life. It always seems stupid in hindsight, but that doesn't help you in the moment. When you don't prioritize the importance of your decisions when the need arises, you'll always end up wasting time and adding stress to your life in the process.

Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and WhenThe Solution: Train your brain to question your thought process. To solve my email problems, I just instituted one simple rule: before I start editing any email I've written, I ask myself, "Do these edits matter?" If I can't immediately answer yes, I push the send button and I'm done with it. After doing this for a week, it became clear that those little, nitpicky decisions were a waste of time, and forgoing them meant I was back on top of my email, with no negative side effects. It made email less stressful because I wasn't overwhelmed by the crazy amount I receive every day and I felt a lot better because I wasn't worrying about something pointless.

If you find yourself wasting time on any regular decisions in your life, just start asking yourself "is this important?" whenever similar circumstances arise. It takes a little practice to get used to, but after a few days you'll remember. You can even put a post-it note on your computer screen to help. Once you start asking that question regularly, and answering it immediately, you'll have trained your brain to stop wasting time on the choices that just don't matter.

Know When to Ignore Your Gut

Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and WhenThe Problem: Your gut can be a great aid in the decision-making process. When you go with it, you're leaning on years of experience in an instant. You're also making a decision based on a feeling you have, and trusting in yourself. This feels great, and it's even better when that decision proves to be the right one. On the other hand, always trusting your gut can get you into a lot of trouble. It's the process that leads you to eat poorly, buy things you don't really need (or even want), and sometimes completely ignore the best course of action because you know you're right.

The Solution: You're destined to make bad decisions if you always trust your gut, so you need to learn when to listen and when to ignore it. There are two ways to do this, and both involve developing the habit of asking the right questions—both to yourself and others.

Your Head or Your Gut: How to Know Which to Trust and WhenThe way my guy tries to lead me astray most often—and I'd guess this is the case with most people—is when it comes to buying things and eating poorly. When a shiny new gadget or chocolate cupcake is right in front of your face, it's hard to trust anything but the sudden desire provided by your gut feeling. This happens because you're defaulting to a bad question: "Do I want this thing?" Of course you do. The trick to getting around these impulses is reframing the question by asking yourself if you want what you're going to lose. When presented with the prospect of a new smartphone, don't ask yourself if you want it. Instead, pretend a stranger is offering you $200 and the freedom to choose any cellular carrier. In the case of food, pretend that same stranger will give you health and even fat loss. When you reframe the question by focusing on what you're going to lose, you're able to have a gut reaction to that loss as well. You'll generally have the answer you want by going with the strongest feeling.

Your gut doesn't stop there. It's capable of screwing you over by causing you to believe you're right when pretty much everyone else can see that you're wrong. This is due to a phenomenon called illusory superiority, which a fancy term to describe how you think you're a lot better than you actually are. Because we all think we're pretty great, and that can't be true 100% of the time, it's better to just assume you're below average. (Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, found this worked great for him.) Doing so will cause you to ask more questions, question yourself when you need to, and listen better to others. This way you can avoid the negative effects of illusory superiority and the problems your gut can cause when it leads you to believe you're right at the wrong time.

Photos by Sedova Elena (Shutterstock), Stocklite (Shutterstock), and Lucie Lang (Shutterstock).

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27 of the Best Video Game Ideas from E3

June 11th, 2012Top Story

27 of the Best Video Game Ideas from E3

By Stephen Totilo

27 of the Best Video Game Ideas from E3How bad was this year's E3? Not that bad, actually!

If you knew where to look, played the games that were there and talked to enough game creators, you could find plenty of signs that video gaming is still full of interesting new ideas, big and small.

It would have been wonderful if there was more blockbuster news at E3, less next-gen news being suppressed by the major players in the industry and just more buzz. But, hey, this wasn't a show bereft of innovation and quality game ideas.

Some of our favorites (not including the silly Wii U luge thing pictured above!):

  1. Online career mode in Madden turning into some sort of alternate-reality competitions among groups of 32 real people, one in charge of each team, whose exploits throughout the year—wins, losses, injuries and more—are then reported on, over Twitter, by fake versions of real, top NFL reporters. —Stephen
  2. Starting something that is going to be huge, the people making the upcoming Paradox Interactive PC game Showdown Effect are adding livestreaming support, letting people stream their games to TwitchTV, live with one press of the button. This is going to become more and more common and is going to help mainstream the concept that in this decade, playing a game will often be the same thing as broadcasting a game. —Stephen
  3. The people making Halo 4 say they will be offering up to five new 15-20-minute chapters of new missions that can be played solo or co-op... every week... at least for several months after launch... for free....tied to new releases of an online show... essentially turning Halo 4 into what will probably be the first blockbuster episodic video game. —Stephen
  4. In Injustice, when the Flash is primed to pull off a super move, he'll run around the world to punch Superman. —Stephen
  5. In the next Need for Speed, which might as well be called Burnout Paradise 2, you will find many billboards bearing the logos of top EA development studios like BioWare, DICE an Visceral. You will be reward if you smash through them, which will turn them into billboards for the EA studio making this game: Criterion. —Stephen
  6. Watch Dogs. —Stephen
  7. Resident Evil 6's surprise team-ups. Multiple single-player campaign players can jump in when progress through storylines align. Like I said in the preview, it's Journey-esque but still relatively unique and intriguing. —Evan
  8. In Ascend: New Gods, an XBLA game that is one of multiple new games beginning to show the influence of Demon's Souls, players will be able to send enemies they defeat to invade other player's games, and those invading enemies will show up with the other player's gamertags on each of their heads. Also: players can surrender control of their own character and send them off as an invader into friend's games. —Stephen
  9. In ZombiU, every time you die you respawn as a new character, and have to go find your old character and pick up whatever quest items he/she was carrying. More specifically, you have to find your former character and kill him, because he is now a zombie. Better still, when your online friends die in their games, their zombies will populate your game. Awesome.—Kirk
  10. Another sterling Wii U concept: in ZombiU, the player whose character is being chased by zombies can pause to check their inventory, but their inventory is in their backpack, which is displayed on the screen in their controller. In other words, they will have to look away from the rushing zombie horde to check their inventory and grab survival gear, an inspired analogue to the kind of trade-offs one might have to deal with when encountering a real zombie horde. —Stephen
  11. A top-down Animal Crossing mini-game on the Wii U requires one player to control two watchdog characters, one with each of the Wii U gamepad's analog sticks, while three other players run around on the TV screen, trying to avoid them. (See it here.) Before this E3, I'd never played a dual-analog game that put the control of a character apiece under my two thumbs. —Stephen
  12. Since Assassin's Creed: Liberation is on Vita, it doesn't have two triggers on each side any longer, and as a result the franchise will see its first dedicated "jump" button. I don't know why, but this feels like a win to me. —Kirk
  13. In Assassin's Creed III, instead of calling in a brotherhood of assassins, you can call in some local pals and pull the old Chewbacca-Death-Star-prisoner gambit and have your redcoat-wearing friends march you right through the Imperial's guard line. —Stephen
  14. Persona 4 Golden takes one of the original game's strongest qualities—its music—and repackages it in a slick stand-alone music player that even includes clips from the live performances of the music of the entire Persona series. Not only is it an interactive tribute to the entire series, it's good enough to entice those who have already played Persona 4 to buy the game again on Vita.—Kirk
  15. Dance Central 3 finally lets players get creative with "Make Your Move," which finally lets the game become the You Got Served serve-fest that it's long felt like it needed to be. Be careful: if you challenge someone to a dance-off, It Will be On. And when It Is On, you're probably about to get served up something fierce. —Kirk
  16. Nintendo played some good music before their press conference. Broken Bells and The Shins? Hard to argue with that much James Mercer. —Kirk
  17. The folks at Vivitouch have come up with a next-gen rumble tech that will make your gamepad's rumbling much, much more accurate and detailed. Yes, this sounds silly. But in actuality, it's very cool—their super-thin rubber device offers levels of nuance unparalleled by the single spinning rumbler of current controllers. It's good to know that someone is thinking about how to upgrade tactile feedback along with all the graphical and processing upgrades the next generation will bring. —Kirk
  18. In Ron Gilbert's new game, The Cave, the characters you choose determine which areas of the cave you get to explore. It also means you'll play out a different part of the storyline depending on your companions. You'd need to play the game three times to see them all. —Tina
  19. Also in The Cave, death rewinds you five seconds instead of making you replay a portion of the adventure. Ron Gilbert says that traditional death has no place in adventure games. The Cave can therefore be played in one seamless sitting, sans loading time. —Tina
  20. SOE's SOEmote technology changes the face of massively multiplayer interaction, thinning the veil between player and player character by mapping facial expressions and mouth movements onto in-game avatars. More than just a voice communication tool, SOEmote aims to bring the subtle movements and facial ticks, mechanics capable of speaking volumes in real life, into a virtual setting. When you raise your eyebrow at a stupid idea, or gasp in surprise at a plot development, so does your avatar, and that creates a whole new level of connection. —Mike & Kate
  21. In South Park: The Stick of Truth, you get to enter your own name. No matter what you pick, Cartman will just call you Douchebag. This is a perfect (and fitting) way for the game to bypass the problem of voice acting a player-selected name. —Jason
  22. Madden 13 has an entire playbook just for New York Jets backup quarterback Tim Tebow. —Jason
  23. With the Blink skill in Dishonored, you can teleport short distances to anywhere you want. Theoretically, this could allow you to break the game. The creators enjoy this. They want you to break the game. That's part of the fun. —Jason
  24. The mobile RPG Final Fantasy Dimensions gives you several different options for using the touchscreen to move around, one of which is to touch anywhere on the screen and use the directional pad that pops up. —Jason
  25. In Game & Wario for Wii U, there's a mini-game that requires you to use the tablet controller as a camera to snap photos of criminals in a crowded city. Could we see a new Pokemon Snap for Wii U? —Jason
  26. Upcoming indie PC game Scale (shown at the Indiecade showcase at E3; and showing up soon on Kotaku) lets you change the size of anything in the gameworld and—along with clever puzzle platforming—the mechanic makes players think about how some things (like butterflies) stop being cute when they become monstrously huge. —Evan
  27. Co-op games working hard to make sure both players have full, meaningful roles to play (as seen in Divinity: Original Sin and Star Trek) and that either player can feel like the center of the story, rather than making one a tag-along. —Kate

    Bottom line: even in an "off" year, E3's full of fascinating stuff.

    (Top pic of Wii Fit U by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
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Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last Week

June 11th, 2012Top Story

Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last Week

By Hamilton Nolan

Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last WeekEarlier this year, I wrote to every American death row inmate scheduled for execution in the near future. I asked them about their personal history, their lives in prison, and their thoughts on America and its justice system. Today we hear from Abdul Awkal—a man who was scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio last week, before receiving a last-minute reprieve.

Abdul Awkal was convicted of shooting and killing his wife and brother-in-law at a courthouse in Cleveland in 1992, in the midst of a custody battle over his daughter. He was scheduled to be executed on June 6. The day before he was scheduled to die, Ohio governor John Kasich granted him a two-week reprieve, citing doubts about Awkal's mental health—a psychiatrist hired by his defense called him "a severely mentally ill man" with "a chronic psychotic disorder." (Many of Awkal's writings can be found here.) His execution is now scheduled for June 20. Below, his full letter to us; click on each page to enlarge.

Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last Week Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last Week Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last Week Letters From Death Row: Abdul Awkal, Who Was Supposed to Die Last Week

Previous Death Row Letters: Brett Hartmann

[Image by Jim Cooke]

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