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As Halloween approaches and we finalize our Psy costumes (I mean, we all know we’re going as him, right?) we also are here to give you all a very special treat this month. We kick it off with Nintendo’s highly anticipated Wii U launch, the first of the next “next-gen” consoles. While it may look a lot like its predecessor, the new GamePad should usher in a whole new set of gameplay experiences for consumers and developers. We follow up new console news with new console games and our fall titles preview. Though most are sequels, we’re not complaining with the likes of Halo 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, and Assassins Creed 3 on the docket.

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Do you watch television like it’s a part-time job?  Then, like me, your DVR is probably chock-full of shows like Parks & Recreation, Modern Family, New Girl, The League, Covert Affairs, No Reservations, and RHO__ Reunions (don’t judge).  However, unlike me, you probably don’t make active TV watching a perfectionist endeavor. “What does this mean, Albert?”  Glad you asked.

This means watching every show with an undivided attention, rewinding segments several times with Closed Captioning on to catch every under-the-breath quip.  Yes, watching TV with me is exhausting, and in the world of cord-cutters and Roku boxes, I’m reading dialogue on my HDTV like the grandpa from Up.

And I am just as hard of hearing.

So it was a bit of a surprise this summer to see a mysterious logo appear at the beginning of many of my favorite primetime shows:

 

The Swahili people thought of it as a soul-stealing machine, but we just call it a camera, the magical tool that captures life as it happens. Nowadays, everyone has one in some shape or form, and in the digital age we all have a favorite way to share our photos with each other. With such great accessibility to the technology, it seems we are all photographers, by habit, and by no means are we all good at it. We even use filtering apps that make our technically-deficient pictures interesting and “cool”. Photo albums we grew up with are now kitsch and old-timey. Social streams and photo feeds are now the timeline and portals to our memories. But, when it comes to making memories, has technology taken the soul out of photographs?

We live in our digital streams. More and more of our lives are spent scrolling through endless feeds of pretty pictures, flashing gifs and smart articles we wish we had time to read.  We’ve got Google Reader accounts packed to the gills, Tumblr dashboards that never seem to quit and Twitter feeds that often move faster than we can comprehend. I am both enamored with the perfectly curated content that bubbles up to the surface of my feeds and crippled by their constant bombardment. I even made a site that tracks nearly everything I consume in an attempt to quantify the ridiculous rate at which we now take in. No matter how much I scroll, read, watch, like and tweet, the “work” is never done. And that’s the biggest issue, why does this feel like work?!

 

The other day I stumbled across this Microsoft IE9 campaign, another curious example of reverse psychology marketing. Which got me to thinking about how so many brands crave our love. They earnestly seek to win the masses over with memorable campaigns, helpful apps and flashy giveaways. While the coddling is nice, the approaches can naturally become predictable and undifferentiated. So it’s refreshing that Microsoft is focusing energy on embracing hatred instead. If people actively exert the energy to hate you, can’t that only mean there is the potential for love?

Louie C.K. recently claimed “If somebody loved hating my show, that’d be great.” While it’s much trickier for brands to lure us into this polarizing state, here’s how recent media has perfected this art form.