Taking a look around planet earth’s current economic climate, you may notice skills in traditional, detached, consumerism remain coveted. Selling a smartphone app that simulates a fidget spinner is a responsible financial investment in 2017.

Time requires recognition. We need weeks and months. We need weekends and birthdays. We need start dates, end dates, buzzer-beaters, and summer haircuts.

When did we lose the ability to rest?

It's a matter of public knowledge that George Lucas both created and damned the modern American "geek." He created it with Star Wars in 1977. He damned it with Star Wars in 1999.

While the crippling effect The Phantom Menace has had on global society cannot be understated, that's a story for another time. Today, I address a hypothetical.

What if Jim Henson had lived and George Lucas had died?

Ghost Little officially re-launched a few months ago. It has been home to roughly 20 blog posts, each featuring and four original book samples availalbe for download.

Some posts were fantastic. Some were good. A few were inadequate. Without the site's re-launch though, there would have been no inadequate posts, good posts, or fantastic posts. Without the sight of the inadequate posts gracing our presence, the barometer for quality would not have been set.

And most important, the book samples—Ghost Little's reason for existing—would not exist. They would be as real as anybody who only plays an eletric guitar plugged into headphones.

This is a recurring segment, "Whiny Questions, Simple Answers," where I gather the whiniest question I come across on the Internet in a given week, and provide a straightforward answer.

This week's question again concerns the recently-released Overwatch. We covered Overwatch's comparison to its competitors last time. This time the question is about its microtransaction structure and total-luck loot drops.

June 7, 2016: (post delayed from its usual Monday slot due to the death of Muhammad Ali over the weekend.)

Muhammad Ali is dead. He was 74. He was the Greatest of All Time. There is a fantastic op-ed on him The New York Times.

What casual knowledge does a random person possess, concerning Muhammad Ali?

Among all the obituaries, thinkpieces, and craggly monsters spitting hate from the cheap seats, what do we really know about Ali? We, meaning, people, off-the-cuff knowledge, removed from immediate influence -- and perhaps incorrect.

I'll start with myself. I won't say I know a lot about Ali. I bathed in Sports Illustrated for my childhood and I absorbed a decade of SportsCenter during ESPN's good years. I was told what has to be Ali's myth. To me, much of it is too unbelievable, set against a modern backdrop, especially. Nevertheless, that is as remarkable a story as what is perhaps true.

So, let's begin.

On a hot day flushing down into a cold night's quickening coil, a seahorse, a praying mantis, and a penguin walked into a bar.

They did not arrive together. They had never met one another before. Upon meeting though, they discovered they have something very particular in common.

Does our damage define us? If so, then women are wriggling balls of nerves and erupting neuroses, according to Joss Whedon.

It's rightfully recognized that Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and director of two Avengers movies, is an active feminist. He talks about giving strong women visible roles in his worlds. He built an entire vampire-slaying show about a young lady. It's right there in the title! These shows drill further into the female characters than any other in recent pop-culture, combining shit that boys like—action, winged freak-beasts, space cowboys, sex—with women in layered, leading roles.

That's progress!

Somehow—that's progress. It's sickening that hundreds of years in western history have passed since Shakespeare (or you can argue as far back as Chaucer's The Knight's Tale), made humans with lady-bits thinking, feeling, talking, and scheming individuals worthy of crafted drama. It's progress that we can point to a character like Inara on Firefly and say, "that character is feminine, and wasn't instructed to trip over her ovaries getting out of bed for a laugh."

Yes, bothering to give the female character's dialog and back-story a punch-up, unfortunately, is progress. That's progress. And that's sad.

I want the Xbox One to fail. It's a gooey and black taste coating the inside of my mouth when I read about what the marketing is intending this hardware to be. A centerpiece for people that use the term "man-cave," usually shouted, who then high-five, cuddling with their hollowed-out tree trunk of endorphic validation. Then they mow the lawn, thinking, "I mean, I just want to drink A LOT of beer. I like beer best when it's cold." A quick trip to the store, and they've got chips, frozen corn, a whole rotisserie chicken, and an 18-rack of Miller Lite.

These middle-aged white-boy dad-types with string-cheese personalities and hyperventilating helplessness are tragic. They hate / fear / hate again their wives. Their wives don't understand them.

But do these men actually exist?

Included here are four micro-reviews for major video game releases from a few years ago. You may remember them. You may not. Still, enough time has passed to give them a more thorough, unbiased perspective.

There is tremendous hype and mindshare that influences criticism on creative endeavors. I pointed this out in my study of Paradise Lost ages ago. As they are now, videogames are disposable candy snacks, like a rockabilly single from the 1950's, meant to spin on a radio turntable for a month, only to be replaced by the next single. Then very smart people started enjoying music, listening to music, and producing music of their own.

The same can be said of film. Formerly just little image reels, movies got, uh, big, to put it lightly, and EVERYONE wants to BE movies, be they athlete, rapper, or videogame. That artisitc perspective came with time.

I will not flex any muscle to say the micro-reviews included below are set to become celebrated triumphs five decades from now. None of them is the Citizen Kane of videogames (we won't know that for about 20 years after the assumed videogame is released). Nevertheless, these are THINKABLE games.

This is a recurring segment, "Whiny Questions, Simple Answers," where I gather the whiniest question I come across on the Internet in a given week, and provide a straightforward answer.

This week's questions concerns the recently-released Overwatch, and why it is so immediately beloved in comparison to its similarly-structured competition.