Want to know what's great about the Wii U? That nobody can figure out if it's good or not. There are arguments for both camps. Lots of people want it to become popular -- they're probably big Nintendo fans. Lots of people are rooting for its failure -- they're probably fans of something different.

Here are a few negatives that have come up in the last week since the thing launched, summoned from my brains:

1: The menus / apps load slowly.
2: It requires a 5 GB patch to go online.
3: The emulation of original Wii games is still in 480p and is not up-scaled.
4: The GamePad tablet-controller needs to be recharged frequently.

I'm going to take the high road on this and assume that the people leveling these criticisms are in the industry of leveling criticisms. They're paid to stand alongside, and consistently evaluate, potential fun-levels, like the manager of the guy that wears the Daffy Duck costume at Six Flags in Tampa, Florida. On the subject, that manager really wants a microscope for Christmas so he can finally try to find his balls -- and a mustache comb for combing his back hair.

I can't trust these people. They're hateful. I don't work in the industry of recommending entertainment, but you don't go to The Industry to get recommendations on fun and happiness. You go to some person that has one.

"Modernizing" is a fascinating concept. No movie franchise does it better than James Bond -- it helps that it's 50 years old.

Is modernizing objective? Yes, to a fault. Is it cynical? Sure, oftentimes. Is it disrespectful? That's somebody's opinion, and although I find opinions to be fascinating, I have my own, and they cause me enough anxiety without help, so I'll only think hard about your's if your brain deserves a firm blow to its mouth.

Skyfall is a great movie, reminding us that great movies can have gunfights in them, and reminding us how eternal James Bond can be, even with his ridiculous misogyny and fetishistic love for uncomfortable, British-built sportscars.

"[Kellogg's Frosted Flakes® Reduced Sugar cereal with Fiber] is childhood, evolved."

I don't have a pre-existing medical condition that prevents me from enjoying Frosted Flakes, unless if you count aging naturally as a pre-existing medical condition, and the FDA does not, so I have very little legal recourse. If it didn't hurt my stomach, I would have more regularly eaten the wax paper in the cardboard box that held the Frosted Flakes in the 1990's.

Nowadays, the cereal hurts my stomach too. It's all corn and sugar and it tastes like a prickly storm cloud against a blue sky, and the atmosphere is fading fast around the planet. It's Halloween forever with Frosted Flakes. Urgh. Man, I wish I was still a 6 year-old with a Game Boy and easy homework with Halloween forever, at least once-in-a-sometimes. I didn't have to be conscious of accidentally, or intentionally, using the word "moist," in a sentence, so I suppose I had to sacrifice that. Things can still be funny and delicious as an adult.

Split/Second is a racing game, and it is dairy-product buffet, a veritable milk-n-slide of cheese, ice cream, and butter that will leave you worshiping a golden calf.

Unlike Mario Kart, a racing game that is like a conversation with your company's new CMO that you're begging for a departmental budget increase, Split/Second is a racing game that resembles a conversation with God. Scratch that, Split/Second is a conversation with Zeus and his Olympian brothers and sisters, and you are a four-wheeled demi-god, and you are gonna land on the finish line with just a massive engine and a fistful of prayers. You know who you should worship: you worship drift, you worship draft, you worship hang-time, and you worship reflexes, dodging around your enemies attacks, and you hope the gods are watching, and you keep those hopes close to your heart.

My second question concerned the common cold. I knew, based on the answer to my first question, that I couldn't just eat this man's brain and absorb his medical knowledge that way. Maybe he was just trying to discourage cannibalism. I couldn't take that chance, at least not right then. I didn't want mad-cow disease.

"Is there actually a cure for the common cold?"

The doctor drank his beer. Memories reeled off inside his head -- ones not for eating. "There is not. However, you can attack the symptoms and your immune system will take care of the rest in about 10 days or so."

That was a professional answer.

Bro, stop using your phone in the bathroom. 

It's got nothing to do with germs. I'm almost positive the keyboard at your desk has more bacteria on it than a urinal. Your hands will touch far filthier things in a regular workday, like the handle on a supermarket shopping basket, or any surface within 200 years of a subway stop.

"[The Last Story] is Gears of Swords."

Sometimes, when you're walking along in the cobblestoned Lazulis City early on in The Last Story, the princess Calista might get careless when she's following you and whack her head on the sign hanging above the blacksmith's shop. It looks like it hurts. She winces the same way anybody would.

You helped her give some guards the slip. She is following you because she likes you. She hurt her head because she's a person. The Last Story is going to teach you how to love.

We are very aware. 

In a space occupied half a century ago in America by baseball heroes, war heroes, and The Splendid Splinter -- who was both! -- our admiration of the famous, skillful, and merit-worthy has become an obsessed dependence because they are viewed as those who have won the day while inside The System. We're all stuck within The System, aren't we? And these visible, modern heroes are just like us, flaws enhanced because we asked them to be magnified mortals, enlarged to show texture. We have unwittingly bestowed the kiss of death on our former aspirations that we abandoned long ago. Our own dreams were killed years ago. Our heroes disgust us now, weird-shaped things in a very aware word being pounded into square holes. We certainly want them to fit. We would like that very much. We want to see their failure as one they are sharing with us. We observe their troubles and co-opt their drama, nodding assuredly at one another at their unenviable lives when the tragic turn arrives.

We think there are no more heroes.

Some modern games have their auto-pilots set to: "cruise," a plush rug that's nice between your toes and looks good next to a Metacritic score of 86. Final Fantasy XIII-2, however, has its auto-pilot set to: "beautiful," or, at least, beautiful to somebody that has stared at the moon for too long. Whatever Final Fantasy XIII-2 was intending to make you "feel," it has failed, because nobody would try to mass-distribute a sugarcane-enema-simulation for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 on purpose.

Do you read Gawker? I read Gawker. Lots of people read Gawker. I started by reading Kotaku and Gizmodo and Lifehacker, not even realizing they were all part of the same network, and then I stumbled upon Deadspin for sports-coverage and Gawker's main site itself for pop-culture minutia. There are a few other sites on Gawker's family of blogs too, with io9's TV recaps and Jezebel's gender politicking probably being the physically best-written stuff when the writers can keep themselves from being trashy on purpose and keep from tripping over their own snarking keyboards.

It's not the end of the world that so many written words are being read off of LCD screens instead of newsprint -- we aren't livig in a tactless, social-media hellscape, even if your basket-case uncle insists we are.