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.

Bi-partisanship is bad enough in America, and in the world, thanks to the wedge issues Republicans jammed into their palms in the early 2000s, and along with that, the need for subtlety was dragged down to the ocean floor. Combined with written information's ultra-proliferation, and non-empathetic interaction rising at roughly the same time, we've arrived at an Internet with its own weird, sad twin-language.

The need for singular, specific words lessened, as there were fewer states of mind we were capable of properly conveying via the internet's dominant, limiting pathways. There was no need to mold words together into thoughtful exercises that may exercise a reader, too. The internet defined its own shorthand lexicon and repeated the words and phrases until they were sub-cultural memes, a streamlined text-form communication fit for the medium.

During my younger years, I would sometimes drive eight hours a day through the empiness of rural New Hampshire, interviewing for jobs. Writing that sentence fills my mouth with tasteless loneliness.

I had a few things to occupy myself: the ultra-long ambient Nine Inch Nails album, "GHOSTS I-IV," released earlier that year, a jar of iced coffee brewed from my own recipe, and Stephen King novels on audiobook.

And dread. Youthful, livid dread that my life might die on the vine. The Stephen King audiobooks didn't help that, but I realize I had immersed myself in the frantic mind of a creative soul, who knew the feeling.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower series put its arm around my shoulder, and through a hitched-up grin, it said, "You and I are gonna be great friends." That was how I met evil.

Are you staring down into a big barrel of boring? Probably wish there were fish in that barrel. At least then you'd have a live target.

Instead, you've been tasked with ladeling that gray slop onto a paper, a report, a blog post, or a project. You need to write about a boring topic. Your body is resisting the task. Writing about a boring topic is emotionally taxing.

Know what else is boring? Running.

Who here disagrees? Who thinks running is most certainly NOT boring?

But people still have asked me how to write about boring topics throughout my professional career. Regardless of which side you take on that topic, you'd likely agree that somebody, somewhere, could write about recreational running and make it interesting. Somebody cares enough about it, knows enough about it, and knows the audience well enough to keep it sharp.

That's the secret.

Who are you talking to? You're preparing something creative, YouTube videos, free books, original songs, paintings, and in your obsession and self-centeredness, you only rarely considered its audience.

Or, perhaps you considered them for the wrong reasons: you imagined your parent, or sibling, teacher, or work colleague: opinions you value, or at least are familiar with.

Trouble is, there might be five to ten individuals on earth whose opinions on YOUR work that you could accurately guess. You guess them because you know them as people. You know them better than you know your own WORK. Considering you can guess them so accurately, their usefulness wanes, because it already lives inside you.

Whether negative or positive, the only audience you can consider are the people close to you.

You need a target audience. You need to know your target audience.

I am divided on whether to accept the voice-activated future that RoboCop promised me from its chromed-out Reagan-esque heckscape. The movie was a satire, I suppose that should be all the warning required.

Google has announced a deluge of more learning algorithms built into in-home speakers and chat-apps at their I/O 2016 convension. This is their big move, a heave of lunar gravity set to move ocean tides, and all who float upon their ocean. They already possess a thousand-million bits of data on consumers. So what's this mean?

The Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare trailer was posted to YouTube on May 2, 2016. By May 17, 2016, the trailer was the second most-disliked video on YouTube, totaling 2,415,670 "dislikes" on nearly 23.5 million views, as of this writing on May 20.

This current negativity means nothing. It will not change the game. It will not upset sales. All because of one simple reason.