The Nintendo Wii was a momentary magic trick. While mainly just silk scarfs and white gloves distracting an unsuspecting audience, the system was potent reminder to lapsed Roman-Nintendophiles:

• Video games are fun for the whole family, including the near-dead Grandma
• Mario Kart Wii is fun for the whole family, including Grandma, who is now dead (but we'll always have the memories)

Since Mario Kart Wii launched, the franchise has vampire-fang chomped onto the crossover fanbase it seduced, refusing to budge. Now fat as a tick, Mario Kart has mutated into the Ur-Nintendo brand. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch is debatably the series' best outing. That's where the trouble kicks in:

Mario Kart has become so competent, all that "Mario Kart" baggage is ruining its races...

Certain people who bear the diamond-hard feeling that the world owes them a speaking platform will tell you through their clenched orthodontistry that there's nothing worse than a Millennial, except maybe a blogger. This is a section of people who believe status is the greatest yardstick of a person's capability. To them, a writer is a writer, and a blogger is a plagiarist without an editor.

What is the difference between the two? Is one superior? Is the other outdated terminology? Is a rose, is a rose, is a rose, is a rose, or am I Frankensteining too many miniature gags and references together?

Here's the difference between a blogger and a writer:

I had to go into a meditative state following last Sunday's Game of Thrones episode. I needed a come-down after what can best described as a heck-gasm. That's a pretty rough way to end the weekend.

I guess it's just how we roll now. Tragic, greusome, cynical, delusional, and dare I summon a made-up term, "Snyderian?" Everything is horrible. All of it is true. The pendulum swing between the smile-pop curated playlists on Spotify generates upwards of 13 g's as it hurls over to a common Facebook feed, before its return journey to the navel gazing and vacation-envy on Instagram.

Then it's back to HBO Go and Amazon Prime for Game of Thrones and Mr. Robot to tell us we are a hopeless people.

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?

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?

I hate advertising. My dad sold ad space in bicycle and skiing magazines. Technically, that's sales. He was selling companies real estate for them to hawk their reductive ideas of their products.

I don't hate my dad. I fact, I admire him. His work made me familiar with advertising at a young age. People, or companies, have a product that they want people to purchase. That product requires recognition. Ideally, you'd want a certain person to recognize that product, considering that certain person would be more inclined to purchase the product, rather than the billions of other humans on the planet.

Recognition is a fantastic sales tool. Recognition is the best salesperson imaginable.

It hasn't happened yet, but the salesperson is evolving. They'll be difficult to recognize alongside their contemporary form.

How is a salesperson evolving? Someday, they'll be singular individuals with good tastes on a certain topic that may just HAPPEN to work for a certain company. They'll sell solutions to a buyer's query, like a living search-engine. This is a fantasy, of course. The salesperson will always be at least somewhat compromised by their employment.

This is not the case with a good marketer.

"What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?"

Truth, justice, and the American way. Strangely enough, I learned a lot about Superman from my mom, who in turn had learned it through osmosis from her brothers when she was young. Back when comic books were books, and not recognizable intellectual properties ripe for mass-marketing, they represented a kind of simple math that a kid could understand. Superman was the simplest, so much so that most people, young people especially, are untucking their shirts and sneezing directly at the idea of Man of Steel coming out in June, because while The Dark Knight Rises was a French revolution allegory, what in the blue fucking hell could boring-ass Man of Steel possibly bring to the modern discussion? These days, we have Batman, and Wolverine, and The Avengers, and Robert Downey Jr, who is a genre unto himself. Superman's a boyscout. Punch the Commies, save the cat in the tree, last son of Krypton, Moses-allegory, defend the defenseless so they can live in peace, and on and until the day is done. Superman was conceived in 1933 in a time before the term "nuclear family" had been added to the American lexicon, nevertheless, he was the hope, the aspiration that even though we aren't invincible like he is, America, and all its promises, won't burn out if we stick together and keep driving forward.

"The American man is neither chiseled from stone nor from crispy-chicken batter. The American man isn't helpless. . . He doesn't shirk on his responsibilities. He does work hard and he does not pick on his friends. He loves rock and roll and he hates Nickelback. He loves football, but he's smart enough to hate the NFL's greed."

You are an idiot. You are an obsessed idiot. You are a zealous, obsessed idiot. You are part of a nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You shall find camaraderie amongst others in that nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You, and your comrades in arms, know of a deeper love than those who are not part of your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots -- noses turned up at you as if their farts smell like Cinnabon and Carebears. You know that even amongst the other citizens in your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots, in your heart of hearts, there is no doubt that you are unique in your understanding. You know how far, and how strong, this empire, your empire, of zealous, obsessed idiots truly reaches. You, idiot, are part of something so grand that you understand your place in the world, despite that those unlike you will see your idiocy as idiocy, and not as a badge of honor.