There is really nothing to argue about here. Even if you are the most devoted of Nintendo fans, someone that purchases every major release they come out with, you have to admit that 2011 has been a rather dry spell for an already mixed history of software releases on the Nintendo Wii. The impending release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword might be hailed by some as a reason to pardon Nintendo’s lack of titles but, it doesn’t change facts.

As I write this, I am anxiously awaiting the delivery of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I’m not waiting because I have to — it’s my day off — and I’m not anxious because it’s a game with “Elder Scrolls” slapped on the front. I’m waiting because Amazon’s release date delivery can sometimes mean the product showing up around eight at night, and I’m anxious because I loved Fallout 3.

Joss Whedon and I don’t necessarily mix well. That isn’t to say I dislike the man or the various creations he has been part of over the years. It’s merely an observation that while I overall enjoy his work, there have been times where, for me, he’s missed more than he’s hit. Like any other human being on this planet, he makes mistakes. Also like any other human being on this planet, everyone has their own opinion about art.

That said, I’m a firm proponent of Firefly and all that the show entails. Nathan Fillion still has me watching Castle, though I generally loathe the way the show is paced. As someone who grew up with Toy Story, Whedon’s works have rarely been out of my life entirely, but I could never warm up to either Buffy or Angel. They never captured my rapt attention like they did for so many others, and there truly are so many others out there who loved it. There’s a certain section of people out there that praise everything Whedon and condemn all of those who dare question the simple fact that he is the best and has always been the best. To them, everything he touches is silver and gold. Maybe even platinum. There are also entire communities focused on following Whedon’s ripples in the world.

For those of us who don’t connect our identity with Buffy or the like, however, there’s a much more even-keeled approach.

The world of technology waits for nothing. It’s probably not news to you that we’re innovating, creating and developing new technologies faster and faster as years go by. For example, new interfaces can lead to entirely new ways to interact with objects, both domestically and otherwise. But even with the accelerated growth in the technology sector that we’ve seen just during our lifetimes, trying to actually gauge that from our own perspective is almost impossible. We’re just too close to the action.

Perhaps, then, a story of my childhood, my father the computer programmer and Wolfenstein 3D can successfully relate just how quickly things manage to move and how little we often recognize it ourselves. Sometimes, it takes the experience of watching it happen to another person in order to fully appreciate the circumstances we live in.

As the joke goes, I first learned about the passing of Steve Jobs on my iPhone. But I’m not much of an Apple devotee; it’s the first I’ve owned and that’s only been since this summer. I don’t have a MacBook — never have — and of all the various iterations of iPod devices, I’ve been gifted an original iPod Nano and an 80GB iPod Classic over the years.

The only money I’ve directly given to Apple in my lifetime has been through iTunes and perhaps the recent purchase of my iPhone, though I’m not positive how much of that actually trickled back to the corporate overlords. All of this is to say that I don’t have a huge investment in Apple and never have.

But the passing of Steve Jobs is not something anyone involved in the tech scene can ignore.

Steve Jobs is dead, and I’m more than a little choked up. I’m not the most stoic of people (when Dumbo goes to visit his mom in prison I go to pieces) so it’s really not that surprising. But, it turns out, that I am not alone. Thousands of tweets are pouring in, expressing their condolences. World leaders have stopped to say a few words.

And I’m wondering, “why?” When John Lennon died and thousands gathered in a days-long vigil, that made sense.When Abraham Lincoln died, his body was taken on a final tour of the country he helped reunite and was met with tens of thousands of mourners, and that made sense. But Jobs never recorded a hit song, or led a country. He was a businessman, and a salesman. I have never seen so much emotion poured out on a CEO before, and it really is something of a puzzle. I have given the matter some thought, and propose three possible answers.

I’m a fairly recent neophyte when it comes to Netflix. As I’ve been subscribing for just under a year, I have little-to-zero investment in what was once my experience with the service as compared to what it is now. Even then, I didn’t begin seriously utilizing what I had until late March or early April; the loss of Showtime didn’t faze me as it happened before I knew what I had.

The more recent announcement that Starz would be ending their deal with Netflix in 2012 didn’t shock me either. The old media giants are still recoiling from the new ways, and often. Besides that, Starz never really had the best selection as a channel, though my love for Disney borders on obsession. Perhaps the biggest change for Netflix, prior to this week, was the introduction of separate plans for DVD-by-mail and streaming customers in July.  For those following along at home, this was where Netflix began to dip heavily in the eyes of customers. Those who had been with Netflix since the introduction of instant streaming had grown accustomed to receiving both DVD-by-mail and the instant gratification of streaming services. The announcement that they’d have to double their investment in order to receive the same benefits as before was not received well, to put it mildly. However, it makes perfect sense with the spin off and reveal of Qwikster, which will ship games as well as DVDs, as a distinct entity from Netflix.

I would definitely go on a date with Jon Finkel. That is to say, if I were single. And into dudes. But the point is that Jon Finkel, as a human being, is someone of interest, a former Magic: the Gathering world champion and straight up smooth. Even after a former Gizmodo intern managed to, well, drag his name through the mud, the internet backlash was something to behold and Finkel’s responses to the debacle have thrust him squarely upon the nerd pedestal. In a good way.

A little history here might be needed: At some point in the past, Alyssa Bereznak got drunk, made an OKCupid account and ended up going out on a date with Jon Finkel. These are the facts as they have been related to us. Apparently, not disclosing your status as a former world champion in a sport – ESPN covered it, therefore, sport – is grounds for disgruntlement.

And there’s the rub; she’s perfectly within her rights not to want to date Mr. Finkel, but making a blog post about it where she purposefully calls him out by name and characterizes him in the poorest terms imaginable is downright despicable. If the tables were turned here and Finkel had made a similar post, he’d have been drawn and quartered as well. It’s not like she couldn’t have seen this coming.

The gut reaction to GameStop pulling OnLive coupons en masse from retail PC copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution usually includes the words “how dare they,” or something to that effect. The legality of it all has been discussed to death, with mentions of tortious interference floating about, and GameStop has come under fire for the missive pretty much unanimously.

Except for the fact that Square Enix issued what amounts to a public apology and acknowledgement that they had not previously informed GameStop of their third party coupon inclusion.

Obviously, whenever the publisher, developer, or whoever includes something in the packaging, the end consumer is going to feel cheated if they don’t receive the full product. Cutting open factory sealed copies in order to remove a slip of paper and then selling them as new anyway is, ethically speaking, kind of shady. But so is trying to slip coupons into the games for one of GameStop’s direct competitors.

The law behind trademarks is somewhat of a sticky wicket. Similar can be said about patents, but that’s an entirely different set of loopholes and barrel rolls. In the world of gaming, there is perhaps no more well-known case than that of Tim Langdell, his trademark of the word “edge” and his many attempts to legally hustle various companies. The lengthy history of Langdell is best divulged by Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s coverage of the most recent court case and, by extension, the ChaosEdge blog. But to summarize a bit: Langdell has been legally (and allegedly extralegally) haranguing anyone and everyone that used the word “edge” in any way related to games. Sometimes, as was the case with Mirror’s Edge from Electronic Arts, he managed to tie up the trademark in such a way as to make sequels and the like a bit tricky for developers, publishers and anyone else involved.

Flash forward to the here and now. Markus “Notch” Persson, famed developer behind Minecraft, revealed not all that long ago that the next game from his company, Mojang, would be a game taking bits from the collectible card and board game genres entitled Scrolls. If your first response to this announcement was along the lines of, “but wait a darn second, are they making an Elder Scrolls game or is this some sort newfangled contraption” then you seem to be in good company as that’s what the lawyers from ZeniMax Media would seem to believe.