The evolution of gaming expectations in a nutshell. Back in the '90s, gamers were just happy if the cartridge actually loaded without blowing into it three times. "The game runs? Amazing! 10/10 would play again." Fast forward to 2020s where we've got RGB-lit gaming rigs that could probably run NASA simulations, and gamers are having existential crises because their FPS dropped from 167 to 165—a difference literally imperceptible to the human eye. The contrast is beautiful: a chunky CRT monitor on a wooden desk versus a curved ultrawide with a glass panel PC showing off its RGB fans. We went from "it works!" to obsessively monitoring frame times and getting tilted over 2 FPS drops. The hardware got exponentially better, but somehow our tolerance for imperfection got exponentially worse. Welcome to the future, where your $3000 setup still isn't good enough for your anxiety.

Let's be real: if you held CDs and DVDs by the edges like a civilized human being, you were probably the same person who actually wrote documentation and used meaningful variable names. Meanwhile, the rest of us were out here fingerprinting the data side like we were booking suspects at a police station, wondering why our burned copies of Linux ISOs kept failing the checksum. The "filthy animal" crew also definitely had that one scratched-to-hell disc that somehow still worked 60% of the time, and we'd spend 20 minutes cleaning it with our shirt before every use. Different times, same chaotic energy we bring to production deployments today.

Every year, it's the same dance. Seasoned devs and PC builders screaming "BUY NOW DURING BLACK FRIDAY" while everyone else goes "nah, I'll wait for a better deal." Then January rolls around and suddenly GPUs are either sold out, scalped to the moon, or both. And there you are, refreshing Newegg at 2 PM on a Tuesday, wondering why you didn't listen. The GPU market is basically a psychological thriller at this point. Crypto miners, AI bros training their models, and gamers all fighting over the same silicon. The people who bought in November are happily training their neural networks while you're stuck debugging on integrated graphics like it's 2005. Pro tip: When people who survived the 2021 GPU shortage tell you to buy something, maybe just buy it.