Bro Had His Priorities Set Right

The bravest soul in the tech universe, sitting there with a "4K IS OVERRATED" sign in 2023. This is like walking into a gaming convention with "RGB lighting causes cancer" written on your forehead. Meanwhile, this dude's probably coding on a 720p monitor from 2008 and telling everyone his eyes "can't see the difference anyway." Sure buddy, and I'm still using dial-up because broadband is "just a fad."

Game devs are literally SUFFERING in their own special circle of development hell, and here they are, sipping coffee while laughing at regular programming memes like "Ah yes, humor based on MY pain." The AUDACITY! While web devs cry about centering divs, game programmers are over here wrestling with physics engines that defy actual physics, optimizing 60 FPS on hardware from 2010, and explaining to art directors why no, we cannot actually make the character's hair have 10,000 individually simulated strands. But sure, laugh at the JavaScript joke, it's FINE. TOTALLY FINE. 😭

So we've reached the dystopian future where owning your own hardware is a crime and the AI overlords enforce subscription models for everything. The meme hits different because it's basically where we're already headed—every game company salivating over "games as a service" while you're just trying to play something offline without internet connectivity checks every 5 minutes. The "You're sheltering Nvidia Gforce RTX 5090 32GB aren't you?" line is *chef's kiss* because in this hellscape, having actual gaming hardware becomes an act of rebellion. Like hiding Anne Frank but it's your GPU. They've turned PC gaming into a thought crime where local storage and offline play are contraband. Remember when you could just... buy a game and own it? Yeah, your kids won't. They'll be paying $29.99/month for the privilege of streaming games at 720p with 200ms latency while corporations monitor their every keystroke. Fun times ahead.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

The evolution of graphics "cards" is the tech equivalent of your friend who said they'd "just have one beer" and ended up ordering the entire menu. Started with that cute little PCI card that could barely render Minesweeper, moved to something resembling an actual card, then suddenly we're installing mini-refrigerators that require their own power supply and structural support. Next GPU generation will come with its own mortgage and custody agreement. Remember when upgrading your PC didn't require reinforcing your desk first?

Left side: John Carmack in his Oculus days, looking like the brilliant but slightly disheveled programmer who could optimize your rendering engine while explaining quaternions over lunch. Right side: Post-Facebook acquisition Carmack, who clearly discovered the secret API that transforms cargo pants energy into executive chic. The function signature must be something like: transform(millions_of_dollars, years_at_meta) . The real optimization algorithm was inside his wardrobe all along. Still has that "I could rewrite your entire codebase in assembly before dinner" vibe though.