Console Joy, PC Despair

You spend months saving for that sweet GPU upgrade, finally ditching your ancient 4060TI for the shiny new 5070 with 50% more VRAM. You're on cloud nine! Then you make the fatal mistake of checking r/pcmasterrace the next day where some 16-year-old with daddy's credit card is explaining why "anything less than 24GB is basically unusable in 2024." The hardware rat race claims another victim.

OMG, the AUDACITY of this bell curve! 😤 Cheap games are for the intellectual EXTREMES of society! Meanwhile, the average IQ masses are over here throwing away $80 on AAA titles that'll be in the bargain bin next month! The gaming industry's greatest achievement is convincing the mediocre middle that expensive = quality, while both the brilliant geniuses AND complete simpletons are playing Terraria and having the time of their lives for $9.99! The math doesn't lie, people - true gaming enlightenment is found at both ends of the IQ spectrum!

The hierarchy of suffering in CS specializations perfectly captured in Toy Story scenes: Cybersecurity and Game Design students? Living the Buzz Lightyear dream - endless identical clones, mass-produced and overconfident. "To infinity and beyond!" (aka "I'll be making six figures right after graduation!") Operating Systems students? That's Woody with the maniacal grin. Sure, they're dealing with kernel panics and memory management, but they're still maintaining their sanity... barely. But those poor souls specializing in Compilers? Straight to the lava pit of despair. They're drowning in parsing algorithms, abstract syntax trees, and the existential dread that comes with implementing a lexer from scratch. Not even the garbage collector can save them from this hell.

The forbidden C++ time bomb! Some poor developer at Westwood Studios left themselves a nuclear reminder in the Command & Conquer source code. They basically wrote: "This optimization experiment failed spectacularly, but I'm too lazy to remove it right now... if nobody fixes this garbage by 2003, PLEASE NUKE IT." The best part? They're defining NO_USE_BUFFERED_IO and then immediately checking if USE_BUFFERED_IO is defined. It's like building a highway with a "ROAD CLOSED" sign that only appears if you're already driving on it. Somewhere, a developer is still waking up in cold sweats wondering if anyone ever nuked their code. Legacy systems are just ancient burial grounds for our worst decisions.

Left side: "My code is self-documenting!!" with a sketch of someone looking distressed at the lowest end of the IQ bell curve. Middle: Actual documentation with detailed comments about monster attack algorithms in a game. Right side: Someone who just writes "// this is bridge" next to a drawing of a bridge, sitting at the other low end of the IQ curve. The perfect balance? The 130+ IQ person with comprehensive, helpful comments that actually explain the why behind complex game logic. The eternal developer struggle: write no comments and claim "self-documenting code," write useless comments stating the obvious, or be the rare specimen who documents the intent and reasoning. Most of us oscillate between all three depending on how much coffee we've had.

The "Gaben of the Pool" meme takes the classic "Panzer of the Lake" format and replaces it with Valve's CEO Gabe Newell floating in a pool. The joke here is that after 15+ years of fans begging for Half-Life 3, Gabe's mythical wisdom is to bundle it with some hardware nobody asked for. It's the gaming equivalent of your ISP bundling AOL CDs with your internet service in 2023. Valve's strategy of "here's the game you've been desperately waiting for, but first buy this random cube" is peak corporate wisdom. The cube exists solely to make you pay for what you actually want - a pricing strategy so transparent even enterprise software salespeople would blush.