It's That Time Of Year

Grandma heard you like "computer games" and bought you a Steam Deck thinking it's a new Nintendo! Now you've got a portable Linux machine that can run your entire Steam library, debug Docker containers, and maybe even finish that side project you've been avoiding. The best part? You can pretend you're playing games while secretly writing code in Vim. Grandparents accidentally turning their grandkids into terminal-loving power users since 2022.

The GPU market is basically a tragicomedy at this point. First panel: "NVIDIA is anti-customer" - yet we keep throwing money at them for those sweet, sweet frame rates. Second panel: "AMD is anti-customer" - but hey, at least they're slightly cheaper while they gouge us! Third panel: "Intel Arc is our only hope!!" - that moment of desperate optimism when you're willing to believe a newcomer will save us all. Fourth panel: Reality check - market share shows NVIDIA at 94%, AMD at 6%, Intel at 0%. The invisible hand of the market is giving us all the middle finger while we complain on Reddit and still buy the next overpriced GPU anyway.

Behold! Someone just casually opened their desk drawer like it's a treasure chest from the gods themselves, revealing enough RAM sticks to run a small data center. We're talking HyperX, Corsair, G.Skill, T-Force—basically every premium brand known to humankind, all color-coordinated and organized like they're preparing for the RAM Olympics. Meanwhile, the rest of us are out here downloading more RAM from sketchy websites and praying our 8GB stick doesn't give up during a Chrome session with three tabs open. This person literally has a DRAWER. A WHOLE DRAWER dedicated to RAM modules. They're probably using it as a coaster collection at this point because what else do you do when you have more memory than memories? The sheer audacity of flexing a RAM drawer while some of us are still running on hopes, dreams, and 4GB of DDR3 is absolutely unhinged. Pure hardware royalty energy right here.

The eternal GPU benchmarking disappointment. You spend hours researching the perfect graphics card, finding benchmarks showing it'll run Doom (1993) at 500 FPS. Then reality hits when all you actually play are Valorant and CS2 - games that would run on a calculator powered by a potato. That $1200 RTX card is now just an expensive space heater rendering stick figures at competitive settings.

THE ABSOLUTE BETRAYAL OF GAME PHYSICS! 😱 Just as you're about to drift off to sweet slumberland, your brain VIOLENTLY yanks you back to consciousness with the EARTH-SHATTERING revelation that virtual lamps in video games are somehow emitting ACTUAL PHOTONS into your room! The audacity! The treachery! As if game developers weren't content with stealing our sleep through addictive gameplay, they've now programmed light sources to transcend the digital-physical barrier! Next thing you know, water levels will be flooding our living rooms and enemy fireballs will set off the smoke detectors!

When the job posting asks for "clean, maintainable code" but you open the codebase and find a 200+ element global array tracking everything from "Joe's Sunglasses" to "Coffee Temperature" to "Did we say No to Joe?" 😂 That GameMaker project is the digital equivalent of finding a serial killer's wall of string and newspaper clippings. Each variable is initialized to zero, patiently waiting to track some obscure game state that only makes sense to the original developer who's probably moved to a cabin in the woods by now. Pro tip: If your storyline tracking system requires comments longer than the actual code, you might want to consider using, oh I don't know... OBJECTS? ENUMS? Literally anything but a massive global array that screams "I learned programming from a YouTube tutorial in 2003."