Look How They Massacred My Boy

The endless cycle of mod addiction strikes again! Your poor computer is basically begging for mercy like an overworked employee on their 12th straight hour. "Just one more mod" is the programmer equivalent of "just one more line of code before bed" – a dangerous lie we tell ourselves right before everything crashes spectacularly. Your PC's cooling fans are probably screaming louder than a junior dev who just pushed to production without testing.

Steam slides into your DMs offering a measly 10% discount and suddenly you're blushing like a schoolgirl, ready to empty your wallet for the fifteenth copy of Skyrim. But when Epic Games shows up with an ENTIRE FREE GAME—like, literally zero dollars—you're immediately on the phone with HR screaming about workplace violations. The audacity! The BETRAYAL! Steam could offer you a used napkin and gamers would frame it, but Epic literally throws AAA titles at people for free and gets treated like it committed a war crime. The gaming community's loyalty to Steam is stronger than most marriages, and Epic's desperate attempts to win people over with free games just makes everyone more suspicious. Nothing says "I don't trust you" quite like refusing free stuff out of pure spite.

The code shows a variable named ps for a ParticleSystem . Above it are ASCII art comments that look suspiciously like the PlayStation logo. Some developer couldn't resist the urge to add this Easter egg when they saw "PS" – because apparently professional codebases need more corporate logos drawn in ASCII. Management probably thinks this increases shareholder value.

Nothing says "modern gaming" quite like paying premium prices for games that run like they're being emulated on a toaster. AAA studios are out here slapping Denuvo DRM on unoptimized garbage, then marketing DLSS and FSR as "features" when they're really just band-aids for their spaghetti code. "Hey, buy our $80 game that needs your $2000 GPU to run at 30fps! Oh, and we'll throw in some day-one DLC for just $19.99!" The gaming industry is the only place where you can sell a broken product and expect customers to thank you for the privilege of beta testing it.

Ah, the classic "explaining graphics programming to someone who just wanted to know what you do for a living." Guy's deep in the weeds about shadow mapping and depth buffers while she's probably wondering if she can escape to the bathroom. The thousand-yard stare of the man in front is all of us who've overheard a developer monologuing about technical minutiae at a social event. Pro tip: save the rendering pipeline discussions for the second date.

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.