Raise Your Hand If You've Been Rule 34'ed

The great GPU wars continue. Intel Arc arrives as "A New Hope" in December 2024, only for NVIDIA to immediately crush that hope with RTX 5070 in January as "The Empire Strikes Back." Then AMD swoops in with RX 9070 XT in March as "Return of the Jedi." Just another predictable chapter in the never-ending saga where your wallet is the true casualty. The Force is strong with price gouging.

Ah, the sweet delusion of game developers thinking they've outsmarted players. First, you laugh at clientside prediction, then celebrate with friends. But soon the boss music starts . You add lag compensation? Players counter with anticheats. You implement lag configuration? Players just adapt. And then there's the final boss: PVP balancing in games without clientside prediction - a mythical creature that eats developers for breakfast. Seven years in game networking has taught me one truth: no matter how clever your netcode, players will find ways to make you question your career choices. It's not about winning—it's about how gracefully you lose.

When your friend discovers you're hardcoding an entire chess game by manually printing each board state for every possible move. 2.6 million lines of code instead of using a chess library or even basic loops? That's not programming, that's digital masochism. The real checkmate here isn't on the board—it's the developer's sanity. Somewhere, a computer science professor just felt a disturbance in the force and doesn't know why.

Console gamers are getting absolutely destroyed right now. Xbox raising prices, $80 games becoming the norm, and Nintendo charging $499 for a Mario Kart bundle? Meanwhile, the PC gaming prophet descends from the heavens with his divine message: "Don't worry and come to PC, you can trust me." Sure, you'll need to sell a kidney for a graphics card, but at least you won't be paying $70 for a game that goes on sale for $12 three months later on Steam. The PC Master Race welcomes another batch of console refugees with open, angelic wings.

The gaming hardware arms race continues to claim victims. Just when you thought your Nintendo Switch 2 with its fancy 120hz refresh rate and HDR support was the pinnacle of portable gaming, Valve's Steam Deck enters the chat and shatters your reality. It's like bringing a calculator to a math competition only to find your opponent brought a quantum computer. The sheer existential crisis on that man's face says it all—the moment you realize your tech is already obsolete before you've even finished the unboxing video.

The eternal dev cycle of adulthood: First, you fantasize about building that ultimate gaming rig with liquid cooling and RGB everything. Then you meticulously install 17 different launchers (Steam, Epic, GOG, Origin, Ubisoft Connect...) because each one has that one exclusive you absolutely need. Next, you frantically buy games during every sale because "80% off is basically free money." Finally, the crushing reality hits - you spend your precious free time scrolling through your 300+ game library for 45 minutes before giving up and watching YouTube videos about games instead.