Ray Tracing: Expectation Vs. Reality

Look at this man cradling his RTX GPU like it's his firstborn child at the hospital. The gentle support, the tender gaze, the protective stance—this is PURE paternal instinct kicking in. And honestly? Can you blame him? That thing probably cost more than an actual baby's first year of diapers and has better cooling than most nurseries. The way he's holding it with both hands, making sure not to touch the PCB, checking for any shipping damage—this is the kind of care and devotion that brings a tear to your eye. Meanwhile, his actual future children are somewhere in the void wondering why dad never looked at them with such unconditional love and concern. Fun fact: The RTX 4090 weighs about 4.5 pounds, which is roughly the same as a newborn baby. Coincidence? I think not. Nature is healing.

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.

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.

Nothing quite like the special kind of rage that comes from debugging C for hours, only to realize the "bug" was actually a feature you forgot you implemented. Or worse—it was working exactly as intended and you just didn't understand your own code anymore. The progression here is beautiful: starts with innocent optimism, discovers something's wrong, descends into debugging hell trying to fix it, then finally achieves enlightenment (or insanity?) when you realize there was never anything to fix. Those five hours? Gone. Vaporized. Could've been playing the game instead of hunting phantom bugs. Bonus points for doing this in C where every "bug" could legitimately be undefined behavior, a segfault waiting to happen, or just your pointer arithmetic being spicy. The paranoia is justified, which makes the realization even more painful.

The eternal battle between game companies and Valve's Steam platform in one perfect image. On the left, major publishers (EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, etc.) screaming bloody murder while Steam casually responds with "I like to provide good discounts and customer service" alongside that sweet -95% tag. It's basically the gaming industry's version of that meeting where someone suggests actually making customers happy and gets thrown out the window. The difference is Steam actually did it and now has everyone's wallet in a stranglehold.

PC gamers and the Epic Games Store have a relationship that can only be described as "transactional at best." You open it once a week to claim your free game like you're collecting coupons at a grocery store, then immediately close it and pretend it doesn't exist. The Epic launcher sits there in your taskbar, wondering if it'll ever experience the warmth of human interaction again. Spoiler alert: it won't. Not until next Thursday when they're giving away another indie game you'll add to your library of 47 unplayed titles. Steam stays open 24/7 like a loyal golden retriever, but Epic? That's the friend you only text when you need something. And honestly, Epic knows what they signed up for.