When You Realize How Old Everything Is

Game developers at DICE apparently skipped CS101 where they teach you how arrays start at 0 and proper version numbering. Battlefield sequence: 1, 4, 6, 5. Just like how I organize my Git branches – chronologically challenged. The QA team must've been on vacation that sprint.

Remember when games were actually games and not elaborate schemes to empty your wallet? The Vince McMahon reaction meme perfectly captures the unicorn that is a quality game in 2023. First, it's free? Mild interest. Could run on a potato from 2017? Now we're talking. No microtransactions? Holy crap, that's rare. But great replayability too?! That's like finding a bug-free production release – theoretically possible but I'll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, modern AAA studios are shipping 200GB games that require a NASA supercomputer and still ask you to pay $4.99 for a slightly different colored hat. The gaming industry really took "monetize everything" a bit too literally.

The real bug in your code isn't a syntax error - it's that FPS counter permanently burned into your screenshots. Nothing says "I'm debugging while gaming" like accidentally sending your boss a screenshot with CPU: 47%, RAM: 4GB, and FPS: 112. That black cat is just judging your life choices from the corner, wondering why you're troubleshooting production issues during your Elden Ring session.

The skeleton of every Steam user, faithfully converting wishlist items into digital dust since the dawn of time. That wishlist is basically a graveyard where good intentions go to die. We tell ourselves "I'll buy it when it's on sale" but then we're too busy playing the same three games we've had since 2012. The wishlist is just a monument to our gaming FOMO – the digital equivalent of buying a treadmill that becomes an expensive clothes hanger.

Ah, the multiverse of hardware confusion. Someone at marketing decided to slap an Intel logo on an AMD Ryzen processor because brand loyalty is for people who read spec sheets. This laptop must be powered by unicorn tears and compiler warnings. Next they'll tell us it runs both Windows and Linux simultaneously while maintaining your sanity. The perfect machine for developers who can't decide which tech religion to join, so they just worship at the altar of "whatever works sometimes."

The ETERNAL DUALITY of a programmer's soul! On one side, we're embracing the elegant simplicity of established data structures like binary trees for problem-solving. On the other side, we're POSSESSED by the absolutely DERANGED delusion that we'll build an entire game engine from scratch—as if our weekends aren't already sacrificed to debugging semicolons! The audacity! The hubris! The inevitable 3 AM breakdown when you realize your "revolutionary" engine can barely render a square without crashing! Yet here we are, cycling between these two extremes like some kind of computational bipolar disorder. It's not a phase, it's a LIFESTYLE.