Could You Not Pet The TrackPoint

Ah, the sweet delusion of the elderly PC builder. Remember when $1000 could get you a beast of a machine? Now that same budget barely covers a decent graphics card after you've sold a kidney on the black market. The chip shortage, crypto miners, and "gamer aesthetics" tax have turned PC building into a luxury hobby that requires a financial advisor. Meanwhile, the younger generation just pats us on the back and humors our ramblings about the good old days when we weren't choosing between rent and a new CPU.

Ah yes, the classic "let's use the example key from the documentation" approach to security. Like putting "1234" as your bank PIN because it was the example in the manual. AMD apparently used a test cryptographic key from a NIST publication in actual Zen CPUs for years. The stunned ellipses and "I have no words" perfectly capture that special moment when you discover someone's treated a security example as production-ready code. It's the security equivalent of finding out your nuclear launch codes are "password123".

Ah yes, the future of gaming: staring at a motherboard with "BOOT VGA DRAM CPU" labels while a single LED glows menacingly. In 2025, we won't be playing games—we'll be diagnosing why our $4,000 graphics card isn't working after the latest "optimized" driver update. The red light of doom is the new RGB. Instead of frame rates, we'll measure success in "minutes spent troubleshooting per hour of actual gameplay." Future Steam reviews: "Great game, only had to reflash my BIOS twice to run it. 10/10."

The AUDACITY of this tiny $5 speaker! There you are, lying in bed, completely BAFFLED why your precious computer won't work, while this smug little piece of hardware is DESPERATELY trying to communicate with you through its primitive language of beeps and boops! It's literally SCREAMING diagnostic codes at you while you stare blankly at the ceiling wondering if you should just throw the whole PC away. And then the MOMENT OF REVELATION hits you like a truck - "Oh wait, that annoying little speaker I never paid attention to was actually trying to SAVE MY LIFE this whole time?!" The betrayal you feel towards yourself is immeasurable.

Remember when 720p felt like you were watching reality itself unfold before your eyes? Now the same resolution looks like someone smeared Vaseline on your screen. Our brains literally rewired themselves to expect 4K everything, and now 720p triggers the same disgust response as finding a semicolon in Python code. It's the tech equivalent of going back to your childhood home and realizing everything was way smaller than you remembered. Except instead of your house shrinking, your pixel standards inflated faster than a startup's valuation during a funding round. The pixels didn't change—we just became insufferable resolution snobs.

You spend months saving for that sweet GPU upgrade, finally ditching your ancient 4060TI for the shiny new 5070 with 50% more VRAM. You're on cloud nine! Then you make the fatal mistake of checking r/pcmasterrace the next day where some 16-year-old with daddy's credit card is explaining why "anything less than 24GB is basically unusable in 2024." The hardware rat race claims another victim.