I Guess I Am Older Than I Thought

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.

The GPU market in a nutshell: AMD abandons their still-in-production RX 6600 like it's last week's leftovers, while Nvidia's over here giving 12-year-old GTX 750 Ti cards the royal treatment with fresh drivers and game optimizations. It's like watching one parent forget their toddler at the grocery store while the other helps their 30-year-old son with his taxes. No wonder Nvidia's charging kidney prices—they're supporting cards older than some of their customers' children!

The legendary Gabe Cube—Valve's unreleased hardware that shows Gabe Newell's facial expressions based on your code quality. Smiling face when your code is optimized, horrified face when you try to implement Half-Life 3. The USB ports at the bottom are for plugging in your tears when Steam rejects your game for the 17th time. Rumor has it the cube crashes if you say "3" three times in your codebase.

Ah, the classic GPU launch cycle. AMD proudly announces their RX 9060 XT 8GB that's "Dead On Arrival" – not because it's defective, but because it'll be sold out before you can even load the purchase page. Nothing says "successful product launch" like immediate unavailability. Your wallet gets to live another day while your 7-year-old graphics card wheezes running Notepad.

The eternal dilemma of PC gaming economics: your hardware is simultaneously ancient and too expensive to utilize properly. By the time game prices drop to reasonable levels, your "new" rig has already transformed into a digital fossil. It's like saving up for years to buy a Ferrari only to discover you can only afford the gas when electric cars become mainstream. The hardware-software value curve is the cruelest joke in computing—a mathematical proof that the universe has a sick sense of humor.

Gandalf and Saruman battling it out on top of a WiFi router instead of Orthanc tower. Because let's face it, the real battle in any household isn't good vs. evil—it's who gets to control the WiFi password. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS... more than 100Mbps to your devices!" The router's probably thinking, "I didn't sign up for this fantasy drama, I just want to stream Netflix without being turned into Middle-earth."