The Real AI Girlfriend Without Makeup

After three months of GPU hunting, six crashed websites, and a second mortgage, this guy finally scored a Radeon RX 9070 XT. And what does he do? Tucks it into bed before even installing it. That's not desperation—that's respect for the silicon gods who finally answered his prayers. Tomorrow he'll sacrifice his entire weekend to driver updates and benchmarks while explaining to his partner why they're eating ramen for the next six months. Worth it.

Spent $3000 on a liquid-cooled gaming rig with RGB everything just to play a game that looks like it was made in Microsoft Paint. Meanwhile, the kid with a potato laptop is desperately trying to run Cyberpunk at 12 FPS. The true tragedy of modern gaming isn't bad game design—it's resource allocation. That RTX 4090 is sitting there calculating the perfect shadow on a Roblox brick while somewhere an integrated GPU is literally catching fire.

That's the Portal cake logo with "The MSRP is a lie" repeated like a dystopian mantra. Graphics card prices haven't been this fictional since cryptocurrency miners were building rigs in their mothers' basements. Manufacturers slap on MSRPs that belong in fantasy novels while retailers mark them up to "market value" – which is corporate speak for "whatever desperate gamers will pay." Nothing says "modern computing" like needing a second mortgage for a GPU that'll be obsolete before you finish paying it off.

Someone saw a building with "BIOS" lit up in the windows and immediately thought it was a gathering of hardcore IT professionals, only to realize it's just a New Year's decoration that reads "2018" backward. The classic case of tech brain taking over your perception of reality. When you've spent so many hours tweaking boot settings that you start seeing BIOS everywhere—even in innocent holiday decorations. The digital equivalent of seeing faces in electrical outlets.

The duality of PC gaming in its purest form. At the top, we have Linus Tech Tips building a $100K desk PC that probably requires its own power grid, while below, some resourceful hero is gaming on a monitor they literally found in the trash. Both are having approximately the same amount of fun, which is the most beautiful part. One spent a mortgage, the other spent nothing. The FPS might differ, but the dopamine hits just the same. Nature is healing.

Look, I've been through enough hardware cycles to know the drill. You start planning your build, check PCPartPicker, and immediately realize you need to take out a small loan just for DDR5. Then you hear whispers about the "AI bubble bursting" and suddenly you're doing the math: if NVIDIA stock tanks, maybe—just maybe—those absurdly overpriced components will finally become affordable. The real kicker? We're all sitting here praying for an economic downturn just so we can justify our hobby. That's where we are as a society. Waiting for the market to crash so 1TB of RAM doesn't cost more than a used car. Because apparently every stick of memory now needs to be "AI-optimized" and costs accordingly. Remember when 16GB was overkill? Now Chrome alone needs that just to keep 12 tabs open. The hardware industry really saw us coming.