They Finally Go On Sale

Big Tech promised us flying cars and Mars colonies. Instead, we got a GPU shortage and AI that can make cat videos look slightly more realistic. Every major tech company dumped billions into AI development with dreams of solving humanity's greatest challenges. The result? A digital arms race to see who can generate the most convincing deepfake of a person who doesn't exist saying things they never said. Meanwhile, the collective computing power of Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google—enough to simulate entire universes—is being used to make chatbots argue about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Revolutionary stuff. Really pushing the boundaries of human achievement here. The philosopher statue representing ancient wisdom has been replaced by an excited cat meme. That's basically the tech industry's trajectory in one image.

The UK gave us Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, and the ARM architecture, yet somehow pays their developers like they're interns at a failing startup. Nothing like inventing modern computing and the World Wide Web only to reward your tech talent with salaries that barely cover a London flat share and a Tesco meal deal. The classic "we'll pay you in prestige and rainy weather" compensation package.

Santa went full Thanos mode after some kid asked for 256GB of DDR5 RAM just to run Minecraft. Look, we all know that one person who thinks they need a NASA-grade supercomputer to play games with blocky graphics. But honestly? 256GB of DDR5 is overkill even for Chrome tabs. The kid probably just wanted to run 47 mods, 12 shader packs, and still have room to keep Discord open. Santa took one look at that wish list, calculated the cost-per-gigabyte, and decided violence was the answer. Can't blame him—DDR5 prices probably pushed his workshop's budget into the red faster than a production bug on Friday afternoon.

When your gaming rig runs so hot you just mount RGB case fans directly above your window like some kind of deranged HVAC engineer. Because why buy a normal fan when you can repurpose $200 worth of PC cooling equipment to move air at 2000 RPM with addressable lighting? The best part is those fans are probably running off a fan controller somewhere, meaning someone actually wired this whole setup. That's not a cry for help, that's commitment to the aesthetic. Your electricity bill might be screaming, but at least your room looks like a cyberpunk nightclub.

Gaming enthusiasts have zero chill when it comes to the Steam Deck's cuboid shape. The second Valve released their portable PC gaming device, the internet collectively decided it's just Gabe Newell (Valve's founder) trapped in a box. Now we can't unsee it—a sea of GabeCubes ready to invade our homes, bringing Steam sales directly to our couches. The perfect rectangular prison for a billionaire who just wants you to play Half-Life while sitting on the toilet.

Kids these days with their high-speed fiber will never understand the ritual sacrifice of dial-up modems. That unholy symphony of electronic screeching wasn't just noise—it was the sound of digital suffering that granted you access to a blazing 56kbps connection. The modem's death wails were our loading bars, and we liked it that way. Now I just silently connect to WiFi like some kind of barbarian without properly thanking the router gods.