Your GPU's Brutal Honesty Hour

THE AUDACITY! Someone labeled an Ethernet port tab as "Protective Boot"?! I'm having an existential crisis right now. For YEARS I've been yanking these little plastic tabs off network cables thinking they were just annoying packaging leftovers! Turns out they're ACTUALLY serving a purpose?! My entire networking life has been a LIE. Next you'll tell me those silica gel packets aren't just forbidden snacks! 💀

Ah, the PS/2 ports—where mice and keyboards went to die before USB came along and made everything better. If you recognize these ancient circular connectors without Googling, congratulations! You're officially old enough to have debugged Y2K bugs and probably still have a drawer full of IDE cables "just in case." The blue one's for mice, the green one's for keyboards, and getting them mixed up was the original "USB superposition" before USB-C made us all flip connectors three times. Remember the satisfying click when you finally got the pins aligned? And the sheer panic when you bent one? Good times. Kids these days will never know the joy of rebooting because you dared to unplug your keyboard.

Spent three months researching parts, another month waiting for GPU prices to drop, two weeks building and troubleshooting, and now you just... stare at it. The RGB looks nice I guess? Turns out the real dream was the obsessive parts comparison spreadsheets we made along the way. That moment when you realize you spent $3000 to do exactly what you were doing before: scrolling Reddit and occasionally opening VS Code to stare at that side project you'll "definitely finish someday."

Two calico cats representing the display tech rivalry that keeps tech forums busy. IPS is your reliable workhorse with decent colors and viewing angles that won't betray you when you tilt your head. OLED is the flashy sibling with those perfect blacks and infinite contrast ratio that makes your wallet cry. Both get the job done, but OLED knows it looks better and isn't afraid to show off. The cats' matching patterns but different colorations pretty much nail the "same purpose, different approach" vibe. Also, good luck finding an affordable OLED monitor that doesn't burn-in after displaying your IDE's taskbar for 10,000 hours straight.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

Ah yes, the dark ages of computing. Before FORTRAN showed up in 1956, programmers were just keyboard warriors in the most literal sense - manually toggling 0s and 1s like prehistoric savages. Nothing says "I'm having a productive day at work" like frantically flipping physical switches for eight hours straight while your coworkers wonder if you're having a seizure or actually programming something. The best part? Debugging meant checking if your finger slipped on switch #4,271. Good times.