Buddy and I were playing the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue this evening and I abruptly grabbed the controller from him and paused the game.

“Matt,” I said, because my friend’s name is Matt, “look at this. Look.” I waved the controller at him. “You’re playing Gran Turismo 5 on a Playstation 3. This is a game with utterly realistic graphics and physics, being rendered on a system more powerful than every computing device in the world put together just a few decades ago, displayed in high definition on a sixty-inch television.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Think about it. Really. We’re both 30—when we were fifteen, we would have shit our pants over this. This was ‘Lawnmower Man’ kind of technology. In 1993, what were we playing? Doom? Remember when you got your 486/66 and we all went over to your house for a whole weekend and camped out in your room, and played Doom for like 40 straight hours?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Fucking Wing Commander Privateer came out in 1993. We played the balls out of that. X-Wing came out in 1993. Strike Commander came out in 1993. Fuck, remember Strike Commander?!”

“Yeah,” he says.

“In fifteen years, and we’ve gone from basic 3d games to, well, to that. LOOK AT IT!” I pointed at the screen. It’s amazing looking—really, I mean, it’s a beautiful game.

“And it’s not just that! Look at this shit here!” I pull out my phone. It’s an Apple iPhone. “I can pinpoint my location on this fucker with with GPS, access the Internet from it…shit, it makes Kirk’s communicator look like…well, like a prop in a 1960s TV show. And the Internet itself!”

“Yeah,” he says.

“The fucking Internet! When we were fifteen, if you wanted to see tits, you had to dial up a BBS and bug the sysop into giving you access to the dirty pictures section. Then you had to post in his stupid message boards to get your post-call ratio up enough to download. Then you had to upload something to get your upload-download ratio positive. Then you had to pick a file and download it at 2400 bps—that’s five seconds per kilobyte. Porn one line at a time! It’s like…oh, I think that might be a boob!”

“Yeah,” he says.

“But now, shit, the Internet! There’s so much fucking porn on the Internet, I’ve actually stopped looking at it. I’VE LITERALLY SEEN TOO MUCH PORN. I’m bored with it. What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“We’re surrounded by technological advances and we see incredible things, every single day, all around us! It’s amazing! It’s mind-blowing! We’re actually LIVING in the FUCKING FUTURE, RIGHT NOW, and I DON’T THINK YOU REALIZE IT!”

“Give me back the controller, or I will punch you in your sack,” he says.

I frown, then shrug, then give him back his controller. He unpauses the game and wrecks spectacularly, and it’s beautiful. We watch the replay.

The future is pretty fucking awesome.