So the boat's free. Ever Given wiggled loose from the bank of the Suez Canal on Monday after six days stuck sideways across one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet, and for about a week my Twitter feed was nothing but boat memes and people who suddenly became armchair experts on dredging. I'll admit I was one of them. I spent an unreasonable amount of time reading about how a 220,000-ton ship gets pulled out of mud by tugboats and a very lucky combination of high tide and a full moon.
Lloyd's List was estimating something like $9.6 billion a day in stalled trade while that thing sat there, which is a number so big it stops meaning anything. What actually got my attention wasn't the money, it was watching the marine traffic tracker sites melt down from all the extra visitors. I hadn't thought about a boat tracking website in years and suddenly it was the most refreshed tab in my browser, right next to the other tab I keep refreshing about nine times a day: Newegg.
Because here's the thing nobody's fixing with a tugboat and a full moon: I still cannot buy a graphics card.
I've been trying to get an RTX 3070 since November. Not even the fancy one, just the reference card at the $499 price Nvidia claims is real. Every single restock I've caught wind of is gone in under ninety seconds, scooped up by bots running scripts I don't have the patience to learn, then relisted on eBay for $850 like that's a normal thing to charge for a piece of silicon that fits in your hand. My current setup is a GTX 1660 that wheezes through anything released in the last two years, and at this point I've made peace with playing everything on low settings like it's 2014 again.
Part of it is the pandemic, obviously, everyone's stuck at home building PCs and streaming and gaming more than usual. Part of it is Ethereum miners, who apparently do the math and figure an $850 scalped 3070 still pays for itself in a few months if the price holds. And now you can add "a boat blocked a canal for six days" to the pile of reasons my card's not shipping, because a chunk of the container traffic that got backed up was full of, guess what, components. I don't actually think one blocked canal is the reason I can't buy a GPU. But it's satisfying to have a single, dumb, visual villain to blame instead of a vague soup of pandemic demand and mining economics and fab capacity that nobody can really picture.
What I keep coming back to is how fast the internet's attention moved once the ship actually came loose. Wednesday it was the only thing anyone was talking about. By Friday it had already curdled into "old news," and people were onto the next thing. I get it, that's just how this stuff works now and has for a while, but there was something almost funny about watching a genuinely huge global logistics story get the same three-day attention span as a mildly interesting tweet.
Anyway. If anyone reading this actually manages to snag a 3070 or 3080 at MSRP, I want to hear about it, because at this point I'm half convinced the people who got one are just telling us it exists to keep the rest of us hopeful. I've set up alerts on four different stock-tracker Discord servers (yes, the irony of using Discord to hunt for parts while there's a rumor going around that Microsoft wants to buy the whole platform for something like ten billion dollars is not lost on me) and so far all I've gotten out of it is a 2am notification for a card that sold out before I even opened my laptop.
Small silver lining: my old 1660 did just fine running Slay the Spire last night, so it's not like I'm completely dead in the water. Unlike a certain boat.