Tl;dr: European teens and 20-somethings who sprinkle 68000 opcodes on their Müsli each morning create elaborate real-time visual hacks and general awesomeness -- now, thanks to the demise of the Amiga and the rise of (not-so) DirectX, considered something of a lost art.

Sad, really. Nothing else -- not even the game projects I work on and don't quite finish -- comes real close to the raw visceral fun of programming, the reason why I got so deeply involved with these infernal machines in the first place.