Since I have a summer job, I've been thinking quite a bit about what I'm going to spend all my hard-earned money on. At first, I considered buying one of the current generation of consoles, but I reconsidered once I got a look at the price tags on those particular machines. Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that I would buy consoles from older generations instead, because they now sell at maybe $30-$50 and they still have the world's greatest library of games (I am referring, of course, to Nintendo's line of consoles). Thinking about those old consoles got me thinking about the 80s and 90s, and every cultural oddity that I knew to be associated with those decades. The 80s and 90s were when my world was created. Massive computer networks became available to regular consumers, culminating in the public birth of the World Wide Web in the year of my birth. Just as V.S. Pritchett, born in 1900, always remembered that he was "as old as the century", most kids my age are "as old as the Web". That wasn't the only thing to come out of it, though. Nintendo's Legend of Zelda games set the stage for modern videogames where players may explore vast worlds and act out multiple storylines in one game. The greatest among these was obviously Ocarina of Time, considered by many to be the Greatest Game EVAR. Not only that, but id Software's Doom and Quake games were the great-grandfathers of Half-Life, Halo, and Crysis. Final Fantasy also hails from the 80s, originally created as the dying breathe of a destitute game company. Their final fantasy became the forerunner of pretty much every single RPG made since then. Entertainment as we know it evolved in those two decades. Musically, the 90s carry much more importance than the one-hit-wonder mania of the 80s, although alternative music began to gain one hell of a following around the beginning of the 80s. Without hardcore punk and Metallica and the Sugarhill Gang to pave the way in the hearts and minds of the world, Nirvana and gangsta rap and all manner of alternative music would never have exploded onto the popular music scene, where they maintain quite an influence even today (Nickelback and 50 Cent are among the many wannabes who continue to try and recapture the awesomeness of the 90s).

So thinking all these crazy thoughts about how important the 90s and 80s were to me led to me actually missing them. I wasn't even alive in the 80s, and I remember hardly anything of the 90s! Yet I know almost anything and everything about the culture back then, and it's something I wanna live. A couple of days ago, I idly mused out loud to a coworker how great it would be to turn back the clock and live through the 80s and 90s, and he heartily agreed. It sounds like a crappy modern knock-off of romanticism: let's recapture the spirit of the good old days, when we were more like us, not these obsessively consuming morons! I for one would like that. The 90s pretty much kicked ass, and I'd live through the 80s just for the thrill of getting an NES when they were still new, and for going to Minor Threat concerts and hating conservatism. To learn more about how the world you live in now was shaped, check out the relevant Wikipedia articles. We live in fascinating times.