voidbat:

asymbina:

designatedheckingadult:

thebreakfastgenie:

apparentlyeverything:

apparentlyeverything:

I’ve given it some thought and I have concluded that out of the entire second half of the 20th century (1950-2000), the early 1980s were the weirdest years in which to be born, followed by the late 1960s

logic: 

people born in the early 80s had an internet-free childhood and early adolescence, then became the transition generation for most modern technology and social media. People who were babies in the early 80s seem to have been dressed like clowns. 9/11 happened just as they were reaching early adulthood, and they had to start their adult life in the reactionary shadow of the GW Bush years and the bizarre early 2000s cultural landscape

late 60s people were the first generation after baby boomers, came of age right as the economy was going under and never caught up economically or professionally with their older peers, and were at a relative age disadvantage during the late 90s boom. Apparently higher mortality rates than other people born in the late 20th century. They were kids in the 70s, so bad hair and bell bottoms. High school and early adulthood highlights included Reagan-era right wing politics, crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, and mullets

That last part sounds a bit like We Didn’t Start the Fire

Honestly, you have no idea. I was an ‘83 baby and I can’t properly convey how much things changed during my childhood. Going through my teens having been told the worst was over (Cold War, The Troubles, late 80s-early 90s fashion) only to have the Dot-com crash and 9/11 happen the year I turned eighteen. 9/11 and the resulting spike in islamaphobia and racism being in particularly sharp focus for me, being from a city where about 14% of the population and a third of my classmates being Pakistani Muslims.

Technology advanced at a baffling pace, especially looking back at it now. When I was a kid, we had four terrestrial TV channels, VHS was a luxury and my first video games came on cassette tapes. My grandparents still had a rotary phone. By the time I was an adult, we had games and movies on DVD and everyone had mobile phones. As a precocious, technophilic little brat, I, starry-eyed, read articles the internet and how the web was gonna change everything. By the time I left home, I had unmetered broadband.

It’s fucking wild.

I was born in 1975, so I have a pretty good idea.

The most striking, memorable thing for me, re: all the wild changes over the past few decades?

There was a short (2-3 pages, at most) comic in … I want to say Boy’s Life (the official Boy Scouts of America magazine), don’t ask me what issue but given when I was in Scouts, had to be circa 1988 or so. It depicted a bunch of speculative but plausible future technologies, along with some jokes about them; the only one I remember was a couple of panels that essentially predicted the smartphone.

I don’t remember the time frame it gave, but it struck me at the time as unlikely, given how horrifically expensive car phones were in the mid-late 1980s (and they were very much “car phones” at the time), and I’m pretty sure that it put them at least a decade further out than it actually took. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted remembering enough to be talking about it on one of the same devices.

i was born in early 82. can fucking confirm.