Where our yards the damned kids should get off include validated xhtml 2.0

So I think about my parents, who continue to take baby steps into the wild world of technology, partly because I'm starting to land on their side of the technological fence.  All the cool, new, hip tech is starting to feel foreign to me (I rarely text anyone, and twitter is something that, upon viewing it for the first time, I want to toss bones in the air while Also Sprach Zarathustra plays) but my status as nerd point of the 3pi^e +54th degree demands that I keep up as much as I can.

So I try to remember the state of the art back when I was a kid, and how, if I were my parents, what resources I would have had to deal with.  I utter fail at this attempt, although it does allow a nice, fancy dovetail into what I'm really wanting to talk about, nostiliga.  I try and think about back then, and how my parents would have dealt with looking back at their own upbringing.  And man, when you think about it, they really only had their memories.

I'm going to use 1985 as the proto-example year, mainly because it covers a nice midsection of the decade, it's when I was 5 and what I can most cleanly remember, and because, well, it worked in Back To The Future.  At lunch the other day, the topic of William Shatner's rendition of Rocketman came up over the course of conversation.  (Other tangential things involved in this conversation: Babyloian temple whores, Kosher laws, and rice pudding).  10 minutes after getting back to the office, someone had forwarded a link to everyone with a link to youtube showing this exact clip. On the same youtube bent, if you wanted to hum along with the same candy coated cartoon lyrics today that you would sing along with as a kid, it's just a simple search away. (And you get to realize how god awful it really was)

Back in 1985, sure, we had VHS (and Beta) cassettes, but they rarely, if at all, released completed seasons of television shows that were current at the time, let alone complete series of shows that my parents would have watched as kids.

Or let's take music, I vaguely remember my dad trying to share his Beatles records (Yes, records) with me when I was discovering the amazing sounds of M.C. Hammer (Yes, shameful, I know, it took me until high school and a marching band show of Beatles tunes to really get my attention to the Liverpool boy's music). Luckily, he had a few records that had survived plenty of moves, including him transferring back to the State after being stationed in England in the late 60s early 70s.

Whereas I have my entire music collection on a small device about the size of my father's wallet. And that's backed up on my laptop and my desktop. And speaking of music, I have so many different ways to discover music these days (I'm currently listening to Pandora Radio, a radio channel seeded with Jesus H Christ, a band I found out from a weekly music Podcast.

Books are still books, but with the aforementioned iPod and the explosion of audiobooks, there are now more ways to be exposed to printed/spoken words. Movies are as much a social experience these days, and with tiny digital cameras the before and after are captured in HD.

I could characteristically ramble on for more, but all of this is leading me to this point: that my current generation is the most hooked into their nostalgic pasts than any other generation before. In other words, other generations, like my parents, couldn't connect back to their childhoods and their pasts like mine can. And come the next generation after me, the first to have access to a connected, wired world their entire lives (Mine only caught this whole internet thing as we were in high school), it's going to be even more plugged in.

All this came to me as I realized last week I'm one of the few who often bring a GameBoy into work. (It's only for the bus ride into and out of town, I swear) I had this sort of mental crisis, is this just a sign of lack of maturity on my part, or as part of the first generation of gamers is it just a sign of my upbringing, like a former high school track runner still jogging a mile during lunch?

I guess it's just a sign of the times, that the first people who are socially allowed to remain in contact with their childhoods, that it's our turn to decide what grown-up actually means are starting to get in charge now.

Hmm, on second though, I think I just realized why the economy tanked. Never mind...though I wonder if 700 billion dollars is a cheat code in Mario 3....

At any rate, here's Take on Me: the Literal Version... to cleanse the pallet of all this serious navel-gazing