Culture

A continual work in progress as the mood strikes me…

As I look back over my 30 years, I have to admit something: I am a child of the 80′s. There are a few web sites out there devoted to the 80′s, but this isn’t just about the 80′s, even though that’s going to be a big part of it. On this page I want to list the things in my life that have had cultural significance, and maybe even why. Please note that these things are not necessarily important to me now. (As you may read on other parts of this site, at least one of these things I am whole-heartedly against.) However, they were certainly important at the time. Also note that this isn’t about relationships (yet – maybe I’ll make a separate page about that), just about things. This is the collection of “stuff” that has “made me who I am” and that have, I guess, in a way, led to the creation of this site.

Video Games

Commodore 64

• Bard’s Tale I, II, & III
• Wasteland
• M.U.L.E
• Hard Hat Mack
• Archon
• Defender, Dig Dug

DOS

• Descent 1 & 2 (but not 3)
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Red Alert
• Doom
• Quake 2
• Fallout 1
• Outlaws

Windows

• Far Cry
• Unreal Tournament
• Half-Life
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• No One Lives Forever 2
• Battlefield 2 & 2142
• Fallout 2 & 3
• Red Alert 2

All-Time Top 10 (regardless of genre)

1. Bard’s Tale (all)
2. Fallout 2
3. SWKotoR
4. Fallout 3
5. Outlaws
6. Duke Nukem
7. Quake 2
8. Red Alert 2
9. NOLF 2
10. Star Wars Jedi Knight series

Movies

• Star Wars series
• Star Trek I, II, & III
• Dreamscape, Brainstorm
• Trading Places (You know, I still think about that one when I think about investing, and my brother-in-law, an investment broker, says that it’s part of the course work in getting a financial degree to watch that movie.)
• Bachelor Party (Those of us that have seen it know why. “Are you crazy?! Look at these …!” Or something like that.)

TV Shows

• Different Strokes, The Facts of Life
• Buck Rogers (Ah, Erin Gray… Now that I recall, I had a crush on all kinds of female TV stars.)
• Little House on the Prairie (We watched it every week because my sister was so in love with the show. I always complained, but I secretly enjoyed it too.)
• The Brady Bunch
• The Bionic Man! (Was it just me, or did that show have the worst fizzle of any show ever? I mean, teaming up with Sasquatch to save the Earth from aliens with time-stopping devices? Sheesh. Maybe it’s my faulty memory. It couldn’t have been that bad, could it?)
• Three’s Company (You know, it suddenly strikes me that I watched a lot of television while growing up.)
• Knight Rider! (Do you have any idea how cheesy that show is to watch now? Yeesh!)
• SNL, but more importantly, Fridays, which was a much funnier show, IMO (You know Kramer, and Elaine? That’s where they got started.)

Cartoons (Oh yeah, baby!)

• Laf-A-Lympics
• Scooby-Doo
• Road Runner, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck
• Space Ghost
• Justice League (That wasn’t what it was called, but it had all the DC Comics characters in it, with the special addition of … The Wonder Twins! Woohoo!)

Music (This is a really big one for me)

• Duran Duran
• Rush
• Led Zeppelin
• Pink Floyd
• John Cougar Mellencamp (or Johnny Hoosier Melanoma, as Mike used to call him)
• UTFO
• The Beastie Boys
• RunDMC
• Sheena E. (Or was it Sheila E.? As I write this, Glamorous Life is playing in my head, and it’s what made me think of updating this page.)
• Cameo (Word Up is my theme song)
• Shaka Kahn
• The Thompson Twins
• The The (sic)

Comics

• X-Men, and its derivatives
• Fantastic Four
• Iron Man
• Calvin and Hobbes (These is one of my favorite strips. I know this is illegal, but now that Bill Watterson has retired, it seems more palatable.)
• 

  Calvin the Big-Business Man

Computers (I should leave this for another page.)

• Commodore Vic-20 and C-64
  It’s not the first computer of importance in my life, but certainly the most influential. I had the Vic with a cassette drive until I made a program big enough to fill up it’s 4.5 KB of usable memory. Then Dad upgraded us to a C-64 with a floppy disk drive! I could go on for a few days about this. Applications? What applications? Yeah, there was a spreadsheet. Yeah, there was a word processor. There was even a GUI desktop at the end (GEOS), but man was it slow! No, what was significant here was programming and games. I wrote lots of small programs. The one that overran the Vic was a Dungeons and Dragons character generator. I never finished it, because there are only so many IF-THEN’s a person can put into one program before he’s not going to work on it anymore. But that’s still the only way to program a table lookup in BASIC, and – at least at the time – you had to typically do about a million big table lookups to get your character completed. Then there was the D&D character sheet, the simplicity and usefulness of which could not be duplicated in any official product.
• My best friend David’s Texas Instuments TI-77
  It was yet another classic computer from that era (there were a lot of stinkers too, but I was fortunate to only deal with winners.) We played a lot of games on it, but never did any programming with it. I don’t think it had BASIC built in, and David’s dad never bought the CART or something.
• A Tandy TRS-80
  My later best friend, Darren, brought his dad’s to school in 6th grade to show a program he had written. All it did was have a stick figure walk across the screen, but it was cool.
• The Atari 400, which the junior high library had
  I had to take turns at lunch with a half-dozen other people, but since dad had bought the C-64 by then, I could stand not to get on it every day.