Do the Millennials have or do anything that their parents think comes from the literal Devil?
No. We grew up with that shit, so we know exactly how stupid it sounds
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I can get a motorcycle jacket.
Unfortunately, the only great big pile of hair I have is in my shower drain.
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The Boomers ruined so much for us. They had their fun with sex and drugs and gave us Reagan and Wall Street instead.
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Harry Potter?
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Quite possibly. But the Satanic Panic around Harry Potter paled in comparison to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.
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I used to kind of identify with Boomers because my four eldest siblings were all Boomers, born between 1949 and 1954. But I was born much later, at the tail end of 1969, and thus solidly GenX. Still, my childhood felt kinda Boomeresque. For the longest time I thought The Wonder Years was set about six or eight years later than it actually was. I didn’t watch regularly enough to catch the blatant 60s references, but the kids looked and sounded just like the kids I’d grown up with.
And when I read Stephen King’s IT, the half of the book set in 1958 really resonated with me. I too spent much of summer vacation when I was 11 riding my bike and building dams in the woods and having dirt clod fights and hiding from bullies and exploring somewhat unsafe places I shouldn’t have been. Those kids were fully 22 years older than I was, but other than the supernatural horror element, our childhoods seemed nigh interchangeable.
And my dad practically had a childhood out of Twain. He was born in San Diego in 1937, but in a very rural area. He and his sisters attended a one-room schoolhouse, and often got there on horseback. More than once, their mother went with them, armed with a shotgun in case they encountered a mountain lion. They had an outhouse, and had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity until after the war.
We didn’t have a computer until my parents bought me an Atari 800XL in late 1984. The next computer I owned would be a secondhand laptop with a 386 processor that my brother gave me in 1991. I didn’t even get on AOL until I was 26, so a lot of tech-driven GenX culture passed me by.
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Yea, in the 80s version, real people went to prison over the hysteria. The McMartin family was ruined over paranoia, and they were not the only ones.
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The whole point of Spacehunter was that it was in 3D (well, okay, it also had Molly Ringwald before she was famous). Seeing it on video would defeat half the point of seeing it.
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Welcome to how it feels to be Canadian - primarily not-American. 
I’m X too btw.
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I’m not arguing that it wasn’t worse in the 70’s-90’s, just that it still goes on.
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We must be damn close in age – tail, tail end of 1969 here too.
My childhood also included a lot of biking around in ‘gangs’. We never had cable, so it also included various sibs and I standing near the TV touching the wall or some damn thing to keep the picture ‘clear’. And I bought my first computer, a recnditioned 386, when I was 20.
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Yep, I was born three days after Altamont. All the good stuff of the 60s was over by then.
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I squeaked in five days before the baby jesus. Thus ensuring a really, really crappy xmas for my mum that year… 
All the stuff of the 60s was pretty much over before I got there…
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When I was nine, we moved into the city.
My new school was much better resourced than my old one; they even owned one of these…
Sixteen kilobytes of RAM and a tape-loaded copy of Turtle Draw.
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Oh certainly the AIDS epidemic was much more important. But as a kid at the time, I was seeing the transition away from the bright flashy rad colors and upbeat music of the 80s to the dreary earth tones and grunge music all around, and not really paying that much attention to national health care politics.
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Quite a time gap between Reagan and Cobain, too.
Peak AIDS was a dreadful thing that happened around the time I started high school (and I did know people killed by it); Cobain was a shitty thing that happened as I was leaving high school.
Kurt’s suicide wasn’t a mass human tragedy, but it was the '90’s equivalent of Ian Curtis or Janis/Jim/Jimmy.
It had a substantial impact; he was something of a generational representative.
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I’m solidly GenX, and I think something else that might define us is that we were the last generation to grow up with top 40 radio. Every kid I grew up with, maybe eventually developed deeper genre tastes but there was always a shared reference point. Li’l bits of country, li’l bits soul, li’l bits R&B, li’l bits rock, li’l bits easy listening, etc. Love them or hate them, we all knew the same songs.
Also, I’d say that the cynical 70s shaped us more than the events of the 80s. Everything I grew up watching was dripping with contempt for politicians, big wigs, any authority. Felt like “Won’t Get Fooled Again” belonged to us more than the 60s boomers. And don’t get me started on boomers and the War on Drugs.
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Anniversary was two days ago. Quite a few people were at the park by his house, apparently - last time I went there was on the 20th anniversary, and it was really busy then.
He wasn’t a big figure for me, but for my wife, still is, definitely.
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I think I was just a few years too old. I will grant Nirvana some catchy hooks and good music but I was in my 20’s by then and they just were not my thing.
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Me too. I had just graduated college when Nevermind came out. I thought it was great and all, but I never thought of Cobain as some sort of poet for our generation, he was just another rocker and when he died I thought it was just another celebrity death. I always felt there was some sort of irrationally enormous difference between being 17 and being 22 when that album dropped.
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