I'm talking about the year 1986, of course, which saw the release of one of the most important videogames of all time.

I've been researching the year, and, wow. A lot of things happened in 1986 that I knew about, but I never made the connection that they all happened in the same year!

Soviet Union launches their space station, Libyans are blamed for a terror attack, Chernobyl stops being a location and starts being a date, "gone postal" becomes a phrase, and the US Contra scandal breaks. Plus, everything else.

I wasn't around for the 80s, and I was barely around for the 90s, but I can appreciate that it was the last decade before the internet started to creep into everyones life. You could count on a grocery store having a telephone, or a city having telephone booths around, but even "telephone-connected credit card readers" were rare. I only had a small taste of the world before The Internet Was Everywhere.

I'm watching this video and appreciating the haircut of the presenter at ~1:10 in. They let men have haircuts like that back then? That gay little curled bleached part? That's awesome.

That song "We Didn't Start The Fire" is pretty great, in addition to being a template for a K-12 social studies assignment, because it's also a desperate apology from the past. It's reassuring that even in 1989, people felt overwhelmed with all the horrors surrounding them.

... 1986 was a standout year, right? Worse than the others, kind of like 2016 or 2020 was? What happened in, say, 1989? Woah, holy shit. What a year, huh?