Cold Y Generation

This is what I planned to write Wikipedia: Talk: Cold Y Generation, but for the sake of brevity there, I placed the bulk here. Maybe will expand later with more relevant stuff and other links.

We used fountain pens at first and second class (and maybe beyound) to exercise good handwriting (no "kid" font). The childhood historical shift was the end of the Cold War, but here termed as sovereign countries regaining their independence, which I recall in a manner similar to how User:209.6.159.204 remembers the Berlin Wall event: knowing that things happened, but confused at first as to why. So I never understood either (and was poorly interested on) what "Rambo" and "Commando" were until I learned their short synopses in my 20's and saw a couple scenes from these. I can vaguely remember the Challenger accident and the Chernobyl incident.

Ditto on reality tv and the MTV Generation. I am still aware of the much more simplistic way of life before the onslaught of Internet technology, of which I was a very early adopter compared to my peers at that time. 9/11 did make an impact, perhaps for the reasons of having been disinterested in evening news in early years and later having had the chance to follow 9/11 on the net through MSNBC's live feed (which was shown in a small window) to see the eventual demise of WTC7 (missed the first two towers because of school).

Never had a VHS player in a household and no cable for a very long time. Never got the vibe of popular local or U.S.-focused social networking websites targeted at Gen-Y'ers.

To present a cultural vantage point (like Jman did) of what I watched in the 1980's, then I can tell that I, perhaps willingly, as a means to an escapade, grew up on lots of TV: Soviet kid's cartoons and Estonian kid's films, MacGyver (on Finnish TV), Latino soaps and then throughout 1990's "Santa Barbara", "The A-Team" and "The Equalizer", the horrendous "Saved by the Bell" (still all 1980's stuff), some of "BH 90210" and "Melrose Place" (and "Valley of the Dolls" to boot :), "Star Trek: TNG", then later DS9 and followed Farscape into adulthood.

cbc.ca column