Pizza Hut Classic 1

Generation Y’s Real Café 80s

Most people reading this will be familiar with the 50s retro diner, in concept if not by firsthand experience. This style of restaurant gained popularity in the 1980s as Baby Boomers neared middle age. Savvy restaurateurs figured out that appealing to that generation's nostalgia for the 1950s culture they dismantled…
December 29, 20236 Comments
Break Down

The Break Down

Reader Rudolph Harrier comments on a previous post: What makes things worse is that Zoomers have only learned how to deal with existing services. Music sites everywhere are littered with comments of “I heard a song I liked but it’s not on Spotify so how can I listen to it…
December 12, 202313 Comments
Scott Pilgrim Subculture

Subcultural Experiences

Commenter Hermetic Seal writes: As someone who started college in the mid-2000s, a big part of my experience was how all of my communal activities, and the entertainment I was into, moved from shared cultural experiences, to subcultural ones. I think a lot of that emerged naturally, or subconsciously, in…
July 20, 20233 Comments
Tower Records

Gen Y Tales: Welcome to Adulthood

A reader writes in to share a Gen Y tale of his own: It was 2005 and I had just turned 18. I was at a Tower Records with a bunch of high school friends. It was a neat, two story place and that particular night it was lively and…
July 19, 202316 Comments
friendship2

The Friendless Generation

The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for men. And not just in the way your brain instantly sprang to. Sometime in the last 30 years, men pretty much stopped having friends. The real male retreat from society is husbands vanishing into man caves when not serving…
February 16, 20239 Comments
Vellee

1940s Babies

Loyal readers of this blog know that I've been combating the prevalent Madison Avenue-concocted generational model for years, along with fellow authors David Stewart and JD Cowan. Much of our understanding of what, say a Zommer or a Millennial is comes from ad agencies who draw arbitrary lines between cohorts…
February 1, 20239 Comments
Civilization 1

The Gen Y – Millennial Gap

A commenter on yesterday's post writes: I don’t quite know what to say. I’m a millennial, and one who has hardly heard a song from the 80s (That I was aware of) but when I heard that last song on your list I felt… Something. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was……
January 17, 20239 Comments
80sNot80s

80s Not 80s

One strange aftereffect of Cultural Ground Zero has been the rise of the retrowave musical aesthetic. Like the PulpRev in fiction, this movement doesn't so much embrace a genre as an earlier state of the art - in retrowave's case, the 1980s. To a member of Generation Y, the phenomenon…
January 16, 202334 Comments
Life Teen Mass

Hopeful LibCath Listicle

Way back in the mists of time before the Trump years, #GamerGate, and even the Sad Puppies days, Fr. Dwight Longenecker's blog was on my regular rotation. Fr. D. is a former Anglican priest, Catholic convert, and indie author whose balanced commentary proved quite helpful in the early days of…
January 11, 202311 Comments
Batman Moonwalker

Speculation on VHS

Loyal readers will recall the summer of 2021, when we delved into the seedy world of video game speculation. For newcomers, what was alleged to have happened was unscrupulous grading services were colluding with auction houses to drive up prices on vintage video games. So you had carts with millions…
January 4, 202314 Comments