Yes, it's me! Back at it again posting only when there's an important event going on.....in this case, the end of the 2010s! Interestingly, we're transitioning between decades during the Year of the Pig, which is my zodiac animal. Looking at the date of my last post (which I still remember posting/think of as being recent), I can definitely see why i've dropped off since then--grad school has been pretty much soaking up all of my time and energy with increasing frequency since Year 1 when I made that post (on the upside, i've launched two studies since then). Will my New Year's resolution be to start posting more often again like i'd actually planned last time? Will I actually manage to draft out all those analysis posts that I thought I was going to do? Tune in to my concluding paragraph to find out!
Google tells me that an era constitutes "a long and distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic." Society (or at least American society) is now inextricably linked with technology, so i'd say this decade marks the end of an era. This is bad in lots of ways (re:Robopocalypse + data mining + whatever was going on with Hong Kong in the summer where they had to use lasers and things to disrupt facial recognition technology), but I also give thanks every day that I was born in a time when microwaves and laptops are commonplace. Speaking of laptops, this brings me back to the original point of this post: discussing how much things have changed since the turn of the century (at least in my very personal, very biased opinion). I'm including some of the 2000s in this roundup simply because I wasn't on Blogspot until 2012/didn't have the chance to talk about it before!
Over the past two decades, we've gone from the Gameboy Advance to the Nintendo Switch. We've seen a countless number of memes, some which have stayed and some which have been lost to obscurity. 1337speak is over, but bitcoin reigns. The great rise and fall from grace of Harry Potter/J.K. Rowling. The mass exodus of people from Deviantart to Tumblr to Twitter. VHS tapes have been replaced by DVDs, which have been replaced by Blu-Ray. My little cousin was born, and quite a few of my family members have died. We had our first black/biracial president. The MCU started and ended (?). Tablets and smartphones came out. Area 51 got raided (?). Maplestory still holds its spell on me (that it first cast when I was 9 years old), though I haven't been able to play recently because of multiple issues. There was a brief nuclear crisis over that false missile alarm in Hawaii. "Gangnam Style" happened. The 2012 Mayan calendar panic. "What Does the Fox Say?" happened. The Ice Bucket Challenge. Tide pods. Same-sex marriage got legalized in the U.S. and Taiwan. We've had our third impeachment in the history of the United States. There was a total solar eclipse. Marty McFly went to the future. We photographed a black hole for the first time. Vantablack's creation and controversy. I bought a Nintendo Switch at the start of summer, and have played 235 hours of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (in addition to 5+ hours per game on several other games) on it since then. CGI got really good, then turned really bad. The Mars rover Opportunity died. I've been in school for 19 years straight. Tons and tons more things have happened, but I went to bed late last night and honestly can't remember anything else right now. Overall, it's been quite a full twenty years, and an especially packed last decade.
Fun fact: the very first mass panic I experienced in my early years was the freakout about Y2K. It turns out this is going to happen again in 2038, so shoutout to all the 2030 kids who are going to dimly remember that panic!
In that vein, it's very easy to see how things may change, yet at the same time everything stays. While this has been obvious to me for a long time (since i've always been interested in history and even minored in it in undergrad), I just now have enough years behind me to actually see cycles in motion. Certain fashions are being renewed, old bands/singers are getting back together/releasing new tracks, old diseases are making their rounds, and Disney is remaking in a horrible fashion all of their movies......amazing. Whatever gets thrown our way in the next decade is sure to be both new and not, and i'm sure it's going to be another ride to remember.
Going back to the topic of New Year's resolutions, I can honestly pinpoint when I unconsciously decided to stop using this blog as much: 2013, when I received a DMCA complaint about a post i'd made about One Piece having been my inspiration to lose weight. How on earth anyone could say a personal post like that infringes on copyright is beyond me, but that incident definitely caused me to lose trust in the Blogspot platform since apparently anything I post could be removed at any time for some bologna reason. However, without my Blogspot navigation skills, I would have never netted the job as my lab's Webmaster (since Wordpress is a lot like Blogspot) a few years back, so thank you, Blogspot! I'll keep using you for the occasional post.....at least until I get another DMCA.
Happy New Year, and i'll see you all in the next decade!
