Pledges – I received a big lump of lead thanks to the mini-swap on the forums, and – following last weekend’s discussion about the 80s – my resin He-Man arrived this morning; so I reckon a priming/base coating session is imminent. Getting both assembled, primed and base-coated should be feasible over the next few days.

The 90s?
At the time, I was a bit… meh about them.
Sure, I had my first job, bought my first house, did the first relationship thing, but culturally, I felt it was all just a bit of a nothing. In hindsight, I look back and see what a fantastic period it was, but at the time, living through it, it just seemed a bit underwhelming.

1. Whenever I see the video for 4 Non-Blondes “What’s Up” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXnxTNIWkc) I get really melancholy. It’s a great song. For me, the video sums up the idealism of the 90s – people in grungy clothes, coming out of the hair-and-makeup dressing up period of the 80s, facing real issues, not just singing about getting drunk or laid. Dreadlocks and pierced noses were still quite “edgy”. Maybe it’s my own transition from teen-to-adult during the time that makes me look back on it with greater fondness for it that I had at the time!

Of course the best thing ever to come out of the 90s is the Wildhearts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkQ-Y8WLQv4&list=PL9dXnHaGJt6NltB7a1vFBObc0dQwFBkW0)
But there were loads of really good bands around at the time – British “indie rock” bands like WH and Terrorvision (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNXijH0LmZg), Skin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3F92dD8iqM), Therapy? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDVsIvvFtcs), Extreme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqP76XWHQI0) were really good – hell, even bands like Thunder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6NxKb9r_oA) and The Little Angels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIa66snvpGs) andn Soul Asylum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrrE5bCA5lg) were half-decent.

Of course, bands from the 80s dropped the makeup and actually learned to play their instruments, like Poison (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D-QgTRlK80) and Motley Crue, while Pantera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i97OkCXwotE) and Metallica (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384) really came of age in the early 90s.

Ska-punk crossover bands like Reel Big Fish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHpU0ZfXZ_g&list=RDEMz72_BFdqytFRWW-zdjTeZg&start_radio=1) and Bowling For Soup (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K38xNqZvBJI&list=RDEMjZKrBTPMgG46fX3KryVEkA&start_radio=1) were also pretty cool. And while there were a few so-terrible-they’re-good songs (like Betty Boo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM_9As_2VAg) who can forget John Barnes rapping on the theme song to the best ever World Cup in 1990? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re4aDJL3heA).

To this day, I refuse to acknowledge the whole Seattle/grunge scene ever happened. I really never understood the appeal of Nirvana (nor Pearl Jam or Soundgarden)….

In fact, now I’ve listed all these things, I’m pretty sure that the 90s were bloody awesome!

2. Do we go with the Iraq War? That’s pretty much a given, right? What about “The Rachel”? I never did fully understand the whole Friends and coffee-culture thing. There was a time where everyone in the UK wanted to be American with that statement-as-an-inflection thing and making verbs out of nouns that has never really gone away. Could I be any more cliched? 😉

3. IF we can, should we? It’s a tricky one. The engineer in me wants to say “yes” if only to prove it can be done, and possibly even to prove that we absolutely shouldn’t ever do it again. There are some things we really shouldn’t have done – internet advertising, for example. As a resource for learning, the internet was amazing. Then it became an entertainment platform. Then we applied old-fashioned monetising techniques, such as flooding web pages with adverts, to generate money – yes, we *could* turn the internet into an entertainment platform – sometimes I wish we hadn’t.

4. All that said, I love using the internet. For everything. Maybe I’ve shot my own argument. I love creating things with microcontrollers and pretty much all of my learning has been via the ‘net, since I got my first 386 in around 1996 (after keeping my old ZX Spectrum going long after everyone else had given up on it as a gaming platform, I tinkered and poked all kinds of things into the hardware expansion port for years). I’m loving that bluetooth and wifi lets you connect actual hardware and physical devices to your phones and laptop computers – with advances in things like voice recognition coupled with smartphones becoming ever more powerful, the possibilities for integrating technology – hardware and software – into just about anything, are endless. Which brings us back to question three…..