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<\/center><\/p>\nI started this feature without having a coherent plan,just a nostalgia-tinted swirl of memories unearthed after flipping through some periodicals from the year in question. Now that the project is done, I’m still not sure what I was trying to accomplish, much less whether or not I succeeded in doing so.<\/p>\n
1983 was the year when my cultural awareness experienced a major awakening. It was the year I hit the pre-teen “sweet spot” that has come to wield tremendous influence on geek culture in general — the wellspring of “ruined” childhoods and thinkpieces extolling everything from shitty toy cartoons to the Backstreet Boys to Rob Liefeld comics. My enduring affection for 1983 may be rooted in a quirk of developmental psychology and some fortuitous timing, but I’m things shook out the way they did. I shudder to think what would’ve happened if I’d been born a couple of years later, where my irrational enjoyment I have for Toto’s “Africa” could’ve fallen on a Howard Jones cut instead.<\/p>\n
Synthpop, nuclear dread, videogames, a deep and abiding love of Roy Thomas’s All-Star Squadron<\/em> — so much from 1983 has been incorporated into my being that the reasons why have become moot at this point.<\/p>\n 1983 was the rare year when the “great times” tag was recognized in the now, not applied in a moment of after-the-fact reverie. While I’m instinctively leery about nostalgia’s deceptive snares, revisiting those moments has been a therapeutic experience. In trying to contextualize and articulate those memories, I’ve also had to confront certain truths — about my family, myself, and other things — in between the wistful moments of self-indulgent navel-gazing.<\/p>\n It was a helpful exercise in keeping things in perspective, a long-overdue bit of personal inventory taking. I’m not sure of its value outside my headspace, but I don’t regret undertaking it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started this feature without having a coherent plan,just a nostalgia-tinted swirl of memories unearthed after flipping through some periodicals from the year in question. Now that the project is done, I’m still not sure what I was trying to accomplish, much less whether or not I succeeded in doing so. 1983 was the year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,9,3,2457],"tags":[625,605,2254,124],"class_list":["post-11566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-culture","category-general","category-the-year-my-voice-broke","tag-625","tag-finale","tag-process","tag-unintended-consequences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11566"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12784,"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11566\/revisions\/12784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armagideon-time.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}