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Care Bears and the Danger of Weaponized Kindness - The 80's #10

  As kids, we were sold a powerful lie! The Care Bears were NOT gentle creatures.... Sure, they looked like happy, pastel-furred ambassadors of love that took cues from Mary Poppins and floated down from cotton candy clouds to teach children how to feel feelings properly . Propaganda! Pure and simple. Look back on them closely. Really look... cast your mind back to Saturday mornings in the 80's by the TV, half-eaten bowl of Cap'n Crunch resting in the crook of your crossed legs. You can see it now, can't you?? Care Bears Were Running a Plushy Authoritarian Regime Here's proof: Each one had a symbol on it stomach: uniformity is step one. Those symbols evoked feelings: branding is step two. Every life they touched was sorted by emotional function; a rainbow based caste system.  Logical conclusion? Cult-like regime whose greatest weapon was colour-coded emotional engineering. Happy? Blue. Grumpy? Also blue, but angry. Love? Pastel pink, of course. And what, pray tell, h...
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Be Kind, Rewind. Or Face Eternal Judgment - The 80's #9

  Friday night in the 80's was a military operation. It required speed, stealth, an unwavering commitment to personal and family values, and a membership card. The battlefield was Blockbusters... ...where hope went to die. And die brilliantly under fluorescent lighting and inside empty video cassette shells. An entertainment starved schlub couldn't simply rent a movie on demand in the legwarmer years. There was no such beast as streaming . But there was this entity known as scarcity . Maybe better known as supply and demand. It was definitely a mood maker. All foul. If the copy of the movie you wanted was gone, it was gone. The poor teens working their after school jobs behind the counter tried to do their managers proud by saying the movie was "temporarily unavailable." Lies! And we knew it!! The tape you wanted was taken by some other schlub's family. Because they were quicker, stealthier, or more aggressive in their task handling. Or they knew people; had conne...
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Is That a Mixtape In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Emotionally Unavailable? - The 80's #8

  Romance was complicated in the 80's. Some will argue that it's always complicated. Unless you're blessed with movie-star level good looks and no sense of embarrassment/shame whatsoever. I only have one of those. But it was especially complicated in the neon decade. Mostly because finding ways to express those types of feelings seemed inefficient, messy, and way too frequently required rewinding. Texting? Not a thing. Say it out loud? And risk being seen as a hormone-driven lunatic with an unbalanced mullet? Nuh-uh! No way!! One made a mixtape. And then one lobbed it at another one like a ticking emotional device and awaited a response. Mixtapes Were Curated, Not Casual Handing someone such a tape said, "I've spent hours thinking about what you'd say or do if I ever worked up the courage to actually tell you I'm interested. Here... uh... Whitesnake." You should've spent that time doing your homework or developing coping skills. But no, you squande...
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Pac-Man is the Reason I Stress-Eat - The 80's #7

  Pac-Man wasn't a video game. Let's be clear about that right from the get-go. It was nothing short of a psychological experiment under the guise of an anxious little yellow pie chart. How do I know? Several red flags: You are a mouth, consuming pellets of questionable origin and - from the glow - radiation levels. Colorful nightmares are hunting you relentlessly. No real narrative, explanation, or escape. Eat and run, eat and run, eat and run until inevitably caught and drained of all life force with a spin and a weirdly descending soundtrack. Childhood fun! Am I right? The other sounds rewired that childhood. Wakka wakka wakka became recognized as the sound of compulsive consumption. Danger closed in from all sides, but that noise told you, "Hey! You're doing great. Keep going!" To this day, I hear it whenever I open my fridge on a full stomach. The ghosts were the ultimate villains. They disguised themselves in bright pastel colors and had fun-sounding names....
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How Every 80's Mall Was Basically a Thunderdome - The 80's #6

  The 80's mall was a lot of things. A shopping centre was NOT one of them. It was: A lawless biome where "Lord of the Flies" played out over and over again on weekends, and on Tuesdays at the arcade. A concrete savannah where the native wild teenager roamed in packs. The place where parents, though tethered to their toddlers, still managed to lose them by the fountain An environment where hormones went on full display; a zoo where the always accessorizing met the chronically lustful. Who was in charge of this mess? Nobody ever really knew. You stepped inside, and civilization loosened its belt until the pants of reality hit the faux-marble floor. Time bent. Morality wobbled. Somebody farted in the glass elevator. And at the precise coordinates that landed a youth between Orange Julius and the vintage lava lamp display at Spencer Gifts , an uninvested mall employee with a survey clipboard said, "Have at it, kid. Good luck in there." Survival challenges started...
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When MTV Still Played Music and Other Fairy Tales - The 80's #5

  Gather around for a twisted tale. More twisted than usual, anyway. A story from a mythical land where television channels were based on themes they actually stuck to. Whaaaaaaaaaat?? Truth. Like MTV - Music Television - played music videos. Of actual music. All day. On purpose. Gen Z'ers out there are going to believe this is folklore whispered by an aging writer staring nostalgically at flowered wallpaper and wondering where all the time went. Well... phooey. It's the truth. In the days of yore (the 80's), MTV wasn't just a content dump; it was cultural rewiring at its finest. We were hit with guitar solos, face melting riffs, synths, eyeliner, and a mystery glow from the ole boob tube that helped us cope with new and exciting feelings we didn't yet have words for. Video Jockeys (VJs) announced new videos like they were royal decrees. They told us what mattered.  We wore leather jackets indoors because it was cool and sunglasses at night because Corey Hart said s...
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New Coke: The Beverage That Asked "What if Failure Had Bubbles?" - The 80's #4

  The Day Marketing Took a Dump In 1985, Coca-Cola was wildly successful. The company made tons of money each quarter and their product was beloved by millions around the globe. And some executive looked at the numbers and said, "Yeah, but we oughta go full-on bat doo-doo crazy and hit the panic button anyway." Probably because he only had one yacht and drove a Ferrari instead of a Lambo. Thus, New Coke was born. Unleashed on an unsuspecting world by a boardroom full of suits who weren't happy just being bajillionaires. They'd clearly been drinking their own Coke Kool-Aid for far too long. Several things went cattywampus in this comedy of errors. First off, soda is soda, not a corporate chemistry experiment. However, somebody shared a power point... This led to charts and graphs with no solid informational proof being drawn up and nodded at because it had pretty colours. And finally, some dude named Gary said, "Consumers crave change," and nobody had the ...
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Walkmans and the Art of Ignoring Everyone - The 80's #3

  I don't know what kind of gadgets kids are grafting to their skulls or shoving into their earholes these days. Some kind of cybernetic mysticism is going on in the world around me, creating teenaged zombies attached to their devices. But we had the Walkman. It was 'compact' in an age when gargantuan Boom Boxes were a thing and caused semi-permanent spinal injuries. It weighed in at the low, low poundage of a mid-sized ham. It also provided an answer to a universal problem of the 80's: Other people existed, and sometimes they wanted to talk to you. Like, totally gross. The Walkman was liberation! Walk down the street and listen to your own soundtrack, pretending you were both star and way under-appreciated extra in your own  music video. Pop in a cassette, hit the play button, and suddenly for the next 90 minutes you were as emotionally unavailable as Mom during her afternoon soaps. Either that, or you burned through your third set of "value pack" AA-batteri...
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Why the Rubik's Cube Ruined My Self-Esteem - The 80's #2

  It had 54 smug square stickers. It looked like a Borg flagship named "Flamboyance."  But it wasn't a simple cube. Or a Rubik, whatever the heck that is. Well, it was. But it was more along the line of a little grinning plastic psychopath that broke the will of every kid who once thought they were good at puzzles. In case you missed it, imagine someone you love and trust handing you a block full of colourful, demonic, smaller blocks and saying, "Here, go twist this until it's perfect." So you do. For hours. Days. Entire geologic epochs. Until one day, the gift-giver finds you sitting in the middle of your bedroom floor, cross-legged, unwashed, surrounded by a circle of half-eaten Twinkies and muttering, "red to left, blue white up, yellow always right, right never green, orange beats itself, and where in the world is Carmen San Diego." It wasn't Twister in a twister... EF2 or otherwise. It was you, following the cult of Rubik, but spiralling ...
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Big Hair; Bigger Problems (The Great Follicular War of the 80's) - The 80's #1

 Some of life's constants: - Gravity - Taxes - Acupuncture at 50 miles per hour whilst downhill skiing amongst the majestic pines. That last one... probably just me. But a universal constant is the fact that every person who lived through the 80's as a teen was nearly suffocated at some point... by their own hair. And I'm not just speaking figuratively . No, quite literally in fact. Choked out by a chemically-enhanced, ozone-depleting cumulus cloud; a beauty-pageant thunderhead surrounding the dome. If you weren't there, you might believe I'm prone to exaggeration. How adorable. But let me paint you a picture: Imagine your head. Now double it. Now picture it after it's been plugged in to a small nuclear reactor fueled by volumizing conditioner and hairspray. That's your baseline. We called it Monday. On special occasions we added mousse. 80's Hair Philosophy Went Something Like This: If you didn't have to turn sideways to enter through an interior d...
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