"This book is ten years old. I started work on it in 1992..."
I remember 1992. I feel old.
I remember 1992. I feel old.
Now I wonder whether that always works, or whether there's something special about the last twenty years that makes 1990 seem surprisingly recent. To me it seems that culturally not much has changed since the 1990s; the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties all have distinct cultural vibes, whereas the 1990s, the 200xs and now our new decade have all sort of blurred together. You wouldn't look _that_ silly today wearing clothes that were fashionable in 1990, and as for 1999... well actually some of my clothes are from 1999.
Now the net has created for us a "long now" where cultural elements are basically assimilated and never forgotten (to emerge later as idealized nostalgia). I think its the fist little nibble of the singularity at our heels.
After all, I can't see much difference between the fashion and culture of 1910 and 1890, though perhaps they'd seem larger to someone living through them.
In terms of popular culture, musical genres such as boy bands of the 90's, drum and bass, goa, nu-metal have came and gone; some truly remarkable movies have been made, think of Forrest Gump, The Matrix, Amelie or Trainspotting.
More specifically my home country (where I don't live anymore unfortunately) has seen the end of communism and people had to grow used to a capitalist environment which affected every aspect of their lives.
And yes, believe me, you would look extremely silly if you've worn 90's style clothes so please don't.
Quake 1 is down-right retro.
I remember being surprised the first time I heard someone refer to Duke Nuke'm 3D as an old game (if I can remember getting it when it just came out it's surely a modern game!)
I wonder if part of it has to do with that the older you get, the more of your life you remember. When I was 5 (which I don't remember), I probably couldn't remember what it was like to be younger than 4 - in other words, I could only remember 20% of my life. When I was 10, I could probably remember about half my life. Now that I'm 23, my earliest memories are around age 7: I remember more than two thirds of my life. But I think that, while growing up, I sort of got used to most of my life being unremembered - so when I'm faced with how much of it I now remember, I somehow feel uncomfortably far from my memory horizon. Thinking about the fact that I've lived more than half my life since the release of the N64, which I remember reasonably well, is disorienting.