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My 10 favorite things about 10 years ago:
- Fallout 2: In my opinion (and there are more of these than people), this is the best video game ever made. Beginning with the introduction narrated by Ron Perlman and Louie Armstrong's "A Kiss to Build a Dream On" and allowing the player to wander freely through the vast wasteland of post-apocalyptic California (if you had enough power cells for your car), this was a game without peer. Viewed today, the graphics seem terrible... but the game still remains fun. Ironically enough, 10 years later -- Gas is making it difficult to travel the vast wasteland of California, and Fallout 3 is finally set to come out.
- Google: Google was incorporated as a privately held company. Before then, no one was apparently able to find anything on the internet. Now we can feel lucky finding things as well as watch satellite images of our cars in our driveways.
- Fallout 2: No, really. I'm not sure that you understand just what a groundbreaking game Fallout 2 was. It didn't just merge 50's style with a Mad Maxian post-nuclear sense of fashion. It had zombies. And Supermutants.
- iMac and Windows 98: The former being a great computer for its time, and still useful today. Windows 98 was a very special operating system in that it was a marked improvement from both the OS that preceded it and that followed it (its name shall not be mentioned).
- Galaxy IV: The Galaxy IV satellite malfunctioned, causing the great pager outage of 1998. I used Google (see number 2) to look this up.
- Fallout 2: Ok, I don't want you to think that I'm obsessed with this game. It was a really good game, you should try it sometime. It's fun. Fallout: Tactics seems fun too, but I haven't played it yet. It came out in 2001, but it doesn't really count. Fallout 2 came out a year after the first game. Given the timescale, it will likely be 100 years before Fallout 4 (which will then be followed by a thousand years of darkness).
- Line Item Veto: The line item veto (granted in 1996; allowing the President to veto specific parts of bills instead of having to veto or sign the whole thing) was declared unconstitutional, thus ensuring that no President would ever again be able to abuse their powers.
- Lethal Weapon 4: This was Jet Li's American debut. He beats up Mel Gibson. It was the start of a great career.
- Pi: Speaking of fights, this is the trippiest movie in which you will ever see a group of Hasidic-looking Jewish guys beat down some governmental men-in-black. I guarantee it.*
- "All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger": It is a great regret of mine and everyone else that both plays video games and watches movies that no one has ever picked Uwe Boll up a copy of this book. Imagine BloodRayne's potential now.
-Honorable Mention- Nobel Prize: The Nobel Prize in Physics for that year is brought to us by Google. I'm not really sure what exactly it means, but I figure that any prize won for "discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" sounds exciting -- it's even in the name. If you disagree, give it a shot. Your quantum fluid will thank you. **
* Void where prohibited. If you can think of a movie that fits that, I'm interested in seeing it.
** My wife needs to get an honorable mention too. She had nothing to do with the Nobel Prize that year (as far as I know), but we started dating then (we weren't married). She also proofread this and has very painful elbows.
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