The Smithereens' record 'Green Thoughts' came out today, March 22, in 1988. Happy 36th anniversary to one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands. This is a pic of the two copies I have on vinyl, the one on the left is signed by all the guys in 1988 (albeit to someone else -- I'm not Lance, and I was 8 in 1988). But it's a great piece, and I grabbed it around 1999. 💚
#TheMetalDogArticleList #Loudwire
42 Years Ago: Iron Maiden Unleash 'The Number of the Beast'
On March 22, 1982, Iron Maiden changed heavy metal forever.
Following up on my Commodore 64 tribute, here's a 3D poster illustration I created for a 2014 documentary called "8 bit Generation: The Commodore Wars".
40 years ago this week, "New Moon On Monday" by #DuranDuran entered the #Top10 and peaked at 10. Apparently, there were several videos of different lengths, up to the 17-minute "cinema" version with more dialogue. If you can track down the "Greatest" DVD, it includes all but one of them. Personally, 5 minutes is enough for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3a4OTh2Y8w#1980s#MusicHistory#MusicVideo
Happy birthday to rocker @DeeSnider of Twisted Sister. The band had a pair of hits in 1984 "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock". #80s#80smusic#1980s
“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed slogans as they marched against President Ronald Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988.
Acting within a broad progressive coalition, RABL helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America. They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America threatened to explode.
Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out of political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s-1970s—were dead, and mainstream society seemingly offered little worth saving.
Meanwhile, Reagan crushed the hopes of a better world in Central America by funding and training Guatemalan death squads, Nicaraguan Contras, and violent Salvadoran elites. The 1980s was the decade of the triumph of American capitalism against both the left-wing idealism of the 1960s at home and the “Evil Empire” of Soviet Communism abroad. The New Right remade American society in its image, spreading suburbia and waging war on what it called the liberal “nanny state.”
But dissidents emerged out of the cracks of the new society. A new generation growing up in Reagan’s America turned to anarchism. Young people found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for rebels of the new generation.
Mazeon’s animated pixel tribute to the Commodore Amiga 500.
The Amiga was a revolutionary computer in the 1980s and early 1990s, spawning many software devs, music composers and graphic artists (including myself).
The screen shows a low-res version of the legendary Boing Ball, an early demonstration showing off some of the Amiga’s multitasking power.
Mazeon's animated pixel tribute to the legendary Commodore 64.
The C64 was a very popular 8-bit computer in the 1980s. One of its most-appreciated features was the SID audio chip. The SID's distinctive synth sound caused people to sometimes buy a game predominantly for the soundtrack, like the compositions of SID maestro Rob Hubbard:
When I was a 16-bit game graphics creator, I got accustomed to thinking in multiples of 16, for sprite dimensions, game scenery patterns, image resolutions, RGB color values and more.
That became a lasting habit. Even now, long after using multiples of 16 was necessary, I'm still entering 16, 32, 48, 64, et cetera, when numerical input is required. Does anyone happen to recognize this? 🙂
When I was a youngster in the late 1980s, I formed an Amiga game dev team with 2 friends.
Before making games, we started by trying to sell game music that used minimal RAM, made with our music editor SIDmon.
To promote our game music, this energetic music module was composed by our musician Ramon Braumuller. The file, including tiny sampled sounds, is only 22 kilobytes.
@racchio Yeah, we had plans for an army type game back in those days, but decided to go for a shoot-'em-up called Venom Wing, which got this soundtrack by Ramon: