We’re down to the last couple of bolts in this particular quiver, so let’s start wrapping things up with a look at the literature that shaped the most formative year of my childhood. The top of that particular heap was Twilight Zone Magazine, purchased with scrounged pocket change at the convenience store across from Ferullo […]

The notion that I’m an asocial recluse has been a recurring gag since Armagideon Time’s inception, and it’s certainly based in reality to a fair degree. I don’t like to travel, for various reasons I’d rather not get into or feel capable of articulating at this time. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy visiting Gettysburg […]

1983 was the year of the Great Videogame Crash, when the flood of overproduced and undercooked product forced a severe market correction that effectively killed the home console market until the NES started gaining traction a couple of years later. The savvier developers shifted their focus to home computers, which offered more functionality and perceived […]

I didn’t set foot into a proper movie theater until I was eight years old, when my aunt took my brother and I to see The Black Stallion at the multiplex across the highway from the North Woburn shopping plaza. Up until (and even for a few years after) then, the entirety of my big […]

Nostalgia is all about counting the hits while ignoring the misses. This is especially true with childhood nostalgia, where youthful affections gain intensity over the temporal distance and blot out less pleasant memories. The gap between “what was” and “what we choose to remember” has been a recurring theme over AT’s decade of posts. My […]

Up until 1983, the vast majority of the comics I read were back issues or bundled remainders picked up via flea markets or in polybagged three-packs sold at the supermarket checkout aisle. The few new releases that filtered down to me were wild card outliers passed on as gifts or picked up in trades with […]

As a kid, pop music was something I passively encountered rather than actively sought out. The twin vectors of exposure were my parents’ record collection (the Easy Rider OST, the Doors, Neil Diamond) or my elementary school classmates (AC/DC, the Bay City Rollers, the Grease movie soundtrack). Apart from occasionally environmental wild cards — such […]

When 1983 began, I was ten-going-on-eleven, starting the second half of my fifth grade year. That was a significant grade for kids at the Linscott-Rumsford Elementary school because the teacher was a — GASP — man, a polyester-clad F. Murray Abraham lookalike who had a rep for being both a Fun Dude and an impatient […]

When I embarked on my deep dive of Google Books’ digital archive of Billboard, I picked 1975 as my starting date. That year offered the best intersection between my childhood nostalgia and my historical interests — enough faint memories to avoid abstraction while offering a solid vantage point for observing the ascendancy of disco, the […]