1984 Olympics. Was this the last time that the Olympics were at all culturally relevant or is it merely because I was a kid and it was the first Olympics that I have any memory of?

It seemed huge at the time. Mary Lou Retton. And...Carl Lewis? Was that his name? Black guy. Runner. Yeah, that was him.

Wow. Mary Lou Retton is only ten years older than me. How is that possible? Well, I guess I was 6 so she would be 16 or 17 at the time. There aren't many 30 year old gymnasts. Yeah, she retired at 18 or so.

Anyway, the Olympics seemed a big deal at the time. Then 1988 came around. I remember it being in Seoul. That's in Korea. South Korea.

Then...1992...was that the Dan versus Dan shit? Oh, Dan versus Dave. And yes. It was a promotion set up by Reebok. And one of these homos didn't even make it to the Olypmics.

Then after that, who gives a shit. But I was 18 in 1996.

So that's what I'm wondering. Did the Olympics get progressively less culturally-relevant as the years wore on or did I just get older?

I mean...in 1984, there wasn't as much to do as in 1988. There was just Atari in 1984. And...I don't know...cable television was in its infancy. I guess. Not many people had it, probably. But I remember always having cable. So maybe I'm wrong.

But still, by 1988 there were more options. Nintendo was out. And...computer games were better. Compare 1987's Sid Meier's Pirates to 1983's Ultima III. Well, maybe that's a bad example. I never played any Ultima game until I got the Ultima Collection in like 1999. And I only gave the early games a cursory glance. Even the later games I barely played. It's not really my genre. But...it does seem to be a pretty in-depth game with graphics similar to Pirates.

Anyway, by 1992 there was...I don't know...Super Nintendo. I never got into any of that console shit. I was a computer game kind of guy. It wasn't until 1993 or so that I got a non-Atari 2600. And that was Turbo Grafx. Nobody had these things. I was totally out of the loop.

You know, the problem is that my mother was totally out of the loop. I don't mean just with video games. You would expect that. Parents in those days didn't know anything about video games and didn't care.

But she's sending me to school with a Finnish hat that has a long tassle at the top with a little poof at the end. Nobody's wearing this. I looked ridiculous.

And a Viking Line backpack. Viking Line is a Finnish cruise company. Again, I was the only kid with this shit.

And I was never getting haircuts. All other kids would get regular haircuts. I'd get a haircut once every six months or so. And the haircuts I was getting were bad. There was no style. It was just "make it shorter." So I always had this bad, mid-length hair.

You can see it in yearbooks even up to my last year in high school. All the other kids have smart haircuts and there's me with this shit hair.

So that's why in high school, I just stopped getting it cut for a few years. I just didn't know what to do. I was never taught how often you're supposed to get a haircut or what you're supposed to ask for, et cetera. So I just grew it out. Then when it was starting to look kind of cool and the long hair was coming into vogue, of course that's when my idiot mother made me cut it again. So for college up until I shaved it ten years later, I always had shit, mid-length hair.

I was just never taught any of this. I had some friends but I don't know. Whatever they were doing was a mystery to me. They always had short hair and they had Nintendos and whatnot but...I couldn't figure it out. So I had shit hair and a Turbo Grafx 16.

So yeah, the 1992 Olympics. There was probably more to do than in 1988. I don't know.

But the explosion was 1996 when the internet started to get mainstream. Who gives a shit about the Olympics when you can view all the pornography ever made? And play all the video games ever made? Listen to all the music ever made? Fuck those homosexual steroid junkies.

And the Olympics never embraced the internet. I remember maybe in 1992 or 1996 there was talk about being able to watch the Olympics on Pay Per View. So you could watch some events that weren't shown on NBC or whatever the network was. NBC would show like a compilation of what was happening. They'd switch from competition to competition depending on who the most engaging American athlete was at the time. It was all very nationalistic and who gives a shit about competitors from other countries, just show us Americans winning in competitions that nobody cares about except during the Olympics. Wow. That American guy beat the shit out of the Chinese guy in badminton. U-S-A! U-S-A!

But with cable tv, NBC's stranglehold over the Olympics was over. Now you can watch other events. Not many, I guess. I don't know if they offered everything. But at least two other feeds, I guess. I'm sketchy on the details because this idea never took off. Nobody wanted to pay for this shit.

Then the internet comes along. Even to this day, as far as I'm aware, the Olympics are not shown on the internet. Why not? It seems a natural. You can watch any competition you want.

It's just not done. Must not be any money in it. There might be some questionable feeds but BBC isn't doing it, NBC isn't doing it, nobody as far as I know. There's not even any "press the red button to watch table tennis" shit. That's another thing. The "red button" gimmick has come and gone. I guess as soon as people realised that it's just another channel, they stopped caring.

So yeah. No work today. Guy came to replace my electricity meter. Only 1.15. Did the first 15 minutes of my transcript. That's all I plan to do today. So time to take a nap.