50 years

[Moritz]

It's June 15, 2009.

25 years ago, it was the Summer of 84.

25 years from now, it will be the Summer of 2034.

What were we doing in 84, and what will we be doing in 34?

[templeorder]

In the summer of 84 i was really gaming a lot with minatures, and i was really getting into metal music. My dad and i would get in fist fights, and things would get broken. I was on a boat a lot. I was writing a lot of code "for fun" and hacking games i bought at Egghead.

In '34 i expect to be rocking back and forth, on a porch, with a shotgun. Kids will pass and point at the crazy old man in his Bermuda shorts, wife-beater tank top, sock garters, and creaky porch and say "There's old man Berger.. i heard he killed a kid at Halloween last year, shot him from the bushes while the kid tried to TP his house!" Then my wife will come out with lemonade and wave to the kids, baring her fake vampire teeth and shouting to the kids, asking if anyone is thirsty. I wont be 'cool' enough to score drugs myself, but i will still know how to and who is holding.

[mrken]

Hey TO, sounds like your still a bad boy, and will continue to be one even when you are all old and wrinklely.

Back in the summer of 84 I had just discovered the DnD game. Getting killed every time I brought my first level characters character to the Epic level game. lol Hey, I didn't know any better.

In 34 I suspect I will be taking a dirt nap. Just turned 55 last month and don't think I got another quarter century worth of mileage. Been kind of rough on this old body sometimes just trying to make it to the next day.

In spite of all this I will (I hope) still be painting minis and building cool terrain pieces even if I can't find people willing to rp with an old guy. Who knows I could have a group of players who's average age is 72. Now wouldn't that be special. lol

[Arch Lich Thoth-Amon]

1984: I was on top of the world. Playing sports, video games, rpgs, girls.
2009: Transitional time in my life. Writing, drawing hobbies going strong. Still working on my education and computer certs. Marrying my high school sweetheart in less than a year.
2034: Wealthy and successful with my book writings. Still playing rpgs, and with my wife.
2059: By this time i would have figured out how to stay young, get involved with an alien discovery crew, and travel throughout the galaxy, and still playing with my wife, now young and super hot. With no more worries of either of us breaking a hip.

[Valdar]

I realized something cool about last year, so I'll answer from that perspective:

1983: Started playing Car Wars.
2033: Year that Car Wars was set in at the time.

[Arch Lich Thoth-Amon]

Hey, that is cool, Valdar.

[Umiushi]

In June of 1984 I was looking forward to summer vacation and the Olympics in Los Angeles, and wondering about the general election after that. I was playing the piano, something I don't do anymore, and swimming, something I do still. I was abusing the "remote" (it was still connected with a cord!!) on my new VCR while starting to watch Doctor Who, but otherwise wondering whether I should jettison TV from my life. I didn't finally do that for another nineteen years, however. I don't have the faintest recollection of what movies I might have been watching.

In the world of gaming, I was in my second year of designing what would become my longest-running rpg campaign. I wouldn't start playing it for another year. I was also in the second year of my subscription to Dragon Magazine, where I read Test of the Twins that March. I was certainly curious about "Dragonlance," but nobody I knew owned DL1 Dragons of Despair, as of yet. Oh, and Katherine Kerr was still someone who wrote interesting articles in the pages of Dragon, rather than being a full-fledged author of fantasy novels. The rpgs of choice for me in those days were AD&D (1st edition, of course), Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn (eagerly looking forward to owning a copy of Knight Hawks), and Traveller. Also, that was the year of my one and only foray into microgaming, with titles such as Ogre, Advanced Melee, and Advanced Wizard.

For books, the big fantasy novel everyone was reading at the time was a horrible, horrible book called Urshurak that owed its popularity to the color illustrations within its pages. Other books I was reading at the time were the Ringworld novels, the Dune series, the Deryni Chronicles (Deryni were a playable race in my campaign, thanks to a Dragon article by Arthur Collins--can't believe I still remember these names!), the Humanx Commonwealth series, and the Pern series, plus I was struggling through the Belgariad.

As for computer and video games, my Atari 5200 was starting to gather dust while I was finally getting close to winning Microsoft's Adventure, copying games in BASIC out of a book, and daydreaming about owning Ultima III.


In June of 2034, I'm hoping that someone will have solved both the "you can't all be the hero" problem and the "all the stupid people" problem of MMOs, and been rewarded a Nobel Peace Prize for it, or something like that. Then I'd be looking forward to some immersive and rewarding online experiences, possibly with an uploaded personality and cyberbrain. Yeah. Failing that, I'd at least like for "massively multi-server" games to take off and become widely accessible, with robust and easy-to-learn toolkits. I may still be playing "pen and paper" style rpgs (I think the definition for that is going to become "rpgs where it's possible for the player and referee to comprehend and enact all the rules.") but I might be doing them totally online.

I would like to have read lots more Vernor Vinge novels, and hope that transhumanist science fiction, or some worthy successor to it, will have many skilled and imaginative authors writing in that style. I would then have a stack of their novels in some form, ready to be enjoyed. I'd like to have completed the Song of Fire and Ice and the Taltos series, and not regret the time spent waiting for all those books to come out.

I'd also like to have my own vegetable and flower garden by then. While I'm making up my wishlist, I'll also have my doctorate, so I'll be taking college courses strictly for fun, and I'll be enjoying both regular employment and seniority in my workplace. If I still have a physical body, I hope I'll still be able to do the butterfly stroke when I go swimming. Oh, and I think I'll still be wondering about the midterm elections in November.

[tesral]

It's June 15, 2009.

25 years ago, it was the Summer of 84.

25 years from now, it will be the Summer of 2034.

What were we doing in 84, and what will we be doing in 34?

1984 I was raising a kid, gaming every chance I got and working a soulless factory Job that was destroying my health.

in 2034 I'll consider it a win if I'm breathing. I'll be 76 years old that year. I'm not the healthiest guy around.

[Dytrrnikl]

Summer of 1984: Let's see, I was 11 and spent most of the summer fighting with my older brother and casuing upwards of $8 grand worth of damage to my parents house between breaking doors, windows, and variety of other things. Didn't pay off the debt until I was 15.

Summer of 2009: Wife and I pursuing adoption and celebrating first year in our first home together. Considering giving up gaming due to staleness.

Summer of 2034: 61 years old, breaking in a set of replacement knees. Call me cynical, I'm hoping Social Security has been eliminated, welfare systems of all types are gone, organized religion has been outlawed, people return to parenting there kids and stop spoiling them rotten, that this planet survives then next World War - it's coming whether we want it to or not, and finally that being a politician is no longer a career being allowed only a single term of office at each level of government - local, state, and federal.

[Skunkape]

June 1984 Was back home from college, don't remember for sure what I was doing, but probably working for the summer.

December 21, 2012 End of the Mayan calendar, and most likely end of the world!

June 2034 Pointless!

[RoryN]

The early 80's were kind of a blur to me...not in a very good place at all in my life. I remember some very good music coming out in '84, especially the Police's "Syncronicity" album, one of my alltime favorites, but as for what I was doing, I'ld rather not get into that.

In 2034, I'm really hoping to still be alive and kicking, and comfortably retired with my wife. Odds are high we'll have our house paid off by then and have done all our remodeling so we can sell it and live our remaining years off the profit.

[cplmac]

June of 84, celebrating graduating from high school.

June of 09, still kicking and looking forward to going on vacation with the wife and daughters in a couple of weeks.

June of 34, no idea. Most likely still working since I expect there to nolonger be anything like Social Security, so this generation will never be able to retire.

[tesral]

June 1984 Was back home from college, don't remember for sure what I was doing, but probably working for the summer.

December 21, 2012 End of the Mayan calendar, and most likely end of the world!

June 2034 Pointless!

Considering how ofter the end of the world has been predicted I'm not giving the Mayans a pass on it either. After all, they died out long before the end of their own world.

[templeorder]

Its not really the end of the world, its the end of a cycle. Many religions, theories, and cultures refer to a similar thing happening... the Mayan one gains more credence than any because of their hyper accurate calendar.. the rest are interpretive to a degree (thats a a broad generality.

Don;t worry too much folks, "there is always hope" (to quote someone famous). So come on folks, speculate! Where would you LIKE to be!?

[Valdar]

December 21, 2012 End of the Mayan calendar, and most likely end of the world!

It's more like the rollover point of the Mayan calendar. Like saying that the world ends when we hit a millenium (ok, yeah, turns out a lot of people were saying that in 999 and 1999, so maybe bad example...)

From a brief search:

On the winter solstice of 2012, the noonday Sun exactly conjuncts
the crossing point of the sun's ecliptic with the galactic plane,
while also closely conjuncting the exact the center of the galaxy.

Pretty awesome astronomy there- the Mayan calendar's longest time measurement is the time it takes between solar crossings of the galactic ecliptic? And the end point turns out to be the Winter solstice...