Generation Splat. Generation*. Millennials. Generation X. Generation Jones. Generation Splat. What’s that, you say? Well, a splat is an asterisk or a wildcard used in a computer search string to represent “whatever.” If I want to search for all the Laura(s) in a database, I would search for Laura*. Now let’s make a link to something seemingly tangential: Gaming. The gaming community expanded the meaning of splat to a metaphor and popularized it with the slang term “splat book.” A splat book refers to the specialized books that publishers release about subcategories used for creating roleplaying characters. To illustrate, the White Wolf company publishes anRead More →

I’ve never heard of Generation Jones — the generation between the Boomers and Gen X — until recently. Generation Jones is presumably named such because they (we) are a generation of Jonesers. We yearn for things. This, I identify with. We were too young to participate in the summer of love, the Vietnam War, or any of the defining events of the Baby Boom generation. I’m not sure how I feel about the very existence of a Generation Jones. I’ve identified as a Gen-Xer ever since I read the book Generation X by Douglas Coupland. Some accounts of generations have me dated as a Boomer,Read More →