I Love the 20s
I Love the 20s
[Megan walks in from the left greeting Cueball, White Hat, and Ponytail standing next to each other, the last two looking in her direction.] Megan: Happy new decade! Ponytail: Welcome to the '20s! White Hat: Actually— Ponytail: I'm excited we can name decades again. Ponytail: "Aughts" and "teens" never caught on.
[Megan stops next to Cueball as White Hat has his finger raised.] White Hat: Actually, the new decade doesn't start- Ponytail: Mostly, I'm just glad we can go back to attributing cultural trends to decades instead of generations.
[All four just stand normal.] Cueball: Yeah. Cueball: Decades were silly, but making everything about "millennials" turned out to be even worse. Ponytail: Seriously.
[Only White Hat and Ponytail are shown, both with their arms held out to the sides.] White Hat: It's technically not a new decade until 2021 . Ponytail: OK, listen. Ponytail: If you're going to be pedantic, you should at least be right. White Hat: I am right! Ponytail: You're not .
[Zoom in on White Hat and Ponytail's upper bodies as they gesture towards each other both raising their hands palm up. Megan interrupts them from off panel, as made clear in the next panel. Her voice comes out of a starburst on the left panel frame.] White Hat: See, the 20 th century didn't start until-- Ponytail: But decades aren't centuries. They're not cardinally numbered. White Hat: You don't get it. Let me draw a-- Ponytail: No, you don't-- Megan (off-panel): Stop!
[All four characters are displayed again. Megan has raised a finger and all the others look at her.] Megan: I can resolve this. Megan: *Ahem* Megan: MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This (1990) was featured in I Love the '90s , not '80s . Ponytail: ...That settles that. White Hat: Yeah, I accept VH1's authority. White Hat: You win.

This comic was released on the first day of the year 2020 . It was the second of two New Year comics around the 2019-2020 New Year, after 2248: New Year's Eve .
The comic opens with Megan , Cueball , White Hat , and Ponytail celebrating the new year and discussing their relief that the change of decade brings with it two beneficial side-effects; firstly, they can now unambiguously name the decade "the 20s", and secondly, since the decade has a well-defined name, any cultural trends that begin in the 20s can be attributed to the decade itself, and not to the generation that happens to coincide with it.
White Hat, however, tries a couple of times to raise a pedantic objection: he believes that the new decade does not "officially" start until 2021.
Ponytail corrects him on this, but he refuses to accept the correction until Megan cites an unlikely source: the fact that the VH1 television show I Love the '90s categorized MC Hammer's 1990 single " U Can't Touch This " as a 90s song, which supports Ponytail's definition of decade. The joke is that a pop culture documentary is not an authoritative source for definitions of time standards, yet for some reason everyone is willing to accept its authority on such matters anyway.
The disagreement over the definition of when decades start is due to the fact that there is more than one way to count decades. You could do it in one of the following two ways:
White Hat's definition is an "ordinal" method, since it functions by counting the number of ten-year spans since the first one , which is defined to have begun in the year 1. However, Ponytail's definition is the "cardinal" method, which simply groups years by their common most significant digits. For example, when we say "the 1980s", we mean "the span of ten years that all began with the digits 1-9-8".
Neither definition is wrong, however Ponytail's definition is the more common one, and she notes that this is not how decades are typically determined (the show isn't called "I Love the 200th Decade"), and the fact that we count centuries in an ordinal way does not mean that we should do the same with decades.
White Hat's objection (probably deliberately) recalls an issue that was frequently discussed around the year 2000.  Because we do count centuries ordinally (eg. "1st century", "20th century", etc.), and the first century began on the year 1, the 21st century did not technically start until 2001. Much of the world, not understanding this (or not caring), celebrated the dawning of the year 2000 as the start of both a new century and a new millenium, ignoring those who point out the change wouldn't happen for another year. (Though it should be noted unlike decades this is a genuine mistake rather than two slightly different definitions.)
Megan's exclamation "Stop!" is similar to the line famously used by MC Hammer in "U Can't Touch This" ("Stop! Hammer time.").
" Aughts " and "Teens" were names suggested for the 2000s and 2010s respectively; however, neither of those names managed to gain widespread acceptance.
Millennials is a name given to the generation which was born in the 80s and 90s, such that they began entering adulthood in the 2000s. The term was sometimes used pejoratively by older generations who view millennials as immature or complacent, particularly during the 2010s. The comic speculates that millennials may have been unfairly targeted due to the fact that the decade didn't have an easily-identifiable name; if it had, then people might have attributed their misgivings about modern culture to the decade itself, instead of singling out a demographic. This phenomenon was previously discussed in 1849: Decades .
Continuing the dubious "proof" offered by Megan, the title text goes on to use the Billboard Best of the 80s chart as proof that the 1980s started in 1980, as their chart includes Blondie's " Call Me ", which was released in 1980. The title text ends with QED ("quod erat demonstrandum"), which means "which was [necessary] to be shown", and is traditionally used at the end of a mathematical proof, as if this second landmark piece of evidence proves Megan's point as conclusively as a mathematical proof.
[Megan walks in from the left greeting Cueball, White Hat, and Ponytail standing next to each other, the last two looking in her direction.] Megan: Happy new decade! Ponytail: Welcome to the '20s! White Hat: Actually— Ponytail: I'm excited we can name decades again. Ponytail: "Aughts" and "teens" never caught on.
[Megan stops next to Cueball as White Hat has his finger raised.] White Hat: Actually, the new decade doesn't start- Ponytail: Mostly, I'm just glad we can go back to attributing cultural trends to decades instead of generations.
[All four just stand normal.] Cueball: Yeah. Cueball: Decades were silly, but making everything about "millennials" turned out to be even worse. Ponytail: Seriously.
[Only White Hat and Ponytail are shown, both with their arms held out to the sides.] White Hat: It's technically not a new decade until 2021 . Ponytail: OK, listen. Ponytail: If you're going to be pedantic, you should at least be right. White Hat: I am right! Ponytail: You're not .
[Zoom in on White Hat and Ponytail's upper bodies as they gesture towards each other both raising their hands palm up. Megan interrupts them from off panel, as made clear in the next panel. Her voice comes out of a starburst on the left panel frame.] White Hat: See, the 20 th century didn't start until-- Ponytail: But decades aren't centuries. They're not cardinally numbered. White Hat: You don't get it. Let me draw a-- Ponytail: No, you don't-- Megan (off-panel): Stop!
[All four characters are displayed again. Megan has raised a finger and all the others look at her.] Megan: I can resolve this. Megan: *Ahem* Megan: MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This (1990) was featured in I Love the '90s , not '80s . Ponytail: ...That settles that. White Hat: Yeah, I accept VH1's authority. White Hat: You win.
