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The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

midnightmurmurations.substack.com

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Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#171

Post by miiiiiike »

I was a huge X-Files kid growing up. I was 10 when The X-Files (and Brisco County Jr.) debuted and I watched "Encounters" on FOX in the years before.

Are we talking about the same 90's?

There's no one like you in your area? I hope you like sitting in your house alone. You saw half of a movie late at night? Heard a song in a show? Hold onto it, it might take you a decade to finally track it down (it was Land by Patti Smith.) Have an medical issue that the doctors in your area aren't interested in diagnosing? Good luck, I hope it's not progressive.

You had to fight for access to everything in the 90's. Even if you could track down the thing you want (big IF), actually getting it was SLOW. That book you finally found, it might be 2-3 months away.

Today is the best day in human history to be alive.

We have instant access to everything and yet we choose to waste our time on short-form garbage. We are the people Homer Simpson was designed to mock. Homer and the people of the 90's wasted their time watching whatever trash TV was sloshed into their troughs. We're watching whatever an algorithm is slopped into ours.

You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.

Here's the secret. It's not the 90's, the 90's were nothing special. It's the Past World, the one that you can only see when you're looking back at it. The world that we live in today was built in the 90's and the world that we will live in tomorrow is being built today.

The world is and will be what we make of it.

Our current moment will pass. I want to see what we'll achieve in another 100 years and I'm jealous of the babies just getting started now. I hope that something that I make will be seen as a stepping stone towards something better.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#172

Post by GoodOldNe »

krapp wrote: post #140
dustfinger wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.

They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia. Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the o…

They're already working on it:

https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-...

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#173

Post by Markoff »

besides already recommended Fringe, Millennium and Halt and catch fire I enjoyed at same time as X Files in 90s also new Outer Limits, opening credits were great and episodes are always thought challenging, I'm just rewatching it and still enjoy it, though technical quality is horrible since I think FHD was never released

but if you wanna straight up X Files just based on 50s check out Project Blue Book, it's like retro X Files, you won't get closer than that to X Files

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#174

Post by uncircle »

criddell wrote: post #85
slopinthebag wrote: post #28

Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have pl…

I agree with some of that, but not with TV. The best TV shows today are as good as or better than TV has ever been and there's usually an ad-free option. Televised sports is an exception- the number of ads is insane and there's no real way to avoid them. On the plus side though, I have access to a lot more games/matches/races/etc...

The golden era of TV just ended. All that’s in our future is endless remakes.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#175

Post by carefree-bob »

criddell wrote: post #85
slopinthebag wrote: post #28

Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have pl…

I agree with some of that, but not with TV. The best TV shows today are as good as or better than TV has ever been and there's usually an ad-free option. Televised sports is an exception- the number of ads is insane and there's no real way to avoid them. On the plus side though, I have access to a lot more games/matches/races/etc...

What is a good TV show that is on today (or was, say, within the last couple of years)? I'm looking for recommendations.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#176

Post by mike_hearn »

krapp wrote: post #140
dustfinger wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.

They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia. Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the o…

That wouldn't work. The X-Files revolves around a government conspiracy because governments are genuinely scary. They have near infinite resources, can break any law they want at will, are frequently motivated by convoluted social engineering schemes, don't investigate themselves (so it requires a plucky outsider hero character) and so on.

If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#177

Post by mike_hearn »

palmotea wrote: post #126
xhevahir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.

I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).

Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. I remember reading 90s books about aliens and they tended to be collections of UFO encounter reports, sometimes alongside or in the same books as reports of fairies, werewolves and other monsters. They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#178

Post by dingaling »

miiiiiike wrote: post #171

I was a huge X-Files kid growing up. I was 10 when The X-Files (and Brisco County Jr.) debuted and I watched "Encounters" on FOX in the years before. Are we talking about the same 90's? There's no one like you in your area? I hope you like sitting in your house alone. You saw half of a movie late at night? Heard a song in a show? Hold onto it, it might take you a decade to finally track it down (it was Land by Patti…

"You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history"

I hear this a lot, particularly from Millenials, and it's entirely incorrect.

There are vast amounts of information still only available in books, or on the shelves of archives.

Sure, the Internet might provide 99% of pop-culture information, but don't mistake that for 99% of knowledge.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#179

Post by CamelCaseCondo »

kstrauser wrote: post #166
saltcured wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to hear anecdotes about whether FBI agents were being issued or were finding it worth purchasing their own notebooks, cell phones, for use in the field back then! Anecdotes about what we thought was affordable or common place in our neighborhoods isn't very relevant to whether the tech was available for enterprises and workers who needed it. With no insider knowledge, I can only guess whether…

I can't speak to the FBI, but I was in the military at the time and almost no one had a personal laptop. Our department got one in 1994 that we could share around the office. I would be gobsmacked to hear that the FBI were given the budget for laptops and cell phones back then. Remember also that 2G didn't meaningfully have data until the very late 90s. Its first "data" offering was SMS, which was pay-per-message. No…

This strikes me as weird. In 92/93/94 I was on packet radio, a ham equivalent of digital lora which used hopping to get you to neighbouring countries. Most had 1200 baud, some 9600. I downloaded executables from bbs’es over the air and chatted with likeminded folks. Around that time we also had the first guest lectures about software defined radio with proof of concepts. I find it impossible to believe that a bunch of amateurs in EU were more digitally connected than the folks this thread talks about. Without a monthly payment, mind you.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#180

Post by thomassmith65 »

bityard wrote: post #64

In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files. The other half was that so…

  In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true.
Today is different, but people are worse informed. Every online place that an average person visits is a hotbed of fantasy.

That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.

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