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

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

#211

Post by snozolli »

uncircle wrote: post #38
moregrist wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant. To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is the inherent nihilism of it all. If there's one thing I miss, it's the optimism. I used to be enthusiastic about what the tech industry was doing and where it was going. > The larger…

The optimism died a long time ago. I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up, but one of my formative experiences was playing Deus Ex in 2001, after 9/11. It gave me healthy distrust of technology, governments, big corp, and what the world is going through today only reinforces this vision of the world. Of course I am nihilistic about AI: when I read about Altman and Karp, I see Bob Page. These are NOT th…

I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up

I'm a young GenXer and I've told some Millennial friends that I feel bad for them because they had probably the best childhoods in human history[1] and then were plunged into worldwide terrorism, the Great Recession, and now the affordability crisis and incoming AI Apocalypse.

As a GenXer, at least I lived with the anxiety of nuclear annihilation at any moment as a child to set my expectations for the future.

[1] assuming you're at least vaguely middle-class and American or, presumably, living in Western culture. I can't speak to the experience outside this realm, but I watched my Millennial cousins grow up in a flourishing economy with endless products and media designed to delight them.

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

#212

Post by snozolli »

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 and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.

YouTube is full of excellent content. I regularly watch several highly skilled YouTubers the same way that I would watch Norm Abrams and Roy Underhill on PBS as a child.

As a child, I could have watched grifting religious folks or Public Access conspiracy peddlers on TV, too.

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

#213

Post by miiiiiike »

snozolli wrote: post #212
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 and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube. YouTube is full of excellent content. I regularly watch several highly skilled YouTubers the same way that I would watch Norm Abrams and Roy Underhill on PBS as a child. As a child, I could have watched grifting religious folks or Public Access conspiracy peddlers on TV, too.

Another response that (deliberately?) misses the point. I’m going to stop responding after this one.

Again, deliberate exaggeration. When I say “rotting in front of YouTube” the key to understand my point is the word “rotting”, not “YouTube”. Good work is done in every medium and on every platform.

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

#214

Post by Sylamore »

I remember back in the early seasons of the show, logging into Delphi (the VAX hosted text forum) immediately after to chat with other fans and sometimes people involved in show production. There were huge threads about the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (actually there were a bunch of these, but DDEB was the biggest by far) and the Gillian Anderston Testosterone Brigade, lots of fanfic, consipirary analysis and more. It made it feel like more than just a show and more like a community.

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

#215

Post by saltcured »

krapp wrote: post #198
mike_hearn wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know. Obviously a certain personality type considers government to be an all-encompassing evil (which is the Cold-War era fear the conspiracy theories of the X-Files drew from) but in the modern day corporations (particularly tech companies) seem to be far more competent and dangerous. And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology…

I think the government conspiracy fear works best for the audience who still has some belief in government. So it is a disturbing moral corruption of something they consider powerful and benign. Lots of people older than myself reported this feeling from the 60s and 70s as things like the Pentagon Papers came to light.

The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).

So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?

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

#216

Post by Izkata »

uncircle wrote: post #174
criddell wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it ended in the late 2010s, when streaming took over:

Over the 2000s and early 2010s, writers were perfecting the style first experimented with by the great shows of the 90s and earlier, where seasons were mostly episodic but led into serial plot. Several of those early ones have been mentioned in these comments, and often alternated episodic and serial, while the later ones were figuring out how to mix the overarching plot into the episodic ones, advancing it slowly as something extra so viewers could miss one or two episodes without getting lost. Then at the midseason and season finales it'd be a big event for the larger arcs, bringing it all together.

Streaming no longer had to worry about viewers missing an episode, so all the episodic filler started getting dropped in favor of streamlining the overarching plots. Unfortunately, what we lost along with it was things that were less filler and more character and world building. Getting to know the characters through action instead of summarizing it with narration, making the setting feel more real, laying out events and actions in a more natural way instead of it feeling contrived.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjd9RgRUQDY

The backstory that makes this scene work so well was almost all in those episodic character and worldbuilding episodes we don't really get nowadays. We actually watched these characters develop and grow and change over years before this scene. I don't really think modern TV in its serial format could have a scene with as much impact - all that "filler" makes them feel like three dimensional people rather than plot devices.

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

#217

Post by bityard »

ethbr1 wrote: post #203
krapp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm the only person who didn't really vibe with Firefly. I usually like the "space Western" motif but Firefly was so broad and over the top with it that it just seemed silly to me.

Firefly is "Western" in the same way that 1960s spaghetti westerns (and arguably even John Ford's) were. Which is to say they used a facsimile of a lawless frontier to tell stories about ideologically stark, independent characters. Less cactus, more open carry.

I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run.

The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)

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

#218

Post by Izkata »

snozolli wrote: post #209
Izkata wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were ones before that, my mom had one. Apple added polish and used a capacitive touchscreen instead of a resistive one, then amped up the hype in their commercials, so everyone forgot these existed.

Possibly a Palm Treo, introduced in 2002, or a Windows-based PocketPC, introduced in 2000. I always felt that Apple basically reimplemented PalmOS with the benefit of ~10 years newer technology and a wildly efficient Chinese supply chain. I definitely wouldn't say that these devices were mainstream. They were very much targeted toward business people and hardcore nerds. The iPhone definitely revolutionized the market…

It may have been a 2005 phone or something. I think it was a Nokia, Motorola, or Samsung phone (our whole family was on those at the time), but whatever it was it had just about the complete form factor and an app store - mostly a screen with a grid of apps on home, with a couple of buttons at the bottom (more Android than iPhone). Maybe it had a slide-out keyboard? Can't remember that part for sure.

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

#219

Post by ethbr1 »

bityard wrote: post #217
ethbr1 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefly is "Western" in the same way that 1960s spaghetti westerns (and arguably even John Ford's) were. Which is to say they used a facsimile of a lawless frontier to tell stories about ideologically stark, independent characters. Less cactus, more open carry.

I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run. The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have ju…

Devil's advocate: deft use of zeitgeist-known settings in time-limited media can make for more efficient storytelling.

A captain of a ship.

An outlaw.

In a western-seeming system of planets.

If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm.

Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.

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

#220

Post by palmotea »

mike_hearn wrote: post #177
palmotea wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

> Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se.

Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups.

> 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.

IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.

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