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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

#61

Post by throawaywpglib »

cestith wrote: post #34
ramesh31 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Music was incredible Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on e…

Here’s a list of albums just from 1998. Mezzanine from Massive Attack, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Big Pun’s Capital Punishment, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby from Fatboy Slim, and Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys. The K&D Sessions from Kruder and Dorfmeister. Stunt by Barenaked Ladies. Then there’s one of my personal favorites, Mermaid Avenue from Billy Bragg and Wilco. You mentioned rock. How about Hellbilly De…

All those albums are hilariously overrated and not representative of the truly good music coming out at the time.

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

#62

Post by criddell »

travelalberta wrote: post #32

To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want. While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do…

That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.

And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.

You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.

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

#63

Post by slopinthebag »

throawaywpglib wrote: post #53
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…

Im a elder millennial and i hope that things are ripe for a change, because it really does feel like everyone is pissed off about the system

Yep, I'm not a socialist but I don't even care if thats where young people are moving towards, we just need change.

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

#64

Post by bityard »

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 much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.

Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.

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

#65

Post by hakunin »

Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.

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

#66

Post by BeetleB »

travelalberta wrote: post #32

To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want. While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do…

> I think the only place you have to compromise is work.

Or if you have a family.

The next time I say "We didn't have (to do) X in my days and things were just fine (or better)", I'll be kicked out of my house. :-)

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

#67

Post by flumpcakes »

reconnecting wrote: post #16

Here's another, next-level of nostalgia: a copy of the official Gillian Anderson website (1) with her favorite music from the 2000s. 1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html

Wow. I didn't realise how much I miss that era of web design. Reminds me of PhpNuke/game clan sites.

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

#68

Post by BeetleB »

andrewstuart wrote: post #13

I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times. The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization. Tech was exciting, futuristic. Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems. People talked socialized read books. Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which…

> People talked socialized read books.

Reading books - perhaps more than they do now, but in the 90's it was already on its way out.

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

#69

Post by scottious »

moregrist wrote: post #31
detribaby wrote: post #12

There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all? One poster already menti…

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…

I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.

These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.

I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost

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

#70

Post by Schmerika »

keyringlight wrote: post #55
NoSalt wrote: post #24

The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you wil…

24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a…

24 was extreme racist pro-torture fear porn propaganda.

So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.

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