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

213 points by Teever 5mo ago

rhelz 5mo ago
Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package. There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
- toyg 5mo ago
  And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.
  - happytoexplain 5mo ago
    As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Reading a summary of "third way triangulation" makes it sound good.
    - throawaywpglib 5mo ago
      Mostly because of the implications for deregulation.
    - rhelz 5mo ago
      A couple of things happened. One, the Supreme Court handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, and not Al Gore. Bush did not continue the policies of Clinton. He cut taxes, which increased the deficit, which made interest rates rise, which made the subprime market collapse, which resulted in the worst recession since the great depression. What gave him political cover to do this was 9/11. He took the opportunity to spend Trillions on oil wars, which we fought for the next 20 years, and which accomplished absolutely nothing. The result was that for the first time in American history, the next generation had it worse than the previous generation. When I graduated from college, my biggest problem was choosing which stock option package to accept. When my son graduated from college, his biggest problem was deciding which meals to skip to afford his insulin. Thank goodness Obamacare fixed my son's insulin problem. And Obama wasn't able to get rid of the deficit, but he at least put it on a path where it was shrinking relative to the size of the economy. I can't bear to rehearse what the Trump administration has done. Absolutely incalculable damage to the budget, the deficit, civil discourse, our international goodwill, and to the rule of law. It's hard to even convince people how bad it is, because nobody under the age 40 even really understands what a functional government and economy looks like.
    - toyg 5mo ago
      It accepted unfettered capitalism in a very fundamental way. Once you make it axiomatic that taxes should always be low, that the private sector is always better, and that massive inequality is just fine, you basically renounce all meaningful tools to fight for the little guy. Plus, you can only triangulate effectively if there are two radical sides to play off of. Once your policies effectively disqualify one of those positions, you're left alone to face the other radical group - and they now have no incentive to compromise. Which is exactly what happened over the following decades.
    - overfeed 5mo ago
      > As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Whether it's good or bad is subjective, and depends on your perspective on both major parties being "Fiscally conservative"
  - thomassmith65 5mo ago
    Anybody who remembers the last century knows that any Democrat left of Clinton would have resulted in a President Bob Dole. And at least the Clinton administration tried to give Americans Hillarycare.
fithisux 5mo ago
Like Synthwave
saltyoldman 5mo ago
The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul. * Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead) If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
- stackghost 5mo ago
  I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint. It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle. I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.
  - travelalberta 5mo ago
    It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
    - c-hendricks 5mo ago
      Different strokes and all that but I'm pretty happy it's much less socially acceptable to beat the shit out of 5-10% of the population for no reason.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
detribaby 5mo ago
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 mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail. You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly. For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly. The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
- moregrist 5mo ago
  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 thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this. How about this: Back in the late 90s, after Google appeared, search actually worked, worked well, and was not yet deeply tied into creepy tracking and ad tech. I would wade through thousands of geocities memed sites to have that experience again.
  - uncircle 5mo ago
    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 the type of people I want to create a new world order. Yet these are exactly the people positioned to create a new world order. I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
andrewstuart 5mo ago
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 no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading. The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
- NoSalt 5mo ago
  It's looking more and more like The Matrix was correct ... the end of the 1990s was peak human civilization.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  > The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization. Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US. I enjoyed things in the 80s and 90s, but many things about it sucked too. In many ways I like the current times a lot more than this idealized past.
  - overfeed 5mo ago
    > Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US. Not just the US, it was pretty peak for the UK as well. Probably even moreso, considering the deleterious austerity policies that followed. The 90's were great for Germany, and formerly eastern-bloc countries.
- BeetleB 5mo ago
  > 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.
- jgord 5mo ago
  Economic inequality was relatively low in 60s 70s, and economic growth was high in late 80s and late 90s. That seems to be a good backdrop for human flourishing, not just in science/tech but also in art, music, film etc. Recommend Piketty / Gary's Economics for more opinions on this. A couple snippets from my own experience / wow points : - browsing bookstores was phenomenal, hand illustrated romance, fantasy and sci-fi covers - Turbo Pascal, Dr Dobbs journal - Wolfenstein and Quake ushered in the era 3D interactive games - shareware and file sharing on BBS boards, via dialup modem - tapes, then CDs, then minidisc ! - digital watches, scientific calculators !! - double your hard-drive storage every 18months !!!
reconnecting 5mo ago
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 https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
- flumpcakes 5mo ago
  Wow. I didn't realise how much I miss that era of web design. Reminds me of PhpNuke/game clan sites.
- canucker2016 5mo ago
  Scully fans may feel weird in this present alternate universe, where Gillian Anderson has gone into witness protection in the UK as... an actress with an English accent. Watching millennials and gen Z discover her previous life on American TV is cute.
SilentM68 5mo ago
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
- RajT88 5mo ago
  Lone Gunmen I go back to more than X-Files. It is short and very fun. A less fun show I go back to is Harsh Realm.
  - SilentM68 5mo ago
    Yes, it was short and fun, to those who appreciated it, but the world was saturated with X-Files. I would have waited 5-10 years, then brought the Lone Gunmen back for a revival. The viewers would've had time to miss X-Files and thus Funny & Quirky would have appealed more to a nostalgic audience. I think it can work again, given the right conditions, the writers, same actors + new faces, even different shows/genre crossovers. There I go, again, giving advice for which I am never credited :| Harsh Realm was interesting, noticed Gillian Anderson's voice narrating the Harsh Realm training video. Rewatching it now, nice piece of Nostalgia :)
NoSalt 5mo ago
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 will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.
- dustfinger 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - bityard 5mo ago
    Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
    - krapp 5mo ago
      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.
      - ethbr1 5mo ago
        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.
        bityard 5mo ago
intended 5mo ago
Yep, things went downhill after social media. Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
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 places to live. Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
- FeteCommuniste 5mo ago
  We have amazing cell phones, though.
- throawaywpglib 5mo ago
  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
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    Yep, I'm not a socialist but I don't even care if thats where young people are moving towards, we just need change.
- commandlinefan 5mo ago
  The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc. There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.
travelalberta 5mo ago
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 in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life. I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
- autotune 5mo ago
  Books have been replaced by DVDs at my library. I spent almost all my time at a book store for a year in Austin and can count the number of active readers I saw in there on one hand. It's depressing.
  - travelalberta 5mo ago
    Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
    - criddell 5mo ago
      Reading is an independent activity, but wandering through a magazine store with friends while you were on your school lunch break wasn't.
    - adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
      > Reading is an independent activity by nature. This wasn’t my experience at all. I read similar novels as friends, we talked about them, tried to replicate some of the stuff the characters did, have suggestion about books to each other, lent them out, went to the bookstore together, etc. People read books on public transport before the iPhone and that was often the path to strike a conversation with a complete stranger who nonetheless shared interests (depending on the book they were reading). Books certainly could be completely individualized experiences, but they offered a whole world of socializing opportunities.
gsanderson 5mo ago
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
- Anthony-G 5mo ago
  I had to click on your profile to see if there was any clue as to whether the ‘G’ stands for “Gillian” or not. :)
davesque 5mo ago
There are two shows I still watch from start to finish every few years: The X-Files and Star Trek: TNG
- dustfinger 5mo ago
  I think I have watched Star Trek: TNG all the way through 3 times with my kids already. They also love Deep Space 9.
  - davesque 5mo ago
    DS9 is also great. I don't go through it as often but it's definitely in rotation.
    - i_am_a_peasant 5mo ago
      I learned to love Sisko a lot more than Picard tbh. I find him much more relatable than some pretentious english-frenchman who gets weird around kids. I never understood why he’s such a jerk to Wesley in the beginning.
      - ryandrake 5mo ago
        Over the course of a few years, my wife and I did TNG, DS9, and VOY in order, back to back, without missing an episode. Such great TV.
        fragmede 5mo ago
        And then there's Babalyon 5.
- mna_ 5mo ago
  For me, it's The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle. Those are the shows I watched as a kid and I'll love them forever.
rayiner 5mo ago
On a similar note, go back and watch the party scene from the 1991 movie “City Slickers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. My wife and I are moderately social with diverse groups of friends. I haven't been to a party where guests were glued to screens in years. I can think of a few, but they were so uninteresting that we didn't prioritize future events with those people. Why would I spend my limited free time hanging out with people who don't want to socialize? Thinking back, those people probably think that staring at phones at social events is just what people do, so it was okay. When you don't see your friend group self-selecting into a bubble of people with shared beliefs and behaviors, you think everything around you is how everyone in the world operates.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  I remember back in the early 80s my father knew the drummer or bassist of some "A-minus-list" up and coming 80s band (the actual band escapes me, maybe Poison way before "Every Rose Has Its Thorn") and he convinced the band to hang out at his house and jam. Well I remember the whole small town Pennsylvania community showed up and it was a total ripper. I never properly capitalized on the cool-kid-cred I should have gotten from that night.
Triphibian 5mo ago
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this." I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
- brendoelfrendo 5mo ago
  The X-Files reminds me that there was a time when conspiracy theories were funny and cool and not something that members of our government earnestly believed and used as the basis for their legislative agenda.
gibletsingravy 5mo ago
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
bityard 5mo ago
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.
- thomassmith65 5mo ago
  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.
hakunin 5mo ago
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.
block_dagger 5mo ago
The 90s truly were a wonderful decade for human creativity.
- i_am_a_peasant 5mo ago
  Most of the scientific writing up until mid 2000s seems to have been a golden age.
BrandoElFollito 5mo ago
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows. This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish. It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
saltcured 5mo ago
I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish. As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing. And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not. I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
- kstrauser 5mo ago
  I agree with most of that, but disagree about the "road warrior" bit. Laptops and cell phones and email existed, but not pervasively when the show started in 1993. It was around 1998 or '99 when work issued me my first cell phone that didn't require me be careful how I used the minutes. A powerful laptop of the time had a 250MB hard drive, a 486, and 2 hours claimed battery life (but in reality the battery was more like a UPS so you could carry it between power outlets). Pagers were common but coverage sucked outside metro areas. Email was uncommon. Email that worked between organizations was science fiction for most people. On a personal level, when X-Files first aired, I navigated around with a Thomas Guide, and you were out of luck if you got to a friend's house and they weren't home. My dad had a car-mounted cell phone and warned me not to touch it at risk of my life and bank account. No one I knew could afford a laptop. I dialed into a lot of local BBSes with my Amiga but only knew of the Internet from magazine articles and hadn't actually seen it in person. FidoNet was the closest I got to wide-area email. No, I'd contend that X-Files was reasonably accurate for the time.
  - saltcured 5mo ago
    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 a federal agency like the FBI was aggressive with such options or lethargic and stuck in their legacy methods. Likewise, the writers and show producers may have made choices based on what they thought the audience would relate to rather than what was actually possible or in use. Or maybe they didn't have any insider knowledge either..? However, the term "road warrior" was jargon for a category of business travelers in PC advertising by the late 1980s. There were various portable computers back then, and "notebooks" became idiomatic in the early 90s. PowerBooks and ThinkPads were already around when this show launched, and being used by companies and individuals who saw the value. It's hard for me to imagine that a Hollywood writer wouldn't know about these things if they did any background research at all. People had modems and various forms of dial-up interface with larger enterprises. You likely dialed a modem bank specific to your employer to access some kind of mainframe app or terminal server within the enterprise. But the transition to things like SLIP and PPP was also happening at this time in some enterprises. And CompuServe and Prodigy were more retail focused. You could imagine agents using something like this in the field much like people today use unofficial social media and personal phones. It's hard to prevent it... The first 2G digital cellular networks were rolling out in the US around the same time this show launched. But, yeah, coverage was not as universal as it is now.
t1234s 5mo ago
Best show on network TV at the time (and possibly since then). I look forward to seeing how Hulu is going to ruin its remake.
christkv 5mo ago
Oh well I guess I'm going to have to rewatch X-files now.
- fuzzfactor 5mo ago
  Still re-running almost daily on comettv.com
lossolo 5mo ago
Cigarette Smoking Man! I was a kid when I first watched the show, and he seemed so mysterious and fascinating to me from the moment he appeared.
jgord 5mo ago
Recommend "Halt and Catch Fire" series, if you haven't already seen it. Its set slightly earlier in the PC rush. The magic of that era, I think was that there was this new explosion of technology and a smart teen could figure out how things worked and tinker. It coincided with a relatively low level of economic inequality, meaning garage bands and garage startups were doable, imo.
kstrauser 5mo ago
My wife and I rewatched X-Files start to finish a couple years ago. It still holds up. The monster-of-the-week where Mulder sings the "Shaft" theme song is still hilarious. But in retrospect, I wish we hadn't all collectively decided to winkingly go along with conspiracy theories. While crackpots will always exist, I think a lot of people took this and other shows too literally. Yes, conspiracies exist. But no, most of the time, the guy at the metal desk in the grey government office is just doing what his job description says he's suppose to be doing. I don't know that X-Files directly led to idiocy like antivaxxers and climate change denial and election truthers. I do think it gave a lot of people social cover to start exploring those dumb ideas, and no one took them seriously until it was too late.
xhkkffbf 5mo ago
[flagged]
i_am_a_peasant 5mo ago
X-files was great for the first couple of seasons but then it went downhill, fast. I watched it start to finish twice, including fillers, and I gotta tell ya, past the first 2-3 seasons it really ain’t that great a show. I remember playing the live action video game that was split across several cd’s. that one was real nice. sometimes i still rewatch let’s plays on youtube about it. I feel like most people who are nostalgic about X-files, me included. Are only nostalgic about the vibe it gives you in the beginning.
- krapp 5mo ago
  I think the big mistake the X-Files made was trying to solve its own lore. The mystery was what made the show work. The more it explained, the less interesting it became.
- technion 5mo ago
  Yeah, all my friends watched it when it was new. After an episode played we would talk about it the next day. Im pretty sure none of us saw the final few seasons, with it moving to a late night time slot and noone caring.
pupppet 5mo ago
Morpheus was right, the 90s were the peak of human civilization.
- breve 5mo ago
  That was Agent Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBdYmStZJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBdYmStZJ4
  - pupppet 5mo ago
    You're right!
CodeArtisan 5mo ago
Geocities had a ton of xfiles fansites https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/ (beware, has auto-playing audio!) https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/5795/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/5795/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8406/main.htm https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8406/main.htm https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/6601/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/6601/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8616/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8616/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2133/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2133/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2442/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2442/ and many more.
lovegrenoble 5mo ago
X-files was so great show...
pan69 5mo ago
I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.
wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago
ELO's 1981 song "Ticket To The Moon" lyrics said: "Remember the good old 1980s? When things were so uncomplicated? I wish I could go back there again And everything could be the same." At the time, it was a bizarre and crazy idea that the 1980's would be better than the future. The idea that the future would be MUCH better has always been a given - at least for me but I think much of society felt that way back then.
deafpolygon 5mo ago
[dead]
sethev 5mo ago
It's fascinating to read the perspective of someone seeing X-files as a show from before their time. The clunky phones in the show, for example, were actually advanced technology that most of us had never seen in real life. The closest thing I'd seen was the IBM technician Brick that an uncle had. > I want to twiddle the dials on a car radio That's one thing I miss. As a kid in the early 90s, I used to collect car radios whenever someone was replacing theirs (which seemed to happen a lot more back then) - they were fun to take apart because so much of it was mechanical. Even the buttons to remember a station were mechanical and worked by using latches and levers.
giannicmptr1000 5mo ago
I watched it back then, but I don't think it held up over time. Twin Peaks did though.
morkalork 5mo ago
Just watched the X-Cops episode last night for the first time and it was hilarious. I didn't know I could nostalgic for absolute trash TV.
gramie 5mo ago
If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time. It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour. The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs. The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers. The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.
miiiiiike 5mo ago
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.
- dingaling 5mo ago
  "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.
  - miiiiiike 5mo ago
    Name an important archive that isn’t in the process of being digitized or an unimportant one that’s likely to crumble before we get around to snapping a picture of its contents. But if we look under the hood you can see where you’re taking an obvious exaggeration literally. See it? Right? That’s what’s making the thunking noise. Over there on the left. No, your other left. There. The point is over there.
Markoff 5mo ago
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
Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
Yes it is peak TV. Also sad how young people are. I was a child though. But am rewatching it. Yes no modern TV comes close. And the remake... I suspect HN aggress with the casting but I wont speak on it or I will be banned. But yes I mostly rewatch 00s and 90s TV only
keepamovin 5mo ago
I love the X-files. Season 5 & 6 are the best. Maybe the best episode of all time is Tithonus. Tho many greats. What a fantastic show.
Sylamore 5mo ago
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.

213 points by Teever 5mo ago

rhelz 5mo ago

Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package. There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.

toyg 5mo ago
And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.
- happytoexplain 5mo ago
  As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Reading a summary of "third way triangulation" makes it sound good.
  - throawaywpglib 5mo ago
    Mostly because of the implications for deregulation.
  - rhelz 5mo ago
    A couple of things happened. One, the Supreme Court handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, and not Al Gore. Bush did not continue the policies of Clinton. He cut taxes, which increased the deficit, which made interest rates rise, which made the subprime market collapse, which resulted in the worst recession since the great depression. What gave him political cover to do this was 9/11. He took the opportunity to spend Trillions on oil wars, which we fought for the next 20 years, and which accomplished absolutely nothing. The result was that for the first time in American history, the next generation had it worse than the previous generation. When I graduated from college, my biggest problem was choosing which stock option package to accept. When my son graduated from college, his biggest problem was deciding which meals to skip to afford his insulin. Thank goodness Obamacare fixed my son's insulin problem. And Obama wasn't able to get rid of the deficit, but he at least put it on a path where it was shrinking relative to the size of the economy. I can't bear to rehearse what the Trump administration has done. Absolutely incalculable damage to the budget, the deficit, civil discourse, our international goodwill, and to the rule of law. It's hard to even convince people how bad it is, because nobody under the age 40 even really understands what a functional government and economy looks like.
  - toyg 5mo ago
    It accepted unfettered capitalism in a very fundamental way. Once you make it axiomatic that taxes should always be low, that the private sector is always better, and that massive inequality is just fine, you basically renounce all meaningful tools to fight for the little guy. Plus, you can only triangulate effectively if there are two radical sides to play off of. Once your policies effectively disqualify one of those positions, you're left alone to face the other radical group - and they now have no incentive to compromise. Which is exactly what happened over the following decades.
  - overfeed 5mo ago
    > As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Whether it's good or bad is subjective, and depends on your perspective on both major parties being "Fiscally conservative"
- thomassmith65 5mo ago
  Anybody who remembers the last century knows that any Democrat left of Clinton would have resulted in a President Bob Dole. And at least the Clinton administration tried to give Americans Hillarycare.

fithisux 5mo ago

Like Synthwave

saltyoldman 5mo ago

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul. * Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead) If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.

stackghost 5mo ago
I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint. It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle. I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.
- travelalberta 5mo ago
  It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
  - c-hendricks 5mo ago
    Different strokes and all that but I'm pretty happy it's much less socially acceptable to beat the shit out of 5-10% of the population for no reason.

deleted 5mo ago

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detribaby 5mo ago

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 mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail. You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly. For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly. The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.

moregrist 5mo ago
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 thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this. How about this: Back in the late 90s, after Google appeared, search actually worked, worked well, and was not yet deeply tied into creepy tracking and ad tech. I would wade through thousands of geocities memed sites to have that experience again.
- uncircle 5mo ago
  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 the type of people I want to create a new world order. Yet these are exactly the people positioned to create a new world order. I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.

andrewstuart 5mo ago

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 no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading. The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.

NoSalt 5mo ago
It's looking more and more like The Matrix was correct ... the end of the 1990s was peak human civilization.
surgical_fire 5mo ago
> The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization. Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US. I enjoyed things in the 80s and 90s, but many things about it sucked too. In many ways I like the current times a lot more than this idealized past.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  > Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US. Not just the US, it was pretty peak for the UK as well. Probably even moreso, considering the deleterious austerity policies that followed. The 90's were great for Germany, and formerly eastern-bloc countries.
BeetleB 5mo ago
> 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.
jgord 5mo ago
Economic inequality was relatively low in 60s 70s, and economic growth was high in late 80s and late 90s. That seems to be a good backdrop for human flourishing, not just in science/tech but also in art, music, film etc. Recommend Piketty / Gary's Economics for more opinions on this. A couple snippets from my own experience / wow points : - browsing bookstores was phenomenal, hand illustrated romance, fantasy and sci-fi covers - Turbo Pascal, Dr Dobbs journal - Wolfenstein and Quake ushered in the era 3D interactive games - shareware and file sharing on BBS boards, via dialup modem - tapes, then CDs, then minidisc ! - digital watches, scientific calculators !! - double your hard-drive storage every 18months !!!

reconnecting 5mo ago

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 https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html

flumpcakes 5mo ago
Wow. I didn't realise how much I miss that era of web design. Reminds me of PhpNuke/game clan sites.
canucker2016 5mo ago
Scully fans may feel weird in this present alternate universe, where Gillian Anderson has gone into witness protection in the UK as... an actress with an English accent. Watching millennials and gen Z discover her previous life on American TV is cute.

SilentM68 5mo ago

Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.

RajT88 5mo ago
Lone Gunmen I go back to more than X-Files. It is short and very fun. A less fun show I go back to is Harsh Realm.
- SilentM68 5mo ago
  Yes, it was short and fun, to those who appreciated it, but the world was saturated with X-Files. I would have waited 5-10 years, then brought the Lone Gunmen back for a revival. The viewers would've had time to miss X-Files and thus Funny & Quirky would have appealed more to a nostalgic audience. I think it can work again, given the right conditions, the writers, same actors + new faces, even different shows/genre crossovers. There I go, again, giving advice for which I am never credited :| Harsh Realm was interesting, noticed Gillian Anderson's voice narrating the Harsh Realm training video. Rewatching it now, nice piece of Nostalgia :)

NoSalt 5mo ago

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 will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.

dustfinger 5mo ago
> 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.
- bityard 5mo ago
  Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
  - krapp 5mo ago
    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.
    - ethbr1 5mo ago
      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.
      - bityard 5mo ago

intended 5mo ago

Yep, things went downhill after social media. Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.

slopinthebag 5mo ago

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 places to live. Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.

FeteCommuniste 5mo ago
We have amazing cell phones, though.
throawaywpglib 5mo ago
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
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  Yep, I'm not a socialist but I don't even care if thats where young people are moving towards, we just need change.
commandlinefan 5mo ago
The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc. There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.

travelalberta 5mo ago

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 in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life. I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).

autotune 5mo ago
Books have been replaced by DVDs at my library. I spent almost all my time at a book store for a year in Austin and can count the number of active readers I saw in there on one hand. It's depressing.
- travelalberta 5mo ago
  Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    Reading is an independent activity, but wandering through a magazine store with friends while you were on your school lunch break wasn't.
  - adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
    > Reading is an independent activity by nature. This wasn’t my experience at all. I read similar novels as friends, we talked about them, tried to replicate some of the stuff the characters did, have suggestion about books to each other, lent them out, went to the bookstore together, etc. People read books on public transport before the iPhone and that was often the path to strike a conversation with a complete stranger who nonetheless shared interests (depending on the book they were reading). Books certainly could be completely individualized experiences, but they offered a whole world of socializing opportunities.

gsanderson 5mo ago

One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.

Anthony-G 5mo ago
I had to click on your profile to see if there was any clue as to whether the ‘G’ stands for “Gillian” or not. :)

davesque 5mo ago

There are two shows I still watch from start to finish every few years: The X-Files and Star Trek: TNG

dustfinger 5mo ago
I think I have watched Star Trek: TNG all the way through 3 times with my kids already. They also love Deep Space 9.
- davesque 5mo ago
  DS9 is also great. I don't go through it as often but it's definitely in rotation.
  - i_am_a_peasant 5mo ago
    I learned to love Sisko a lot more than Picard tbh. I find him much more relatable than some pretentious english-frenchman who gets weird around kids. I never understood why he’s such a jerk to Wesley in the beginning.
    - ryandrake 5mo ago
      Over the course of a few years, my wife and I did TNG, DS9, and VOY in order, back to back, without missing an episode. Such great TV.
      - fragmede 5mo ago
        And then there's Babalyon 5.
mna_ 5mo ago
For me, it's The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle. Those are the shows I watched as a kid and I'll love them forever.

rayiner 5mo ago

On a similar note, go back and watch the party scene from the 1991 movie “City Slickers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.

Aurornis 5mo ago
> But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. My wife and I are moderately social with diverse groups of friends. I haven't been to a party where guests were glued to screens in years. I can think of a few, but they were so uninteresting that we didn't prioritize future events with those people. Why would I spend my limited free time hanging out with people who don't want to socialize? Thinking back, those people probably think that staring at phones at social events is just what people do, so it was okay. When you don't see your friend group self-selecting into a bubble of people with shared beliefs and behaviors, you think everything around you is how everyone in the world operates.
ryandrake 5mo ago
I remember back in the early 80s my father knew the drummer or bassist of some "A-minus-list" up and coming 80s band (the actual band escapes me, maybe Poison way before "Every Rose Has Its Thorn") and he convinced the band to hang out at his house and jam. Well I remember the whole small town Pennsylvania community showed up and it was a total ripper. I never properly capitalized on the cool-kid-cred I should have gotten from that night.

Triphibian 5mo ago

I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this." I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.

brendoelfrendo 5mo ago
The X-Files reminds me that there was a time when conspiracy theories were funny and cool and not something that members of our government earnestly believed and used as the basis for their legislative agenda.

gibletsingravy 5mo ago

Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.

bityard 5mo ago

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.

thomassmith65 5mo ago
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.

hakunin 5mo ago

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.

block_dagger 5mo ago

The 90s truly were a wonderful decade for human creativity.

i_am_a_peasant 5mo ago
Most of the scientific writing up until mid 2000s seems to have been a golden age.

BrandoElFollito 5mo ago

The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows. This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish. It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.

saltcured 5mo ago

I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish. As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing. And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not. I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...

kstrauser 5mo ago
I agree with most of that, but disagree about the "road warrior" bit. Laptops and cell phones and email existed, but not pervasively when the show started in 1993. It was around 1998 or '99 when work issued me my first cell phone that didn't require me be careful how I used the minutes. A powerful laptop of the time had a 250MB hard drive, a 486, and 2 hours claimed battery life (but in reality the battery was more like a UPS so you could carry it between power outlets). Pagers were common but coverage sucked outside metro areas. Email was uncommon. Email that worked between organizations was science fiction for most people. On a personal level, when X-Files first aired, I navigated around with a Thomas Guide, and you were out of luck if you got to a friend's house and they weren't home. My dad had a car-mounted cell phone and warned me not to touch it at risk of my life and bank account. No one I knew could afford a laptop. I dialed into a lot of local BBSes with my Amiga but only knew of the Internet from magazine articles and hadn't actually seen it in person. FidoNet was the closest I got to wide-area email. No, I'd contend that X-Files was reasonably accurate for the time.
- saltcured 5mo ago
  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 a federal agency like the FBI was aggressive with such options or lethargic and stuck in their legacy methods. Likewise, the writers and show producers may have made choices based on what they thought the audience would relate to rather than what was actually possible or in use. Or maybe they didn't have any insider knowledge either..? However, the term "road warrior" was jargon for a category of business travelers in PC advertising by the late 1980s. There were various portable computers back then, and "notebooks" became idiomatic in the early 90s. PowerBooks and ThinkPads were already around when this show launched, and being used by companies and individuals who saw the value. It's hard for me to imagine that a Hollywood writer wouldn't know about these things if they did any background research at all. People had modems and various forms of dial-up interface with larger enterprises. You likely dialed a modem bank specific to your employer to access some kind of mainframe app or terminal server within the enterprise. But the transition to things like SLIP and PPP was also happening at this time in some enterprises. And CompuServe and Prodigy were more retail focused. You could imagine agents using something like this in the field much like people today use unofficial social media and personal phones. It's hard to prevent it... The first 2G digital cellular networks were rolling out in the US around the same time this show launched. But, yeah, coverage was not as universal as it is now.

t1234s 5mo ago

Best show on network TV at the time (and possibly since then). I look forward to seeing how Hulu is going to ruin its remake.

christkv 5mo ago

Oh well I guess I'm going to have to rewatch X-files now.

fuzzfactor 5mo ago
Still re-running almost daily on comettv.com

lossolo 5mo ago

Cigarette Smoking Man! I was a kid when I first watched the show, and he seemed so mysterious and fascinating to me from the moment he appeared.

jgord 5mo ago

Recommend "Halt and Catch Fire" series, if you haven't already seen it. Its set slightly earlier in the PC rush. The magic of that era, I think was that there was this new explosion of technology and a smart teen could figure out how things worked and tinker. It coincided with a relatively low level of economic inequality, meaning garage bands and garage startups were doable, imo.

kstrauser 5mo ago

My wife and I rewatched X-Files start to finish a couple years ago. It still holds up. The monster-of-the-week where Mulder sings the "Shaft" theme song is still hilarious. But in retrospect, I wish we hadn't all collectively decided to winkingly go along with conspiracy theories. While crackpots will always exist, I think a lot of people took this and other shows too literally. Yes, conspiracies exist. But no, most of the time, the guy at the metal desk in the grey government office is just doing what his job description says he's suppose to be doing. I don't know that X-Files directly led to idiocy like antivaxxers and climate change denial and election truthers. I do think it gave a lot of people social cover to start exploring those dumb ideas, and no one took them seriously until it was too late.

xhkkffbf 5mo ago

[flagged]

i_am_a_peasant 5mo ago

X-files was great for the first couple of seasons but then it went downhill, fast. I watched it start to finish twice, including fillers, and I gotta tell ya, past the first 2-3 seasons it really ain’t that great a show. I remember playing the live action video game that was split across several cd’s. that one was real nice. sometimes i still rewatch let’s plays on youtube about it. I feel like most people who are nostalgic about X-files, me included. Are only nostalgic about the vibe it gives you in the beginning.

krapp 5mo ago
I think the big mistake the X-Files made was trying to solve its own lore. The mystery was what made the show work. The more it explained, the less interesting it became.
technion 5mo ago
Yeah, all my friends watched it when it was new. After an episode played we would talk about it the next day. Im pretty sure none of us saw the final few seasons, with it moving to a late night time slot and noone caring.

pupppet 5mo ago

Morpheus was right, the 90s were the peak of human civilization.

breve 5mo ago
That was Agent Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBdYmStZJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBdYmStZJ4
- pupppet 5mo ago
  You're right!

CodeArtisan 5mo ago

Geocities had a ton of xfiles fansites https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/ (beware, has auto-playing audio!) https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/5795/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/5795/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8406/main.htm https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8406/main.htm https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/6601/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/6601/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8616/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8616/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2133/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2133/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2442/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2442/ and many more.

lovegrenoble 5mo ago

X-files was so great show...

pan69 5mo ago

I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.

wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago

ELO's 1981 song "Ticket To The Moon" lyrics said: "Remember the good old 1980s? When things were so uncomplicated? I wish I could go back there again And everything could be the same." At the time, it was a bizarre and crazy idea that the 1980's would be better than the future. The idea that the future would be MUCH better has always been a given - at least for me but I think much of society felt that way back then.

deafpolygon 5mo ago

[dead]

sethev 5mo ago

It's fascinating to read the perspective of someone seeing X-files as a show from before their time. The clunky phones in the show, for example, were actually advanced technology that most of us had never seen in real life. The closest thing I'd seen was the IBM technician Brick that an uncle had. > I want to twiddle the dials on a car radio That's one thing I miss. As a kid in the early 90s, I used to collect car radios whenever someone was replacing theirs (which seemed to happen a lot more back then) - they were fun to take apart because so much of it was mechanical. Even the buttons to remember a station were mechanical and worked by using latches and levers.

giannicmptr1000 5mo ago

I watched it back then, but I don't think it held up over time. Twin Peaks did though.

morkalork 5mo ago

Just watched the X-Cops episode last night for the first time and it was hilarious. I didn't know I could nostalgic for absolute trash TV.

gramie 5mo ago

If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time. It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour. The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs. The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers. The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.

miiiiiike 5mo ago

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.

dingaling 5mo ago
"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.
- miiiiiike 5mo ago
  Name an important archive that isn’t in the process of being digitized or an unimportant one that’s likely to crumble before we get around to snapping a picture of its contents. But if we look under the hood you can see where you’re taking an obvious exaggeration literally. See it? Right? That’s what’s making the thunking noise. Over there on the left. No, your other left. There. The point is over there.

Markoff 5mo ago

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

Scroll_Swe 5mo ago

Yes it is peak TV. Also sad how young people are. I was a child though. But am rewatching it. Yes no modern TV comes close. And the remake... I suspect HN aggress with the casting but I wont speak on it or I will be banned. But yes I mostly rewatch 00s and 90s TV only

keepamovin 5mo ago

I love the X-files. Season 5 & 6 are the best. Maybe the best episode of all time is Tithonus. Tho many greats. What a fantastic show.

Sylamore 5mo ago

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.