The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
midnightmurmurations.substack.com
midnightmurmurations.substack.com
I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.
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.
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...)
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.
There was someone else on the ship like River.
If you love animated stuff I guess it might be fine.
Damn, now I want to binge-re-watch Firefly.
I loved the trick with the colour grading. Won't say more because spoilers, if you know you know.
TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs.
Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres.
TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more).
Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie.
Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it.
Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays.
They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-...
If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.
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?
1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there.
2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.
35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
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.
Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.
So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.
Pretty certain I said nothing of the sort.
Given that both major parties in the US are now fully complicit in arming and enabling live-streamed genocide, there's a pretty strong case to be made that anti Arab and Islamophobic racism is reaching new heights.
And while most actual Americans are very much against the arming and enabling of said genocide, that hasn't motivated them to move on from the two party system.
There's a widespread notion that "agitating" against two genocidal parties is idealism, or perfectionism. It's really just doing your duty as a person, and the fact that so many Americans don't care/understand that points to... Massive widespread racism, ding ding ding.
It wasn't a bubble of the 90's, it was a prescient blueprint for the 2020s.
It took something far more powerful than a TV show that was mildly popular for a few years to create what we live today. It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then.
Can you say more about this? All I'm finding are articles about PTerry predicting the rise of fake news:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/terry-pratchet...
If anything, the 90s were the one era where that thinking had receded more than at any other time. Then 9/11 brought it roaring back.
Especially for anything tech oriented.
Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge.
Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more.
Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies!
The list is endless.
In the moment, there's a sharp "time before it existed" and "time after it existed."
I.e. late 2006, there was no mass market iPhone-like device; late 2007, there was
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, with its vastly more desirable aesthetic and approachable interface.
I remember planning trips with Lonely Planet books. I just really don't miss the pre-GMaps era. I don't think I'd ever drive now without one a phone.
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.
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.
I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
But the common folk was doing amazing stuff. A 3D suite/raytracer for free? Free as in freedom math books with easy algebra teachings? Free compilers, operating systems and whatnot? You don't need to pay about $600 (or $3000 on industrial basis) for everything in Debian Sarge? Just an $20 DVD? It was like getting a damn interdimensional UFO for free when everyone was paying for expensive cars, gas and highway tolls.
I still have my original copy of High Noon on the Electronic Frontier[1] and still hold out hope that computer technology will ultimately end up on the positive side of the scale rather than the negative side, despite how our current tech leaders are racing as fast as they can toward the negative side.
1: https://www.amazon.com/High-Noon-Electronic-Frontier-Concept...
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.
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
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
Not just that but the whole "shaping the future whether you like it or not" push.
In the 90s, building the computing future meant figuring out a user need and building a product that fit that need. Now, there is this idea that technology companies are just building their idea of what the future should be, minus any product imperative, minus input from customers or the public, and then it's up to us to "get on board" and adopt it. The cart is driving the horse.
If you're a basic bitch consumer and complainer, that's on you. The world is hard, life is hard, humans are beautiful and terrible. These things don't change. But there are more options now, and it's never been easier to learn, explore, and DIY.
Besides all the nice luxuries like power tools and google maps and online shopping, my true optimism lies in digital data, transparency, and accountability. The powers that be of course are allergic to latter two, but tools are there now and we're slowly making inroads. There are real problems being solved across all industries that wouldn't be possible without technology.
Nostalgia is fine and all, and the 90s were certainly a more naive time of course, but it's not like everything was great and now it's terrible.
To me it felt we were slowly making the world better for all. Progress was happening and would continue to happen.
Now it feels like we are rapidly on the path to a dystopian Elysium like future. A dystopia for everyone but the sociopathic ultra wealthy that want to rule over us. And they’re not even hiding their intent from us anymore.
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...
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.
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.
Remember also that 2G didn't meaningfully have data until the very late 90s. Its first "data" offering was SMS, which was pay-per-message. Not that it mattered, because a phone couldn't do anything with data at the time, and if laptops and cell phones were rare, cell modems were unicorns. In any case, cell coverage outside cities sucked until 2010 or so. My wife had to commute to a nearby city once a month to run a medical clinic, and she lost signal about 5 miles outside our town and picked it up again when she could physically see the other. Those tiny towns in the middle of Washington state forests were probably busy upgrading to IP over Avian Carrier during X-Files times.
But, what was his pay? Could he have decided to equip himself, much like US servicemen were known to upgrade their own body armor, GPS, etc. in recent decades? The Lone Gunmen side characters surely must have known about all this stuff, and his character could have been informed of the options.
And, in the timeframe of the show, I know that US college professors and various "creatives" were buying the Apple PowerBook and using the online services I mentioned. They were not the executive class in terms of pay or prestige. But they saw the value, and prioritized the spend from their own modestly middle-class means.
And I used my first 2G phone as a modem to dial up my work modem bank. I believe this was on Pac Bell Wireless, before Cingular. In this GSM scenario, the phone itself had a serial port accepted modem control commands. My computer still saw it like a normal modem call, but as far as I know the digital stream was sent over the air and something on the telco side terminated it with an analog modem that called my work number over POTS lines.
These were slow, somewhere in the 2400-9600 bps range.
It was a capability designed into the networks, since dial-up was so important back then. You generally just had to have the right adapter cable that split out the serial (or USB) from your phone's proprietary multi-pin port.
1000% times better than what people are wearing today.
Today is so hoodified you have office workers in sneakers.
The white shirt, suit and trench looks so good. ALSO people where not as obese. This has of course an effect on the fit.
I'm not sure if that was intended as a dog whistle but you might want to consider that it's coming across as one.
Yes, the tech world brought "casual everyday" to the office. But, ironically, the SF tech scene is full of designer t-shirts and jeans, so the obscenely rich and/or sartorial types can still signal their elite status among casual wear...
The Mulder equivalent today would be wearing a clearance rack hoodie from the megamart, rather than the hand-woven, artificially distressed version from this year's runway show.
An off the rack OCBD and suit with a herring or trench over is so so so so so SO much more stylish than "designer t-shirts and jeans" or "clearance rack hoodie from the megamart"!!!
Or do you honestly set a = between them? Are they equal?
We are truly lost, my god.
Explains why I have to fight to get a decent OCBD and Slacks. I have found it and never leaving.
Hoodies are for kids and african americans when in public and I am neither.
I do not mean runway style if you think that. I mean business and/or business casual. YES give me the 90s slacks, OCBD and blazer anyday I am trying trying so so so hard.
My real message here is, perhaps, old fashioned. I believe art's meaning is in the intention of the artist or author, in this case the show producers and costumers who did their work in the 90s. You can understand it by considering the context of their intended 90s audience. If there are records of their production decision process, that would be even better.
It is through this lens that my original post found mild amusement in this young person's misunderstanding of the show's costumes. In the originating context, nobody should consider the federal drone as fashionable. Rather, it signals the least effort the character could get away with. It expressed a "phoning it in" vibe. This person has other priorities and just wants to bypass the cultural gatekeeping of the time.
By comparison, I'd say Scully's clothing started off expressing the straight-laced, eager college graduate of the time who is trying to manage her appearance, on a budget. Something like "adulting" for later generations? I'm not passing judgment on that either. It's just the contrast that was there to establish characters.
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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%.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> 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.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>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.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
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. :-)
The nineties literally ended in a party where at least one person in the room thought they were going to die the next day. You cannot recreate that with a Doug t-shirt.
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.
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.
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.
Whether it's good or bad is subjective, and depends on your perspective on both major parties being "Fiscally conservative"
A less fun show I go back to is Harsh Realm.
Harsh Realm was interesting, noticed Gillian Anderson's voice narrating the Harsh Realm training video. Rewatching it now, nice piece of Nostalgia :)
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.
Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.
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.
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.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reading books - perhaps more than they do now, but in the 90's it was already on its way out.
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 !!!"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.
> 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.
1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
Watching millennials and gen Z discover her previous life on American TV is cute.
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
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.
Im pretty sure none of us saw the final few seasons, with it moving to a late night time slot and noone caring.
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.
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.
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.
You can get every book ever realeased in PDF or ePUB on the web my guy. Hello?
Just because your internet is just TikTok on your phone...
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.
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.
First, when many people "miss the point", perhaps you should review your communication.
Second, perhaps you are missing the point that garbage has always been available and, generally, preferred by the masses.
But yes I mostly rewatch 00s and 90s TV only
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
* Andor
* Black Rabbit
* Dune
* Last of Us
* Percy Mason
* The Paper
* Pluribus
* Severance
* The Studio
* Succession
* White Lotus
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
* 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.
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.
I don't agree with this premise at all.
It's not like being straight was perfect protection. You'd get abuse just for acting in ways that had been arbitrarily decided to be gay-coded.
There was plenty of other bigotry to deal with as well. For example, support for interracial marriage was under 50% at the beginning of the decade (in the US), and was still under 2/3rds by the end. Bigotry is still plentiful, of course, but it was quite a bit worse then.
But, its also true that it was better in many ways that affect both gay & straight people!
I was a kid in the 1970s, a teenager through the 80's and turned 20 in 1990. I had everything I needed and most things I wanted (eventually). High school was easy and actually fun. University was cheap (compared to now) and I had a blast. Graduating with a degree in comp. sci. in 1995 was bonkers. Opportunities were everywhere.
There have been some ups and downs, but I really don't think I would have wanted to be born any other time or place.
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 either side of that range. Just see the set-list for Woodstock '99 to further illustrate the point.
Rose coloured glasses though - I was a teenager at the time.
The 80's died but not with Cobain, but with The Pixies and R.E.M.
And in late 90's the industrial rock/metal basically made 80's glam rock cringey and obsolete.
- Odeley (Beck '96)
- Aenima (Tool '96)
- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)
- Homogenic (Bjork '97)
- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)
- Stankonia (Outkast '99)
- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)
You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.
Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.
Second Toughest in the Infants (1996)
In Sides (1996)
Homework (1997)
To name a few. The 90s were great for electronic music.
Edit: commenter below with Underworld - 100%.
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 Deluxe from Rob Zombie? Follow the Leader by Korn. The New Radicals released Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. Garbage’s Version 2.0, and Lenny Kravitz 5, and Van Halen III. What’s more rock than Walking into Clarksville by Page & Plant?
NIN / The Fragile
Radiohead / OK Computer
Daft Punk / Homewerk
All of these are generation defining albums.
Black metal was a 1992-1998 thing. It was dead (and many of the genre's leading lights were looking to move beyond it, mostly without success,) by the end of 1999.
Those six years also produced an explosion of experimentation in industrial, ambient, darkwave, and many other niche genres. In some cases, musical and aesthetic boundaries were pushed as far as they can possibly go.
From where I'm standing, the 26 year period from 2000-2026 absolutely pales in comparison to just those few years 1992-1998.
As an oil exporter country we were saved in the 00s by oil prices ballooning to the moon, so that was the golden decade for us instead (relatively speaking, and mostly in the big cities).
I'm pretty sure we count unemployment the same way. Those groups are just larger now because of age, education and economic malaise.
I so so wish I could go back as well. Its such a magical time in my memories. I was 6 in 1990 and I was 16 in 2000. God, what a world that was!
I'm pretty nostalgic for the 90s. Maybe everyone who had at least a halfway-decent childhood feels that way about their kid years, though.
I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.
I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.
For sure; the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is a great comedic exploration of this feeling as its central theme. (well, if you can set aside any well-justified reservations about writer/director Woody Allen.)
Kinda like the opposite man, kinda like the opposite.