numb3r_5ev3n

With Andor Season 2 being released, I was working on a follow-up post to my Andor/Goncharov post from 2022, postulating that the 1970s (more specifically, the Carter era) and not the 1990s might have been the pinnacle of American culture, based just on the vibes from this video. (Also, I need to finally watch Xanadu.) But then, lo and behold, this happened:

Ryan Coogler will be rebooting the X Files, as per this announcement which first aired on The Last Podcast On the Left.

Guys,



I have not been this hype about anything fandom-related in a long time. I'm hype about this the way I am NOT hype about the new Tron sequel. Unless Ryan Coogler decides to cast Jared Leto, in which case I will no longer be as hype.



Already, reactionary dorks are blubbering about how Ryan Coogler is "going to make it woke," and "is going to include CURRENT DAY politics," but I'm like:



I truly hope so, and the weird incel dweebs can fuck all the way off. Those dorks really thought that Donald Trump being back in office meant that they would never have to see anyone who doesn't look like them in a media creation ever again. THINK AGAIN, ASSHOLES. Also: X Files dealt with "current day politics" back in the 1990s! It's only with about 25+ years of separation and hindsight that it seems devoid of 1990s-era politics. WTF did they think that such a thing as a LITERAL TV SHOW ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES was going to not address what were then "current-day politics" for the time?

(They mean Black People. It's going to have Black People. And probably people with pronouns! That's what "current day politics" means to these people.)

But regardless,

WE. ARE. SO. BACK.

Confession time: I have never really liked Facebook. I have a lot of the same complaints about its format and the way it skews communication that I did about Tumblr, and it has been no secret for years that data gleaned from people's activity is mined for third parties to try and sell them products, and Facebook algorithyms curate people's feeds to this end. But this newest crap with Cambridge Analytica is really the straw that broke the camel's back.

What I really need to do is blog here, which I said I was going to try and do more often.

In other news: yes, X Files is back and has been for a few months. No, I have not been watching it (yet) for two reasons: one, the way it contributed to conspiracy theory culture bothers me as much as it did when I blogged about it last year. I feel like it gave a lot of validation to people who are now devotees of Breitbart and Infowars - and everything Chris Carter has said indicates that he really believes he is "shaking up the sheeple."

Two, I binge-watched the entire run of Twin Peaks, much of which I had not seen since its original run in 1990-1991, along with the new third season, which ran on Showtime this past summer. And having done so, I now see how much X Files was influenced by it, almost to the point of it being a straight lift of some aspects of it - like it was created to fill the void Twin Peaks left when it went off the air.

And now I wish we had gotten a spinoff about the Blue Rose division of the FBI - David Lynch's idea of a FBI task force that investigates paranormal occurences. Except one could kind of say that season 3 *was* the Blue Rose spinoff.

I am sure I will check out the new episodes of X Files at some point.