The X-Files Friday Feature: Blogging, Revisited

Writing a blog about a television show is a lot like writing a book report.

I'm glad it's not for credit.

I was struck with this idea for another meta post when I thought about just how hard it is to come up with something meaningful to say for every episode of this show.

At first I considered just batching episodes together, especially when I felt there wasn't enough content for the individual ones, but that presented some problems. Specifically, I didn't really know how best to break it up. Even if I watched six episodes at a time, what if the fifth and sixth were a two-parter, but the second and fourth were so spectacular as to warrant their own posts?

So, easier to just go for the individual episodes.

This meant having to write at length about episodes that are probably best forgotten, like 'Fresh Bones' and '2Shy' and 'Teso dos Bichos'. Some of the episodes that I haven't liked, I've found plenty to say about because they were bad in memorable ways. I didn't like 'Sanguinarium', but I sure won't forget it any time soon, and 'Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man' was interesting if for no other reason than it was a disappointment after I saw the title, given that it had little to do with present day storylines.

On the other hand, the episodes that I really enjoyed can often be easy to write about because every scene is noteworthy. Occasionally a good episode will just stand by itself, again leaving me with little to say and struggling to find enough specific things of note to write about.

So back to the whole book report thing.

I never had to write that many book reports in school. Somehow I managed to avoid it, but considering my education, I suspect this was because the teachers at the schools I went to tended to prefer more artistically interpretive responses to the books we had to read for class. They rarely wanted us to write papers, but more often wanted us to construct or draw things. These are things I'm less good at than writing book reports. In hindsight, I probably should have figured out a way to write songs for the creative projects.

No, I will not sing about The X-Files. Well, we'll see. If I write something, I promise I'll record it and post it here.

And my college education was largely technical and project-based, rather than focused on a lot of research papers, so again, little experience there. I wonder if the really successful professional bloggers were all liberal arts majors. I suppose the tech bloggers probably were not. Maybe I should write about software engineering next. I could probably find a lot more words about it.

But the point is, I try to write a certain length - not in terms of word count, but in terms of how much space the Blogger composition window takes up on my screen. If I can fill it, I consider that a successful entry. And that's a big challenge sometimes, like it was the few times in school I did have to do it. At least in this case I'm choosing to watch the show - I rarely chose to read the books my teachers assigned, and as a result I often didn't appreciate or enjoy them.

I do wish I could be more analytical about the show - I feel like a lot of what I've written hasn't been particularly deeper than saying what I did or didn't like, or what theories I have about where things are headed. Which is important, because I think the purpose of a first time viewing blog is primarily to predict things and be hilariously wrong about them, so that all the people who've seen the show can laugh at me.

And it's not like there isn't already plenty of actual analysis about this show. It's only 20 years old, after all.

So either way, on I go, watching and writing, trying to vaguely entertain people with my silly predictions and theories that are almost certainly some extreme form of wrong.