Noiseless Chatter Archive

  ALF Reviews: “Looking for Lucky” (Season 1, Episode 3) After “Strangers in the Night” I was really, really worried that every episode of  ALF  would be that bad or worse. “Looking for Lucky” represents a Pyrrhic victory then, I guess, because it’s unquestionably better than that one while still being fucking terrible. The episode’s title refers to Lucky the cat, which means we’re three episodes in and while we still don’t know anything about the family, we’re going to spend a half hour developing the character of their pet. Great. And Mrs. Ochmonek, with whom we spent a half hour last week, doesn’t even appear. It’s like the writers are doing everything in their power to procrastinate the moment that they will have to make a decision about who the people in this family  are . Anyway the episode opens with ALF attempting to hypnotize Lucky. He tells the cat he’s getting sleepy, and then he tells him he’s a bagel. We learn soon that this is because ALF wants to eat L...

Calling all writers / humorists / parodists / gamers / whatever else you are. This is an official announcement of a one-off fiction anthology that I will be assembling, and I need your submissions! The anthology is called The Lost Worlds of Power , and I would love to get as many submissions as possible, so please pass this on to any writers you know who might be interested in being published in a collection! THE LOST WORLDS OF POWER The Concept: Worlds of Power was a series of notoriously awful and totally inaccurate novels based on popular video games. What we’re doing is writing more of them! I want you to choose a video game (see the rules below) and novelize it. If you aren’t familiar with Worlds of Power, you can read a bit about the series here . You can also read my reviews of two of the books (with excerpts) here and here . The Final Product: The Lost Worlds of Power will be an electronic, one-off fiction anthology. I will not sell it, and will mak...

  ALF Reviews: “Strangers in the Night” (Season 1, Episode 2) So I saw the thumbnail for this episode, featuring ALF in a dress, and I figured that this episode might fulfill the promise at the end of the pilot: Lynn was going to have a sleepover, and ALF was going to dress as a woman in order to remain undetected. Of course I don’t know why he couldn’t dress as a man, or even better just stay the shit away from the sleepover completely, but what do I know. Anyway that’s not what this episode is about. Which is kind of strange, since ALF at a slumber party is about ten thousand times better as a plot contrivance than what we actually get here. More on that later, though. The episode’s title is the name of a song, and looking through a list of  ALF  episodes shows me that nearly all of them are…or are named after a famous line in a song. It makes me feel conflicted, because somebody on the  ALF  writing staff cared enough about episode titles that, at the time, t...