Noiseless Chatter Archive

Hello, and welcome to the first-annual Noiseless Chatter holiday gift guide! The idea here isn’t like most gift guides, being as I can’t personally vouch for every product here, nor have I received any form of payment or exchange for including what you see below. So what is this? Well, I’ve got a large number of very talented friends, and I wanted to take an opportunity to spotlight their wares specifically. If you still have shopping to do, I hope something below will appeal to you as a potential gift for a loved one. There should be plenty of time to receive any of the below before the holidays. In order to avoid any appearance of favoritism, I won’t single out any of the products I can vouch for, but I will say that I can vouch for each of these individuals personally. They’re all great people, and if any of the below looks like it would make a good gift for somebody (or yourself), make the seller’s Christmas, too, by buying it through them. If you are intereste...

  ALF Reviews: “Help Me, Rhonda” (Season 1, Episode 7) Toward the beginning of this project, I was speaking with a friend of mine, and I realized something kind of shocking: even though I remember watching  ALF  every week as a child, owning the toys and presumably enjoying it, I really don’t remember much as an adult about the show. A few details stuck out, such as the fact that ALF’s real name is Gordon Shumway (a fact I expected to find out in the pilot, but apparently the Tanners didn’t give enough of a shit to ever ask, “Hey, who are you?”). I remembered that he was from Melmac, and that he ate cats. I remember “Ha! I kill me!” And, for whatever reason, I remembered that his favorite song was “Help Me, Rhonda.” That’s about it. And, granted, I wasn’t very old when  ALF  was airing and it’s fair that I’d have forgotten a lot. But aside from a few miscellaneous bits of trivia, I didn’t remember  anything . It’s actually kind of strange, because as an adu...

WELL HELLO. I know things have been relatively quiet around here, but I promise that Noiseless Chatter isn’t gradually becoming an ALF review blog. It’s just a matter of the holidays coming up, and with them a pilgrimage back to my ancestral home: New Jersey. The ALF reviews should keep coming as planned, because I’ve got a bunch of them locked and loaded, but other updates might be slightly more sporadic. Nevertheless, you should visit this site every day, and if you don’t see anything new, just re-read everything else I’ve ever posted. It will enrich you as a human being. But anyway, some updates! – The Lost Worlds of Power anthology is going to be awesome. I’m not exaggerating, either. It’s going to be like walking into your bathroom in the morning and finding an angel taking a shower, and you can see all of her breasts and everything. THAT GOOD. So far we’ve received five complete stories for potential inclusion, which isn’t bad considering that it was ...

I haven’t been very impressed with the past few Legend of Zelda games. Actually, that’s putting it a bit too lightly; I think the past few Legend of Zelda games are terrible. And I don’t mean “terrible” in a relative sense, with me comparing them to the incredible highs the series has achieved in the past and calling them failures because they don’t have quite the same resonance. No, I mean “terrible” as in “these really are some lousy games.” And so I didn’t get my hopes up about A Link Between Worlds , which was released this past week after many months of buildup. After all, I’ve been burned a bit too much by the past couple of releases. And yet I took the plunge anyway, and I’m glad I did. Not only because I absolutely adore the game on its own merits, but because it’s helping me to see, and to articulate, the problems I’ve had with the series lately. It not only illuminates them…it seems to deliberately atone for them. The game, as you can probably tell from...

  ALF Reviews: “For Your Eyes Only” (Season 1, Episode 6) Well, I’d love to be able to report that  ALF  finally managed to slap together a decent episode, but I can’t say conclusively that prolonged exposure hasn’t just driven me insane. Either way, I found myself kind of liking “For Your Eyes Only.” In a relative sense, at least. When it comes to  ALF , you need to grade on a curve. It’s a bit like someone attacking you with a baseball bat that has a nail in it. If that happens enough, and eventually the nail falls out and you’re just being attacked with a normal baseball bat, you’ll probably feel kind of relieved. So that’s what “For Your Eyes Only” is. It’s not great. It’s not even all that good. But you know what? It’s better . And I’ll take that. Of course, as surprising as this is, it also makes me feel somewhat vindicated in my previous reviews, as a lot of what makes “For Your Eyes Only” work is stuff that I’ve been hoping they’d address all along. Maybe thi...