Noiseless Chatter Archive

Just a relatively quick note to let you know that I’ve got a guest post up at Dead Homer Society , a site that is far more intelligent than it has any right to be when discussing modern day Simpsons episodes. So check it out. It’s called Mourning the Loss of Mourning, and it’s guaranteed to be a laugh and a half. Or a vaguely emotional personal reflection on some genuinely touching moments of a show long dead. EITHER ONE WORKS. I’ve also got some great site news that’ll be coming in the near future, so stay tuned for that, and another Noiseless Chatter Spotlight going up tomorrow. It’s a reworked piece from my Noise to Signal days, but being as that essay, and a few others I did around that time, were direct forerunners to what I’d like to accomplish with the Spotlight series, it is perfectly acceptable for me to do this and if you argue I will quite literally gut your dog. So, that’s happening. But seriously, go read that post. It’s destined to be the shittiest o...

The image above is a screengrab of an ad I came across while doing some linkbuilding. It hopes to get me to click it by enticing me with the following question: What do Bing Crosby, Jimi Hendrix and Yanni have in common? Well, they’re all musicians. So…done? I’m sure there’s some more interesting and obscure connection between them — or I assume there has to be, by mere virtue of the fact that the question was posed at all — but doesn’t this enticement fall at the first hurdle when all three things are immediately connected anyway? After all, it’s not like these three individuals had minor, relatively-unknown careers in music before they became famous for something else…music is the first thing anybody thinks of when they hear those names. Maybe the advertiser just doesn’t understand how these things are meant to work. You can’t ask something like “What do bananas, coconuts and oranges have in common?” and expect people to give you the chance to say “They all have i...

Two years ago, Goodbye Galaxy Games appeared on the scene with Flipper , a destructive puzzler that reveled in its artful simplicity. Then late last year it got a sequel, Flipper 2: Flush the Goldfish . This time there was a completely different play style, artistic approach and overall more action-oriented experience. Both games were fairly well received, and without a doubt are all the more impressive because of the size of Goodbye Galaxy Games: one man. That man is Hugo Smits. July saw the release of Hugo’s third game, Ace Mathician . It’s an educational game which — in an unusual move for the genre — wants to provide just as much game as education. With three games under his belt and no two of them alike, I wanted to take some time to speak with Hugo, and get his opinion on his design philosophy. Along the way he also discusses his candidate for perfect game, why he feels video games are not art, the trials and tribulations of playing Commander Keen in Dutch,...

In May, I did this . It was just one post for my Wes Anderson Month project, but ever since then, a larger idea has been haunting me. After all, if it was so much fun — and so self-enlightening — to write such an exhaustive piece on a single scene from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou , why not do the entire film? Unquestionably the concept owes great debt to Fred Clark’s page-by-page trot through the Left Behind series , but, of course, I like The Life Aquatic. Actually, that’s not really true. I adore The Life Aquatic . It almost immediately became my favorite film when it was released (Christmas of 2004), and it’s had a firm grip on that top spot for me ever since. So, after much deliberation, I have indeed decided to deconstruct every scene, in sequence, from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Whereas Fred does a great job of pointing out absolutely everything those books get so appallingly wrong, this will be more of a celebration. It’s a film I love. It’...

  … so says Sight and Sound . I can’t say that I agree, but it is a fantastic film, and anything that gets more people watching it (as this undoubtedly will, and as their previous decades-long pick Citizen Kane undoubtedly did) is alright by me. It’s a masterpiece, unquestionably, but I don’t even think it’s Hitchcock’s best…which says more about the brilliance of the director than it does about any relatively lower estimation of this film. The first time I watched Vertigo it was eye opening. It was one of the defining artistic experiences of my life, right alongside the first time I listened to (as opposed to heard) the music of Bob Dylan, and the very first time I pulled Catch-22 off a shelf in my school’s library. But Vertigo didn’t hit me in quite the same way. Whereas those other two experiences were more like accelerated awakenings to a gorgeously complicated world of invention woven into, around and through our own, Vertigo was a single, glorious slap...

As mentioned previously , Nintendo Life has a shelf in the 3DS eShop, starting today and continuing on until next Thursday. If you go here you can see which staff member chose which five games. But I wanted to write a short post about why I chose to spotlight those games…and also provide the five more recommendations I would have made, had space allowed. VVVVVV (3DSWare) Unquestionably one of my favorite games, period. I played this when it was fairly new for the PC, and was instantly won over by its affectionate visual tribute to the Commodore 64. Sharp writing, brilliant stage design and a perfectly utilized gravity-flipping gimmick were just icing on the cake. I almost mentioned the game’s stellar soundtrack in that sentence as well, but…no, the soundtrack deserves a sentence all to itself. It’s genuinely, impossibly, beautifully perfect music, and as silly as it might sound, the game is worth playing just for that. Even if you end up despising it — which I...

…provided you live in America. Log in and check it out! I’m second from the right, as if you couldn’t tell from the fact that I’m ABSOLUTELY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MY MII. It will be up until a week from today, so soak it in while you can. You can read more about it here for now, and I’ll update later on with some commentary on what I picked, why, and maybe some additional recommendations as well. But for now… …I’m in the ****ing Nintendo eShop! Photo by Ron “The Bod” DelVillano