Noiseless Chatter Archive

I’ll admit this right up front: it’s not pleasant to realize that you’ve said something stupid. Especially since you’re not an idiot. Really. You’re not. You, reading this, whomever you are: you’re not an idiot. You may do idiotic things. Your name may be attached to idiotic statements. But you’re not an idiot. This is why it stings when you do accidentally dip into idiocy. When you say something that you immediately wish you could take back. When you do something that you know immediately afterward someone as smart as you shouldn’t have done. But, if I may be so bold…that’s a good thing. Yes. It is. It’s a good thing to say things that you regret. Regret is a useful feeling. Yet the internet — depending upon the site, anyway — allows us to erase that regret. It’s a nice thought, but it’s unintentionally destructive. It’s healthy to want to take things back…but it’s less healthy to actually take things back. I’m speaking of a few different things, here...

Toward the beginning of this month, I posted something about 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I’d hesitate to call it a review. I’d also hesitate to call it a collection of thoughts. If anything, it’s a loose assortment of unconnected observations. Of course, at that time, I had only read the first volume. I’ve now read the second, and I’m no closer to having my thoughts collected. 1Q84 is a deliberately confounding work. There’s nothing unique about that fact, but there is something unique in just how playfully it manages to find new ways to confound. To be frank, I’m impressed by just how consistently baffled it manages to make me when barely any passing time is unaccounted for. It doesn’t take a very skilled magician to pull off an illusion as long as he keeps you from looking in the right place. That’s basic sleight of hand, and on its own it doesn’t qualify as art. It qualifies as technique. But keep the reader focused on every detail and still manage to pull o...

  ALF Reviews: “A Little Bit of Soap” (Season 1, Episode 14) I know I say this all the time, but that’s okay because I mean it all the time: this is one lousy episode. It does immediately grab my attention, however, as we open on ALF nailing a GOOD-BYE GRANDMA sign to the front door. Does that make this episode and “Mother and Child Reunion” an unofficial two-parter? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but serialization never seemed to be something  ALF  was interested in. Hell, introducing characters that don’t immediately get knocked over the head with a shovel and buried forever never seemed to be something  ALF  was interested in. For Kate Sr. to still be hanging around…yeah, that’s definitely got my interest. In fact, another episode with Kate Sr. takes a lot of responsibility off of the previous one. Sure, it should have been  funnier , but its aimless, meandering non-plot is less important if we view “Mother and Child Reunion” as a new character’s introduction ...

I hate Upworthy. I wish I could say that I only hate what Upworthy does , but that’s impossible, because there’s nothing to Upworthy apart from what it does. And what it does is manipulate. And that’s damaging. First of all, I will say that it’s nice that there’s an outlet devoted to spotlighting positive things. (Hold tight to this sentence, because I’m going to more or less dismiss it later on.) But I do wish that that outlet wasn’t this outlet. Upworthy is all over the place. People share links from it constantly, and I almost never have to look to see what site the links are from; the headlines give it away. Look at the examples above. I didn’t pick and choose…those are three side by side articles spotlighted on the front page of Upworthy as I write this post. Are those distinguishable in any way from the presentation of spam advertisements you’ll see on any given website? You know the ones I mean. “Insurance agents do not want you to know about this trick ...

Whew! I wanted to have a few new things ready to post this weekend, but that didn’t happen. For good reasons, though. It was a pretty awesome weekend. However there were two things I wanted to draw attention toward. In one case, it’s a friend trying to raise money for what looks to be a pretty cool passion project of his. In another case it’s not quite as happy a story. Of course, if you decide to help either, or both, or none, that’s entirely your choice. I’m not going to tell anyone to donate to anything, but if you find it in your heart to do so, I can promise you that these are two very deserving people who would appreciate it more than you realize. One Friend: Friend of the website and webmaster of Digitally Downloaded , Matt Sainsbury has set up a Kickstarter . He’s unhappy with the current state of games criticism, and hopes to rectify this in some small way with a nice, insightful, authoritative text that treats the medium with the artistic respect that ...

  ALF Reviews: “Mother and Child Reunion” (Season 1, Episode 13) So, some bad news has been brought to my attention. It turns out that the episodes of  ALF  that are on Hulu — the ones I’ve been watching — are the syndication cuts. At first this disappointed me, but then it made sense: they’re using the same edits that were mastered for the DVD releases, which themselves used syndication cuts because the budget did not allow them to dig back and remaster the originals. What does this mean? Well, in syndication episodes typically run shorter, in order to make room for more commercials. In the pre-DVD age, this was extremely annoying. I remember catching syndicated episodes of  The Simpsons  that cut out my favorite scenes and jokes. In addition, the folks responsible for editing a show for syndication may or may not pay any attention to the story, and are simply cutting things to get it as short as it needs to be. In the case of shows like  The Simpsons ...