Noiseless Chatter Archive

Ladies and gentlemen: we did it. Featuring: “Mario is Missing!” by R J Burgess “Balloon Fight,” by Lucas Hale “Ring King,” by Robert Holt “Kirby’s Adventure,” by Chris Gomez “Tetris,” by Philip J Reed It will be out this week, as part of a name-your-own-price bundle from Groupees. I’ll post the information as soon as I have it, but for now I wanted to take a moment to thank everybody involved with this. When the opportunity to work with Groupees came about, it was a bit of a dream come true. It was also seemingly impossible. I’d have to put together an entire unique fiction anthology in under a week. Thankfully, I was not alone. In spite of the insanely tight turnaround time, Sindi Johnson provided another gorgeous cover (pictured above). In addition to his job, daily webcomic, and the work he’s doing for the main volume of The Lost Worlds of Power , Ron DelVillano provided illustrations for all of these stories. Co-editor James Lawless stepped in to help me pr...

Every week until the release of The Lost Worlds of Power, one author selected for inclusion will be given the floor. I’ve asked them to talk about themselves, their approach to the project, and anything else they’d like to say up front. I’ve also asked them to avoid spoilers, so have no fear of those. Anyway, week five: Jerod Mackert, author of “Yo! Noid.” Hi, guys. I am the author of what I sincerely hope is the longest Noid fanfiction ever written. I’m so, so very sorry. This is the first thing that I’ve ever had published in any capacity, which is pretty exciting. I’ve been writing ever since I had my trusty journal in high school, and I spent most of my college years working on (now defunct) websites with my friends, but a career in engineering made it kind of hard to keep up with writing in general. Lately I’ve been trying to get back into it, since I’ve missed the outlet that it provided me, and when I saw the call for submissions, I was immediately interested in jo...

So, first things first…I really, really didn’t want to miss posting ALF this week. In fact, I have the notes and screenshots all ready to go, but I haven’t had time to sit and write it. My bad. It will return next week, and continue uninterrupted from there. But something warranted an interruption, I felt, and I hope you’ll agree. Ready? The Lost Worlds of Power is getting a second volume! …but it’s not volume two. In fact, it’s going to come out before the main volume. Like, next week. Yeah! What happened is this: Groupees was interested in featuring The Lost Worlds of Power in an upcoming bundle. Unfortunately, there was no way the book would be ready by then. So we emailed back and forth, and ended up deciding that I would provide another, exclusive volume to Groupees, which could be ready by next week. So this isn’t one volume and a sequel, or anything like that. The original volume is still coming, more or less on schedule. It’s just that now there wil...

Every week until the release of The Lost Worlds of Power, one author selected for inclusion will be given the floor. I’ve asked them to talk about themselves, their approach to the project, and anything else they’d like to say up front. I’ve also asked them to avoid spoilers, so have no fear of those. Anyway, week four: Samuel Clementine, author of “The California Raisins: The Grape Escape.” Every once in a while, a person will wake up and realize that if they died tomorrow, they would leave nothing behind. It was a realization that struck me around the same time Philip was conceiving the idea of Lost Worlds of Power , so it stood to reason the only way to break out of this existential funk was to write a novel about the California Raisins. Before I began writing I wasn’t sure I’d have anything people were interested in hearing. The only thing I can recall writing was a short story entitled “The Farmer and His Wife Go to the City” back when I was in the first grade. I don’...

  ALF Reviews: “Somewhere Over the Rerun” (season 2, episode 2) First things first: this episode’s title is actually “Somewhere Over the Rerun (aka The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island).” WordPress will only display a title of so many characters, though, so I skipped the parenthetical addendum. NOISELESS CHATTER TRIVIA Second things second: I definitely remember this episode from when I was a kid, but watching it now makes me realize how little I remembered. I knew that ALF went to Gilligan’s Island…and that was about it. Considering the fact that he’s only there for around three or four scenes, I think that says a lot about how memorable  ALF  really is. We open with ALF drilling holes into coconuts and speaking some vaguely Hawaiian gibberish. This is because he’s preparing himself for some event television: a rerun of  Gilligan’s Island . ALF is obsessed with the show, which is the very first thing he and I have in common. Well, I’m not obsessed with  Gilligan’s I...

Every week until the release of The Lost Worlds of Power, one author selected for inclusion will be given the floor. I’ve asked them to talk about themselves, their approach to the project, and anything else they’d like to say up front. I’ve also asked them to avoid spoilers, so have no fear of those. Anyway, week three: Matthew McKinley, author of “California Games.” Hello, my name is Matthew. I’m a 6’2″, 29-year-old Caucasian male and my favorite color is light green. By day I work with digital libraries and archives, making sure all sorts of important digital stuff doesn’t just go poof, and by night I play various stringed instruments and watch far too much Netflix. I heard about this bizarre challenge via the electronic annals of the Gamelogical Society (recently re-transmogrified to The A.V. Club Games) and, over the course of 24 hours, mentally steeled myself for the task of writing a submission. I’ve always loved words but have roughly the attention span and sel...

A few weeks ago, when I finished my reviews of season one, I opened the floor to donations to buy the ALF Complete Set of German Funfun. The reason was that this set, as far as I could tell, was the only one that contained uncut episodes, and I thought it might be a little more fair to the show to review those versions moving forward. Of course, I didn’t actually expect there to be much interest, but there were four brave little toasters who pitched in: – Casey Roberson – Eric Lemoine – Alessandro Arzilli – Kevin Loy A fifth asked if he could send me a donation through the post. Nothing’s come through yet, but if it does I’ll be sure to thank him as well. Between those four, nearly the entire cost of the box set was covered. I was happy to pitch in the rest, and, as you saw from my review of “Working My Way Back to You,” it did indeed arrive in time for me to cover season two. So, as a way of saying thanks, I figured I’d do a little mini-review of the physical ...