Noiseless Chatter Archive

  ALF Reviews: “Tequila” (season 2, episode 23) I’d really hoped to make it through the end of season two before “needing” another break, so I’m more than a little bummed that last week was interrupted by an unexpected outage. As I mentioned in my previous post, the site went down because I had more traffic in October than my service plan allowed for. That’s not to say it’s never been higher (my “Ozymandias” review of  Breaking Bad  is probably destined to be my all-time most visited post), but taking a look at Google Analytics, I see that the average number of visits per day has about tripled from this time last year. Over the course of a month, that adds up, and I ended up exceeding my bandwidth as a result. Mysterious commenter / antagonist  E[X]  suggested that if I post my screenshots in .jpg format, they’d eat up less bandwidth. And he’s right. (That adds up, too, unquestionably.) But…I don’t know. .jpgs always look lousy to me. I’ll post the first screens...

I spent Tuesday night with some friends. They may be moving to Germany. I may be able to count the number of times I’ll see them again on one hand. It was a fun night. I came home late. Tired, but not enough to sleep. So I went onto 4chan. No, I’m not linking to it. Nor will I include any pictures. Because during a night of aimless browsing — the very last context I’d expect — I witnessed a murder. An actual murder. This is not a metaphor. This is not a cutesy way of making a point. There was a woman who was murdered and I was there to see it. I’ll explain, but at the same time I’m not sure how much I can explain. 4chan has a reputation, of course. But I know people who use it, and enjoy it. I think you need to go into the site knowing you’re going to hear a lot of inflated, ridiculous talk. It goes without saying that that talk will focus around subjects that polite conversations do not. You can come up with your own examples. I don’t need to supply them. ...

I’ve opened up, a bit , about some of the emotional struggles I’ve faced. What I’m not sure I’ve opened up about yet — and what actually has bearing on what happened here at the end of October — is the fact that I take medication. Which makes me crazy. Right? I mean, I’m not in pain. I don’t have cancer. Is it fair of me to just pop a pill and gloss over the hard times when everybody else has to deal with their problems like an adult? These are the kinds of things people assume. They must. Otherwise people like myself would be a lot more open about the fact that we take the medication we do. Somebody can mention openly that they take Percocet — a very addictive and frequently abused painkiller — because they sustained a physical injury. Very few people would begrudge them this escape from their pain. In fact, they’d be likely to make allowances for fluctuations in that person’s behavior. They are, after all, on drugs. Mention that you take an antidepressant, ...

Regular visitors of this site (I like to call them Chatterholes) will no doubt have noticed that THIS SITE CEASED TO EXIST. What happened? Well, something very good: October saw the most traffic this site has ever had! Unfortunately that traffic exceeded the agreement I had with my webhost, so Noiseless Chatter (I like to call it Chatterhole Central) was taken offline with a cryptic error message that told nobody anything. This happened while I was in a hotel room in Chicago, unable to deal with it and without any of my billing information. So it was down for a few days…right before I was supposed to launch The Lost Worlds of Power. I’m back up, now. To save time and heartache, I upgraded my hosting package. That’s more money, which means I may revisit the idea of advertising. Or maybe I’ll just put a PayPal button somewhere and those who feel inclined can donate. But as of right now, I haven’t given it much thought. We’ll see. I’m open to ideas. As much as I lo...

  ALF Reviews: “I’m Your Puppet” (season 2, episode 22) When I started doing these reviews, each one took me about…two hours or so to write. (Not counting the viewing time of the episode, of course, but that’s negligible.) Now they take several days’ worth of on-and-off work. Which, frankly, is insane. I think, however, that’s because I’ve allowed my writing process to evolve into something very inefficient. Even though my reviews are better now than they were then (feel free to disagree…), I think that the change in writing process is coincidental, and is not responsible for any bump in quality. The improvement is far more likely to be down to my expanded mindset, and increased willingness to engage with the material. So, what I’m doing with this review is going back to my old writing process. If you think this installment represents a major step backward in quality, let me know. Hopefully you won’t even notice. Or wouldn’t have if I didn’t draw your attention directly to it OOPS ...