Noiseless Chatter Archive

It might look like I don’t write much anymore, but that’s bullshit. In fact, just today my comprehensive, scholarly examination of sexual subtext in Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers went live over on Ranger Retrospective. You should check it out right here . Granted, some of this stuff you will have already known, but I wanted to provide a platform for intelligent discussion, and that sometimes requires a common sense recap. Ranger Retrospective is a weekly blog run by friend-of-the-website Samurai Karasu. Check it out if (when) you get bored of my rambling. It’s quite good, often funny, and nearly always insightful. I appreciate the opportunity he gave me to write this post while he’s off having breast reduction surgery, and I hope it provides you with a level of insight you didn’t have before.

  ALF Reviews: “Do You Believe in Magic?” (season 3, episode 12) So, we’re here at last. “Do You Believe in Magic?” is the episode of  ALF  that I remember best, and not for positive reasons: this is the episode that convinced me, even as a stupid kid, that this show was a bit shit. I didn’t have the most discerning tastes as a child. For every  Pee-Wee’s Playhouse  or  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory  that I fell in love with, I’m sure there were twenty films and television shows that I watched all the time, but which faded immediately from memory the moment they went away. Memory is the grand curator, after all. It does a pretty good job of retaining that which is worth retaining, and letting the vast mediocre majority slip away. I remember catching  The Great Muppet Caper  on television once when I was in high school. I hadn’t seen it for probably around ten years at that point. I was with my girlfriend. We watched a few minutes, and...

Just a few minutes ago (as I begin writing this) the first of three hour-long, free demos for Splatoon has ended. In a way, it’s odd to require everyone to participate in a demo at the same time (and god knows I’ve read enough grumbling about it elsewhere) but since Splatoon is a competitive shooter, it makes sense. It wouldn’t be much fun, or much of a sales pitch, if someone downloaded the demo just to sit around waiting around for other participants. It’s also true, though, that Nintendo used this as a pre-release stress test. It was a good marketing move to turn a server test into an interactive commercial, and they might get a sale out of me now that they wouldn’t have gotten before. But here’s what this Splatoon trial really accomplished: it reminded me that I miss Events. That’s captial-E Events. In a world where everything is available at the push of a button, we start to lose a sense of importance. We can have so many things at the instant we want them…...

  ALF Reviews: “Alone Again, Naturally” (season 3, episode 11) So, here’s an odd one. “Alone Again, Naturally” has me conflicted. To be totally honest, I’m not sure I’ll even know how I feel about it until I finish this review. (How’s that for incentive to keep reading?!) In most cases, it’s pretty basic, forgettable, baseline dumbassery. In other cases, it’s awful. But in other cases still, it’s really well-done. It’s a patchwork episode, to be sure. It feels as though there was the germ of a great idea here (indeed, I’ll argue that there was), but not much thought went into building a sturdy episode around it. As it stands…I don’t really know what I think. But I’m glad I watched it, and that’s a definite first for season three. It opens with Willie and Kate coming home from grocery shopping, while ALF bitches about how long it took them. So, yeah, forgive me for not immediately throwing my arms around this one. He starts grabbing food out of the shopping bags and eating it becaus...