Noiseless Chatter Archive

As the episode titles for season two rolled out, this is the one that interested me most. After all, it’s the name of a character we haven’t met yet. That’s intriguing. Is she a client? One of Saul’s eventual ex-wives? A friend or rival who makes a return and further upsets Jimmy’s stability? Whoever she is, she’s all at once important enough to have an episode named after her. That’s exciting. It suggests a force, a presence that means something to these characters and yet hasn’t even been mentioned before. Interestingly enough, I thought immediately of the female colleague of Jimmy’s we’d seen a few times already. If she had been given a name, I didn’t remember it. Perhaps she was Rebecca? Either way, something about that colleague stood out to me. I was able to tell that she was going to be important at some point. Something about her — whether it was some way the camera lingered on her or just an infectious confidence on the part of the actress — tipped me...

Hey everybody! Better Call Saul is back with a whole new season, and I’m here to… …wait. We’re still on season two? Crap. Yes, back when I was reviewing Better Call Saul in more or less real time, I was still reviewing ALF . And there was a new season of The Venture Bros. And…basically…one of those shows had to forgo coverage, if there was any way I was going to retain my sanity. I ended up choosing — more or less by circumstance — Better Call Saul . There was no right answer, really, but I’ve regretted it ever since. The show deserves respectful coverage. Prompt coverage may not be as important, but the problem is that I never caught back up with it. I moved on…and then didn’t go back. Until now, at least, when my Facebook wall is flooded with people crowing about Gus Fring being in season three and I figure, well, I might as well catch up with my spoilers. Part of the reason it was hard to go back, though, was this episode. Not that it was bad. It wasn’t. B...

  So maybe I could be a fly… Track List: Llama Eliza Cavern Poor Heart Stash Manteca Guelah Papyrus Magilla The Landlady Glide Tweezer The Mango Song Chalk Dust Torture Faht Catapult Tweezer Reprise Hello! It sure has been a while since I’ve done this. Forgive me; I’m still getting used to being able to write about things I like again. And, hey, A Picture of Nectar is a thing I like! My previous installments about Junta and Lawn Boy involved a lot of hesitation to embrace the albums completely, but here, for the first time in Phish’s studio history, the balance tips. For my money, A Picture of Nectar contains more to recommend it than to detract from it, and it’s the first sustained evidence that they could function as an effective studio band. (Their legacy as a live band was never in question.) Having said that, it’s also their most scattershot album to date. The band tried everything they could to find their studio footing once and for all…and it’s an ex...

Ah, the poor Wii U. It never did quite capture hearts the way nearly all of its predecessors did, and I’ll be the first to admit that it never came close to reaching its potential as a home console. Nintendo had the odd strategy of baffling consumers with it and then plopping it onto shelves in the hopes that it would somehow take care of itself. It never did. We know that. And just four short years later, Nintendo quietly killed it off, like a cast member it could never figure out how to integrate into plots. Last night the company hosted a live debut of The Switch, the Wii U’s replacement console. It’s officially dead, and it’s never coming back. But there is one small benefit that comes from a console with such a short lifespan: it’s pretty easy to pinpoint its highs. And because it struggled for releases I can honestly say that I’ve played an uncommonly high percentage of games available for the system. As such, I’d like to present to you the ultimate top 10. ...

Some time ago I picked up Tales of Zestiria from a PSN sale. It was an impulse buy; basically it was priced very low and I’d vaguely remembered hearing good things about the larger series. I didn’t, I hasten to add, pick it up because I had any specific interest in it or time to play it. It sat on my home screen, waiting for me to give it a try, wondering if I’d really play Spelunky atrociously for the thousandth time again instead. At one point I did try it. I didn’t play for very long…just long enough to start to feel overwhelmed by the battle system. I figured I’d pick it up again, eventually, when I had the patience to really learn it. And I didn’t touch it again for ages. I was intimidated by what I felt to be a needlessly complicated set of controls. I didn’t abandon the game, but I definitely decided I didn’t have the time to dig into it just yet. Video games occupy a pretty interesting position in entertainment media, in the sense that gamers don’t reall...

So ends everyone’s favorite year, ever. I don’t think anyone within my circle of friends — real life friends and online friends alike — made it out totally unscathed, but that’s what comes with surrounding yourself people who still have shreds of moral decency, I guess. The point is: we made it through the arbitrary stretch we’ll all look back on as “2016,” probably while rolling our eyes or making a sour face or something. It was a rough year, but I don’t need to tell anybody else that. And as we look forward to one of uncertainty (unless you’re one of my readers who is already on January 1, in which case it’s probably at least a little more certain)…this blog’s future follows suit. No, I’m not shutting it down. (TOO BAD.) But my longest, most consistent project ended this year. I have a few other balls in the air, and some ideas, but it’s going to come down to where (and when) the inspiration finds me. I don’t have a specific direction right now. I do plan on r...

Hey. I’ll be back with my typical year-end post, but for now: Merry Christmas, if you celebrate that. If you don’t, happy December 25. Thank you for reading, and for tolerating my wallowing in literacy this holiday season. I deeply enjoyed writing these. It was…good for me, I think. It was a chance to just write. Not to worry. Not to be anxious. Not even to think very hard. These are books (or sometimes authors) that already mean a lot to me. I knew what I wanted to say. I sat down and said it. And that helped me a lot to get back into the habit of writing…something that, to be honest, has been difficult for me lately. Having a daily commitment was good as well. Without that…I can’t imagine I’d have done much of anything. So thank you. I needed this. I hope you got something from it as well. If you’re interested in the full list, or just want to revisit any previous entries from my advent feature, have at it: Day 1: Catch-22 Day 2: Blindness Day 3: Lord ...