Welcome!

Greetings! So glad you decided to visit my reviews blog. Tiny bit of background before I get to the how-I-rate portion of this message. I used to post to a LiveJournal community with other review bloggers (like Andy the Saint) that was peppered with top-5 lists on pop culture. With that group sadly abandoned, I decided to move my output here. Everything is retro dated to its original post date on LiveJournal. You can access it all from the handy indexes on the left side of this window.

The crux of my review process is being unapologetic about how entertaining I find something. Poop jokes can outrank a war story if the former kept me watching. Rather than assign things a score based on the weight of merit-based sub-categories, I like to compare my subjects against media of a similar type. Movies tend to fall on a number line of "what would I rather see?" within the same genre. Sure, acting skill and technical matters get mentioned, but for the most part, scores reflect my personal taste on a knee-jerk level. I only took one film course in my college career. My reviews started as an "everyman" venture. I'm not an art critic; I want to tell you what I like.

Ratings here are out of five stars, in quarter-star increments. Although the best frame of reference for how a movie stacks up is to see how I rate other movies, I've attempted a field guide that describes some of my numbers.

Games are rated on the basis of "what would I rather play?" BoardGameGeek.com has a wonderful 1-to-10 scale that I use to rate games of all kinds (detailed here). With more storyline-based games, I try to give a definitive score based on going through once.

TV series are rated almost the same way as games, as I try to stack up what show I would rather watch. Simply substitute all language in the board game scale to make it apply for television. For entire seasons, I give each episode a thumbs up, thumbs in the middle, or thumbs down. I use the average of those judgments to score the entire season, with DVD extras and other such factors assisting me with rounding. Albums work the same way. Each song gets the thumb, with my opinions on the flow of the record as a whole helping me round up or down.

That's it. Expect reviews of anything and everything, from any time period, as I enjoy it. Let me know what you'd like to see. And feel free to comment!