quick links

Preface

The obvious disclaimer is that all of the above reviews include some degree of personal opinion, from which subjectivity inevitably presents itself. Test environments come into play as well—the monitors I use to watch movies may not accurately depict the colour grading sequence the director intended. The monitors (the other kind) I use to listen to music deemphasise bass. Even humidity affects how ink flows on paper. Needless to say, this has minimal impact on the actual review and should rightly be dismissed as ‘nerd shit’, but still detailed below are some of the measures I have taken to try abate this ‘problem’, as well as full transparency behind the numbers, letters, and other gizmos that I will use frequently.

More importantly, please recognise that my reviews are not meant to be read by people. These are not buyers’ guides, nor are they meant to be featured on rtings.com. A personal belief of mine is that reviews of media (take that as you will) are only relevant if the reviewer has the knowledge and ability to replicate, imitate, or otherwise create an entirely new product in the same class of the reviewed medium. Empathy alone is not enough to fully appreciate the processes behind creative endeavours, especially regarding personal or experimental content. Despite having dabbled in game development, music production, and drawing, I am not qualified to be a reviewer by my own standards.

Then what the hell is this?

They are collections for me to look back at. I’d say that these reviews tell you more about myself than anything being reviewed. I do not have to explain how media can influence and shape a person. How music can help manage emotions, or how films change your perspective on things. Let me just add that writing toys did that for me as well because I’m quirky and cool like that.

Does it not mean, then, that the attempts at sanitising these reviews of subjectivity are meaningless, or even detractory from the premise of your collection?

Yes.

The Media

I plan to rate and review video games, music, films and shows, webtoons, and tools. Each medium will have a different number of components, with a mix of scores and tiers. Every review will come with a writeup in addition to the ratings, to delve into my experience and justify some of the values I bestow upon it. I’ll try at least.

Video games, films, and shows are what you’d expect normal people to have opinions on.

Music almost did not make the cut due to it being almost entirely subjective and done to death by many, but it was a good opportunity to share some of the songs that I hold dear to my heart, and to shill my Last.fm profile.

Webtoons will likely be nugatory to everybody. I will review Korean works written in Korean, hosted on a Korean platform, in whatever language I feel like. Some of the more popular works have been translated on the foreign version of Naver Webtoon, but the translation quality have generally been disappointing in my experience. Do not expect to see many entries as I have convinced myself that it is not worth the effort. Some Japanese manga might also make it in.

Tools will mostly serve as a medium for discussing product design or marketing or other tangential topics, rather than a review of the product per se. This category first used to be stationery, hence the snarky remarks in the preface, and it was described as such:

Stationery is an interesting one. I sincerely hope nobody would read my stationery reviews, as I know they are going to be cringe as hell. On the other hand, this category might be the most entertaining, or maybe even most useful.

Books were not included in the list simply because I’m a failure of a human.

The Rating System

All five categories of my reviews will share a common rating system. My adamance on this makes my own life more difficult, as the rating system used now needs to be flexible for use with different types of media, in addition to being as coherent as possible.

Because I am not confident at making ethereal judgements to return comminuted rating values, a prominent goal of my rating system is to maintain minimal range and granularity. This has the added benefit of abating forms of bias and ambiguity. I sound like a snob because I am one.

Finally, every reviewed medium must have a place where it belongs on the scale(s).

With this information, we have some objectives for our rating system to fulfil:

• Flexibility
• Coherence
• Minimal range
• Minimal granularity
• Comprehensiveness

Turning these abstract concepts into tangible structures and values is not too difficult:

• Usage of both scores and tiers
• Ensuring equal granularity across scores and tiers
• Limiting values from 0 to 5
• Limiting values to integers
• Encompassing all of the following: Exemplary, Good, Above average, Below average, Bad, and Abysmal.

An issue with this system is that I cannot make an impartial decision, instead being forced to take a stand. Using a scale of 1 to 5 would mean 3/5 = 60% would be considered ‘average’ position-wise, which is unintuitive. By introducing 0, we have ourselves 6 values, but no integer median.

In fact, for a scale of a to b, the proportional value only aligns with the percentile (positional average) when a = 0 and b = 2n, such that there are 2n+1 steps. However, even numbers below 10 feel awkward and 10 was too large for my taste.

Something like a Likert scale also encounters the same issue, where you run into a dilemma of whether your lowest rating should warrant a 0% or some positive value.

Scores (aka points)

Tiers (aka grades)

Stars

Overall Rating

The overall rating is calculated as below:

[90*Σ(scores)/5n + 100*Σ(tiers)/5n]/2 + 3*stars − 9*(no. of 0’s) − 10*(no. of F's)

…which should give us a nice integer somewhere in the ballpark of 0–100.*

For example, a pen with a perfect comfort score of 5, A-tier durability, and two value stars will get a rating of 91. A pencil with a comfort score of 3, B-tier durability and one value star will get 60, while a highlighter with a comfort score of 1, C-tier durability and no value stars will only deserve 19.

I would likely get a negative rating.

Note that this means scores and tiers are distributed to be 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20%, and 0% rather than 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%. Again, 3 out of 5 and B-tiers should mean above average, so this is by design.

*The maximum rating possible is 104, while the minimum is technically infinite.

FAQ:

What is the overall rating?

The overall rating should be used to compare multiple reviewed items with one another and serves as a quick reminder to someone who has already read the full review. It is not an absolute measure of any quality.

Why are scores worth 10% less than tiers?

I use scores for value judgements, while tiers are generally reserved for objective evaluation. My personal opinion loses worth by virtue of it being mine. Should the number (n) of scores and tiers be different, scores will have 100% weightage, as well as a modified formula to obtain a more accurate average.

Why not use a multiplier of 91 each so you get a clean 100 max?

Integers.

What’s with the negative penalty for 0 or F?

Scores used to be on a 1–5 scale, and 1 being the lowest, I thought it did not deserve to contribute to the overall rating. The penalty was essentially to force a 0, 2, 3, 4, 5 system (or S, A, B, C, F). This was rather unintuitive and was later changed, but I decided to keep the penalty regardless.