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My dear and treasured friend Jude Jewel Jawahar mentioned liking this system that I use when we saw ghostbusters, so here is a post about it.
Basically, often, when rating stuff, people go on a single metric that runs from “terrible” to “excellent”, often in the form of (or in a way that tracks pretty neatly to) a 1-10 scale. It looks kind of like this*:
0-1 - terrible
2-4 - bad
5-6 -okay
7-8 - good
9-10 - excellent
Spirited Away is a great movie on like, every level, so it consistently gets something like “good” or “excellent” without a viewer having to weigh their judgement much. The last airbender movie is shit, so it’s not a hard decision to rate it “terrible”. but there are a lot of movies that have both good and bad aspects.
when this happens, people usually either: a) average them out and rate it toward the middle of the scale (“well, the sound mixing was bad, but the visuals were good, so I guess overall it’s okay”) or b) pick the value that was more extreme or that they care more about, and then apply that as the rating for the whole movie (“the cinematography was really good, but the storyline was terrible. it’s a terrible movie.”)
instead of doing this, I rate media (and food, and events, you can use it for anything) on two separate scales of goodness and badness. they look vaguely like this**:
excellent - really good - pretty good - kinda good - fine - okay - not very good - not good at all
just awful - really bad - pretty bad - kinda bad - not exactly bad - not bad at all
these measures do not cancel each other out. it is possible for something to be, simultaneously, really good and really bad. it’s also possible for something to be not good at all and not bad at all, or not very good and really bad, or kinda bad and pretty good, and both measures can be very real and relevant. for example, Homestuck is REALLY bad but also (no flames, please) really good, imo. being good doesn’t redeem it being bad, and being bad doesn’t cancel out it being good, they’re just both values that it has.
I like using these scales because I think it provides a more nuanced judgement with more information than a good-to-bad scale.
*some people rarely rate anything below a six unless it’s awful, some people won’t give anything above an eight unless it’s a masterpiece, I know, I know, everyone rates differently. I know.
** note: these are not necessarily exact, linear, or numerically measurable scales.
My dear and treasured friend Jude Jewel Jawahar mentioned liking this system that I use when we saw ghostbusters, so here is a post about it.
Basically, often, when rating stuff, people go on a single metric that runs from “terrible” to “excellent”, often in the form of (or in a way that tracks pretty neatly to) a 1-10 scale. It looks kind of like this*:
0-1 - terrible
2-4 - bad
5-6 -okay
7-8 - good
9-10 - excellent
Spirited Away is a great movie on like, every level, so it consistently gets something like “good” or “excellent” without a viewer having to weigh their judgement much. The last airbender movie is shit, so it’s not a hard decision to rate it “terrible”. but there are a lot of movies that have both good and bad aspects.
when this happens, people usually either: a) average them out and rate it toward the middle of the scale (“well, the sound mixing was bad, but the visuals were good, so I guess overall it’s okay”) or b) pick the value that was more extreme or that they care more about, and then apply that as the rating for the whole movie (“the cinematography was really good, but the storyline was terrible. it’s a terrible movie.”)
instead of doing this, I rate media (and food, and events, you can use it for anything) on two separate scales of goodness and badness. they look vaguely like this**:
excellent - really good - pretty good - kinda good - fine - okay - not very good - not good at all
just awful - really bad - pretty bad - kinda bad - not exactly bad - not bad at all
these measures do not cancel each other out. it is possible for something to be, simultaneously, really good and really bad. it’s also possible for something to be not good at all and not bad at all, or not very good and really bad, or kinda bad and pretty good, and both measures can be very real and relevant. for example, Homestuck is REALLY bad but also (no flames, please) really good, imo. being good doesn’t redeem it being bad, and being bad doesn’t cancel out it being good, they’re just both values that it has.
I like using these scales because I think it provides a more nuanced judgement with more information than a good-to-bad scale.
*some people rarely rate anything below a six unless it’s awful, some people won’t give anything above an eight unless it’s a masterpiece, I know, I know, everyone rates differently. I know.
** note: these are not necessarily exact, linear, or numerically measurable scales.
