I attempt to rate every piece of art I experience on the same 11-point scale from 0 to 5 inclusive. This page collates all the ratings. The specification for the score numbers is given below.
Score number specification
- 0.0: Actively harmful and really really bad, with zero artistic merit or interest.
- 0.5: Uninteresting, poorly conceived and terribly executed, not enjoyable at all.
- 1.0: Some interest, but it’s hard to find the good parts.
- 1.5: Might have a few well-done elements, but still held back in many ways.
- 2.0: Below average.
- 2.5: Average and safe. Not fascinating and I probably won’t come back to it, but worth experiencing.
- 3.0: Some real merit, displaying creätivity, skill and originality.
- 3.5: A serious amount of merit. Executed cleanly and has excellent consistency. Thoroughly enjoyable.
- 4.0: In the realm of excellence. The artist has made something quite special.
- 4.5: Goes above and beyond anything else in the field. Every aspect is near perfect.
- 5.0: Perfect, not in that it can’t be improved upon, but in that it truly masters everything it possibly could.
All music ratings here are additionally kept in sync with my rateyourmusic page.
Title | Genres |
---|
1000 gecs

The Joy of Motion

Selected Ambient Works 85–92

drukqs

Funeral

Favourite Worst Nightmare

Excess

Love’s Small Song

Atomizer

Songs About Fucking

Homogenic

For the First Time

Black Midi, New Road

Ants From Up There

Live at Bush Hall

Crow’s Perch

Talking Heads

Schlagenheim

ded sheeran (ed sheeran send) part 1

Sweater

Cavalcade

Hellfire

Fire of Unknown Origin

Amplifier Worship

Boris at Last -Feedbacker-

Amo

Clandestine

Ege Bamyası

Future Days

Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)

How to Leave Town

Teens of Style

Teens of Denial

how i’m feeling now

The Ape of Naples

Thunder Perfect Mind

Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude

The Inmost Light

I Have A Special Plan For This World

Sleep Has His House

Black Ships Eat the Sky

The Light Is Leaving Us All

You Won’t Get What You Want

I pirated this album and I strongly recommend you do too.
Sunbather

II

Kintsugi

Exmilitary

The Money Store

No Love Deep Web

****** on the Moon: The Powers That B Disc 1

Jenny Death: The Powers That B Disc 2

The Powers That B

Bottomless Pit

Year of the Snitch

Gmail and the Restraining Orders

Emergency & I

Endtroducing…

Morph the Cat

Stratosphere

Ende Neu

Silence Is Sexy

Alles wieder offen

Either / Or

Man Alive

Arc

Get to Heaven

A Fever Dream

RE-ANIMATOR

Raw Data Feel

My Teenage Dream Ended

Chumpfrey

Anatolia

Ultra Ego

LONG SEASON

宇宙 日本 世田谷 (Uchu Nippon Setagaya)

98.12.28 男達の別れ (98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare)

Lesson No. 1

The Ascension

Symphony Nos. 8 & 10 (the Mysteries)

F♯ A♯ ∞

Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

革命京劇 (Revolutionary Pekinese Opera) Ver.1.28

Deathconsciousness

III

Horse Jumper of Love

Understanding The Brobecks

Happiest Nuclear Winter

Goodnight, and Have a Pleasant Tomorrow

Violent Things

CHRISTMAS JAMBZ

Modern Day Cain

1981 Extended Play

RAZZMATAZZ

Joy as an Act of Resistance.

Speak to Me

Imagine Dragons

Hell and Silence

It’s Time

Night Visions

Smoke + Mirrors

Evolve

Unknown Pleasures

Veteran

All My Heroes Are Cornballs

LP!

Scaring the Hoes

僕がCDを出したら (Boku ga CD wo dashitara)

good kid, m.A.A.d city

To Pimp a Butterfly

In the Court of the Crimson King

Lizard

Islands

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

Red

Discipline

Lunatic

Egomaniac

1929, Pt. 1

Autobahn

Radio-Activität

Trans Europa Express

Die Mensch-Maschine

Computerwelt

Tour de France Soundtracks

Entre Poetas y Presos

LCD Soundsystem

45:33

Sound of Silver

This Is Happening

View-Monster

Nature Tapes

Spirit Phone

CALIGULA

SINNER GET READY

Blue Lines

Protection

Mezzanine

Madvillainy

California

loveless

The Black Parade

Quiet World

The Snowbringer Cult

Daughter of Darkness

Éons

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Pretty Hate Machine

The Downward Spiral

The Fragile

Wide Awake!

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Misadventures

Doolittle

Portrait

Dummy

Third

ZyouK

Qujaku

The Bends

OK Computer

Kid A

Amnesiac

Hail to the Thief

In Rainbows

A Moon Shaped Pool

Down Colorful Hill

Red House Painters [Rollercoaster]

Peasant

Royal Blood

How Did We Get So Dark?

Typhoons

Spiderland

Slint

We Like It Here

Sylva

Immigrance

Daydream Nation

Deep Down Happy

The Dial

Houseplants

Town Centre

Sludge / Broadcaster

Bright Green Field

Suede

Dog Man Star

Coming Up

Illinois

The Age of Adz

Carrie & Lowell

Suicide

Circus Mort

Swans

Filth

Cop

Young God

Greed

Time Is Money (Bastard) / Sealed in Skin

Holy Money

A Screw

Body to Body, Job to Job

Public Castration Is A Good Idea

Children of God

The Burning World

White Light from the Mouth of Infinity

Love of Life

The Great Annihilator

Soundtracks for the Blind

Die Tür ist zu

Swans Are Dead

The Body Lovers / The Body Haters

New Mother

How I Loved You

Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home

We Are Him

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head

The Seer

Not Here / Not Now

To Be Kind

The Gate

The Glowing Man

Deliquescence

leaving meaning.

Is There Really a Mind?

Talking Heads: ’77

More Songs About Buildings and Food

Fear of Music

Remain in Light

Speaking in Toungues

Stop Making Sense

Pet Sounds

Pornography

Disintegration

The Doors

L.A. Woman

OpaqueAge

shape of raw to come

Hot Fuss

Wonderful Wonderful

Pressure Machine

69 Love Songs

The Glow, Pt. 2

To be honest, I don’t understand the hype around this album. It’s not bad, but I don’t really feel anything from it. It just feels sorta cold and has some alright melodies.
Sex

Next

Unfold

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Is This It

Deceit

Lateralus

TNT

Twenty One Pilots

Regional at Best

Vessel

Blurryface

Trench

Helter Seltzer

Weezer [Blue Album]

Pinkerton

Wet Leg

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Phantom Pop

Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Knife Play

A Promise

Fabulous Muscles

Dear God, I Hate Myself

Girl With Basket of Fruit

Ignore Grief

あらためまして、はじめまして、ミドリです。 (Aratamemashite, hajimemashite, Midori desu.)

She Gets the Girl
Novel • 2022
Book Review (spoiler-free)
She Gets the Girl tells the story of a college romance between Alex, a girl with an alcoholic single mother and abusive girlfriend Natalie, and Molly, a sheltered girl with extreme social anxiety and a crush on another girl called Cora. I’ve just summarized the information you can glean from the first two chapters (out of 37), but it basically tells you everything you need to know about the story.
And that’s my overall impression, as well as thesis of this review: For what it is, it’s executed pretty well, but it lacks much inspiration and spark that really makes a story excel. Let’s dive into some more details.
Writing Style
The writing style is safe and simple. It’s well-written enough to avoid any linguistic faux pas that interrupt the flow, making it a comfortable and easy experiënce to read; but at the same time the simplicity means it frequently lacks interest in many scenes, often not really doïng the scenes themselves justice. Of course one could argue this is just a product of the genre, but aside from my gripes with the genre’s very existence, the story simply doesn’t garner enough compelling elements in other areäs to make it work, leaving a general impression of weakness.
Aside from that, there are also the blatant factual errors. These ones were upsetting to read — they didn’t impact the overall rating of the story, but certainly made me question if the authors were bothering to put any effort at all into actually writing this. In particular, there are two passages that stand out:
Sure. And I’m going to solve pi and become the youngest president of the United States.
This doesn’t make sense. Pi, assuming the authors are referring to the mathematical concept, is a number, not a problem, and so it is meaningless to say it can be “solved”. And this is not pedantry either; there is basically no mathematical interpretation of this that makes sense.
The sound of screaming toddlers and gossiping high school freshmen could probably break the sound barrier.
The sound barrier is a metaphorical barrier reached when an object is travelling near the speed of sound. Sound itself cannot break the sound barrier, because it is not an object; even if it was, there would be nothing special about it travelling at the speed of sound, because, you know, it is sound. Unless these toddlers and freshmen are somehow travelling at the speed of sound in the room, which seems quite unlikely, there is absolutely nothing breaking the sound barrier here.
This one, at least, does have a favourable interpretation that makes sense: it seems the authors just got confused and meant to say that they were as loud as a sonic boom. I still find it disappointing that they didn’t take the five seconds it takes to look this one up.
Plot
The plot is pretty standard for this kind of story, following a textbook three-act structure. You can probably guess 99% of what happens given the introduction I told you earliër — as stated, this book is not particularly adventurous in that regard nor does it hide much information — but I won’t spoil it nevertheless.
The first act follows the main characters (initially strangers) entering the same college — the “new world” — and exhibiting their personality traits within it, which of course leads up to their fateful encounter and the inciting incident for the second and third acts. There is not much to say here, other than the repetitiveness of the “main character has personality trait → main character exhibits personality trait” cycle; there are a few attempts to diversify this but unlike usual those Chekhov’s guns don’t end up firing.
Act two kicks off after Alex and Molly’s encounter, and is easily the story’s strongest act, which is lucky since it’s the longest one. It follows a fairly episodic structure with convincingly-written continuous character development of the main characters throughout; as a result of this and genuinely creätive events in the story, it maintains interest throughout. My only issue is its neglect of development in the subplots — they do pick up pace later on but are pretty static for now.
The third and final act drastically shifts the story, leading up to a couple climaxes that close the subplots and ultimately the conclusion. Unfortunately, while it’s very able to neatly tie up all the subplots it severely lacks in its ability to tie them together; so the plots, while satisfying in and of themselves, end up ultimately irrelevant to the main story and not that relevant to the characters’ main character arcs either. Then we have the ending itself, which I was pretty disappointed in as it falls into the lazy romance trope of ending on the first kiss scene. Especially considering how well-done the second act was, the lack of any recall to it made it feel as a whole quite underwhelming.
Pacing
The pacing of this story was overall excellent and this is something I have to give it much credit for. The flow of the events from one to the other felt very natural in accordance with the character’s moods and events occurring, and it managed to easily fit everything it wanted to tell without dragging in its short runtime. It’s an “A” from me here.
Characters
And now we move onto the characters, which is definitely one of my biggest points of criticism for the book. The main two characters are very well done, fully fleshed-out and interesting to follow, and the abusive girlfriend Natalie seems also developed at points. But beyond that, the majority of the characters have little to no development beyond a basic one-dimensional character trait and it can really hurt the story at times. Usually, these side-characters play a small role anyway, but it sticks out quite a lot in the third act when one of these underdeveloped characters ends up playing a more major role in the plot, and any scene with them in ends up feeling wooden and unnatural in a way the rest of the book was very good at avoiding.
It builds up in the end to leave an impression of quite a closed-off world: we have the main stories that the authors wanted to tell, and then a few random details scattered about that to push the plot along. It’s a short novel so I can forgive it for not having incredibly developed world-building, but when the story begins to feel more like abstract ideäs with a thin layer of paint placed over than a real subuniverse with internal logic and driving forces, it detracts from getting invested in any of the characters themselves.
Conclusion
This book is not bad, not my any measure. It’s definitely worth reading if you like the genre, but don’t go in expecting something that will broaden your horizons or leave you astounded at its beauty. It’s easy and very accessible, overall giving an impression of two authors who know what they’re doïng deciding to write a lesbian YA romance and then just goïng ahead and writing it. Apparently some people cried — I can’t speak for them — but I found that most of the parts were definitely enjoyable or at least served the story in some way. It has its flaws but they don’t run too deep nor do they interfere casual reading, so I’m happy to place this at a solid 2.5.
2DK、Gペン、目覚まし時計。 [2DK, G-pen, Alarm clock]

獣王星 [Jyu-Oh-Sei]


Parasite

Possibly in Michigan

Nightcrawler

Everything Everywhere All at Once

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Minions: The Rise of Gru

Nope

Thor: Love and Thunder

American Psycho

The Batman

魔法少女まどか★マギカ [Puella Magi Madoka★Magica]


キルラキル [Kill la Kill]


Steins;Gate


SeaBed
