I’ve been planning on writing more reviews for a while now, but have been slowed by scale of the traditional format. I’ve decided to smash it down to its bare essence: the micro review. The concept is based on a mashup of Wired’s 6 word stories, and the many mini review sites out there. Long reviews tend to bore, and my usual ~500 word reviews are really difficult to write well (too large to be just a summary and too short to add much background or musing).

Mini review rules

It’s all about pressure differentials. Things either suck goodness or blow it, so I’ll stick to measuring that. Bombs measure suck and stars measure goodness. I don’t really like the traditional one-star-sucks measure: I don’t give stars to things that suck.

Using my scale of suck, for example, The Apprentice rates 3 bombs (it sucks, only entertaining in tiny doses) and America’s Next Top Model rates 5 bombs (absolute suckage).

Stars are good, so a 1 star thing has at least some redeeming feature. So a movie like Wayne’s World (the original) rates 3 stars in my books, and Wayne’s World 2 rates a solid 1 (so what if they were beating a dead horse, it was still funny).

And the reviews will be short. Usually the most useful words I say about something are the first few, like “wow, that sucked,” or “boy did that rule.” So I’ll keep it brief, adding only a smattering of other noise (mostly comparisons and such).

Shut up and review things already

I’ve moved the micro reviews to their own topic, which also appear in the link log.