Somebody noticed that yesterday’s post about The Rings of Power did not include a star rating. Most of the time when it appears that I have forgotten something, it’s because I’ve forgotten something, but this was deliberate. It just feels a bit too arbitrary. It always has, really, but I’ve done it anyway because it’s what people expect.

Hopefully my words convey whether I like something or not. Star ratings are a difficult thing to do: while not deliberate, it’s very hard to avoid making them relative to the current environment. A five-star rating in 2022 is relative to other stuff coming out in 2022. But then somebody will say “how can you give this thing five stars when you only gave X four stars?” And maybe it’s because X came out twenty years ago, or because I was in a bad mood on that day, or whatever. “You said this is the best thing the composer’s done since 2005 but you gave some album a high rating in 2014!” Yes, I probably did. That’s why the words are more important than the stars.

And then there’s the perennial problem: how to write something that’s clearly done very well, does whatever job it was intended to do perfectly, but happens to just be something I don’t particularly like? I’m only giving opinions here so it should clearly be reflective of how much I like it, but then just dropping two stars against what has for somebody been a labour of love and has achieved every objective they set out for it to achieve – doesn’t really seem fair. Explaining why it doesn’t float my boat seems fair enough though.

(Having said all that – if you look hard enough, you’ll still find the stars. You don’t need a telescope to view them, but you do need to click somewhere else in the site.)