A lot of my friends don't like star ratings for media, and I get it. It's inherently reductive, boiling down your complex and contextual mental-emotional response to a single linear scale that's often taken to approximate some absolute notion of "quality" that probably doesn't even exist in the first place. That's why I always make sure to write down actual textual thoughts about everything I review—to have a place to capture the nuance and context that's never going to be visible in a star rating.

At the same time, I always enjoy the intellectual exercise of comparing very different things across the same lines. Back in the day I did yearly "Natto Awards" among all the media I'd journaled that year, and I'd always have a lot of fun doing cross-media categories like "best horror" where movies, video games, and novels were all in competition with one another. It's not particularly fair as a way of determining quality, but that hardly matters when quality is fake anyway. What it does do is get you thinking about what it means to successfully inhabit a genre across media, and what each medium brings to its takes on the same ideas. I find star ratings do something similar, pushing me to really think about how much I appreciate a film or video game and to try to articulate why.

By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems "irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out that what I thought of a given film—or even whether I saw it at all—is roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my conscious mind! I actually care a lot about being able to remember how much I enjoyed something long after the fact, and star ratings are a major way I do that.

To that end, I also try to keep a pretty consistent rubric of what each rating means, so I don't shift too much over time. I do inevitably move somewhat and have to self-correct, of course. This post was itself inspired by me realizing that I've been giving out ★★★½ and to a lesser extent ★★★★ ratings too eagerly. So, as much as a reminder to myself as anything, here's my schema. It's presented as whole-star tiers only; I'll add a half-star if it's particularly enjoyable or well-made relative to its tier.

• ★ : Corresponds to the "#bad" tag on my old media journal. Actively poorly-made, offensive, and/or otherwise miserable, either with minimal redeeming qualities or simply irredeemably noxious.

• ★★ : Corresponds to the "#eh" tag on my old media journal. Did not vibe with me. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but nothing is outstandingly right either. Alternatively, there are things I liked about it but somewhat more things I disliked.

• ★★★ : Corresponds to the "#good" tag on my old media journal. Solidly enjoyable. Not a barn-burner, but definitely a good way to enjoy some art. I'd expect most media to land here, since I usually don't even hear about stuff that's worse than this.

• ★★★★ : Corresponds to the "#highly recommended" tag on my old media journal. Particularly good to excellent, the sorts of thing I would actively encourage people to seek out. This tier has the most variation—it can be anywhere from "I'd recommend this to people who vibe with the specific thing it's doing" to "everyone should probably experience this at least once".

• ★★★★★ : Also corresponds to the "#highly recommended" tag on my old media journal, but only the cream of the crop. This is a piece of media that connected with me on a deep level, or something that's manifestly firing on all cylinders and perfectly accomplishing what it set out to do. I don't give out a lot of these.

I think generally when I follow this rubric I tend to rate stuff a little lower than most people who are just vibing their stars, since ★★★ to me is solidly enjoyable and I think in general it's considered a bit of a pan. That's probably part of why I tend to swing away from it over time... but it's also a helpful reminder to take a step back and think about why I'm giving out the ratings that I am!