Since 2016, I’ve been tracking most of the media I consume — what I read, watch, and listen to. (Not play, though. I don’t get through games fast enough to make them worth tracking.) Like a lot of my projects, this tracking has grown over time. I used to just keep a spreadsheet with a quick line listing title, author (or artist, etc.), date finished, and a 1 to 10 rating.

However, before long I found myself making the occasional note about what I thought — just a few words, one or two sentence fragments. Then I decided I wanted a little more precision in my ratings, so I expanded the rating number to one decimal place, similar to how I rate IF Competition games.

Right around the same time as I expanded the ratings, mid-2020, I began writing actual capsule reviews. (Pandemic free time may have been a factor here.) There were still plenty of sentence fragments, but I was consistently documenting a thought or two (or more) about each work. Over time, those reviews have grown a bit more polished and extensive, though they’re still never more than a paragraph or two.

For quite a while now, I’ve had the vague intention to start sharing those reviews on this blog, and today that intention crystallizes into action. Every Monday, I’ll post a batch of reviews, and keep at it until I’m caught up. Those early one-line logs aren’t all that interesting or useful to anyone but me (for all I know, none of this is interesting or useful to anyone but me, but I’m quite certain that’s the case for those one-liners), so I’ve decided somewhat arbitrarily to start the sharing at the point I began using the decimal version of my ratings, mid-2020.

I’ll start with book reviews, beginning in 2020 and going up through 2025. Then I’ll do the same for movies, music, and TV, until I’ve shared all those reviews here. After that point, I’ll just post the new ones at year-end, similar to what I do with my music mixes. They may not arrive exactly on time, as I tend to catch up with the writing in fits and starts, as time allows.

Once I have a reasonable catalog in place, I intend to make a new page heading for these posts, that makes the reviews easily findable and sortable. But first, the reviews themselves!