the A or FAIL conundrum...

This is just so seriously fucked up, some interesting reading, and a historical synopsis you might find intriguing.

I just finished "Knight's Cross" by Cristine Kling which is a pretty good book this morning and, as usual, my Kindle asked me to rate it and I gave it four stars. I sorta/kinda feel a little guilty about that and it got me thinking...

For me, if you have a scale of one to five stars, one star is going to be an awful book and, by contrast, a five star book is going to have to be awesome work of art and life changing. So in my view of four stars for a genre adventure novel is actually very high praise.

So, why do I feel guilty?

I think part of it is that, for what seems like the majority, there seems to be no middle ground anymore. Something is either AWESOME or it's CRAP and there is simply no real middle ground any longer.

You see it a lot in the way people talk about boats and gear. People need to have the BEST and it would seem that if it is not THE BEST it must be THE WORST which is very flawed thinking process and tends to give me a headache when I encounter it. I bet this has a lot to do with the reason I seem to eat aspirin like they were peanuts.

It gets worse though. A few weeks ago I bought something on eBay which I almost did not because in the description of the product and suchlike the seller pretty much demanded/threatened that there would be hell to pay if you did not leave positive feedback and give him five stars if you were to buy from him. Which, to my mind, calls into question all that glowing feedback since they could simply be in preemptive self-defense as leaving a less than awesome feedback just might be answered by a negative review of you the buyer in return.

Personally, I read reviews to get an idea of whether something is worthwhile or not but of late with no apparent benchmarks in place it's nigh on impossible to make sense of things. Made even worse by the fact that, for instance, the Amazon five star rating system is not so much good or bad but good or better. "Stars" were always an attaboy back in my elementary school days when we were were rewarded with gold and silver stars (not that I recall ever getting a whole bunch of gold stars for my penmanship or good work habits). Maybe what they should do is add some negative ratings (one to five piles of crap?) to the mix to make for a more reality based scenario.

So, about "Knight's Cross" in my personal scale I'll give it an eight as it had a good beat, kept me turning pages, and was easy to dance to...

Need I say more?

Listening to Brooke Waggoner

So it goes...