One of the ways that I use this website is to review books, movies, radio shows, and other media that I consume. You can visit all of my media reviews at this page, or you can use one of the following taxonomies to navigate reviews:
- The Media taxonomy separates out reviews by what kind of media I’m reviewing. Some of these (e.g., “book” vs. “tv”) are mutually exclusive, but I also keep track of “submedia” within books (e.g., comics within books, bande dessinée within comics, etc.).
- The Titles taxonomy notes the name of all of the different works that I’ve reviewed (and also indicates which I’ve reviewed multiple times!); clicking on a title will take you to all of the reviews for media with that title.
- The Creators taxonomy will show you which writers and other artists show up the most often in my media consumption—and let you find all my reviews associated with a particular creator. I am too lazy (and, frankly, disinterested) to keep track of actors, directors, writers, or showrunners in TV or cinema, though, so it’s mostly limited to books and radio shows.
- The Series taxonomy organizes reviews by the series that a specific book, tv season, radio show, etc. falls under. For heavily serialized media, this can be more useful for navigation, since titles there are often unindicative (And His Amazing Friends really only makes sense if you already know it’s a Spider-Man comic)—or entirely absent (like for individual seasons of a TV series).
- The Franchise taxonomy is useful for finding reviews that are related to each other at a larger—or more ambiguous—scale than a series.
- The Ratings taxonomy doesn’t seem very useful to me, but I built it anyway. You can use it to see the balance of the ratings I give on a scale of 1-5 (I’m a pretty positive reviewer!), or to zero in on my most favorite or least favorite media, I guess.
A couple of other notes:
- As I’ve hinted at above, each top-level taxonomy page is sorted from most-used to least-used term, and then alphabetically among terms used the same number of times. I like this for showing which books I’ve read most often, which creators I keep coming back to, what kind of media I consume most of, etc. However, if you’re looking for a specific term within the taxonomy and they aren’t near the top of the list, it may be easier for you to search on the page than to scroll all the way down.
- Within each review post, the related terms are clickable, so you can bring up all of my other reviews associated with a creator, franchise, series, or medium from that post (or find out that I only have one review associated with that term!). This was a lot of fun to build, so hopefully it’s also actually useful to someone at some point.