News and Media | Jessica Grixti Stanley

Here’s Why You Should Be Rating Books Less Than Five Stars

Posted on March 31 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

I rarely rate books five stars.

“What?”

“Oh no! That must mean you hate books!“

“You don’t support the author, you heartless monster!”

“Think about the Almighty Algorithm™“

“Think about the writers!”

Apparently, there’s been (ongoing) discourse on Book Twitter about whether readers should be allowed to rate books less than five stars.

I am going to say this one more time for the writers in the back:

YOU DO NOT GET TO DICTATE REVIEWERS' FEELINGS TOWARDS A BOOK. YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO A RATING OF ANY LEVEL.

Also, 3 is not negative?? On Goodreads it literally says 3 stars = 'I liked it'.

Just, what the heck. pic.twitter.com/zsNQdt2D0t
— Indie Book Spotlight (@BookSpotlight) March 25, 2023

Perhaps I’m surprised there are still people on Twitter after the Musk takeover, but I stumbled across the blog post Reviewing and rating books: A deeply personal act by Krystal Gagen, and forgot just how passionate terminal Twitter users get about their interests. Gagen’s post was great reading. You should check it out.

As a Creative, You Should Be Very Much Against the Subscription Model of the Modern Internet

Posted on October 31 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

After a decade writing this blog, and three domain name changes, sometimes it’s difficult to come up with decent blog post ideas that don’t bore the socks off readers and prospective readers.

So why not talk today about how shit of a company Adobe is, and why you should be trying your best to get away from companies and businesses that are doing more harm than good to your physical and mental wellbeing?

First: Why Adobe?

They’re definitely not the worst of the bunch, but they definitely draw the ire of anyone who cares about being more than just an ATM for those desperate late-stage capitalists hell-bent on sucking you dry of everything you hold most dear.

I’ve been reading a lot of audiobooks with Borrowbox this year—15 audiobooks, to be precise. More books than I usually read in any format in a whole year. So I discovered a new-release on my TBR was on Borrowbox, but it was only in ebook format. No problem, I thought. I’ll convert it over to my Kindle and read it that way. Now here’s where Adobe comes in. To convert an ebook from Borrowbox over to my Kindle, you need an app/software known as Adobe Digital Editions. And that’s where I went…Fuck it. The negative reviews on the App Store, their closed-source software, their domination over the creative industry. I noped out of it and decided I’m gonna have to read Fiona Barton in dark mode and risk even more deterioration to my already average eyesight.

Fiction Writing and Mental Health Stigmatisation

Posted on April 30, 2022 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

You’re crazy. Delusional. Mad. Insane. Nuts. Psychotic. Loony. Off your meds. Around the twist. Freak. Psycho. Weirdo. Schizo. Mental.

Other.

We like to think we’ve progressed as a society. In centuries past, humanity liked to just lock away anyone who deviated from the norm, preferring to pretend they didn’t exist. Insane asylums and travelling circuses were where you’d find the humans too “delusional” for regular society. The Nazis aimed to eradicate who they perceived as deplorable and below the rest of humanity, with Josef Mengele, among many in his rank, attempting to normalise eugenics and wipe out what they perceived as defective human beings.

Creative spheres are typically full of progressive people, and literary awards are chock-full of stories about struggle in the human condition, about overcoming adversity and beating the odds. BookTube, BookTok and all the other literature-focused parts of the internet, are always sharing books and entertainment that attempt to fix some of the frankly shocking portrayals of mental illness. In the last few decades, a wealth of literature has come out trying to help with the dismal public awareness of both physical and mental health. Far from the days of WWI vets hiding their PTSD in a locked box and suppressing their emotions, newer generations (millennials and Gen Z) are supposedly more open with mental health and mental illness, proudly proclaiming their diagnoses in their Twitter bios and claiming to be all about empathy and compassion.

Are You Distracted?

Posted on August 31, 2021 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

*Can you believe the pictures that exist on Pixabay? I promise I’m not distracting you…or maybe I am?*

Everything is trying to take away our precious time.

The internet and social media. Family and friends. Dishes. Lunch. Bills. That delicious tub of boysenberry ice cream in the freezer. The book that just arrived in your mailbox. The books in your bookshelf, calling your name, begging Read me! Read me! in an insolently nasal accent. Work. Zoom sessions. Grocery shopping. Perusing the latest news that You Season 3 will be out in October and predicting what will happen on Twitter and Reddit and random messageboards and to the neighbourhood bin chicken. When our time is all we’ve got, what happens when we’ve got none left to spare?

Back in May, I blogged about our deteriorating ability to focus in the current attention economy. The attention economy being “the business model of keeping our eyes glued to the specific apps and sites maintained by those with vested interests who do not care about our health and wellbeing” is one of the many things in life distracting us from using our time the way we want to, in our best interests.

Father, I Cannot Click the Book: Baby Boomers, Millennials, and the “Lost Habit” of Reading

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

The younger generation. Can you believe them? They don’t even know what a book is. These Millennial snowflakes will see a goddamn book—paper of glorious smell and touch and taste—and they will try to click the book.

Father, I cannot click the book, they likely say, looking utterly bewildered at this ye olde extinct relic of the olden days.

Is it an iPad? Where is a joystick? Where are the pocket monster creatures? What do I plug it into? Where do the batteries go? How do I turn it on?

The wisened member of the Older Generation knows better. They grew up with the three R’s—reading, riting and rithmetic—so obviously this repository of wisdom and genius and pure big brained 1000 IQ knowledge, will be able to point the dumb, gadgets ‘n gizmos obsessed child in the right direction. After all, absolutely no child has read a book since I was a child. Get off my lawn!

You Shouldn’t Be Judging Books By Their Movies

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

An anonymous person, commonly quoted as J.W, Eagan, told us you should never judge a book by its movie. They have to be right, don’t they? A terrible movie will probably be based off a great book! Books are beautiful precious things that can tell a story with only your imagination to keep it thriving. The book is always better than the movie! How can a movie, which involves like barely any effort, be the same as a novel? The film is barely ever faithful, removes important characters (Peeves the Poltergeist, and Madge from The Hunger Games are the most important characters ever!!), and adds useless subplots that f*** up the beauty and the imagination. Not to mention the actors never look like who I imagined! Grr!

Or not. Books don’t have anything that immediately make them greater than films or even video games. There’s bad books. I’ve read plenty of them in my time. I can’t stand most straight romances except a bunch of my mum’s ones from the ’80s (Little Sister, The Popularity Plan) and those from my trashy YA stage in early high school (South Beach). I still remember the awful books I read in high school: Bypass by Michael McGirr and Deadly, Unna by Phillip Gwynne, that almost turned me off reading for life. I got through Fifty Shades of Grey and seven chapters of Fifty Shades Darker. Those are not good books. The later, ghostwritten Vampire Diaries books make me weep for the future of fiction. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child…well, let’s not go there. Books, by virtue of being books, aren’t necessarily the greatest things ever. The same for movie aficionados, and video game enthusiasts. There’s good and bad.

Should we be judging a book by its movie? Well, of course not. I think that speaks for itself. They’re completely different mediums, interpreted in different ways. See: The Shining by Stephen King, and The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Shocking revelation: I dislike both of them. In this case, Stephen King really loathes Kubrick’s interpretation of The Shining, as it’s completely different to what he wanted. I can’t be surprised: I don’t think I’ve found a single faithfully adapted Stephen King movie. Both have a completely different vibe, and that’s because it’s by two different people who have different visions for the story. The film of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, has a bit of an indie, hipster vibe about it, which the book doesn’t. Popular opinion says the Azkaban film is the greatest one, better than the book. Others like me, prefer the Christopher Columbus vibe of the first two, and wished there’d been a mixture between Columbus’s interpretation, and the forgettable dude who directed Goblet of Fire.

Adapting from a book to movie can be quite difficult. Making it as faithful to the book as possible is impossible, especially if it’s a long book like Harry Potter with a lot of plot. Except if you’re Stephen Chbosky. Alternatively, the Twilight Saga is like seventy-bajillion pages with little to no plot, and the films still managed to miss crucial plot details. In spite of all this, I thought I should go ahead and tell you some of the greatest film adaptations and some of the shittiest ones. Because we all know there are great books and terrible books, just like there are amazing films and God-awful films:

You Won’t Read This Blog Post

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

According to studies, around 60-80% of you never read past the headline. That’s right, this one included. Congrats if you read past the aptly titled You Won’t Read This Blog Post, ’cause you’re in the minority! You’re only slightly more common than the guesstimated 0.01% of people who read the iTunes terms and conditions, those poor, poor souls. I mean, I read the entire Copyright Act of 1968 once for a university assignment, and I don’t even do that.

So, um…hello, I guess? Wow, I actually only had enough content to fill out that one paragraph. Hey, well since you’re still reading this well into paragraph two, I guess you’re here for the long run. Sigh. I guess I’ll start with the article that I first thought of when looking into the topic of, well, Reading Past the Headline and Read[ing] This Blog Post. It was April Fools’ Day, and I was one of those fools that spent the day mindlessly scrolling down the mine of endless time-wasting, Facebook. That day in 2014, I switched between Facebook and Twitter and back to Facebook. Then a wild article caught my attention. These were the wild days in which I didn’t have AdBlocker and F.B Purity, so I immediately reacted—probably with rage or annoyance or something–when I saw this headline:

Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?

With imagined fury running through my veins, I read through the comments, as they, 100% of the time (unless comments are disabled) are a source of lolcowery, entertainment and humour. This one was predictable, with the obligatory slew of comments about millennials destroying society by partying with smashed avocado instead of buying houses; As a non-American, I knew ‘Muricans were always stupid; those “LOL Debbie this is so true” with attached Minions image; and more. The truth: I didn’t even click on the link until I read a comment that gave it all away. And I’m not the only one. You do it too.

The Downfall of the Modern Media

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Jessica Grixti Stanley

I was scrolling down my WordPress reader recently when I came across this YouTube video that appeared in The Conversation Room‘s blog post and it got me thinking about the state of the modern media, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration last month. Of course, Trump’s election win wasn’t the beginning, not even the catalyst, but it definitely awakened the truth to many people about the modern media. Far from the days of the eccentric, mostly honest, trenchcoat-wearing journalists of old, chewing on tobacco, and waiting for that early-morning call of “Extra, extra, read all about it!” from some overeager young boy—21st century media is a shadow of its former self, excuse the cliche.