I mentioned in a prior post that I’d noticed the report cards and the grades were inconsistent. Nobody asked about it, but it bugged me, so I’ve gone in and tidied things up a bit.

Graphics

The card at the top of every report card is now generated. For years I hand-built each one. Not only were there inconsistencies, but it meant I occasionally had to do rework. But now the site builds the card itself using the same layout, type sizes, and spacing every time. Twenty-four of the twenty-eight report cards have the new cards today; the remaining four (Battlestar Galactica, Wall•E, The Star Wars Holiday Special, and Black Panther) still wear their old ones until I dig up artwork for them. The nitty gritty details of this follow…

• I recreated the background of the card, which had been a half-assed kind of blurry thing for a decade +. Now there are nice sharp edges with lines that reflect the book cover much better.
• Title treatments are trimmed to their visible pixels and centered in a fixed box, so a wide one-line title and a stacked two-line title sit in the same place.
• The card is also now each post’s featured image, so it’s what shows up in archives, search results, and social previews.
• It builds itself from the grades present in the report card post, so there’s no discrepancy between the text and the image. (If I go back and change the grades, it will re-build, though I’m unlikely to do that.)
• Having to recreate titles as separate graphics let me make sure to get faithful ones. (e.g. The Story of the Faithful Wookiee.)

Layout

• Grade stamps. Each criterion header (Sci, Fi, Interfaces) now ends in a small rust-outlined stamp with the letter grade and its points out of four. The Overall header uses the same stamp, with a “Scotch rule”—a thin line inside a heavier one—around it for emphasis (above). This makes it more scannable.
• The “Full series, in order” button (below) has moved from the top of each report card to the bottom, just above the IMDB link and streaming availability. It was crowding the card up top, and it’s more useful once you’ve finished reading. It’s also got a “button” treatment to set it apart, visually, from the body.
• The guiding questions are subheaders in the post. The old headers restated “How believable are the interfaces given the science of the day?” in an <H> tag, and I was never that consistent with it. Now I call a short code (WordPress lingo for an inline function call) and it displays the question as a subhead below the grade.

Consistency

This is the real reason for the rebuild. The old report cards were typed by hand over about fifteen years, and when I went through them all at once the seams showed. Letters didn’t match points (Section 31 had an F on a 3-of-4 category, which is not right). Totals didn’t match the sums (Colossus was listed as “B (3 of 12)”; The Faithful Wookiee as “C (8 of 12)” on 4 points). Tiers were spelled four different ways, or missing (Johnny Mnemonic had no tier at all). Some stamps had pluses and minuses, some didn’t, and the rules for when they appeared were whatever I felt like that day, I guess? It was a hot mess and it speaks well of you that you hadn’t trashed me for it.

Now the only thing I need to do in the posts is type the points in a shortcode. The letter, the plus or minus, the total, and the tier are all computed from those points by one set of rules, on every report card, old and new. If a stamp says B+ (9 of 12), it’s because 9 of 12 is a B+. Headers, stamps, the card graphic, and the tier word all draw from the same numbers, so they can’t drift apart again.

Grading

Making the rules explicit meant writing them down. Prior to this they lived in my head, so here they are.

• Each criterion is scored 0–4 points: 0 is an F, 1 a D, 2 a C, 3 a B, 4 an A. Half points are allowed and round up with a minus, so 3.5 is an A−.
• The overall grade is the sum of the three, out of 12: 0 is an F; 1–3 is a D; 4–6 a C; 7–9 a B; 10–12 an A. Within each band the low score gets a minus and the high score a plus, so 10 is an A−, 11 an A, and only a perfect 12 is an A+.
• The tier follows the overall letter, no exceptions: F and D are Dreck, C is Matinée, B is Must-see, A is Blockbuster.

Applying those rules retroactively changed a few verdicts. None of the underlying points changed—these are the same scores I gave at the time—but the arithmetic now lands them somewhere else. Five properties changed tier:

Property	Points	Was	Now
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)	10 of 12	B+, Must-see	A−, Blockbuster
Oblivion	10 of 12	B+, Must-see	A−, Blockbuster
White Christmas (a Black Mirror Christmas special)	10 of 12	B, Must-see	A−, Blockbuster
Star Trek: Section 31	10 of 12	B+, Must-see	A−, Blockbuster
Starship Troopers	3 of 12	D, Matinée	D+, Dreck

Four of those are promotions, which tells you the old me was a little stingy about handing out Blockbusters. Starship Troopers is the lone demotion, and honestly, a D was never a Matinée; that one was a typo waiting fifteen years to be caught.

A longer list of properties kept their tier but picked up or lost a plus or minus on the overall grade: Children of Men and The Fifth Element go from A to A+ (they were perfect 12s all along); Ghost in the Shell A− to A; Doctor Strange B− to B+; Colossus B to B+; Johnny Mnemonic and Back to the Future Part II B− to B; Blade Runner, Barbarella, and Forbidden Planet C to C+; Logan’s Run and Prometheus C− to C; The Faithful Wookiee C to C−; and Soylent Green and Las Luchadoras vs. el Robot Asesino move from F to D− and D+ respectively, which is as faint as praise gets.

If any of that strikes you as wrong, the points are right there on each stamp, and the comments are open.