reviews of this blog

2011-12-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

"Reviews of This Blog seems to finally be whipping itself into form. If one follows the ascension of reviews chronologically, there seems to be a beautifully flowering narrative and stylistic direction emerging from the apathetic (and, if one must be honest, pathetically basic) self-reference of the opening entries. The anonymous first author, although she can hardly be blamed for the fiery display of her rhetoric, woefully overshoots her target of 'hitting the nail on the head.' Not a promising start, perhaps, but by the time Farell offers us his scathing (and by now famous) critique of Farell, the quality of the prose has increased significantly. Indeed, who can forget Leontyev's 'abruptly'-ending and magisterial tour through the problems of reviewing problems? Who can even imagine the excitement that Haze must of felt when the realization occurred that 'the present note' is indeed 'correct'? The literature on self-reference still hasn't recovered! This reviewer still remembers the first time that he encountered Seddon's fiery wondering of 'why a two-column blog layout was selected at all.' Why indeed!

Now that the style and intent of Reviews of This Blog has been well-established, it can only be assumed that the next artistic step would be to begin self-referencing the developed style of self-reference that the blog has come to inhabit. Also, this reviewer would suggest a separate chronicle, perhaps entitled "Reviews of 'Reviews of This Blog'", to help deal with the overwhelming amount of self-referential metacriticism that is sure to be written on the newly discovered self-reference style of the original blog." -- Brett Karlan

2011-12-12T15:21:00.001-08:00

"The reader is struck by the fact that there are more words on this blog now than before but that the overall content hasn't been improved upon." -- Chris Hoover

2011-12-12T09:57:00.001-08:00

"One's first impression is of the (self-abasing?) vacuity suggested by the substantial black space within which the text sits: a basic Blogger template has been employed to display a long, monotonous column of white text, next to which a (likewise monochrome, likewise rectangular) picture from the Escher archive struggles to lend purpose to the frankly vestigial sidebar. One wonders why a two-column blog layout was selected at all. At the top the blog's title and tagline find themselves surrounded by a purposeless rectangular border; above them in turn, the largely pointless Blogger bar (which the hosting site enforces on its users) distractingly inverts the colour scheme. Scrolling down, one comes at last to a terse credit line 'explained', as so much on the modern Web is, by linking to Wikipedia and expecting readers to fend for themselves from then on. To the blog's credit, nevertheless, there is a luxuriant absence of pointless Flash, animated GIFs, badly JavaScripted navigation menus, shoehorned rows of 'sharing' buttons, and other common evils of the Web today." -- Robert Seddon

2011-12-08T08:25:00.000-08:00

"Reviews of This Blog is a clever idea but it could be better executed. The moderator seems to have made no effort to edit or quality control the content---some of the "jokes" are very predictable and poorly delivered. But this also make it somewhat interesting, since it is consists of real (though often tongue-in-cheek) reviews of itself. I was at least interested enough to write a review. I wonder if there are any more witty self-reference comments to make? Of course someone will criticize this review for being overly serious and not making an attempt at a self-reference joke---but I'm not going to." -- James Dimone

2011-12-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

"Erratum: the present note is perfectly correct." -- Tristan Haze

2008-08-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

"Although a delight to read, Reviews of this Blog is pure drivel. It's subject matter is clearly unclear. And it's contributors revel in paradoxicalness and self-referentiality without looking to see wehther words misspelled or left out. Not to mention the incomplete sentences. It also makes the elementary mistake of using quotation marks for emphasis, which I "hate". Did anyone copyedit this thing! But, worst of all, the authors fail to notice that every statement in the blog is false. Wait, that's not true. What's true is that every statement in Reviews of this Blog is not true. Yes, that's much more to the point." -- Josh May

2008-08-25T02:05:00.000-07:00

"This review makes an invaluable contribution to the literature on self reference. It is tightly argued, insightful and provocative. Despite the obvious merits of the work, there are three problems that deserve attention. Firstly, no review is a good review unless it criticizes whatever it is that the review is about (following a few standard compliments which are intended to make the author feel standard). Since this in itself is a review, and moreover, a review that is about itself, it must contain something worth criticizing. Suppose for the sake of argument that there is nothing wrong with this review. There are two ways in which this state of affairs can be realised. One way is that this review doesn’t contain any criticisms. If that were the case then, since we have already established that every good review has a criticism of what it is about, then this review would not meet the standards of what it is to be a good review. On the other hand, if this review does contain a criticism, then there is a further dilemma: either the criticism is a good criticism or it isn’t. If it is a good criticism, then obviously there was something worth criticizing. On the other hand, if it is a bad criticism, then the bad criticism is itself worthy of criticism, and so again there is something worth criticizing. The second problem with this review is that it does not contain the number of problems that it claims it has, goes on a little too long, and ends rather abruptly." -- Leon Leontyev

2008-08-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

"A brief criticism: the second review by Jonathan
Farrell says nothing whatsoever about the content of
any review on the blog. The review should be removed
(and perhaps replaced with this one)." -- Jonathan
Farrell

2008-08-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

"The blog 'Reviews of this blog' (find it here:
http://reviews-of-this-blog.blogspot.com/) seems to
consist only of reviews of this blog. The present
review is a review of that blog. A caveat: as with the
other reviews featured, what this review says about
the reviews on the blog should not be trusted. Apart
from the dubious quality of the reviews it contains,
the blog itself is excellent." -- Jonathan Farrell

2008-08-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

"This blog consists of a series of increasingly deplorable and formulaic entries. The ideas are derivative (indeed, this blog has been mercilessly plagiarized throughout) and the humor is narcissistic and superabundantly verbose. I fail to see why any right-minded member of polite society would waste her time reading, let alone writing, such hypocritical tripe." -- John Cusbert

2008-08-24T15:17:00.001-07:00

"Another forced attempt to squeeze humor out of self-reference. Predictably, the blog is full of reviews that refer to themselves in either a self-fulfilling or a self-defeating manner, e.g. 'This blog is brilliant!' or 'Everything on this blog is stupid!'. Both of which make this reader cringe. Please stop! There is nothing entertaining about self-reference!" -- Brian Rabern

2008-08-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

"Cleverly conceived, but I wonder whether the blog can maintain the same level of freshness. By the third post the reader is already left wondering: 'Is this it'? Still, a brave venture." -- Philip J. Atkins

2008-08-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

"In the second post the standard fell sligthly, although, I would like to add, the convoluted writing style--annoying though it might be at times--is ultimately endearing and kept a smile on this reader's face." -- Ole Koksvik

2008-08-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

"The first entry in Reviews of This Blog hits the nail on the head. Brilliant!" -- Anonymous author of Reviews of this Blog