Colophon.

Why this exists

Most things I've liked, I forget I liked. Most things I've hated, I re-try by accident. A tier list is the smallest useful structure for remembering — better than a bookmark, lower-effort than a review. If I have to place a thing relative to everything else I've ever placed, I have to actually have an opinion. The act of ranking is the act of deciding what I think.

This is a working document, not a publication. Tiers move. Entries get rewritten. The archive shows when each entry was first filed; the history on each entry shows every time it's been moved. Nothing is final. That's the point.

How the tiers work

S Elite

Canon. Hand-me-down energy — the things I'd pass along without caveats to someone I trust.

A Great

Recommended without caveats, but not my religion.

B Good

Quietly worth it. I'd do it again. I wouldn't write home about it.

C Fine

Works. Forgettable. The default outcome of most things.

D Weak

Wouldn't repeat. Not offensive — just not worth the slot.

F Nope

Actively made my life worse. An anti-recommendation.

Editorial standards

Every entry in A or above needs a reason it's not in the tier above, and one tier below — a comparison against a real neighbor entry, in prose. If an entry can't defend its rank that way, it doesn't belong there yet. The system flags entries whose neighbors change tiers, because the old defense may have stopped making sense.

A reciprocal defense counts: if I've written why X sits below Y, the same comparison defends Y's rank above X. No quote appears twice on a page.

The "hot take" on each entry is the one-line version. If I left it blank, it's derived from the first sentence of the writeup. If I wrote one, it's mine.

Craft

Typeset in Fraunces for the voice and JetBrains Mono for the metadata. Two fonts, strictly; everything else is system UI sans. Text is grayscale by rule — only the tier markers carry color, because the tier is the only thing that gets to mean something in the palette.

Paper mode is the canonical surface; ink mode exists because I write at night. The tier colors shift between the two modes because the warmer "paper" hues don't hold up on dark backgrounds.

Built on Astro + Cloudflare Workers · D1 for entries · R2 for images · React for the board. No framework-level animation library, no icon library, no UI kit. Every component is in this repo.