I keep a paper notebook, not this site, a small physical one, where every book I finish and every game I play a first full session of gets exactly one line, the title, the date, and a verdict short enough to fit the line, nothing more. It started as an accident, I wanted to stop forgetting whether I’d already read something when a title sounded vaguely familiar in a bookstore, and it’s turned into a years-long record I don’t think I fully understood the weight of until I sat down recently and read the whole thing front to back in one sitting instead of just adding to it.

The early entries are almost embarrassing in how confident and undercooked the verdicts are, one line for a book that clearly deserved more consideration than “fine, forgettable,” written by someone who hadn’t yet developed the patience to sit with something difficult before judging it. You can watch the verdicts get longer, still one line, but denser, more specific, somewhere around the entries from a few years back, right around when I started actually writing full reviews here instead of just logging a private verdict, which makes sense, the practice of having to explain myself publicly clearly bled backward into how carefully I was thinking privately too.

What surprised me most, flipping through it in one go, was how much of my own reading and playing history I’d genuinely forgotten, not the good stuff, the good stuff stays with you regardless, but the middling entries, the three-star equivalents, gone completely from memory until the notebook handed them back to me. There’s an entry from four winters ago, a board game I have zero independent memory of playing, verdict just “fine, wouldn’t seek out again,” and I have to trust past me that this happened, because present me has nothing.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop keeping it. It’s not for anyone, unlike this site, nobody’s ever going to read it but me, which might be exactly why it’s more honest than anything I publish here, no audience to perform a verdict for, just the plain, unglamorous fact of what I actually thought the day I closed the cover or set the pieces back in the box.