Media Menu is a blog by Gina Trapani where I post short reviews of what I watch, read, and listen to. It covers the film, television, books, podcasts, music, and theater that I choose to enjoy. I’m a casual consumer raising a pre-teen. I do this for fun and don’t take it very seriously.

I welcome comments. Find me on Bluesky or send me an email to my usual username at Gmail.

Who?

I’m not a critic. I just love stories. I want to feel and appreciate great art.

Why?

Writing about the media I consume helps me digest it better, and remember more.

I don’t want to pick whatever the algo feeds me, watch it, and forget it. I want to be intentional about choosing the entertainment I give my time to, pay close attention, and take away what’s meaningful.

Some people call this a media diet. I don’t do diets, so menu it is.

What?

I use a simple scale to rate each thing I review. Sure it’s reductionist, but a rating makes it easy to sum up what I thought.

The ratings are:

• A+ Perfect: Must experience
• A Excellent: Worth a revisit
• B Good: Enjoyable but don't go out of your way
• C Passable: Works in a pinch
• D Bad: Skip if you can
• F Atrocious: Actively avoid

This scale was inspired by Steph Ango.

How?

I launched this site in late 2024 on Bear, a wonderfully fast and minimal hosted blogging engine, which got me writing right away. When I wanted more features, I moved it to a static site generator.

Today, I write these reviews Obsidian, push the code and content to GitHub, which in turn pushes to Netlify, where Hugo generates the web site. It’s much more customized (and complicated) now. The site theme is an adaptation of mgx’s azbug Bear theme, and it uses Bootstrap.

Thanks for reading.

– Gina