Habitually Good

A lot of the readers of this blog are not from India, but if you are and/or if you follow the Indian comic scene, then you would have heard of Saad Akhtar, the artist behind the web comic Fly, You Fools!. Now, I check out his comics from time to time, and some of them are quite funny (although I prefer the brand of humor by another cartoonist – Anshul Maheshwari – who has a web comic called Brainstuck). Anyway, this post is about Fly, You Fools!

I noticed today that on that blog, there is a rating widget below every comic, through which the users can rate the comic on a scale of 1 to 5. I thought, I would use the widget to tell Saad if I like his comic or not. I am guessing that the purpose of that rating widget is for him to get feedback on what type of comic is more fun to his readers, although I am not entirely sure he would care – since the premise is that he has this comic for his own entertainment, and everyone else’s entertainment is collateral gain.

Anyway, back to the rating widget. When I went to rate a comic, the options that it gave me for rating were:

• 1 – OKish
• 2 – Not crap
• 3 – Nice!
• 4 – Totally Great !!
• 5 – OMG! F***ing Excellent!!

So, now here’s my dilemma. Why is it that there are no options on the lower scale such as: boring, sucks, crap, not good at all, and so on. I am not saying that was the rating that I wanted to give, but still.

Typically, I would imagine a scale to cover both sides of an argument. So, what is Saad doing here? Is he asking his readers a Loaded Question? As per Wikipedia, a loaded question is a type of a fallacy, which is often asked such that:

“the question limits direct replies to be those that serve the questioner’s agenda.”

The rating scale, then, looks like a pretty good example of this. With these choices, at worst his comics would be rated OKish – which is not bad at all; for example, for movie reviews, OKish movies are good enough for a one-time watch – on this page the reviewer is calling SRK’s six pack abs in Dard-e-disco as OKish, or a commenter on this page rates the music of Slumdog Millionaire as OKish.

So, is Saad asking a loaded question by limiting the spectrum of choices, so that even the worst choice is actually not that bad?

Or maybe, it is Confidence. He is supremely confident that anything that his creative mind puts out is good, and even on a bad day, it will still be OKish. Well, his success certainly backs this up, and his popularity on Twitter probably also helps this mindset. Maybe, that is it; maybe, he thinks:

Anything that I create will at least be OKish!

I don’t know him personally, never met him, so I have no idea what his mindset is like. So, it is possible that it is neither of the two options above because of which the rating scale is skewed. Could be something else all together?

Anyway, I think the ratings scale should offer a balanced set of choices. And as I wrote this, something just occurred to me – maybe an OKish rating for Saad is as horrible as “this is crap”, and so in his mind the scale is balanced. Maybe that’s it.

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