Some rules for my reading & viewing pleasure

My cumulative fantasy, SF, & historical film viewing, coupled with my attempt to read the latest Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, has made me adopt the following rules:

• Stop reading a science fiction or fantasy story the moment it references other science fiction or fantasy stories. (This ruled out literally 75% of the Year’s Best anthology.)
• Stop watching movies when the aliens, Romans, or Greeks have British accents (unless the movie is itself British, in which case it is merely on probation).
• Immediately distrust a science fiction movie that begins with a crawl. (Crawls are the written-out exposition that opens Star Wars, Blade Runner, and a bajillion other SF movies.)
• Immediately distrust a science fiction or fantasy novel that begins with a prologue in italics, or an ersatz chapter epigraph that ends in a future date and purports to be some kind of report filed post facto.
• Stop reading any novel (especially SF, fantasy, or horror) in which the chapters end in separately paragraphed sentence fragments (Or so he thought.) or ellipses (So why not make two stakes…?)
• For SF, if dialogue is heavily expositional (“As a physicist, Don, you know that the inertial dampers are subject to vibrational distortion within half an AU of a singulartiy,”), or if the page is chock full o’ made up words (Since the Hegemonic Coflation Gralf had been forced to manually grid the vidscreen upward to hi-rez the psy traffic on the prole monitoring apps), I put it back on the shelf. For a fantasy novel, if the dialogue is bullshit Medieval or Elizabethan (“M’lord,” he exclaimed, “the Fjordik barbarians are aswarm the battlements!”), or the page is full of capitalized words (“In the Fargone Lands lie the Darlk Wyrmholds deep within the ancient Fells, where the Scrolls of Nepthar were first beheld by Basalt the Agglutinator”), I put it back on the shelf.

Most of this means I don’t watch a lot of movies or buy a lot of books. And I feel my life is none the worse for that.