Reviewing is on average about reading bad papers that won’t get accepted in great detail to try to figure out what’s actually going on.

At best, it tends to be reading solid work adjacent to your subfield which you can respect but aren’t really that into.

It’s pretty rare for it to be as useful to me as actually choosing something to read.

That’s one of the reasons it’s so good. Alien is perfect space horror. Aliens doesn’t try to match it but tells a different kind of story with some of the same characters.

And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.