Media diet for January 2025

Posted on 7 mins read View source

I watched 12h 18m of movies and 50h 55m of TV shows, a total of 63h 13m:

🎬 Movies

  • Gladiator II (2024) – ⭐️ 2/10
    • Genuinely surprised by how awful this was. I never expected it to be good, but it’s depressing that career-endingly terrible trash like this is even released. Is it still a thing that movies are just published for tax-cheating purposes?
  • Cunk on Life (2024) – ⭐️ 8/10
    • Still great fun, but I think it is time to end that character on a high note.
  • No Country for Old Men (2007) – ⭐️ 3/10
    • Decided to rewatch this more than 15 years after I first saw and strongly disliked it. This movie is constantly circle-jerked about as one of the greatest gifts to humanity, so I was wondering if – I’m an old man now myself! – changed sensibilities would let me appreciate what everyone else seems to see in it. Nope, it’s still shit. I engaged a fair bit with secondary literature on it, and… I get it, but it’s really just not for me. (As most of the Coen Brothers’ stuff.)
  • Super Troopers (2001) – ⭐️ 3/10
    • This randomly came up in conversation with my girlfriend, who basically thought this movie was as well-known as American Pie – which might be true in the US, but certainly didn’t ring true to me as a German. It’s pretty terrible – and while I’m certain that my current 8/10 rating for American Pie wouldn’t stay if I rewatched it today, I’m confident that it’s still better than this.
  • The Substance (2024) – ⭐️ 5/10
    • Gave in to the massive hype, and as per usual my assumption that this wouldn’t be my cup of tea had been correct. I don’t regret watching it, though – large parts of it I actually enjoyed quite a bit. It was just once it went all-in on its genre when it lost me – I cannot fathom what people enjoy about (body) horror. But the movie is rightfully lauded for the cast’s performances.
  • Pulp Fiction (1994) – ⭐️ 8/10
    • Wanted to rewatch another thing I hadn’t seen for more than a decade, and decidedly picked something I expected to (at least mostly) hold up. And hold up it did, strong 8/10 still. A big deal is made at some point in the movie about how outrageous it is that a milkshake – that really is just ice cream and milk (as opposed to being with alcohol?!) – costs as much as FIVE ENTIRE DOLLARS. Had a good chuckle at that one.

📺 TV Shows

  • 1883 – Miniseries (10 episodes with 9h 21m)
    • “Yeah, Yellowstone kinda sucks now, but 1883 really is some of the best television ever” they said. And idiot that I am, I believed these delusions. It was nowhere near as laughably bad as Yellowstone, but that’s about as positive as I’ll go here. Now waiting for 1923 to air its final season in April so I can waste some more of my life on Sheridan’s horseshit.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks – All 5 seasons (50 episodes with 22h 26m)
    • I quite enjoyed this – I wasn’t aware this was primarily a comedy show, all I had heard was “animated Star Trek” and “it’s really good”. I found it a bit hectic initially, but it has a lot of heart and the characters quickly won me over.
  • Die Discounter – S04 (10 episodes with 3h 52m)
    • 🇩🇪 Still got it, some of the best cringe since jerks.
  • Maid – Miniseries (10 episodes with 9h 5m)
    • Was looking for some more Margaret Qualley after The Substance, and this was pretty great. Surprised I hadn’t heard about it before, it’s easily the best thing Netflix made in years. Rather depressing to watch given the topic it deals with, but I thought it did a good job at not just being misery porn.
  • Arrested Development – S01 to S01E15 (15 episodes with 5h 32m)
    • Finally time for a rewatch, only seen it once back in 2013 (and then the Netflix seasons as they were released later). Seems like 90% of the jokes/references I remember from then are all in the first couple of episodes already.

💬 Late Night

🎧 Music

I scrobbled 1136 tracks on 23 days in January 2025:

🎶 Top 10 Tracks

  1. Pharrell Williams – Double Life (From “Despicable Me 4”) (5 plays)
  2. Liam Lynch – United States of Whatever (5 plays)
  3. Len – Steal My Sunshine (5 plays)
  4. Tom Petty – Love Is A Long Road (5 plays)
  5. Elastica – Connection (5 plays)
  6. George Harrison – What Is Life (5 plays)
  7. Vengaboys – Up & Down (5 plays)
  8. Meter Mobb & Too $hort – You Came to Party (5 plays)
  9. Public Enemy – Harder Than You Think (5 plays)
  10. Kendrick Lamar – Not Like Us (5 plays)

🧑‍🎤 Top 10 Artists

  1. Queens of the Stone Age (60 plays)
  2. Bear McCreary (57 plays)
  3. Queen (36 plays)
  4. Sportfreunde Stiller (31 plays)
  5. Darren Korb (27 plays)
  6. The Offspring (24 plays)
  7. The Hives (23 plays)
  8. Seeed (21 plays)
  9. Rage Against the Machine (19 plays)
  10. Millencolin (17 plays)

📚 Books

Now this is a bit embarrassing – and absolutely tragic. Even more so than with TV shows, I really don’t want to start any book series that isn’t finished yet. Even after being burnt by A Song of Ice and Fire I hadn’t quite learnt my lesson. I read Foundryside shortly after release, and after having to endure the wait for its sequels I decided never to do that again. I don’t recall when and how exactly The Steerswoman series was originally recommended to me – maybe it was some “Best of Fantasy” list, or a Reddit thread of similar nature. Either way, the recommendation must have been good enough for me to go ahead and grab all four books in the series and add it to my library. Regardless of how exactly it came to happen, it was many years ago.

Then, some time last year, I stumbled over the series’ name again. Cory Doctorow had high praise for it in early 2024, and somewhere on the net I saw someone reference that. I don’t recall where exactly, but I was like “I know that name, I had that in my Calibre library for years!” and figured now would be as good a time as any to finally give it a go.

As mentioned last month, I enjoyed the series a fair bit. And in fact, this fourth book now is the one I liked the most by far – so great that it elevates all that came before. This is now one of my all-time favorite book series. So you will understand that I was absolutely devastated to learn it actually isn’t finished yet.

How is that possible when said fourth book is from 2004? It’s rather sad: They weren’t successful enough. As of today, the author’s latest blog post is about the hardships of figuring out patronage in today’s media landscape – and it directly addresses that she still does want to finish the next books in the series – twenty years later. Books 1/2 and books 3/4 already had more than a decade between them, so this isn’t completely unprecedented for the series, but I won’t get my hopes up much more than for ever seeing The Winds of Winter being released.

But: It doesn’t matter. No regrets. I would love getting more books in the series, but even as a hardcore hater of starting unfinished things I wholeheartedly recommend it now. Don’t read up anything more on it. Don’t look at the book covers. Just dive in if you have some interest in fantasy. Rosemary Kierstein was ahead of her time (the first book is almost as old as me!), and more people should experience it.

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to 18 episodes across 5 podcasts in January 2025:

I wrote and backdated this post after I built my automated media diet tooling. Published on 2025-05-30.