Media diet for June 2025

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I watched 2h 18m of movies and 13h 55m of TV shows, a total of 16h 13m:

🎬 Movies

  • Sinners (2025) – ⭐️ 8/10
    • A surprise hit – I was lucky and went into this without knowing anything about the plot beforehand. It’s rare these days for new films to actually capture my attention, but this was unique enough to do so. Unique may not be the right word – it ultimately is “just” remixing things that have been done before. But the combination of cast, direction, style and incorporation of music put a spin on it that had me at the edge of my seat. Bonus: Aspect Ratios with Sinners Director Ryan Coogler was delightful – what a nerd, in the best possible way!

📺 TV Shows

  • The Last of Us – S02 (7 episodes with 6h 21m)
    • Damn, I did not like this. At all. A bit shocked by how bad it was, to be honest. When they first announced the game would be adapted for TV I was skeptical, but then positively surprised by the first season. It had no chance of touching the game given how critical the medium itself was for the story to hit, but it was solid television. This new season was not.1
      I adore Pedro Pascal, but his Joel is not quite the right fit for Part II. Even worse, Bella Ramsey is straight up miscast for this (supposedly) older and tougher Ellie. And they’re both set up to fail by the sometimes shockingly bad writing.2 I understand why some of the changes were made to accommodate the different medium, but these changes almost entirely undermine or remove the narrative core that made the second game work. Ultimately what we’ve seen so far reinforced my belief that this adaptation should never have happened in the first place. I say “so far” because of course this seven-episode short season is only half (or even less, if recent interviews are to be believed) of the story. To be continued with another afternoon worth of episodes in another 2+ years? TV production times have gone completely off the rails. But after this season and recent news of Druckmann and Gross both stepping away from the show I’m really not very interested in the rest.
      General disappointment aside, I truly hated the second episode spending so much time on a zombie horde attack that was completely out of place. Genuinely terrible stuff that does not live up to regular (or I guess: past) HBO standards. If I wanted brain-dead action I could (presumably, I’ve never seen it because I do in fact not want that) watch The Walking Dead.
  • Conan O’Brien Must Go – S02 (3 episodes with 2h 5m)
    • I had high hopes for the episode in Austria. It was not as great as I hoped, but perfectly fine – just like the rest of this season. It felt a bit more aimless than the first season overall (which seems weird to say about a Conan thing), but it was still hilarious and fun to watch. Most important detail: I can’t believe I have never before in my life heard about Churros con Chocolate.3 Oh, and Werner Herzog’s intro speech is still amazing every single time.

💬 Late Night

  • The Daily Show
    • June 2, 2025 - Carole Cadwalladr
    • June 9, 2025 - Stephen A. Smith
    • June 16, 2025 - John Mulaney
  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
    • June 1, 2025: Air Traffic Controllers
    • June 8, 2025: Med Spas
    • June 15, 2025: Child Incarceration
    • June 22, 2025: AI Content
    • June 29, 2025: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

🎧 Music

I scrobbled 992 tracks on 26 days in June 2025:

🎶 Top 10 Tracks

  1. The Offspring – L.A.P.D. (36 plays)
  2. The Offspring – Kill the President (20 plays)
  3. The Offspring – Tehran (10 plays)
    • When I fell in love with The Offspring more than 25 years ago, these songs were already almost a decade old. I guess good music is timeless.
  4. NOFX – The Separation of Church and Skate (9 plays)
  5. The Offspring – Beheaded (6 plays)
  6. Hilltop Hoods – Don’t Happy, Be Worry (6 plays)
  7. Donots – Superhero (4 plays)
  8. The Hives – Two‐Timing Touch and Broken Bones (4 plays)
  9. The Beach Boys – Good Vibrations (4 plays)
  10. Eagles of Death Metal – Speaking in Tongues (4 plays)

🧑‍🎤 Top 10 Artists

  1. The Offspring (145 plays)
  2. Bear McCreary (46 plays)
  3. NOFX (44 plays)
  4. Die Ärzte (37 plays)
  5. The Hives (27 plays)
  6. P.T. Adamczyk (27 plays)
  7. Eagles of Death Metal (17 plays)
  8. Michael Giacchino (16 plays)
  9. Green Day (16 plays)
  10. Sportfreunde Stiller (15 plays)

📚 Books

Whoops, actually read #4.5 slightly out of the chronological order, it should have been in-between the two entries I read last month – but these interstitial episodes can be read at any time, so no problem.
The sixth novel might have been my favorite in the series so far, despite pulling a maneuver I often don’t enjoy much. Apparently the next one is “another series starting point if you want to dive into the most recent books in the series”, so I’m already bracing myself for not liking it nearly as much.

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to 14 episodes across 4 podcasts in June 2025:

🎮 Games

I played 8 different games for a total of 47.3 hours in June 2025:

Pretty happy with how well my custom Steam playtime tracking has been working in the almost two months I’ve had it running now – and sad I didn’t build this earlier, as there is no way to gather any meaningful data for the past.
In terms of presenting the data in these media diet posts: For now I’ll use a 💬 emoji to signify when the link goes to my review rather than the store. Not 100% happy with that just yet – ever since I started scraping my own Steam reviews I wanted to publish all (or at least almost all) of them here, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Once I get that done, I’ll likely want to link to those posts instead.

Not captured: A couple dozen hours of Minecraft, after a fairly long break from it.

  1. The discourse around TLoU is so poisoned that it is worth clarifying: To me personally, the second game is almost as much a masterpiece as the first one. ↩︎

  2. I’m not talking about the “I’m Gonna Be A Dad” line. Not that it was a great scene, but it was… fine. Whatever, a lame little joke. If you think that was “woke”, you’re either a grifter or have gotten your brain cooked. Seek therapy either way. ↩︎

  3. Of course I’ve had all kinds of churros before – “with Nutella” (Germans love to put Nutella on everything…) probably being the closest to “con chocolate”. It’s not like it’s some incredibly exotic thing – I’m just surprised that this specific combination never before crossed my radar as a Spanish delicacy. ↩︎