Media diet for September 2025

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I watched 21h 16m of movies and 13h 32m of TV shows, a total of 34h 48m:

🎬 Movies

  • Eddington (2025) – ⭐️ 5/10
    • Ehhhh, I don’t know. Not for me, particularly in the second half and crazy third act. Too much “art” and not enough entertainment for my taste. It starts out interesting enough, the cast was pretty solid and I liked a lot of the themes in the movie and how they were handled. But I guess it’s not surprising that it ultimately didn’t click for me, given that many positive reviews compare it to my old nemesis No Country For Old Men. This analysis was an interesting read, but didn’t retroactively make me enjoy the movie more.
  • The Kingdom (2007) – ⭐️ 5/10
    • I don’t remember why I originally wanted to rewatch this one, had it on my watchlist for a while now… and now that I got to it, I also cannot remember why on earth I rated this an 8/10 originally. It’s okay. Competently made, a really solid cast – with a plot that tries to be smarter than the average action flick of the time. I don’t think it succeeded, but I appreciate the attempt.
  • Scavengers (2016) – ⭐️ 4/10
    • I tried the short film that lead to the TV show I didn’t like last month. Part of why I disliked the show so much is how self-indulgent it was, and I thought a more focused version of it could actually work for me. But I couldn’t even get through this 8 minute long version without groaning and rolling my eyes.
  • Idiocracy (2006) – ⭐️ 6/10
    • For obvious reasons I’ve been meaning to rewatch this for almost a decade now. (It is also breaking my brain a little bit that the movie came out only a decade before we entered the bizarro timeline.) It’s still a fun movie, but nothing spectacular – rating was and remains at 6. The relatively naive and innocent idiocy portrayed in the movie was painful to observe in comparison to the calculated and evil idiocy of today.
  • The Naked Gun (2025) – ⭐️ 5/10
    • Meh. All in all this was as unnecessary as I feared it would be. I like really Liam Neeson – but he was miscast here, or didn’t play this with the right tone. He brought way too much of the intensity of his post-Taken career. I suppose it makes sense if you look at this as a spoof of those kinds of movies, but to me that is not what Naked Gun should be spoofing. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either – despite a fair number of funny scenes, like the thermal images that Kevin Durand’s1 character saw when spying.
  • South Park: The End of Obesity (2024)
    • As I suspected while ranting about the dumb distribution outcome of the Paramount+ deal last month, I had missed/skipped this most recent special. The episode special was fine, I’m actually getting into the mood for rewatching the entire show now. But this should be listed in movies, and there’s no reasonable way to automatically sort it into TV based on its metadata. Maybe I’ll add a manual exception list to my script in the future, sigh.
  • The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025) – ⭐️ 6/10
    • Didn’t hate this, but I might have been mildly biased as it was the first movie I watched on my new screen. It felt more like a “Made for TV” movie than a Marvel blockbuster, and the cast didn’t have much chemistry. But some of the visuals were really gorgeous, I liked the character design for Galactus, and the retro-futuristic world was fun. (It also made the suspension of disbelief work better, thinking back to what I wrote about Superman last month.)
  • Ice Age: The Great Egg-Scapade (2016) – ⭐️ 5/10
    • A bit late to the party, but generally I will watch anything with Scrat (that’s the Ice Age squirrel), Minions or the Penguins from Madagascar. Sue me.

🎤 Standup

📺 TV Shows

  • The Terror – Miniseries (10 episodes with 7h 33m)
    • Decided to rewatch this after reading The Ministry of Time, see below. It wasn’t as good as I remembered it, but still pretty good. (Only talking about the first season, the second one is complete garbage. Luckily that is easy to ignore in an anthology series – coincidentally I learned that there’s gonna be a third season later this year, more than five years after the last one aired.)
  • South Park – S27: E04, E05 (2 episodes with 44m)
  • The Case Against Adnan Syed – Miniseries (1 episodes with 1h 3m)
    • I don’t think I recall a show ever doing this: The original run of the four-episode miniseries was in spring 2019. And now, late September 2025, they released a fifth episode to conclude things. Compared to the new season of The Jinx I watched last month this was the better approach. However, my understanding was that since the Serial podcast concluded, opinion had shifted towards him being guilty and the podcast being biased. So it felt odd that the new episode didn’t even mention that his innocence is still in question.

💬 Late Night & Talk Shows

  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
    • September 7, 2025: Higher Education
    • September 21, 2025: Jimmy Kimmel Suspension
    • September 28, 2025: Benjamin Netanyahu
  • The Daily Show
    • September 18, 2025 - Maria Ressa
    • September 22, 2025 - Jacinda Ardern
    • September 29, 2025 - Jill Lepore

🎧 Music

I scrobbled 1624 tracks on 28 days in September 2025:

🎶 Top 10 Tracks

  1. Billy Talent – Surprise Surprise (9 plays)
  2. Die Ärzte – Schrei nach Liebe (6 plays)
  3. Fettes Brot – Da Draussen (5 plays)
  4. Farin Urlaub Racing Team – Dynamit (4 plays)
  5. Beginner – Hammerhart (4 plays)
  6. Antilopen Gang – Das Trojanische Pferd (4 plays)
  7. Sum 41 – The Hell Song (4 plays)
  8. Reel Big Fish – Trendy (4 plays)
  9. Die Toten Hosen – Hang on Sloopy (4 plays)
  10. Fettes Brot – Schieb es auf die Brote (4 plays)

🧑‍🎤 Top 10 Artists

  1. Die Ärzte (61 plays)
  2. Ramin Djawadi (35 plays)
  3. Seeed (34 plays)
  4. NOFX (29 plays)
  5. The Hives (29 plays)
  6. Weezer (28 plays)
  7. The White Stripes (28 plays)
  8. Daft Punk (27 plays)
  9. Foo Fighters (27 plays)
  10. Fettes Brot (26 plays)

📚 Books

  • 📘 The Ministry of Time – ⭐️ 4/5
    • Wow, I really liked this. Part of my enjoyment may have come from reading something different after the long Laundry Files period, but night after night I couldn’t put it down. A great sci-fi concept with interesting characters (one of them a historical figure that featured in The Terror – a TV show I had greatly enjoyed years back, and now rewatched after the book). The conclusion wasn’t perfect, but a lot of this book meets my “inject it straight into my veins” criteria. More like this, please!
  • 📘 The Echo Wife – ⭐️ 4/5
    • And more like this I did receive – another banger, though not quite as good as the former. While it deals with very different topic, it hit the same “great sci-fi take/setting with fascinating questions being explored” nerve. Not that it’s particularly deep or novel, but it’s exactly the kind of entertainment I’m after in my pre-sleep bedtime reading.
  • 📘 The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change – ⭐️ 3.5/5
    • Speaking of pre-sleep reading, I normally exclusively pick fiction because I’m reading to turn my brain off. Reading non-fiction usually turns my brain on. But, for reasons, I’m currently making an exception. I only read about a third of this book because it deals with many levels beyond “regular manager”, which I have zero interest or ambition to explore in the foreseeable future. There wasn’t much new stuff in the parts I did read, but engaging with leadership topics is usually interesting nonetheless. Even things you already learned in the past – or are just obvious to you – are worth re-exploring as your perspective and experience changes over time. There’s so many things you can’t repeat often enough to help make them stick. With that in mind, I’ve already got another handful of books lined up that are targeted more specifically at my level.

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to 11 episodes across 4 podcasts in September 2025:

🎮 Games

I played 8 different games for a total of 75.6 hours in September 2025:

Another month where I wasn’t in the right mindset to improve the layout of this section. I kinda know what I want it to look like now, and even started working on the script earlier in the month. But in terms of actual gaming it was a good month: The two South Park games are fun, and had long been on my list to 100%. I’ve been meaning to clean up the remaining achievements on The Witcher 3 for an eternity, partly because writing the review for that masterpiece was long overdue. A Short Hike was a brief but wonderful experience, A Way Out is utter garbage that me and my brother suffered through together again(!) just so I could get the achievements.
This month of course marks the the 1.0 release of Hades II at the end of the month.2 I’m writing this a few days after September ended, and my playtime is already twice as much now. I had been holding out until Early Access ended, and it was worth the wait. After 30h+ I’m still fairly early in the game all things considered, but it sure feels like a perfect sequel. Death to Chronos! ✊

  1. He makes good eggs! Also, I never noticed before that he looks a bit like DHH. ↩︎

  2. Yes, I’m aware of Silksong. I liked Hollow Knight, but I was never obsessed with it. I’ll play Silksong at some point but I’m in no rush, especially after seeing early impressions from friends. What’s a few more years of waiting now, after all. ↩︎