Media diet for October 2025

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I watched 1h 50m of movies and 78h 10m of TV shows, a total of 80h 0m:

🎬 Movies

  • Small Soldiers (1998) – ⭐️ 8/10
    • I’ve always remembered this fondly, though I think I only ever saw it once as a kid (or teenager, technically). I still really enjoyed it – enough to leave the 8/10 rating untouched, gladly admitting that it’s a bit nostalgia-buffed. Given its age I think it looks pretty good despite mostly using CGI rather than puppetry for the effects shots. Amazing cast (RIP Phil Hartman, his final performance), especially when including the voice actors. And it’s just such a funny movie – psychological warfare being one of many fantastic lines. (And what a song for the soundtrack, that alone adds one star to the rating!) Jonathan Rosenbaum’s original review from 1998 was a really interesting read. (Scroll down past all the pictures, it’s not the initial snippets in italics.)

📺 TV Shows

  • Task – Miniseries (7 episodes with 7h 10m)
    • I had been looking forward to this ever since hearing that it was a new entry into the MCU. It was good – can’t really go wrong with Ruffalo, and Silvia Dionicio was great as well – but I think I was not quite in the right mood for this kind of gloomy and depressing crime drama. I also sometimes struggled distinguishing between Tom Pelphrey and Sam Keeley, their characters could have done with slightly more different design.
  • South Park – S01 to S12 (181 episodes with 66h 54m)
    • Well, as I said last month: The drip-feeding of new episodes (and replaying the two games) got me into the mood of rewatching the show. I’ve only ever watched it once before – in 2013, over a decade late. I might have gotten a bit fatigued now, but I think there’s a notable drop in quality around season nine. That does seem to line up with when Parker & Stone got increasingly busy with other projects (and stating themselves that they were running out of ideas). Even the not-so-great episodes are often still pretty good, though, and there is so many great ones. As the remaining seasons are only getting shorter, I’ll probably catch up with the present in November.

💬 Late Night & Talk Shows

  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
    • October 5, 2025: Presidential Libraries
    • October 12, 2025: Paramount Skydance Merger
    • October 26, 2025: Medicare Advantage
  • The Daily Show
    • October 6, 2025 - Tristan Harris
    • October 20, 2025 - Bernie Sanders
    • October 27, 2025 - Zohran Mamdani

🎧 Music

I scrobbled 1065 tracks on 25 days in October 2025:

🎶 Top 10 Tracks

  1. Rusted Root – Send Me On My Way (11 plays)
    • I’ve had this melody stuck in my head multiple times in the last couple of years, but I was never able to figure out the name of the song… until now! As the song’s Wikipedia article explains, I’m sure everyone my age (or otherwise versed in 90s pop culture) would immediately recognize it. There also is a fantastic live version from Woodstock ‘99.
  2. Darren Korb – I Am Gonna Claw (Out Your Eyes then Drown You to Death) (8 plays)
  3. Darren Korb – Lost Souls (8 plays)
  4. Darren Korb – Edge of Erebus (8 plays)
  5. Darren Korb – Fated Glory (feat. Colin Ryan) (7 plays)
  6. Darren Korb – In the Darkness (7 plays)
  7. Darren Korb – Into Tartarus (7 plays)
  8. Darren Korb – King Vermin (7 plays)
  9. Darren Korb – Song of the Deep (7 plays)
  10. Darren Korb – Fading Fading (7 plays)

Darren Korb’s Hades sequel soundtrack is almost as god as the first one, and I’ve been listening to both those albums a lot this month. Perfect music for focusing at work.

🧑‍🎤 Top 10 Artists

  1. Darren Korb (348 plays)
  2. DJs From Mars (22 plays)
  3. DJ Schmolli (16 plays)
  4. DJ BootOx (16 plays)
  5. Die Ärzte (15 plays)
  6. Mashup-Germany (13 plays)
  7. DJ Morgoth (13 plays)
  8. Weezer (11 plays)
  9. Rusted Root (11 plays)
  10. Fettes Brot (10 plays)

📚 Books

  • 📘 Engineering Management for the Rest of Us – ⭐️ 4/5

    • I published my main takeaway in a separate post already. Jokes aside, this was quite good. The quote “Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets” (not from the author, it’s a quote in the book) is easily the number one thing I’ve seen leaders stumble over in my own career. Since I’ve taken on the EM role, I’m consistently surprised to learn how low the bar is – this sentence is from the chapter on the importance of regular 1:1 meetings:

      And if they have to be canceled, it’s a good practice to let the other person know why rather than simply removing it from the calendar.

      Absolutely mind-boggling that this even needs to be said, completely regardless of the context for the meeting. What kind of psychopath just removes a calendar event with no comment?! (Unless in a well-established relationship where both parties have agreed on this practice).
      Despite having strong opinions on a lot of things like the above examples: It has only been a few months and I still feel plenty inexperienced all the time, hoping I get more things right than wrong.1 It’s a demanding change and role, and I had to laugh at this sentence towards the end – it sounds a little pathetic, but this month has been really rough (not just job-wise) so it felt accurate:

      You read a whole book even though you also have to lead one or many engineering teams. That in and of itself is a huge accomplishment.

  • 📘 The Dog Stars – ⭐️ 3/5
    • Enjoyed the story, hated the style. Pretty sure I found this in some recommendations after reading Station Eleven last year. I enjoy post-apocalyptic settings quite a bit, and this one was done well. But I instantly disliked the choppy writing – it is very intentional and I understand why the author did it, but I just don’t enjoy reading something as disjointed. I’d still recommend it if you’re into the genre/topic, though.

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to 5 episodes across 2 podcasts in October 2025:

🎮 Games

I played 2 different games for a total of 89.9 hours in October 2025.

  • Hades II
    • 🏆 Finished this up in 88.1 hours across 29 days, unlocking all remaining 43 (of 50) achievements. Wrote a 👍 review (428 words) on 2025-11-02.
  • Minecraft Dungeons
    • Played for 1.8 hours. Unlocked just one more achievement, now at 19/104 total. Haven’t written a review yet.

Finally managed to waste spend a few hours on cooking up a few lines of Python to automatically generate the above summaries and incorporate all the data sources (playtime, achievements, reviews) I have available. Still far from happy with the result, but I’ve tested it against the last couple of months and it should at least handle most cases. Maybe in another couple of months I’ll get around to polishing it up some more. I actually care more about following through with my original plan to publish all the reviews as individual blog posts.

Meta drivel aside, I was pretty addicted to Hades II all month and did neither plan nor expect I’d already 100% it this month. Minecraft Dungeons is a piece of crap and I will write the scathing review it deserves at some point – despite that, there would have been more playtime on it if I hadn’t gotten sick right on my birthday. Garbage games can still be entertaining to a certain degree when suffering through them together, but thanks to illness my brother didn’t come over for gaming much this month.

  1. I forgot the context in which it came up, but my manager shared this article with me that I could not agree more with. Money quote: "Management is not a promotion, management is a change of profession. And you will be bad at it for a long time after you start doing it. If you don’t think you’re bad at it, you aren’t doing your job." 💯 ↩︎