Media diet for January 2026

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I watched 5h 34m of movies and 12h 36m of TV shows, a total of 18h 10m:

🎬 Movies

  • Greedy People (2024) – ⭐️ 2/10
    • Worst JGL movie I’ve ever seen. Wants to be a Coen Brothers movie but isn’t. (And I say that as someone who isn’t even very fond of Coen Brothers movies.)
  • The Life of Chuck (2025) – ⭐️ 7/10
    • This was a nice surprise, I didn’t expect to like this as much. The first half (or rather two-thirds, given the literal act-structure) was so different and odd, I really wasn’t sure where it would be going – and I probably would have preferred it going somewhere different, to be honest. But it was still a very charming and heartwarming story overall, elevated by excellent craftsmanship all around – I especially enjoyed Mark Hamill’s performance. I didn’t know it was based on a Stephen King novella, and it didn’t give me King vibes at all while watching. I read The Long Walk a decade ago, really didn’t like it very much, and had since concluded that King isn’t for me – maybe I should reconsider.
  • Rental Family (2025) – ⭐️ 8/10
    • Delightful, I continue to greatly enjoy the second arc of Brendan Fraser’s career!

📺 TV Shows

  • Stranger Things – S05 (8 episodes with 10h 28m)
    • Finally this is done. I never really understood the hype around this show, not even back in the first season that I’ve often seen mentioned in statements like “Yes, but the first season was really exceptional/perfect/other hyperbole” when the declining quality is discussed. It’s fine, but it’s not great. Back in July 2022, I rewatched the entire show leading up to the season four finale – because for some reason I was under the impression that this was already the final season. Imagine my surprise when it ended on a massive cliffhanger. For a while I considered doing so again for season five, because not remembering all the little details and context does hurt the experience, and as multiple-year-breaks are now standard it is hard to remember much at all. Ultimately I decided I didn’t care nearly enough about it and only watched the last season itself. And it was… okay. Pretty dumb and silly in many ways, but that was always the case with the show – it’s strength wasn’t a cohesive or terribly logical story but “vibes”. Emotions, character moments. And it certainly still delivered those, especially in the finale. Which also was… fine. Not great, not even very good. But perfectly fine. I could post a near endless list of things that made zero sense in this last season, but the show doesn’t deserve (nor desire, I believe) that level of attention. What I thought was really off this season in particular was the song choices – I love me some 80s music and they picked a ton of bangers, but they often really didn’t fit the mood. It felt like they worked based off a “we really want to use xyz song in the show” premise, rather than trying to figure out what songs would be great matches for certain occasions.

💬 Late Night & Talk Shows

  • The Daily Show
    • January 5, 2026 - Sen. Mark Kelly
    • January 12, 2026 - Jenin Younes
    • January 26, 2026 - Jason Rezaian

🎧 Music

I scrobbled 1204 tracks on 29 days in January 2026:

🎶 Top 10 Tracks

  1. Nicholas Britell – NIAMOS! (Chandrilian Club Mix) (From “Andor (Season 2)”) (48 plays)
  2. Foo Fighters – Let There Be Rock (Live Reading 2019) (39 plays)
  3. Dynamite Deluxe – Zugabe (28 plays)
  4. Noisestorm – Crab Rave (10 plays)
  5. Grossstadtgeflüster – Wie man Feuer macht (5 plays)
  6. Party Ben – Walking With a Ghost in Paris (Tegan & Sara vs. Mylo) (5 plays)
  7. Daft Punk – Touch It / Technologic (5 plays)
  8. Ehrling – Breeze (5 plays)
  9. P.T. Adamczyk – The Rebel Path (5 plays)
  10. Prodigy – Breathe (4 plays)

What an incredible month for earworms! My brother is watching Andor, and us talking about the show reminded me that for some reason I forgot adding that banger from the second season to my music library back when I watched it myself last year. During the first two weeks of the new year, I absolutely could not stop listening to it. And my obsession probably would have lasted even longer, had I not stumbled over this utter masterpiece of an AC/CD cover by the Foo Fighters. In a month that often felt even more like purgatory than the one before (I’m ready for this pattern to end any day now, dear universe!) this performance gave me energy like few others things. When sharing this with my (big-time AC/DC fan) girlfriend, it lead to an interesting discussion and exploration of that particular song, various versions of it as well as live music in general. I’m guessing that the Foo Fighters themselves would consider my take blasphemous, but their Reading 2019 performance is, to me personally, by far the greatest of the many renditions I’ve now experienced. Even the original studio version by AC/DC themselves doesn’t hit the same nerve – it is also excellent, though.

This month I had to spend a significant amount of time for work trying to focus on writing and analyzing information (which is insanely hard to do in a management role, which could arguably be described as literally never being able to really focus so that your team can). What I did in those hours where I did manage to shut everything else out was listen to some amazing live shows in the background. The Pinkpop Festival started uploading from their endless archive of recordings some time last year and there are so many excellent shows available – big 90s/00s nostalgia trip. I easily spent 20 hours listening to music that way, and sadly none of that is captured on LastFM. What is captured in the top artist list below is that I also spent some of my focus time listening through almost the entire Foo Fighters discography again, and also to C418’s timeless Minecraft soundtracks.

🧑‍🎤 Top 10 Artists

  1. Foo Fighters (153 plays)
  2. C418 (108 plays)
  3. Nicholas Britell (48 plays)
  4. The Prodigy (33 plays)
  5. Dynamite Deluxe (32 plays)
  6. Daft Punk (27 plays)
  7. The White Stripes (27 plays)
  8. Todd Baker (27 plays)
  9. HEALTH (26 plays)
  10. Justice (20 plays)

📚 Books

  • 📘 In the Woods [Dublin Murder Squad #1] – ⭐️ 4.5/5
    • Wow, this was shockingly good. I first wondered if I was just so glad to finally be reading fiction again after last month’s slog with the USSR introduction. But no, this was just really great and kept me hooked throughout. Painfully so: In multiple nights I just could not put it away and only found sleep after 3am. While it’s a crime drama with strong whodunit elements on the surface, for me the humanity and relationships of the main characters were the core that made this so great. I didn’t mainly want to find out who the murderer is, but how the detective(s’) lives progressed and developed through the investigation – might sound trivial but it’s an important distinction. And it is that carefully crafted frame in which the surface-level story happens that made the ending one of the most depressing and bleak things I’ve read in a while – masterfully done.
  • 📘 The Likeness [Dublin Murder Squad #2] – ⭐️ 3.5/5
    • Needless to say I could hardly wait to jump into the sequel. Ironically I had read a lot of complaints about the ending of the first book, paired with “but book two is much better” comments – so my expectations were sky-high. And immediately shattered. Even a quarter into the book I still wasn’t sure I’d even like it very much at all. I was very happy to learn that it wasn’t a strict anthology format with no recurring characters, but the basic premise for the story was just so ridiculously absurd that I really struggled suspending my disbelief. Overall I ended up enjoying the experience, but it’s notable step down compared to the first one for me. It felt forced – as if the author had the idea for the main setting of this book (which is interesting), and just had to make up a way for arriving at that setting. Even just a bit of restructuring might have helped, the “justification” before the meaty part of the book felt oddly disconnected. Another interesting aspect that lead me to some introspection was that I sometimes got rather annoyed by how unrealistic parts of it seemed, particularly in how extremely dumb some choices by the main character felt to me. And I do think that the second book is “objectively” worse in that regard. At the same time, the main character in book one was not necessarily much more rational. It was a man, though, as opposed to the female protagonist in book two. Is my internalized misogyny measuring differently? Probably to some degree. As I mentioned for book one above, the dynamic between two main characters was a big part of what made that book shine, and the stronger focus on just one main character in the second book meant this magic was gone. Nonetheless I’m still excited to see what part three will be like.

🎙️ Podcasts

I listened to 15 episodes across 4 podcasts in January 2026:

🎮 Games

I played 5 different games for a total of 33.2 hours in January 2026.

  • Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
    • 🏆 Began and finished the entire game this month, unlocking all 12 achievements in 16.6 hours across 8 days. Wrote a 👍 review (214 words) on 2026-01-31.
  • Max Payne
    • Played for 6.8 hours across 3 days. Haven’t written a review yet.
  • Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
    • Played for 4.7 hours across 3 days. Haven’t written a review yet.
    • I very much enjoyed replaying both of the old Max Payne titles to kick off this year in gaming. What I don’t enjoy is that Steam doesn’t let you publish reviews for games that you’re not allowed to buy.1 I’ll probably need to look into how to shift the SSOT for my reviews. It should be my blog, and then spreading them to Steam from there instead of the other way around..
  • The Trolley Solution
    • 🏆 Began and finished the entire game this month, unlocking all 13 achievements in 3.6 hours. Wrote a 👍 review (230 words) on 2026-01-18.
  • Minecraft Dungeons
    • 🏆 Finished this up in 1.6 hours across 2 days, unlocking all remaining 2 (of 104) achievements. Wrote a 👎 review (1444 words) on 2026-02-07.
    • FUCKING FINALLY. Good riddance, you miserable piece of shit.

  1. It’s complicated, but also not really because our lord and savior Gabe could just have half a yacht less and implement proper age checks in Steam. Then people wouldn’t have to resort to buying keys from shady sites to be able to get games that are perfectly legal for them to buy and possess. ↩︎