Media diet for October 2026

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I watched 5h 59m of movies and 23h 4m of TV shows, a total of 29h 3m:

๐ŸŽฌ Movies

  • The Road (2009) โ€“ โญ๏ธ 5/10
    • I rewatched the movie after reading the book this month, see further down. Unfortunately I downgraded it from 7 to 5. It’s a terrible adaptation โ€“ not necessarily because it’s a bad movie. It’s okay, there is technically not much to complain about (though I think the kid was not cast very well, and portrayed a bit too old). I’m just not sure that what the book does can actually be translated onto the screen. I don’t want to claim that it’s impossible, but this film certainly did not manage to do it.
  • Coyote vs. Acme (2026) โ€“ โญ๏ธ 6/10
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) โ€“ โญ๏ธ 6/10
    • Maybe my expectations for new MCU movies are finally low enough, but this one was mildly positively surprising. There was actually an interesting movie in there, unfortunately still buried underneath too much franchise-cruft - it would have been so much better if the Avengers hadn’t even been mentioned, for example. In hindsight I think the biggest issue with Holland’s tenure has been that the character was introduced as Iron Man’s little intern. Raimi’s movies (and Insomniac’s games) had already shown that Spider-Man is more interesting when his story and character are allowed to be their own. The stakes should be NYC, not the world or the universe. Pairing him up with the Punisher works because they have similar scaling. Always good to see Mark Ruffalo, though.
      Lots of people mentioned similarities to Stranger Things, a comparison that of course invites itself due to Sadie Sink’s casting. But much more so I thought that this had really strong Control vibes โ€“ which is good, but makes it all the more depressing how good this could have been if it was its own thing. But its not, and so the ending absolutely sucked: unable to take any risks and devolving into the usual Marvel-copaganda.

๐Ÿ“บ TV Shows

  • Full Frontal with Samantha Bee โ€“ S06 starting from S06E19, S07 (29 episodes with 10h 9m)
    • I guess this should technically go into “Late Night & Talk Shows” below โ€“ I’m not sure at what time of day it aired. For some reason I “forgot” to watch the final 30 episodes back in 2022. I can’t imagine I really forgotโ€ฆ but what I did forget is the reason I stopped watching. While this format usually works best in real-time, Sam did often cover some more timeless topics as well. I had a good time catching up, it’s a shame she doesn’t have a show anymore.
  • It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia โ€“ S18 (10 episodes with 3h 43m)
    • Still digging it, still baffled that of all the shows in the world it is this one that has endured for two decades. As many of the recent seasons it had its ups and downs, but I enjoyed more of it than not. The Christmas cards/motto inspiration “court” scene was probably my highlight of the season.
  • Cyberpunk: Edgerunners โ€“ S02 (10 episodes with 4h 49m)
    • I didn’t like this anywhere near as much as S01. While the first season also wasn’t perfect and a very slow burn, the payoff from the finale was great. As such, they certainly made the right call with the anthology approach and not tarnishing the existing legacy. But the new episodes felt too disconnected and all over the place โ€“ too many plots, too many characters, and in consequence too few things to be able to actually begin caring about. Nothing from the soundtrack stuck out to me either.

๐Ÿ’ฌ Late Night & Talk Shows

๐ŸŽง Music

I scrobbled 1001 tracks on 31 days in October 2026:

๐ŸŽถ Top 10 Tracks

  1. Rosemary Clooney โ€“ Sway (4 plays)
  2. Genesis โ€“ I Canโ€™t Dance (4 plays)
  3. Peter Fox โ€“ Alles Neu (3 plays)
  4. Peter Fox โ€“ Schwarz zu blau (3 plays)
  5. Peter Fox โ€“ Schรผttel Deinen Speck (3 plays)
  6. Peter Fox โ€“ Fieber (3 plays)
  7. Peter Fox โ€“ Das zweite Gesicht (3 plays)
  8. Peter Fox โ€“ Kopf verloren (3 plays)
  9. Peter Fox โ€“ Haus am See (3 plays)
  10. Peter Fox โ€“ Stadtaffe (3 plays)

This was a pretty interesting month musically โ€“ I listened to a lot of stuff, much more broadly than I usually do. This manifests in the most played track only having four plays, usually I’m more obsessed with one (or a few) track(s) every month. The reason for the increased variety is that I’ve been busy migrating my music library. For the last couple of years I mostly used “unsorted” files/folders that I just let Plex match and make into a pretty collection enriched with metadata etc.; at the end of last month I began what I had planned (and procrastinated on) for many years and imported everything into a beets-managed library (that I then serve/use through Navidrome). I had used beets before, so this wasn’t entirely new โ€“ but manually curating a library of this size was quite the undertaking:

$> beet stats
Tracks: 14919
Total time: 5.1 weeks

Approximate total size: 325.0 GiB
Artists: 1782
Albums: 892
Album artists: 247

In the process I’ve also updated, corrected or expanded a fair amount of the underlying metadata in MusicBrainz myself. However, it also meant that I was looking more critically at some of the things in my library: this album that I added three years ago and never actually ended up listening to a single time โ€“ should it stay? That’s why I ended up listening to a whole bunch of stuff “for the first time”, at least in “full album” mode and with intent. This is reflected in the most played artists also having a bit more balanced playcounts as opposed to one being way ahead:

๐Ÿง‘โ€๐ŸŽค Top 10 Artists

  1. Peter Fox (45 plays)
  2. Drapht (31 plays)
  3. Rogue Traders (29 plays)
  4. The Offspring (28 plays)
  5. Jack White (25 plays)
  6. Queens of the Stone Age (24 plays)
  7. AC/DC (24 plays)
  8. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (23 plays)
  9. Bob Vylan (22 plays)
  10. Mandy, Indiana (21 plays)

It was the first time I ever listened to a Jack White solo album. I love The White Stripes so much that I was always scared to engage with his other music. What if I hated it โ€“ would it impact how I feel about all his work? Luckily I’ll never know, because I really enjoyed his new album Frozen Charlotte that came out in July, and I am now looking forward to explore more of his solo output.

Given my QotSA obsession earlier this year, I was of course very much looking forward to their new album being released on October 30th. I only listened to it once so far โ€“ it was just what I expected: fine. Nothing that blew me away, but nice enough to listen to. Which is very close to how I felt about most of their catalogue before my mind opened to it in the spring. I anticipate this album will go through a similar journey.

A couple of things I dropped from my library after taking the time to listen intentionally:

  • Nick Cave (and the Bad Seeds): I like a few of his songs, but overall just not my thing. I have the impeccable Shrek 2 OST so I won’t lose People Ainโ€™t No Good.
  • Mandy, Indiana: I stumbled over this article and it got me interested enough to give it a listen. I get the appeal, but it’s largely not for me. I did keep Pinking Shears as a one hit wonder track, because that goes pretty hard.1
  • Tool: I saw high praise for their 2019 album Fear Inoculum somewhere and figured maybe I should check out this super famous band I’ve never listened to before. Interesting, but not something I’d ever seek out again.
  • Bob Vylan: Pretty sure they landed on my radar due to Glastonbury last year. I did enjoy a fair bit of the three albums I now listened to โ€“ but I’d also skip a lot of it on shuffle. I ended up only keeping Pretty Songs as another one hit wonder for now.

๐Ÿ“š Books

  • ๐Ÿ“˜ The Road โ€“ โญ๏ธ 4.5/5
    • I don’t know why I decided it was finally time to get this over with and read it now, but I’m so glad I did. I saw the movie back when it came out, and in the almost twenty years since then I have seen so many people talk about how the book is much more haunting and depressing than the movie โ€“ but also often naming it as a favorite. Maybe reading it after Covid (or as WW3 looms?) makes it hit differently, because I honestly didn’t find it all that gruesome. I meanโ€ฆ it definitely is absolutely brutal and devastating. But all the years of hearing how people couldn’t even finish it made me expect much worse.
      The book was somewhat hard to read, on a technical level. McCarthy not putting quotation marks for his dialogue was easy enough to get accustomed to and worked well for setting the mood. It fits in nicely with there being no chapters โ€“ the entire book is just one passage after another, most of which are very short. That aspect actually made me progress through the book very quickly, I much prefer that to having hour-long individual chapters. I know it technically doesn’t make a big difference, but it does seem to matter for how my reading brain works. Anyway, the part I sometimes struggled with was the language and words he used. It’s not written in Simple English! In fact, he apparently even used a word from the 17th century. As a non-native speaker, even after multiple decades of almost exclusively living my life in English, it was sometimes a bit hard for me to follow his words. Maybe not even harder than for a native speaker, it’s just not a style I’m used to. I did not constantly look up words in the dictionary or anything โ€“ just every once in a while I’d need to re-read a sentence to grok it. Or after a paragraph I would wonder if I read a description of a daydream or of something actually happening. But this mild bewilderment too seemed very fitting for the subject matter at hand.
      A funny detail was the protagonist’s instinct to instantly fill up the bath tub as he suspected distaster had struck. Almost 15 years ago, the city I live in had some of the worst flooding in its history โ€“ leaving us without drinkable tap water (and electricity) for a while. Ever since then, I also immediately head for the bath tub to fill it up at the slightest indication of upcoming scarcity. Another tidbit I only realized afterwards: this person also wrote No Country For Old Men, the novel that got made into an arch-nemesis movie of mine. Given how much more I liked the book than the movie for this one, I wonder if I should read No Country For Old Men as well โ€“ but I probably won’t.
  • ๐Ÿ“˜ Six Wakes โ€“ โญ๏ธ 2/5
    • Yeesh. Maybe a bit unfair putting this right after McCarthy, but this was some of the weakest writing I’ve encountered in a while. Within the first couple of pages, one of the characters says “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, clearly to telegraph what kind of person they are โ€“ but it’s done so clumsily that my eyes rolled back into my head. It felt like using the phrase this way told me more about the author than about this character. The premise was so good that I kept waiting for some redemption through the story itself, but unfortunately it never came. The best thing I can say is that it was a pretty quick read (and I do mean that genuinely in a positive way, not to throw more shade).

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Podcasts

I listened to 13 episodes across 3 podcasts in October 2026:

๐ŸŽฎ Games

I played 6 different games for a total of 27.3 hours in October 2026.

  • Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
    • ๐Ÿ† Began and finished the entire game this month, unlocking all 14 achievements in 8.2 hours across 6 days. Wrote a ๐Ÿ‘ review (377 words) on 2026-10-20.
  • Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
    • ๐Ÿ† Began and finished the entire game this month, unlocking all 23 achievements in 5.6 hours across 8 days. Wrote a ๐Ÿ‘ review (201 words) on 2026-10-25.
  • Mixtape
    • ๐Ÿ† Began and finished the entire game this month, unlocking all 26 achievements in 4.7 hours. Wrote a ๐Ÿ‘ review (147 words) on 2026-10-25.
  • SEASON: A letter to the future
    • ๐Ÿ† Began and finished the entire game this month, unlocking all 16 achievements in 5.4 hours across 3 days. Wrote a ๐Ÿ‘ review (299 words) on 2026-10-31.
  • Rocket League
    • Played 3.2 more hours across 3 days, already unlocked all 88 achievements in the past. I had already written my ๐Ÿ‘ review (21 words) back on 2022-09-03.
  • VVVVVV
    • Played for 0.1 hours. Unlocked no new achievements, still at 10/19 total. Haven’t written a review yet.

  1. I hadn’t even looked up / translated the lyrics before writing this. I just did, and I feel even better about my endorsement now! ↩︎