My October 2025 Media Diet

Another month, another “I can’t believe how fast it went” intro paragraph. This time I actually have an excuse, October was packed. My brother visited from Seattle, and all three of us brothers had birthdays (plus the usual birthday-adjacent festivities). I also spent a week in Paris, checking off the classic tourist stops and narrowly avoiding being implicated in the Louvre jewel heist. I have an alibi, I swear.

Since it was October, I naturally watched a bunch of horror movies. And I celebrated the return of my favorite YouTube channel, Bonsai Releaf. Seriously, go watch. One video a year, pure bliss.

Here’s what else I got up to last month:

📺 The Paper. I didn’t want to watch this Office spinoff. I’ve always been more of a Parks and Recreation guy myself (sorry, it’s the better show). That said, I kind of liked this a lot? The characters are fun, and I’ve got a soft spot for shows set in Ohio.

🍿 The Witches of Eastwick. I’d never seen or even heard of this before. Once I finally watched it (and its wild cast), I started seeing references to it everywhere. I love these goofy, horror-adjacent movies. They just don’t make them like this anymore. Better than I expected.

📖 Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. This book is everywhere on Hardcover and (I hear) BookTok. I burned through it quickly, so it’s safe to say I enjoyed it too. Light, loose, and reminiscent of how I felt reading Ready Player One way back when. I’ll be reading more of these between the stuffy, serious sci-fi and fantasy I usually lean toward.

🍿 The Home. Pete Davidson was given some truly terrible lines, but he delivers them about as well as anyone could. Not great overall, though the finale goes completely off the rails in a fun way.

🍿 Treasure Planet. Disney’s last hurrah for hand-drawn animation (with a few CGI bits sprinkled in). Anime has mostly filled that gap for me, but it’d be nice if Disney revisited this style once in a while.

🍿 The Conjuring: Last Rites. I liked the early Conjuring entries, but I’m not sure how this series has survived this long. I get it—they’re cash cows—but I’m struggling to see what people love about this one. Supposedly this is the “final chapter.” Sure.

🍿 Tron: Ares. As a movie, it’s… not great. But as a two-hour Nine Inch Nails music video? Fantastic. Trent Reznor is absolutely in his element here, and if you just vibe with it, it’s a great time.

🍿 The Life of Chuck. A Mike Flanagan-directed Stephen King adaptation. I went in blind, which I think was the best choice. Watched it on a plane over the Atlantic en route to Paris, and it made the flight fly by. I love the recurring cast Flanagan uses in all his projects. It’s like seeing old friends again.

📺 Slow Horses. This might be the best show on TV that almost nobody’s watching. It’s so good, and this latest season is one of the strongest. Gary Oldman is perfect as Jackson Lamb, the burned-out spy. Each season feels self-contained and plays out like a novel. Watch this show.

🍿 Wolfs. This might be the ideal airplane movie. Is it good? Not really. But watching Brad Pitt and George Clooney banter like it’s some alternate-universe Ocean’s Eleven? Absolutely worth it.

📺 Make Some Noise. Dropout is back with a new season and a (mostly) familiar rotating cast. Pure comfort food. The two-week wait between episodes is agony.

📖 Absolute Batman. Scott Snyder’s DC film universe wasn’t exactly my thing, but his writing here absolutely rips. Forget everything you know about Batman and just have fun with it.

🍿 One Battle After Another. It sounds hyperbolic, but this might be one of the best films I’ve ever seen. It instantly launched itself into my all-time favorites. Every actor delivers a powerhouse performance, with DiCaprio and del Toro standing out. Also: more movies should have random rooftop parkour sequences.

📖 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky . I picked this up at a bookshop in Paris across from Notre Dame. I’m about a third of the way in, and it’s fantastic so far—big ideas, sweeping timelines, generations of evolution. That said, spider aliens? There are so many spider aliens in sci-fi. Still, Tchaikovsky weaves (heh) the lore perfectly.

🍿 The Long Walk. I read Stephen King’s novel years ago and it really stuck with me. A parable about the Vietnam War, the American draft, and its toll on youth. It’s heavy stuff. The movie doesn’t carry the same weight, but Mark Hamill alone makes it worth watching.

🕹️ Keeper. I had no idea this game even existed until the day before I played it. From the creators of Psychonauts, you play as a walking lighthouse exploring strange lands. The visuals are stunning, and the relaxed gameplay loop makes for a great chill experience. Highly recommend.

🍿 Freakier Friday. I don’t have strong childhood memories of the original (unlike most of my millennial peers), but I actually enjoyed this. It leans Disney Channel at times but avoids most of the cringy Boomer-vs-Millennial jokes that plague other remakes.

🕹️ Ball x Pit. This Balatro-like rules. A mix of Breakout, Galaga, and Vampire Survivors, you control a bouncing ball sprite fighting the armies of Hell. I bought it instantly on Switch; it’s perfect for a 20-minute play session that somehow feels productive.

📺 The Chair Company. The first episode was great, but three episodes in I’m not sure if it has the juice to carry the story (is there even a story?). If you’re curious, watch Friendship first.

📺 Splinter Cell: Deathwatch. Watching this one passively, but I like it so far. Netflix’s animation studios always do great work on these game adaptations, and this is no exception. The story’s engaging enough to keep me going.

🍿 Bone Lake. For a movie called Bone Lake, I expected a bit more… well, you know. There’s a decent Scream-style slasher buried in here, but it ultimately misses the mark.

📺 Love Island: Australia. The new season just started. I like that the Australian version runs shorter. If you think you’ll like this show, you will. If you don’t, you won’t.

🍿 Vampire in Brooklyn. I watched this purely because Wes Craven directed it. The comedy doesn’t land, and Eddie Murphy is shockingly unfunny. I expected a goofy, lovable vampire. What we get instead is basically Blade without the cool fight scenes.

📺 Ink Master. I’m going to recommend you watch Ink Master. Start with an early season; the newer ones don’t hit the same. I also know you’re not actually going to take that advice. Your loss.

🍿 It: Welcome to Derry. The CGI work in this IT spinoff is surprisingly great. I love Goonies-style adventures where kids band together against some big evil, but the military subplot feels very “Marvel”, and not in a good way.