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What I'm Watching - Q1 2026

It's a new year and I'm still tracking what I'm watching. I have a number of television shows still in progress. I don't write them down until the season I'm watching has finished.

Highlights include finally getting around to For All Mankind season 4 with season five having just started. I highly recommend this show if you haven't seen it. I also enjoyed Predator: Badlands, Have Fun, Don't Die, Good Luck, and The Rip. Whatever you do, don't watch Mercy. I still need to catch up on some of the Oscar nominees.

Legend

  • The Criterion Channel = *

  • 4K UHD = +

  • AppleTV+ = ^

  • Netflix = ~

January

  • Predator: Badlands (2025)
  • Boogie Nights+ (1997)
  • The Rip~ (2026)
  • Dust Bunny (2025)
  • Landman S2
  • What Lies Beneath~ (2000)
  • For All Mankind S4^
  • If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (2025)

February

  • Loot S3^
  • The Wrecking Crew (2026)
  • The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)
  • The Assessment (2025)
  • The Lazarus Project S2
  • Is This Thing On? (2026)
  • Mercy (2026)
  • The Housemaid (2025)
  • Eternity (2026)^
  • Industry S1
  • Honey Don’t (2025)~

March

  • Crazy Stupid Love (2011)~
  • Mission: Impossible 2 (2001)+
  • Dracula (2027)
  • A Man on the Inside S2~
  • Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2027)
  • Pacific Rim (2013)+
  • Firefly (2001)
  • Serenity (2005)+
  • Send Help (2026)
  • How to Make a Killing (2026)
  • in movies, tv
  • 1 min read

What I'm Watching - Q4 2025

Wrapping up the year, here's everything I watched in October, November, and December, excluding sports. Because there is a lot of football that isn't accounted for, which is why my total watchlist is down. Well, that and a bit of gaming took out a chunk in November and I was traveling half of December.

I plan on continuing to track my watchlist monthly, though I'm unsure if I'll keep blogging it. A small part of me is tempted to do what Steven Soderbergh does, and track everything. But I probably really don't want to know how much time I spend watching baseball and football.

Highlights include K-Pop Demon Hunters, Peacemaker S2, Task, Wake Up Dead Man, One Battle After Another, and Pluribus. I was disappointed with A House of Dynamite, The Roses, Relay, and Good Fortune.

Legend:

  • The Criterion Channel = *

  • 4K UHD = +

  • AppleTV+ = ^

  • Netflix = ~

October

  • Peacemaker S2
  • K-Pop Demon Hunters~
  • Task
  • The Parallax View (1974)*
  • Punch Drunk Love (2002)*
  • Mission: Impossible (1996)+
  • A House of Dynamite (2025)~
  • Platonic S2
  • The Roses (2025)

November

  • The Toxic Avenger (2025)
  • Chad Powers S1
  • Panic Room (2002)*

December

  • Tron: Ares (2025)
  • A Man on the Inside (2024) S1~
  • Parish (2024)~
  • Fatman (2020)~
  • Good Fortune (2025)
  • One Battle After Another (2025)
  • Relay (2024)
  • Mayor of Kingstown S1
  • The Running Man (2025)
  • Wake Up, Dead Man (2025)~
  • F1
  • Pluribus (S1)
  • The Copenhagen Test S1
  • Dogma (2000)+
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  • 2 min read

What I'm Watching - Q3 2025

Continuing on my journey to catalog everything I'm watching, here's what I watched in the third quarter of 2025. Highlights included the first six James Bond movies on 4K UHD, Tron and its sequel Tron: Legacy in 4K UHD, and some great movies on Netflix including some Alfred Hitchcock films I had never seen, and on The Criterion Channel, 90s movies featuring great soundtracks including Pump Up The Volume (1990) and Grosse Point Blank (1997). I was disappointed in Materialists and 28 Years Later.

Legend:

  • The Criterion Channel = *

  • 4K UHD = +

  • AppleTV+ = ^

  • Netflix = ~

July

  • Wild Things (1998)*
  • The Bear S4
  • Your Friends and Neighbors S1^
  • Heads of State (2025)
  • Thunderbolts* (2025)
  • Murderbot S1^
  • Ironheart
  • Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage S1
  • Duster
  • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)~
  • The Old Guard (2020)~
  • The Old Guard 2 (2025)~
  • Goldfinger (1964)+
  • Psycho (1960)~
  • Miami Vice (2006)*
  • Poker Face S2
  • The Long Goodbye (1973)*
  • Out of Sight (1998)*
  • Rear Window (1954)~
  • Copycat (1995)*~
  • Insomnia (2002)*
  • The Birds (1963)~
  • Black Doves S1~

August

  • Thunderball (1965)+
  • Freaky Tales (2025)
  • Pump Up the Volume (1990)*
  • Platonic S1^
  • Red-eye (2005)
  • You Only Live Twice (1967)+
  • Gross Pointe Blank (1997)*
  • Superman (2025)
  • Peacemaker S1
  • Diamonds are Forever (1971)+
  • Rick and Morty S8
  • Fringe S4
  • Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)+
  • Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)
  • Materialists (2025)
  • The Graduate (1967)*
  • Inglourious Basterds (2009)
  • The Long Kiss Goodnight (1995)+

September

  • Nobody (2021)
  • Nobody 2 (2025)
  • Ballerina (2025)+
  • Weapons (2025)
  • Fringe S5
  • 28 Years Later (2025)~
  • Tron (1982)+
  • Tron: Legacy (2010)+
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3
  • Alien: Earth S1
  • The Naked Gun (2025)
  • Miami Blues (1990)*

What I'm Watching - Q2 2025

Continuing on my journey to catalog everything I'm watching, here's what I watched in the second quarter of 2025. Highlights included kicking off April getting ready for Andor S2 by re-watching the Star Wars Prequels, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Andor S1. I celebrated the life of Gene Hackman with Night Moves, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Runaway Jury. Other movies I enjoyed included The Long Good Friday, Tombstone, and starting to watch the classic Sean Connery Bond films on 4K UHD.

Legend:

  • The Criterion Channel = *
  • 4K UHD = +
  • AppleTV+ = ^
  • Netflix = ~

April

  • Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999)+
  • Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002)+
  • Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (2005)+
  • White Lotus S3
  • The Cleaner (2024)
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi+
  • Vanilla Sky (2001)*
  • Fringe S2
  • Mickey 17 (2025)
  • Andor S1+
  • Sneakers (1992)+
  • SportsNight S1

May

  • A Working Man (2025)
  • Showgirls (1995)*
  • Tombstone (1993)+
  • Strange Days (1995)*
  • The Long Good Friday (1980)*
  • Shutter Island (2010)*
  • Rosemary’s Baby (1968)*
  • The Insider (1999)*
  • Blue Steel (1990)*+
  • Andor S2
  • Rogue One (2016)+
  • Fountain of Youth (2025)^
  • The Handmaid’s Tale S6
  • Shampoo (1975)*

June

  • The Righteous Gemstones S4
  • Fringe S3
  • Sinners (2025)
  • The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)*
  • The Accountant 2 (2025)
  • Coogan’s Bluff (1968)*
  • L.A. Confidential (1997)*
  • Night Moves (1975)*
  • Runaway Jury (2003)~
  • Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)
  • The Last of Us S2
  • Dr. No (1962)+
  • Heathers (1988)*
  • Havoc (2025)~
  • The Studio S1^
  • The Fog (1980)*
  • Sports Night S2
  • Lethal Weapon (1987)+
  • Deep Cover (2025)
  • From Russia With Love (1963)+
  • Shrinking S2^
  • The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
  • Paper Moon (1973)*
  • in movies, tv
  • 2 min read

What I'm Watching - Q1 2025

Each year, the director Steven Soderbergh releases a list of all the movies and TV shows he's watching. It's a fascinating look at what he's interested in and can give a clue to future projects. I've also wanted to do something similar, and this year I'm finally keeping track of everything I'm watching. Mr. Soderbergh's list is a daily breakdown - I'm not going into that much detail, but with the exception of sports, I kept track of all the movies and TV shows I watched.

This past February was my birthday, and I treated myself to a subscription to The Criterion Channel. Criterion started as a home video company in 1984 that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". In 2019, Criterion launched a streaming service that offers a curated selection of Criterion's catalog. For only $99 a year, you get access to classic movies from the last one hundred years of cinema, including some modern classics, such as Minority Report or Down With Love. I'm really enjoying streaming the classics and broadening my knowledge of cinema history.

Even with the two podcasts and my electronics hobby, I watch a lot of TV and movies. TV Shows listed are the month I finished watching the season. Movies are in bold. This list includes physical releases, streaming, and re-watches.

January

  • Interstellar (2015)
  • The Thing (1982)
  • Se7en (1995)
  • The Day of the Jackal S1
  • Red One (2024)
  • Star Wars Skeleton Crew
  • Brilliant Minds
  • Marvel’s What If… S2
  • Better Off Dead (1985)
  • Dune: Prophecy S1
  • Juror #2 (2024)
  • Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)
  • Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003)
  • Kill Bill Volume 2 (2204)
  • The Substance (2024)
  • The Departed (2006)
  • Gattaca (1997)

February

  • To Die For (1995)
  • Moonstruck (1987)
  • Vertigo (1958)
  • Down With Love (2003)
  • Batman Begins (2005)
  • The Dark Knight (2008)
  • The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
  • The Gorge (2025)
  • Constantine (2005)
  • North by Northwest (1959)
  • Minority Report (2002)
  • Companion (2024)
  • The Last Starfighter (1984)
  • Conclave (2024)
  • Severance S1
  • High Potential S1
  • Crossing Delancey (1988)
  • Crimson Tide (1995)

March

  • Love Hurts (2025)
  • Demolition Man (1993)
  • Anora (2024)
  • Thief (1981)
  • Landman S1
  • It Could Happen to You (1996)
  • Manhunter (1986)
  • Glory (1989)
  • Heat (1995)
  • A Scanner Darkly (2006)
  • Severance S2
  • Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990)
  • The Killers (1964)
  • Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)
  • Mythic Quest S4
  • Reacher S4
  • Red River (1948)
  • Adolescents
  • An Affair to Remember (1957)
  • The Princess Bride (1987)
  • Ghost (1990)
  • A Face in the Crowd (1957)
  • in movies
  • 1 min read

Achievement Unlocked: Geek Dad Cred

I took the kids to Captain America: The Winter Soldier this past Sunday. You know it’s going to be a blockbuster when the theater is 75% filled at a 9:30 a.m. showing on a Sunday morning. I usually like to take the kids to the early showing as the theater is almost empty on Sunday mornings.

Warning: Minor Spoiler

Two thirds of the way through the movie, Natasha Romanova (Black Widow), played by Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Rogers (Captain America), played by Chris Evans, enter an abandoned military base with an ancient mainframe computer system. Natasha Romanova turns to Captain America, and asks in a monotone, “Would you like to play a game?” Right out of the 1983 movie WarGames. Zoe turns to me in the theater, her face all lit up, as she gets the in-joke, mostly in there for my generation.

We had just watched Wargames a couple months ago on Netflix, right before it was set to expire. (Alas, it’s still expired and not available for streaming.)

That was definitely a warm fuzzy knowing I’ve contributed to my kids geek credibility. Achievement Unlocked.

All Things Blade Runner

Over thirty years later, Blade Runner still remains one of my favorite films (as I’ve previously blogged about).  It was only six weeks ago that I sat down and watched it again – it is easily one of the movies I can watch over and over and still enjoy with a sense of wonder.

I’m not the only one who shares a passion for Blade Runner, as fans have paid tribute to the classic film in a few ways in 2013:

Blade Runner: 8 Bit Cinema – here is the film re-told as a classic video game.  If only this was a real game! (Via Gizmodo)

[//www.youtube.com/embed/OM6z9czN318]

Moments Lost: Music and Art inspired by Blade Runner. This is an IndieGoGo campaign to create a full length soundtrack using Vangelis’ original recording equipment. (Vangelis did the original soundtrack to the film). It will also include 8 stories and 8 illustrations as part of the fundraising campaign.

[//www.youtube.com/embed/PFCnJ-R33jw]

Lastly, here is Blade Runner done as 12,000 hand painted water color paintings.  As Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing wrote:

The absolutely stunning work of Swedish artist Anders Ramsell, who painted each frame as a 1.5 x 3cm work of art. It’s taken him a while to complete the epic job; Pesco wrote about the first three minutes last year. The end result runs about 30 minutes, which is exactly how long Blade Runner should be.

 

[//www.youtube.com/embed/SLwmlMezS3U]

Cutting the Cable, Part 2

A few weeks ago I blogged about buying the hardware to set up a MythTV PC to record off air high def TV and integrate it with Boxee.

The hardware arrived and I’ve been working on on the setup off and on over the last few weeks. Some random thoughts:

  • The HD Homerun tuner is pretty cool. Fedora has the HD Homerun configuration tool in their repos. Installing that through PackageKit and yum made it easy to test out that it was working and had a good signal.
  • I had to install MyTV 3 times before I could get it to work. On a vanilla Fedora 12 install and then adding MythTV from the repos, only one tuner of the HD Homerun would work. Trying Mythdora, my MythTV front ends on my desktop PC and my laptop wouldn’t connect. Also there was a nasty bug in Mythdora’s kernel that wouldn’t let me mount a NFS share. Using Mythbuntu everything just worked.
  • Schedules Direct is a pretty cool service. I remember hearing about the story a couple years ago when it all went down, but when Zap2It started charging users for the scheduling data, a group of MythTV users started Schedules Direct and licensed the data. $20 / year is more than reasonable to pay to get all the scheduling data.

  • I love the fact that I can browse to the IP address of the MythTV PC from any computer and see the scheduling data and record a show. It took a few minutes to find the setting to only record new episodes, but it’s there! Obligatory screenshot:

    mythtv-schedule

    • The first recordings I made were the second night of the 24 season premiere and an episode of How I Met Your Mother. A one hour recording is about 6 GB.
    • I only have a 100GB hard drive in the MythTV backend, so I mounted my NAS via NFS . I would then in Boxee use the File Browser and surf to my tv recording directory. One downside to this method is that MythTV records the file, such as last week’s 24 as 1091_2010011819000mpg. The File Browser also displays a PNG file so it’s easy to tell what show is what, but it’s not intuitive at all.
    • There are plugins for XBMC, such as MythSExx and MythicalLibrarian that will rename your TV recordings into a S01E01 format and create a symlink for you to make it easier to browse your recordings. I couldn’t get the former script to run, but I didn’t spend a lot of time troubleshooting either.

And then yesterday while idling in #boxee on Freenode IRC, user SpaceBass mentioned that MythTV support was working for him in the Boxee Beta. There are a number of threads in the Boxee forums that the “mythtv://” protocol doesn’t work – but it appears to be working now.

In the Boxee settings, add a manual souce, and make it: myth://IPADDRESS where IPADDRESS is the IP address of your Myth backend and give the source a name – I used “DVR”.

Now use the File Browser in Boxee and when you first choose it you’ll have a list of your sources:

IMG_4870.JPG

Select DVR and you’ll be presented with “All Recordings”, “Guide”, “Live Channels”, “Movies” and “TV Shows”:

IMG_4871.JPG

Note: Guide doesn’t work for me.

If you choose “All Recordings” you’ll see everything that MythTV has recorded:

IMG_4872.JPG

(TV Shows and Movies will just show the MythTV recordings based on those filters). I haven’t looked into using MythTV’s built-in commercial skip as Boxee has a 30 second skip that just works too. I also like that Boxee remembers to resume where I left off watching if I stop playback.

To watch Live TV streaming from your Myth backend to Boxee, choose Live TV from the menu I mentioned above. You’ll be presented with a list of TV channels by station ID, not number:

IMG_4873.JPG

And here’s a screenshot of the NHL game on NBC in HD earlier this afternoon:

IMG_4874.JPG

There are two bugs I’m experiencing that I need to spend some time with:

  • When playing back a recording or starting a live TV stream, it will sometimes start as if it’s being fast-forwarded, including the audio. Hitting pause and then unpausing fixes it.
  • I think this may be related to signal strength as I’m seeing it on NBC and CBS, but not Fox, but I’m seeing jagged edges around an object, such as a person, when it’s moving quickly. If it’s a fairly static image, there are no jagged edges. But even someone quickly sitting down will have the distortion. But I don’t see this problem when accessing the recording from a Myth frontend on another computer, so it needs more investigating.
  • My other theory is it could have something to do with saving the content on the NAS and not on a hard drive in the Myth backend, so I bought a larger hard drive to throw in there too. I’d also rather have it on a hard drive than the NAS just to save wear and tear.

I’m almost done – if I had to guess, I’m about a week away from telling DirecTV to pound sand. I’ll poke at the distortion issue some more and install that hard drive when it arrives but this has been a pretty cool project to work on so far.