I thought it would be fun to track the media that I watched in 2025.

I watched a bunch of YouTube. Who knows how much? I often have that up on my personal laptop at home off to the right of my main screen. I have a bunch of channels that I follow, and I queue their stuff up into the “Watch Later” playlist, then delete it once I’ve watched it. So it’s like a curated channel of stuff I know I will like. Just check the “Subscriptions” page every morning, and search for the newest thing on my “Watch Later” list (the thing at the very bottom), then go up and add anything that looks interesting. That keeps things chronological. Usually I’m watching some Street Fighter content, or gaming related stuff. Sometimes some car things. Sometimes some architecture things, and sometimes some computer / programming stuff. A pretty good mix of stuff.

NBA on Prime Video

Last year I watched NBA stuff on Rakuten’s platform. Many years ago I switched to Rakuten Mobile, and at some point Rakuten picked up NBA League Pass, so I would pay $200 or whatever it was to watch that. Then they started giving NBA League Pass for free with Rakuten Mobile subscriptions, which I already had. It was a pretty good system. You could log in on a web browser or use an App (I think, I never did that). You could register your favorite teams, and the default view showed all games on a given day, with a way to move between days easily. You could hide the score (important!) The player had buttons for each quarter. Pretty good.

This year, NBA League Pass moved to Amazon. So I again paid about $200 or whatever it was, to watch some games. This year I’m pretty much only watching the Lakers – I like Luka, Reeves, and of course Rui Hachimura. It’s interesting to see LeBron in the late stages of his career. I also like the Oklahoma City Thunder a lot – Chet Holmgren is a lot of fun.

Amazon’s player is terrible. First, just getting to the NBA is hard. I have to click on “Prime Video”. Then I have to click on “Sports”, then look for “NBA”. They list all live and upcoming games. There is no way to say what my favorite team is. There is no calendar view so I can’t look to see what games are on a certain date. If I want to see Lakers Games, I have to clicks horizontally on a list of teams until they Lakers come up. I have no idea what order that list is in. It seems random.

Once you find a game to watch, there are no quarter buttons. Every time you move the mouse over the screen, or pause things, the whole screen goes super dark for like 3 seconds. It’s very hard to rewind to find something and watch it because it is super dark.

Anyway, I’ve watched most Lakers games. You can skip through them pretty quick, because the arrow key does a forward 10 seconds skip. I haven’t found a forward 30 seconds skip button yet.

Fallout

I started watching this probably in late 2024. I just watched Season One Episode 6 December 13th. I’ll try to finish Season one off by the end of the year. It’s a great show, but definitely not one I can watch with kids around. Since each episode is pretty long – 40 minutes to an hour – that’s usually more time than I have to watch stuff at night. So I have to either stay up late or really plan to make time for it. Very good show though!! I’m excited for Season 2, which is why I’m pushing to get through Season 1 by the end of 2025.

I did finally finish Season One back on 2025-12-18, and it was very good! Then a day or two later Season 2 Episode 1 dropped, and I watched that as well. There were lots of call-outs to Fallout: New Vegas, which is a game I really enjoyed (Steam says I put 200 hours into it!) The opening with the Dinosaur motel was great, and overall I thought House in New Vegas was an interesting character. I also really enjoyed the “Old World Blues” DLC for New Vegas, and since we’ve already seen mention of BigMT I’m hopeful that the TV series will involve some of the lore from that DLC as well.

Frieren: Journey’s End

I heard this was good, and so I started to watch it. It was very, very good. I’m excited for Season 2. I don’t know if it is as good unless you have grown up on the classics of Dungeon and Dragons / J.R.R. Tolkien, and so on. I really liked the slow pace of this, and the very personal story about Frieren’s journey. No English subtitles, which is unfortunate, because sometimes this show gets a bit metaphysical with magic, and introspective. Still easy enough to follow along with the major plot points. Highly recommended, definitely the best Anime I watched this year.

Dan Da Dan

I heard that this was very good, so I checked it out. It was very good! Very funny too, and I appreciate humor in my anime. I haven’t finished Season One yet, I still have one more episode to go. I should finish this out by the end of the year, and Season 2 is on Disney Plus so I can keep watching into Season 2. The intro song by Creepy Nuts is great. I don’t think this has subtitles either.

Dungeon Meshi

I think this was recommended to me on Amazon Prime, then halfway through switched to only being available on Disney Plus for me. I’ve watched the first 14 episodes of Season One, so have about 10 more to go. It’s very good, and I think you benefit from having played the early Wizardry titles, or at least being familiar with the Wizardry tropes. I should try to finish this up too.

Zom 100: 100 things I want to do before becoming a Zombie

I think this was recommended to me on Amazon, and I started watching it back in early 2023 or something? We were still working from home mostly, so I would watch an episode over lunch. We pretty soon started to go back to the office more regularly, so I only watched until about 75% of the first season. I need to watch the rest, but it looks like it is only available to rent now. I’ll have to check if this is on Disney Plus.

Dorohedoro

I don’t know how I came across this one, but it was a really interesting Fantasy / Magic / Post Apocalypse show. I haven’t finished the first season yet, so I need to get back to that.

My Dress Up Darling

I watched Season 1 of My Dress Up Darling. It was fun and funny, though of course, definitely targeted as a male audience. I’ll try to watch Season 2 at some point. Like most anime on Amazon Japan, there are no English subtitles for this one, but it’s simple enough to follow along in Japanese, this isn’t very complicated stuff.

From Old Country Bumpkin To Sword Master

I really enjoyed Season 1 of this anime. I don’t think Season 2 is out yet though. This one did have English subtitles, which was nice, but probably not necessary. Also has some tendencies to a harem anime, which is fine, but I like having an older protagonist serving as a father figure. I can really relate to that. Not the swordsmanship though; back in high school I used to do a little bit of fencing thanks to my friend Ron, but I was never very good. I’ll definitely watch Season 2 if that ever comes out.

Mashle

I’ve been watching a reasonable amount of Fantasy type stuff, and this was recommended. It’s about someone with no magical powers, but lots of muscle, in a magic world who has to go to the best Magic school. Pretty funny! Also, quite predictable, but it is fun to see how the author gets the super strong non-magical Mashle out of scrapes. No subtitles for this one.