October Media

Another month in which, both by choice and by chance, I didn’t watch a ton of TV. Also remember I’m stripping out a lot of the trivial stuff I glance at on YouTube (although I’ve cut a lot of that, too) and just sharing the substantial or impactful things I have watched/listened to.

Harvesting Tequila, Surfing Secret Coves & Tasting Legendary Mexican Flavors | DIRT Guadalajara
Typically terrific stuff from the DIRT crew.

Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale Gets Candid About Band’s Humble Beginnings
Wonderful.

Halloween Baking Championship, season 11
Well this was a wild ride. It began with a couple extremely annoying contestants – one of which might be the most annoying to ever appear on the show – and some tweaks to the show’s format that I did not like. Throughout the season there was a lot of stuff that seemed even more edited to produce drama than in the past. And while this show is often a step down in ability from the Holiday Baking Championship, no one in this year’s group of contestants was awe-inspiring.

But I’m a sucker for sitting and watching these mindlessly, so by the end I was resigned to it being fine. And then the winner was declared and it seemed they were chosen more for their sob story than their bakes. I made the mistake of reading some message boards to see how other viewers felt and, for the most part, folks were not happy with this season, the winner, or choices the production team made.

I try not to be influenced too much by those, but this season was definitely less enjoyable than ones from the past. But I’m old and a creature of habit so I’ll probably watch again next year.