Hey look, it’s that time of year! When a bitch shares their love! Every song you hear! Seems to say! Spend your money! May your shopping dreams! Come true!
OR!
Here’s the first of four posts about stuff I loved in 2019!
- The Vint & York glasses in Cranberry Splash Ritzy that I wore almost all year and made me feel the most like myself any pair of glasses ever have.
- This Casemate Glitter Case for my iPhone.
- This heated electric throw that basically kept me alive through the early months of 2019.
- This cheap, warm, and very comfortable Amazon Basics Puffy Coat.
- I bought this mechanical keyboard for work and this mechanical keyboard for home and now typing on any keyboard without Cherry MX Blue switches feels a little bit like torture. I came for the clicky sounds which, idiotically and inexplicably, encourage me to write more, but stayed for the reduced effort needed for typing and the corresponding reduced strain on my hands.
- I would be remiss if I didn’t include skiley.net which lets you look at your Spotify stats any time you want instead of just when Spotify wants to send you infographics at the end of the year.
- This countertop ice maker which is a counter hog and pretty loud, but makes really good ice very quickly and enables my Stok Chocolate cold brew habit.
- I’ve got to extol the virtues of the NARS Powermatte Lip Pigments for the second year in a row because I really never wear anything else anymore! We added a few to the collection in 2019 — we’re up to nine now: American Woman, Don’t Stop, London Calling, Somebody to Love, Spin Me, Starwoman, Under My Thumb, Vain, Wild Night — and every single one is amazing.
- I am not a video game person, which I am sure I have said before and will say again, because I’m not competitive, but I also just don’t care about games enough to learn how to actually play them. Thankfully, untitled goose game has a very simple set of mechanics and no stressful metrics for success, so I get to enjoy non-competitive mischief like the rest of the internet.
- This Elizavecca Hair Treatment that makes my hair super soft, but not greasy or weighed down.
- 1 Million and, more specifically, mixing 1 Million with Alien.
- PODCASTS! (Okay, so, I know technically you LISTEN to podcasts and so that’s where this should go, but there was way, way, way too much good music in 2019 for me to sacrifice a spot to something I only barely tapped into, no matter how much I enjoyed it. Also, by ‘podcasts,’ I just mean My Brother, My Brother and Me so feel free to read this number as ‘The McElroy Brothers’ instead, if that makes you feel better.)
- All the stuff that I said about live music last year was pretty true this year, too! I didn’t get to see as many people live because life is about… balance? I guess? But we did see Ludo reunite again AND My Chemical Romance’s return and when you get to see one of your favorite bands play together for the first time in seven and a half years, that’s a pretty good year.
I didn’t know how I would feel about Lords of Chaos going in — I probably know about… 300 times more about Norwegian Black Metal than the average moviegoer — and I wasn’t totally sure what I thought after, but I sure have thought about it a lot. This was both a story I already knew and a subject I am vaguely interested in and I was worried I might be too concerned with The Truth to just watch it as a movie, but that ended up not being an issue because everyone is so good in it that I just sort of disappeared into it. I ended up having a lot of feelings I didn’t expect and though I think I wish it had focused more on the relationship between Euronymous and his band before Dead’s death, I obviously get why we got the timeline we did. I was surprised at how beautifully this was shot and also how absurdly funny it was in places and also how much the ending got to me emotionally even knowing what was coming. It’s not going to be for everyone and I think selling it as a “horror-thriller” is not only incorrect, but gross. This is a music biopic tragedy set in a subculture that looks absolutely nonsensical, even to people familiar with it, and it does that well.
Cavetown, Lemon Boy – I have accepted that I exist only at the whims of the algorithm so I should know by now that when it serves me a song that I really like, I shouldn’t wait six months to listen to the album that the song is on, but that’s exactly what happened with Cavetown. “Lemon Boy” showed up at some point early this year and I loved it and have listened to it and put it on my 
Like so many other people on the internet, I have been playing Cat Condo because it is a soothing and simple distraction in a chaotic world. There’s not much to say about it other than the cats are extremely cute and I really like being able to come and go without any commitment to sit and tap unless I want to because the game keeps generating cats in my absence. What a time to be alive.
Holy crap did I love Good Omens. I read the book in college (200…4? I think) and loved it and have spent the ensuing years recommending it to lots and lots of people. A solid adaptation FULL!! of all the queer angel-demon love I could have dreamed of. I will miss the internet obsessively fan re-casting the story every few years and I maintain that they CERTAINLY could have casted it less white-ly, but we liked it enough to almost immediately watch the entire thing a second time anyway. I thought the narrative and the dialogue did a good job pulling the funny charm from the book into a visual medium and I thought the visuals and placemaking and costuming were ultimately very cool. I also thought it did a nice job of breaking the book up into episodes, though I could have watched a thousand more minutes of Aziraphale and Crowley begrudgingly becoming friends. I will be haunted by “You go to too fast for me, Crowley” for the rest of my life and I will love it.
I didn’t know anything about Drew Magary’s The Hike before I bought it (I have probably made it clear that I don’t ever know anything about what I read before I read it and yet I cannot stop repeating myself.) and even if I had, I don’t think I could have accurately imagined the off-the-charts level of weirdness in here. The writing in this is really solid and, 
We were able to squeeze a viewing of Rocketman into a quick trip to the cities in June and I am SO GLAD. It was so big and fun and moving — making it a big fantasy musical was brilliant and fun and so fitting for Elton John’s music — and I ended up crying like, five times which I hadn’t really expected?? Taron Egerton is so, so, sooooooo unbelievably good. He makes acting look like it’s just having feelings on camera, right there all over his beautiful face, and he really drags you through them with him in the most satisfying way. Also, I had no idea Jamie Bell was in this before he popped up on screen and I kind of yelped in the theater and terrified all of the middle-aged couples that were there with us. As always, a beautiful, talented bitch. The “Your Song†bit is so good — two extremely talented actors just meaningfully, facially emoting at each other over a song I already loved so much — and I’m just going to think about it forever and ever. 
I thought Unicorn Store was incredibly sweet and charming and also it made me cry a little bit, but in a nice, moved way, which is always great. Brie Larson is a national treasure who I already love a lot and Mamoudou Athie is a wonderful new addition to my list of People to Be Obsessed With. I liked that this just leaned into its premise and let it play out as weird as it wanted to without sacrificing any of its characters’ humanity. Samuel L. Jackson was also great as always and man, what a wardrobe! 
I didn’t actually know anything about Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive when I finally started reading it 10,000 years after the hype died down and though 
Lizzo is a babe, a talent, a hero, an idol, an inspiration and Cuz I Love You is joyful and fun and energetic and beautiful and I am so glad I’m alive on earth at the same time as her. I can’t imagine telling a young version of myself about Lizzo’s entire existence and I am so envious of and happy for young people right now. Favorites: “Cuz I Love You” & “Like a Girl” & “Jerome” & “Better In Color”
