November has been so, so good. Not just compared to the painful shitshow of October, but just like, genuinely! Even though it was also super stressful! What a wonderful and hideous mixed bag life can be!

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 giant master list of songs I like but I didn’t listen to the album until earlier this month after “Pigeon” popped up for me and I loved it too. The album is solid and pretty and kind of achy in places I wasn’t expecting which I always loooooove. In addition to the aforementioned tunes, I am also obsessed with “Green” and “It’s U” and “Taking Care of Things” and “10 Feet Tall” and “888,” but the whole album is genuinely great.

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.