I Know They're Supposed To Be Funny But The Australian "need To Wake Up At 5 Am To Watch Eurovision"

I know they're supposed to be funny but the Australian "need to wake up at 5 am to watch Eurovision" posts actually make me a bit emotional.

Wdym people are so dedicated that they get up at 5 in the morning to watch this crazy music competition taking place on the other side of the world??

You guys....🥹🥹🥹

I think that one of my favorite things about the Warhammer settings as a whole is that their absolute apexes of supernatural skill, their absolute peaks of arcane or psychic mastery, the ancient starfarers and precursors with unmatched understanding of the ins and outs of creation and the manipulation of the fabric of reality, who can level mountains with a gesture and orchestrate plans lasting for eons, look like this:

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

Portrait Of An Enemy.

Lucia Heffernan

Fine.

I'm finally downloading this from Project Gutenberg, and I'm finally going to sit down and read it.

So, is Moby-Dick actually a kaiju story? ;)

Eurovision 2023

Trying to process my thoughts about last night in the form of a tumblr post...

Firstly, which songs are stuck in my head today? Well, Cha Cha Cha by Käärijä (Finland), natch, but also Promise by Voyager (Australia), and Who the hell is Edgar? by Teya and Selena (Austria)

Positives

Croatia's Let 3 made it to the left of the board! Yesss!

I'd normally be the first person to criticise the BBC, but I actually feel they did a good job considering. Admittedly my expectations going into this were kinda low, but they didn't make it too, erm, BBC 😅

Also, Hannah Waddingham. New favourite Eurovision presenter. Clearly feeling very protective of Julia Sanina. Presence, crowd control ("We don't boo in this house"). Queen.

Abolishing the jury vote from the semi-finals was a big success. Not all of my favourites got through (sorry Iceland 😢 ), but we had some amazing performers reach the finals that I'm not convinced would have in previous years.

Negatives

There were a number of artists whos performances in the final were not as good as in the semis... I'm thinking particularly Serbia and Australia, which were two of my favourites coming into the final.

Why did Germany and Spain score so badly? I keep telling myself that part of the answer to that is the old thing about the way the points work, if a song is everyone's 11th favourate out of the 26 entries, it'll get zero points, but still... I feel these were objectively two of the best performances of the night, both technically and in terms of everything else. Still very annoyed by this, they were two of my favourites. At least no-one got nil points this year.

On a related note, who was voting for Israel and Poland?! I know that musical taste is a personal thing (believe me, I know :D ) but Poland's song had no energy to it, and the highlight picked for Iceland was the dance break, with no singing...

?????

I'm not sure what else I can add about the winner/second place that hasn't already been said. We love out green cha cha cha-ing blorbo. Europe loves him. The legend of Käärijä will live on!

Related, I felt that Loreen's performance in the reprise was much better than during the main part of the competition... what happened?

Norway put in a very technical performance, and I really want to like it, but as I've been saying all week, there wasn't enough texture, not enough light and shade to the song as it was peformed. We were also missing the growl in Alessandra's vocals from the semi.

Where was the audience interaction? I get that the focus is always going to be getting votes from home, so a lot of the staging will focus on that, but it's still a live music event, and it was disappointing to only notice Belgium and Germany playing to the crowd.

I've yet to listen to the recorded versions of the songs yet (that's my lunch time listening this week), but from what I hear from @itseverydaybear some of the songs that didn't make a great impression in the semis sound much better. I suspect there will be some sleeper hits in there...

Anyhow, catch you later, just going to listen to The HARDKISS and Jann (Poland televoter's choice to represent them this year - once again for those at the back, time to abolish juries...!)

As a bonus, here's Lord of the Lost covering Queen of Kings (they have even more covers on their youtube chanel, it's worth a look!)