Eurovision is only a few weeks away now and normally by this time I’d have started posting my full ranking. However, I’m sitting this year out. Rather than leave this blog hanging, I decided to post this as a wrap up to the 2024 season. Since I’d listened to nearly all of the competing songs over the past few months, and had a rough idea already of how I’d rank them, here’s what my top 10 would probably be for this year, just to have it on record:

10. Australia – One Milkali (One Blood) 9. Ukraine – Teresa & Maria 8. Lithuania – Luktelk 7. Croatia – Rim Tim Tagi Dim 6. Portugal – Grito 5. Ireland – Doomsday Blue 4. Estonia – (Nendest) narkootikumidest ei tea me (küll) midagi 3. Switzerland – The Code 2. San Marino – 11:11 1. Norway – Ulveham

I love Eurovision – it’s one of my main hobbies and I love the music, the spectacle, and the fun of the competition.  But I can’t take part in it right now. I had a lot of fun with national final season this year, and with plenty of good internally selected songs too, I honestly think this had the potential to be a fantastic year. Maybe one day I’ll return to this set of 36 songs and give them the proper review they deserve, but for now, this is the last I’ll be talking about this year.

Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane

Brienne & Sansa characters from Game of Thrones. I don’t usually do fanart, but I really enjoy this show. This print will be available for the first time at the 3 Rivers Comic Con in PA. 

8x10 Print available at Etsy

What makes Persuasion so special imo is that it is the only Jane Austen book - apart from Lady Susan - where the female hero knows that the male hero is in love with her:

And also knows that the male hero is jealous of another male. Yeah even being happy about that jealousy and „supporting“ it.

The last 1/4 of the book is basically just Anne, kicking down metaphorical doors, screaming: „Go man! marry me!“

No other female hero is pushing the male hero - so much - towards a marriage proposal (in a harmless way *looks at Lady Susan*)

And I think it is also fascinating how no adaptation so far has capture this spirit. Yeah we have the iconic: „He ought not, he does not.“ - speech, and every viewer knows what this means. But no one ever shows Anne going: „oh shit! He loves me!“

God, absolutely not. I'm sure that Enzo would be nice as a boss, but he wouldn't be communicating much and I wouldn't know neither what he's doing nor what it's expected of me. And even if I were lucky enough to be under Enzo's supervision, I would de facto be reporting to Lila, and from what we saw in book 3 she would be a nightmare of a boss. She would harbor unrealistic expectations about me and my work. She would bark orders at me and make a fuss about everything that didn't go exactly as expected. She would make me feel inadequate all the time, she might even make me cry and shout to me: this is nothing, look at what I have to put up with a daily basis, you're just being a little baby.

Then I would go on sick leave for anxiety and depression and even though they wouldn't have me legally registered as an employee, they would pay for all my sick days in full and I would even get a "get well" gift from them at home with flowers. (Which may or may not cause me another meltdown.)

In short, I think I'd rather sell shoes for the Solaras. Sorry for being a little baby here.

The earthquake scene is great for a lot of reasons, but not least because it's one of several passages in Bambina perduta so far where Ferrante goes out of her way to make it clear that Lila is just as fucking obsessed with Lenù as Lenù is with Lila. Because of how closely restricted the reader is to the confines of Lenù's cranium, it occasionally seemed in the last two books like she just had weird hangups about someone she wasn't even that good of friends with as an adult, and even though I knew this wasn't what Ferrante was going for, it made sense given all the other childhood acquaintances about whom she has weird hangups. It's nice to see Lila go full "I HATE YOU DON'T LEAVE ME" too, whether it's in a tour-de-force passage like this one or in something like the amazing "Sarratore, three calls; Cerullo, nine calls" moment. ( @delistravaganza is right; this series is funny when it wants to be.)

they need to make a wuthering heights emoji for when u need to quickly express the emotion "heathcliff it's me i'm cathy i've come home i'm so cold let me in your window"

Like Bardcore is a thing and nobody was going to tell me about it?

The fact that neither Lila nor Lenù seem to have decent sex throughout four books that encapsule most of their lives is quite depressing. I have grown fond of the "Lila is ace!" perspective because it provides a consistent explanation for the character, but she wasn't given much of a chance to enjoy sex except for the time when she was enraptured by Nino (and even then, for her it was almost exclusively about the presumed romantic feelings and much less about the physical thing).

With Lenù it's even worse because you can sense that she's different, that the erotic experience is important for her, she's just not getting the kind of sex she wants. And she spends most of her life lowkey longing for an amazing sex experience that would shatter her own being, ideally with someone she can admire, someone who excites her intellectually as much as physically.

This frustration in canon is surely one of the reasons we ship them with each other. It's like "let them have emotionally, intellectually and physically satisfying sex!". We have no clue whether it would be like that or not - but in terms of what the canon lays out, it makes sense to think it might be.

Nadia and Pasquale are the only hetero couple in these books that I think have decent sex. Eleonora seems like she could be good in bed, but she's married to Nino.

i can tie any song to a ship if i try hard enough

i need a "good luck babe" edit of lila and lenu on my table right now!!!

i think there's something wrong with my new landlord

There's a mistake I see a lot of people in the mental health community make and in all honesty, it's one I've made myself. But I think we should really work on it. And that's saying "if this were a physical illness, wouldn't you care?"

I've learned that no actually, people wouldn't care. Katelyn Weinstein (theADHDprincess on Twitter) is a neurodiversity acceptance activist who really put this in perspective for me. She said that it's actually more an issue of longevity than physical vs mental health.

If you're having a bad day people will generally be understanding. But when you're experiencing chronic depression and you have many bad days people lose sympathy.

In the same respect people may be understanding when you've broken a bone that will heal properly or when you have a cold that will go away soon in ways they simply won't understand when you have chronic pain or need to use a wheelchair. They may send chicken soup for a temporary situation, but when you need consistent accomodations it's an entirely different story.

I understand that from our perspective it looks like people care more about physical health than mental health, but it's good to remember that our own perspective is also limiting. Facing ableism doesn't mean you can't be ableist. And I know so many people are not ill-intentioned when they say this. I know I wasn't. But we can't discount the lived experiences of physically disabled people. If we want true equality we need to be united and we need to listen to those with physical disabilities and illnesses. And those with physical disabilities and illnesses (some of which are also invisible) have said that they are not given proper accomodations either.

So let's be united and fight for equality and accomodations for everyone, no matter what their illness or disability may be.

Well I didn't need Catradora to spit on each other's mouths, but I was pleasantly surprised that so many people had written about it on AO3 in detail.

you cannot be tagging posts about wanting more women in fiction to spit in eachothers mouths with little tv shows they make for babies

more girl rivalries in fiction should end in them having sex with eachother

Tracy Chapman