Switzerland has released their song for the Eurovision song contest 2024. What do you think about it?

I noticed how there's no Spronkus Kronkus at 196 anymore at all, and since they were the original reason I discovered 196 back on Reddit, I thought it would be nice to get back to them and post them for once. :)

Art is by u/Nate_Meowski on Reddit (I don't know if they have a Lemmy account).

I just found this community, and in case anyone here has a game they really like and really want to play, but sadly doesn't have a macOS port and is just Windows only, this might help.

The best option you have is wine-crossover. While the Wine website currently doesn't offer a macOS build, the main macOS Wine maintainer has published the Open Source version wine-crossover, which works amazingly well and can even translate Direct X, meaning that video games work with it. Just use brew install --cask --no-quarantine gcenx/wine/wine-crossover to download it. It will then just be a regular program in your programs folder called Wine. And if you double-click on any .exe-files, it will open them with Wine, translate them in realtime and execute them. Then you just need to download the Windows version of Steam, just open it (with Wine), download the Windows game, and voila, you can easily play it :D This is e.g. how I played Will You Snail (which is a really great game, but sadly only available for Windows) on macOS without any problems.

This works with most games, and as I said, I personally often use Wine to play Windows only games (or even games whose macOS versions are 32bit, which my computer can't run anymore). However, if a game has too high graphic requirements for your computer to run, or does not work with Wine (which can happen with e.g. some games that use custom DRMs), then another alternative I know is Nvidia GeForce Now, a could streaming service which allows you to use your own bought games (e.g. on Steam) and play it on a remote computer. It is free to try, although you can only play an hour at a time with the free tier. I've used the free tier for years (I mostly played in the middle of the night, so there were no waiting queues), and I even often played games that had a macOS build (like Planet Coaster), but which were too large to fit on my disk space. So this is definitely something I can also recommend and it's a good way to play even the most demanding games without any graphical problems. The downsides are the limitations of the free tier (although the paid tier without queues or the one hour limit is also worth it you really use the service), and that you need at least a medium-well internet connection for it. Also, they sadly don't have the full Steam catalogue but just a very big selection of games.

So yeah, those are the tools I usually use to play games that don't have a macOS build on my macOS computer. I'm glad if this helps anybody else and have fun playing! :D

Source: https://twitter.com/fake_eurovision/status/1677596262860726272

They're awesome and make many other funny things like this one, so check them out if you like this. :D

This is the monthly video of the Eurovision Youtube channel about the top 20 most watched videos. It's always interesting to follow it, and how it develops after the contest has finished.

I wrote down the exact results about it but spoilered it in case you want to see the video first (I'll write my thoughts in the comments). Click on it to read them!

Not just necessarily restricted to 2023, just in general: What songs did you initially like but stopped liking (as much) after the ESC Grand Finale (or the ESC semi in which the song NQed), and what songs did you initially not like so much, but started liking after the ESC Grand Finale (or an NQ)?

Today, Luxembourg started accepting applications for their ESC entry in 2023 on their website https://eurovision.lu. The national final will be televised and deciding on which artist can represent Luxembourg.

All applicants must be a Luxembourg citizen, have lived in Luxembourg for at least three consecutive years or have a strong cultural commitment and a proven connection to the Luxembourg music scene.

The exact requirements with more information about the participation are available on the linked website.

This graph shows the result each country got in its first participation in the Eurovision song contest. Because the amount of competitor rose so much over the decades (originally, there were just 7 competitors, while now, there are regularly over 40), just taking the place each country got wouldn't be accurate or fair - even the last place back then would be much higher than a really good result now. Therefore, I took the relative placement: The first place is 100% and the last place is 0%. This is more fair since it takes into account how many people have participated and accurately shows how good a country really was in the contest.

Some countries with special circumstances are marked with an asterisk and slashes in the line. For one, this is Switzerland 1956 who won the first contest (which some could be argue is kind of unfair because one country had to win it). Additionally, it won with a shady voting system since the Swiss jury had twice the voting power and juries could vote for the own country. The other countries marked are the countries who participated in the first contest 1956. The exact results of it have never been published (just the winner); therefore their real first result is unknown. Instead, I took their results in the second contest (which they all participated in). I also included Switzerland 1957 because of the special circumstances of their win in 1956.

The country bars are also marked in different colours. This is to easily show the type of their placements: Blue bars represent countries whose first participation was before the introduction of semifinals. Green bars represent countries who qualified to the final in their first participation. Red bars represent countries who failed to qualify to the final in their first participation.

Luxembourg will finally return to the Eurovision Song Contest after a 30 year pause. They now publicly stated that RTL will be responsible for the song selection and that they'll start the Eurovision process next week. All details regarding registrations and the recruitment of candidates will be communicated through their official (new) website https://www.eurovision.lu/ .

What I mean is Sweden 2023 vs Sweden 2022, Finland 2023 vs Finland 2022, etc.

I’ll start in the comments, and I’d be interested in what other people think as well! :)

It doesn’t need to be every country, just write it for the countries you want: Maybe the top contenders, or your favourites, or the ones where you’ve got an unpopular opinion.

I found it really funny and cute how she reacted to the video; and it's really nice for the originl editor to be recognised this way :)

I found it quite interesting to see what songs from the grand finale have been streamed most and how that differs from the placement in the Grand finale itself. Therefore I made charts out of it.

This is the second chart which depicts the difference between the stream rank (from the Spotify streams) and the actual placement in the Grand finale.

The United Kingdom has the best stream rank compared to their placement, which makes sense since they've had a good pop song which can be popular in the radio and on TikTok, but an underwhelming performance with a bad placement. Poland also got a much better stream rank, which I also expected, given how that's rather its target audience.

On the other side, Lithuania and Croatia have the worst stream ranks compared to their placements. They both are songs that (in my opinion) are very fitting for the ESC and appreciated by its juries and viewers, but are not songs many people would frequently listen to and stream, so I can also see that.

What do you think about these results? Are there things that surprise you or what you were sure would be like this?

I found it quite interesting to see what songs from the grand finale have been streamed most and how that differs from the placement in the Grand finale itself. Therefore I made charts out of it.

This is the first chart, showing the streams. Sweden has, as expected (since they won the contest) the most streams. Interestingly, Norway also has more streams than Finland.