[129/365] first semi-final

I cannot believe it's time for Eurovision already. I can't believe it's May!

But here we are.

I like the semi-finals at least as much as the final. You always end up seeing great stuff that doesn't go on to the Saturday night! (I felt a little bad for illustrating this for diffrentcolours last year, which I think was the first he watched it: he got very attached to I think it was Lithuania, and then they didn't make it through).

My quick, non-exhaustive notes from tonight might give you an idea of what I enjoyed.

During the intro:

Liverpool is the best city to host this except maybe for Manchester. Because it's so serious about itself as a Musical City. I just can imagine down the other leg of the trousers of time where we're listening to an emotional version of "Sit Down" by James instead. And then New Order in the background for them to talk over...

Malta set the tone early: it was an extremely 80s night. Not many ballads -- a relief after last year!

I actually hoped for a ballad eventually, for a break from the strobey lights (my nystagmus has been bad since Gary woke me up at 5:30 this morning...tiredness usually makes it worse and I guess I just didn't sleep enough to get any of these spoons back last night!). But when I eventually got a proper ballad, even that was strobey!

I did like how sparkly everyone was this year though! And gay. This was even gayer than usual I think.

I complained about the commentary so much that D changed it to the Radio 2 version. Still a white guy, but at least not Scott Mills! It actually came in handy, because someone narrating Eurovision for a radio audience is basically providing audio description. Still boringly hegemonic, and trying too hard for the sarcasm that Terry Wogan was so good at but drifting too often into just meanness. But it sure came in handy for Finland, which was so flashy I literally couldn't see what was going on. J added to the audio description too: there were apparently other dancers, in pink, something about ribbons on the crate...so not just the regular guy and the big Godzilla projection of him that I knew about.

I just wrote "heck yeah Czechia!" for them. Easily my favorite of the night.

During the touching Ukrainian performance while people were voting, J said "I've been spending too much time on Grindr..." The screen was showing a graphic of text messages as they appear on a phone, on a black background with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow...which is also the color scheme Grindr uses. Hearing that they were sweet messages of someone texting their mother ("I miss you," "I hope you're okay" kind of stuff) made him feel guilty for the comparison, heh.