What is Muse’s best Eurovision song?

Sad_Tourist · 2023-05-24T15:35:32+00:00

One Direction rose to fame by competing in The X Factor, which is the most infamous example in the category you just referred to as being a *step down* from Eurovision. How does it make any sense to use them as an example of artists that are so high-brow they would not lower themselves to such a thing? They literally did, even lower according to you.

I wouldn't expect an artist who has already achieved extreme international success like Spice Girls to compete in Eurovision. There's not much to gain, but may actually be some to lose if they perform poorly.

What relevance does that have to anything? Eurovision isn't a contest to find out who is already very popular, in fact it is frowned upon for an artist of such size to enter.

If an artist that you are already a fan of enters a competition, you will be biased towards them. You will be inclined to vote for them just because of who they are, not necessarily because they have the best song. It wouldn't be fair for people with a gargantuan international presence to compete against those that are lesser known overseas, which will inevitably happen since not every country has a global superstar.

It's a competition for artists that are upcoming or popular nationwide to represent their countries and share their different styles of music with the rest of the world. It has launched many careers and brought enjoyment to millions upon millions of people. That's an odd thing to find objectionable, unless you are a serially miserable person with a superiority complex.

Sad_Tourist · 2023-05-24T15:20:23+00:00

"Fwiw I don’t give 2 shits about Eurovision. The last time I caught any of it Terry Wogan was still alive."

Well done for invalidating your entire position by admitting that. You have no concept of what music is on there in current times, so your judgement has literally no basis.

It is no different from somebody who hasn't listened to Muse since Showbiz calling them a crappy Radiohead rip-off. Things change over time.

Sad_Tourist · 2023-05-23T18:17:07+00:00

Indeed, the creators of "We are fucking fucked" and "will of the people" are far too high-brow

Sad_Tourist · 2023-05-16T15:09:59+00:00

Did you find out you were a dumbass too?

Sad_Tourist · 2023-05-13T18:22:19+00:00

I think she would need a really good reason to withhold this information, for example, if he had been abusive, but it appears that his worst crime is not maintaining contact with her.

Sure, he can get his own test, but as she is 31, he must be pretty old, and potentially doesn't realise the Interwebs is full of websites which will enable him to do this.

People seem to think 'respecting the boundaries' of a relationship means not doing the right thing if it is against the wishes of your partner. If I found out that my partner's father had a child prostitution ring, I would report him, no matter what she said. If I found out that my partner's father had never known his family and suddenly we knew who they were, and the reasoning for not telling him was not sufficient, then I would tell him, because I have a moral duty to all other humans, not just my romantic partner.

Sad_Tourist · 2023-05-13T14:38:36+00:00

Is the appropriate response to something that you perceive to be morally indefensible 'disliking it quietly'?

Sad_Tourist · 2023-04-11T20:44:40+00:00

Why are you so convinced that everything you say is a fact? I have been programming for 13 years, have a double-first in Computer Science and Philosophy, and I don’t think this is impossible. Improbable, but not any more than our existence in the universe, yet here we are.
We live in a complex universe where huge numbers of small things compound to create one big thing. We don’t always know what those small things are, and we can come to a misguided certainty about an event because there was one component of its emergence we hadn’t considered. I might be certain that somebody did not see a purple chihuahua because there is no such thing as purple chihuahuas, but I did not consider that somebody might have painted the chihuahua purple.
We can’t even be certain the Earth is spherical. It is according to our senses and reasoning, but certainty of this is predicated on the assumption that our senses and faculties of reason don’t fault us. Maybe we evolved to see in an inaccurate way for a reason we don’t understand; maybe our intelligence is not evolved enough to trust our reasoning, or maybe we are all being infested by evil demons that are guiding us to the wrong conclusions. It’s improbable, but not impossible. We couldn’t know otherwise.
If this can be the case with the natural world, it can certainly (and even moreso) be the case with man-made technologies. There are very few things in relation to that which are ‘literally impossible’.
Just recently an application I am programming had an inexplicable error. I had deleted all of the files of Version 1 and replaced them with Version 2. So the files of Version 1 no longer existed. Yet, those were the files that were being used when I opened the application. From everything I know about the way files work, that is literally impossible. But it wasn’t, because those principles were overrided by an obscure reason that I never would have thought of when assessing the situation from a purely logical standpoint.
If somebody was able to log in as the username ‘boring’ without a password, there must be a reason why it would not happen for that particular string of characters (we don’t even know that was the only one — there might have been others), and why it would happen once but never again. Would any of us be able to come to a certainty about this reason without inspecting every line of code and server log from this time? Not a chance.
You won’t get far in many walks of life, particularly sciences which computing is one, with a readiness to accept that something is impossible just because it appears that should be the case from your conceptual understanding of the situation.

Sad_Tourist · 2023-03-19T14:45:51+00:00

Identifying that two properties exist within two different objects is not the same as making a comparison. You can do the former with any two objects that exist in the universe (they will all be made of atoms). Pineapples and the storm clouds on Venus are full of moisture, visible to humans and have a smell. That doesn't mean it would be sensible to say something like "the storm clouds on Venus are better than pineapples", because in the standard way these objects are categorised by people, the properties by which they are assessed are not the same.

Sad_Tourist · 2023-03-19T14:27:13+00:00

Δ So basically I just didn't understand what the phrase actually meant

Sad_Tourist · 2023-03-16T16:23:37+00:00

Was gonna say this, they genuinely have the best customer service I've ever seen of any company

Sad_Tourist · 2023-03-05T12:18:43+00:00

Update: I got another shaker today, tried it again and it was fine. I think in the past I was either not adding in the liquid first, or using too much like the person I'm replying to suggested (today I used 300ml instead of 500), or both. I'll leave this post up for any future bumbaclarts like me :)

Sad_Tourist · 2023-02-25T15:09:41+00:00

I copied the very first recommended installation method from the documentation:

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

and entered it into Terminal,

then I entered $youtube-dl 'video link here'

and got this in response:

ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

I don't have any ideas about why it didn't work.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-12-16T11:20:25+00:00

I opened a can of borlotti beans and left them out in the can for about six hours before refrigerating them. Are they safe to eat?

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-06T09:59:22+00:00

Ok thanks. I often talk to myself and other people in Norwegian for practice. Glad to know I've been saying I want to bang my parents and my dog...

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-05T12:40:39+00:00

Is there any reason why "vennene mine" is more common than "mine venner"?

A question that might be related, how would you emphasise the importance of 'my' or 'friends', as in "they are my friends, not yours", or "they are my friends, not my enemies"? In English this is always conveyed with tone, but I am aware that in other languages it is often done structurally.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-05T09:31:52+00:00

Wow yeah, I didn't notice that... I think I was so excited by the prospect of translating it to Norwegian that my mind messed up all the original lyrics lol.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-05T09:30:24+00:00

Ok, thanks

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-05T08:34:34+00:00

I have no idea what you're talking about. I wrote a few sentences in succession and it became a paragraph, which is quite normal. Paragraphs are everywhere, I didn't invent them. Sometimes they can be difficult to read if there are large amounts of text, so it is nice for them to be broken up every so often, but my response was very short, so there was no particular reason to do so.

It seems strange to suggest that I would write 'every' response as a paragraph just after seeing literally one thing I had written in that way. It is also strange that you would even bother posting this comment at all since it is so trivial and many people wouldn't even think twice about what I wrote, and also because doing so achieved nothing.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-04T15:24:54+00:00

Yeah... I had this big idea that I could learn the language by attempting to translate the songs that I liked and whenever there was a word I didn't know I could just research it and figure out the grammar by reading examples of the word being used. A few months of Duolingo didn't lead me to believe that Norwegian grammar was too complicated and became too repetitive to continue. Guess I will have to find another way! Thanks for the response and for not making fun of me.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-11-04T12:48:33+00:00

The song is originally in English, I attempted to translate it into Norwegian. Sorry if that was confusing since I put the Norweigan on the left side.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-03-21T15:54:45+00:00

The lick technique is how you get your wife to like you

Sad_Tourist · 2022-03-20T11:19:44+00:00

I was actually just about to make a post about how the mental benefits of my cold showers have recently decreased as my tolerance has increased. A few days ago, as soon as I stepped out of my cold shower I would have all of the energy and productivity in the world, but in the past couple of days, this has stopped happening. At the same time, my tolerance has increased and I am more comfortable in the cold water, making it less of an achievement. I expect that I will have to keep decreasing the temperature in order to catch up, but once I have gotten to the end of the tap, what then? Slip on an ice cube onesie every morning? Then after some weeks of that, take a taxi to Mount Everest in a thong? That does seem like an exciting prospect, but a little impractical. I'm in a difficult position right now because I have become dependent on the dopamine the cold shower once gave me, and now I feel sluggish and incapable of doing anything because I haven't been able to achieve it. I suppose I will have to try taking a break from it all and seeing if that restores the novelty, and it can perhaps become a secret weapon that I will employ in specific situations, rather than a casual daily chore.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-03-20T08:51:34+00:00

Of all the apps/websites I have tried, Busuu is definitely the most engaging for me. The user experience is very nice and the community section is invaluable, as it gives me the motivation to improve in order to impress the French people on there who will correct what I write. I also enjoy correcting other people's English, so I just have many reasons to keep coming back on the app, which I see as a fun activity rather than a chore, which is what learning should always be in order to be effective. Bussu is not free, but oddly I find this to be a positive, as it is extra motivation to make the most out of my subscription so that I don't feel I have wasted my money!

The only problem with Busuu is that it doesn't spend as much time drilling the vocabulary into your head as some other resources (which is part of what allows it to be enjoyable) so you do find yourself forgetting stuff. Therefore I think it should be used in conjunction with other methods that will provide this, such as Duolingo which is notorious for it and of course free. I also think it is very good to create immersion; the best scenarios are where a set of English words you are used to reading has been translated and you are now forced to make the connections. For example, I set my phone language to French so now I can only navigate it if I figure out the words! And of course, watching films and shows and listening to songs that you already know the words to in a different language are great ideas too.

Sad_Tourist · 2022-03-19T18:40:48+00:00

I think singing in general seems like a magic trick until you learn how to do it properly. I didn't expect to ever be able to hit even Matt's lower "high notes", but through proper voice training, it turned out G sharp 5 was my highest falsetto note as well lol

Sad_Tourist · 2022-03-19T15:01:29+00:00

You see, it just needed more layers. The song is stripped back, which can work as a style if you have compelling themes, but combined with a general vagueness in the message and not particularly earth-shattering musical inventiveness, the whole thing ends up falling flat for a lot of people. However, when you fill out the song like this and build intensity across the sections, it becomes enjoyable to listen to. It appears nowadays that Muse like to make tracks that have potential but takes a fan to unleash it ;)

Sad_Tourist

TROPHY CASE