https://www.aftonbladet.se/podcasts/ab/program/1291
Eurovision and Melodifestivalen specialized journalists Tobbe Ek and Markus Larsson weren’t too happy about Finns not granting any televotes for Loreeen. Few quotes from Aftonbladet’s (one of the largest daily newspapers in Sweden) Eurovision podcast:
Ek: ”The reason is that Finns are jealous. They are collectively jealous at us Swedes and that led them not voting for us.”
Ek: ”How is it even possible that Finns think there were ten better songs than Loreen? That’s shameful.”
Larsson: ”The Finns gave points even for Germany over Loreen. That’s sick. Says lot about Finnish understanding about music and about their taste.”
Ek: ”I’m fucking furious.”
Larsson: ”Dumbass people.”
Ek: ”Finland was only country where Sweden didn’t get any points from the people. Shame on you Finland, it serves you right you didn’t win!”
Larsson: ”I agree! F*ck them!”
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This is nothing new to us finns, swedes have always treated us like this. And it just culminates to eurovision which fucking sucks. I hope this gets spread out bit more so people can see under the polished picture sweden has put out.
I personally voted for germany and other 9 countries that in my own opinion had better songs than sweden, this type of articles just give so icky and bad feeling over everything. There are bad loosers in the world, but swedes seem to be really sore winners. Nothing seems to be enough they need it all. We already gave 12p by jury, but then again our jurys team leader was born in sweden so theres big conflict of interest in that. I think they know it was not pure win and are trying to pin the bad feeling into us.
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Yeah, the money. The lifeblood, the oxygen of this... this... this wonderful civilization that we have built from the mud. The money, the corpuscles of life gushing around this nation, this world, filling men and women all around with... with desire. Quickening the ambition to own, and make, and trade, and profit, and build and improve. I mean, great geysers of life he willed. Of buildings he made stand. Of ships, steel hulls. Amusements, newspapers, shows, and films, and life. Bloody, complicated life. He made life happen. He made me and my three siblings...
Sorry.
And, uh, and yes, he had a terrible force to him. And a fierce ambition that could push you to the side. But... But it was only that... that human thing. The will to be, and to be seen, and to do. And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him to denigrate that force. That magnificent, awful force of him, but my God, I hope it's in me. Because if we can't match his vim, then God knows the future will be sluggish and gray.
Jesse Armstrong, from Kendall’s eulogy, in “Church and State”, Succession S04e09
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I'm so happy that I get the chance to rant again, because the subreddit just gives me so much inspiration <3
I don't really care about Carmilla. She was, at the end of the day, a villain from a kid's cartoon, who wanted to conquer the world because she was just so eeeevil, with only the barest of backstories to pretend she had good motivations. In fact, it's hilarious to me that when you think about it, the N!Isaac vs. Carmilla epic fight, one of the climaxes of this show that has touted itself on being so deep and nuanced, has all the emotional depth of an average Sonic vs. Eggman boss battle: the impossibly cool superhero wants to stop the nefarious supervillain and her world domination plans.
(no shade to Sonic and Eggman, who are far better written than those two assholes could ever hope to be. you know what I mean)
yeah yeah she became what she depised, after a whole season of sitting on her feminist ass lol and then randomly going insane at the last minute. peak writing, as per usual.
No, it's as usual Lenore who has my attention.
She's the most human of the sisters, they say. And they're right. She is a terrifyingly realistic depiction of an abuser.
She's not a cackling madwoman who only serves as a caricature, and she doesn't exist only for shallow representation like Striga and Morana who have no objectives or personalities outside of each other. Lenore may not want world domination like Carmilla, but she absolutely longs for power over other people. I went about it here, how once you read between the lines, Lenore only wants to feel powerful and important, and she's willing to steep as low as she can to get her way because she folds like a coward the moment she doesn't have the upper hand. While Carmilla would just beat people for shit and giggles because look at how Evil (but in a Cool way) she is, Lenore is genuinely convinced that everything she did, all of her physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse, it was all for a good cause, and she did nothing wrong, and anyway you were enjoying it too so what's the issue?
So yes, in this, she's human. She's a cruel, cunning, vile human like many women in the world who know that they can use their charm and take advantage of emotionally starved men to feel powerful, all while still painting themselves as cute and lovable. Her vampiric nature doesn't come into play until the very end, where she realizes (in theory) that she's nothing but a disgusting evil creature and she's doomed to always be so; but until then, you could write her as a human and little would change in her personality and the way she played with N!Hector.
And that's what makes her scary to me. Yes, Dracula and Carmilla are more dangerous on a wider scale, but we are much, much more likely to fall into the trap of one of the many Lenores around the world.
(I usually don't like making it all about gender, but Lenore's abuse of N!Hector is absolutely gendered. Her entire character revolves around what I can only call toxic femininity.)
And that's why the takes I see about her deadass trigger me, because what the fuck do you mean, she's the less cruel of the bunch????
I don't give a shit about the Lesbians, but at least they realized that what they were doing was wrong! Sure, their motivations were mainly self-centered because they didn't want to waste their existence fighting, but they also took pity on the humans they were meant to kill!
I just fought fucking farmers. Saw the fear in their eyes. Not fear of dying. Fear of not having fought. Fear of not saving their people.
It's more empathy than Lenore ever showed for N!Hector, with her filthy "you were having fun"!
"Found her strengths" yeah, instead of physically torturing N!Hector, she used manipulation, abuse, coercion, gaslighting and rape by deception to "solve his problem". Wow, such strengths, many power. And then the second things got worse for her she immediately decided to peace out of life rather than wait a few decades until N!Isaac died, sorry N!Hector if you grew to care about me but my own bratty feelings are more important. I'm sorry, I know it's in bad taste to paint suicide as the cowardly way, but it's what the story did!
The Lenore apologism creeps me out more than anything else. I can stand the Carmilla stans who think she's so cool and badass and #grrlpower. I'm annoyed but resigned to the N!Isaac stans who believe he's the most complex character of all time and forgot about all the petty murders he commited. I'm baffled by the N!Dracula stans who genuinely believe he had the right to start a mass slaughter because some peasants didn't take him seriously enough. But this rhetoric that Lenore is the least evil of the sisters, that she was ultimately a poor broken woman who only did what she thought was the right thing, terrifies me. She's a realistic, human female abuser... and just like many female abusers, her crimes get brushed off because she's cute, because she looked sad enough, because women who sexually dominate men are inherently hot. And I know that fiction is not reality and you can enjoy villains without being a bad person, but the arguments the stans use, not to paint Lenore as cool like Carmilla but to actually downplay her very realistic crimes, just hit too close to home for me.
I just wish that "human" didn't become shorthand for "good deep down", because it's not true. Sometimes a "human" villain is far more evil than a villain so shallow they don't quite feel real.
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Even with the acquisition Dorna is going to be an independent body under the Liberty umbrella with the Ezpleta family still controlling the operation and Carlos still at the helm which means the sport in itself won't change. So the things from F1 I would have actually wanted to happen for MotoGP (Union for the riders, prize pool for the constructors teams, American tech sponsors for the teams, advanced engineering for tech improvements) will not, but we will get more money making practices at the events taking it further away from being a working class sport. Pricier tickets, more financial resources required for junior drivers to enter feeder series are likely to happen if MotoGP actually achieves the popularity it is hoping for. And that in itself is a big if, because if Liberty is unable to turn around their investment they might just abandon it or pawn it off. Which again, there can only be one or two big racing series people are willing to follow. What Dorna was trying to do WSBK by pushing it to be a smaller European series while setting up MotoGP to be the international big leagues is something I'm genuinely worried might happen to MotoGP.
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"“I just think about that a lot. The ugliness of anger. I don’t disagree that it can be harnessed. But it’s so irredeemably ugly.” “You’re a human being, Cyrus,” Sang said, gently. “So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.” Cyrus blinked. Sang was right—"
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)
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