Iz様 🌟

Absolute genius record, 'Grace Kelly', I heard it loads at the time, played it semi-regularly ever since, and it's never gotten boring. Such a good progression and as you note, all its drama and satire built into the vocals, I think that plays really well with what he was aiming for. I am a fan, I've kept up with him at times as he became a bit more niche, and there were a few songs that came close to this, but it really is such a perfect combination of factors, a radio dominating track, that's well-performed, and has some interesting and open to interpretation lyrical content. Fantastic #1. Slight shame he stopped FOB getting a #1 but Grace Kelly is so good I've never really considered it an option.

God I despise Shine even all these years later. Not even the adverts, it just exudes white bread as a song. If I were doing this thread, it might have been out, perhaps not first, but quite a long time ago x Ruby and The Way I Are would be my pick of the top 10 so far, I think both did well at representing their respective genre causes in this year and they're both just rather fun. Do remember 'About You Now' possibly the clearest of all of the #1s from that time, absoulutely inescapable and has remained one of their best songs, not really so for Beautiful Liar, I've always found it pretty forgettable.

I love it when previously quiet contestants come out of nowhere with a power game move, fantastic use of the opportunity Matthew. Happy to see Fiona gone, she was entertaining enough while on screen but it was really wearing thin and she completely torpedoed her own game there, always happy to see the backs of crudely arrogant Traitors.

Talk today about banning X. actually please do it Starmer this would justify this whole shitshow and give Ofcom some teeth again

'Long Way Down' has stuck with me very much more than a lot of the 2018 tracks, I think I'd heard it because of following Darren Styles myself before it got entered but it getting entered cemented it as a fave. Good year for me on the whole although we didn't cross paths much this year (except in 18s, most of yours were excellent), I think Purple Haze was my favourite of yours here.

Hold on there, I've just won Group A Scorpio Cup with this fantastic Taishin I've been relentlessly perfecting. AND I pulled her card I've been repping in my avatar first try as soon as it finally released. Obviously it's concerning that Cygames is exploring AI, but I would honestly have been more surprised if Japanese gaming companies didn't try this. More rational is that because a big part of the reason I've kept playing the game is the fantastic translation (ranks up among the best J-to-E translations I've ever seen in a game) and its sense of heart and humour that I will really start to notice if they replace that with AI. As they're still transposing content from the Japanese server, the only real risk is the translation for now. But I will keep an eye on it and only really make a move away from the game if it's actually in Uma. already submitted some feedback to them to emphasise that I do not want AI in the game.

I am quite happy for the Traitor team at this point in time to go down in a blaze of civil war so those last few minutes were glorious. Amanda the right choice to go in the end given it sparked off this, I thought she had some decent moments here and there but her dogged play against Jade for what seemed very little reason overshadowed any other deducing ability she had (and it did feel mean when it just kept continuing), and when she tried to throw out another theory, going for Sam, she instantly got heat for it. Unconscious bias talk, definitely a factor that keeps coming back, it's there, it being talked about is good, unfortunately you can't do much more than that.

You're always allowed to try, occasionally very popular artists who quite probably are mostly known in their domestic market or otherwise not well known in the UK turn up in the contest. YOASOBI's 'Yoru Ni Kakeru' is my favourite example of this, smashed the streaming records in Japan before being sent here, no one really called it out for being cheap as only a handful of us pay attention to Japan charts, and then I as one of those had to helplessly watch it not qualify from the other semi. The mods would make a judgement call after research, so it could be vetoed, but you'd have the opportunity to submit a replacement. If they've never been mentioned on this forum then, obviously depends, but that may be fine.

Stephen's implication of Maz seems like it was lucky everyone else had Ross or Reece in their heads and wasn't looking too closely because it is indeed full of holes and exactly the sort of thing a Traitor would try to shift the narrative, it's a decent tactic in a social deduction game as an outsider to reinvent facts and get first mover advantage, I've done that myself in Among Us, but it's also such an easy way to get caught, something that has also happened to me in Among Us numerous times - Reece's memory of the night before seems to be missing. Feel like they're getting rid of Sam here, I reckon that Reece somehow got 5 votes at the round table will make them think he has heat. Plus did have to laugh at Fiona just doddering about and refusing to take part in the mission, I think she had her eye on Reece as a murder potential. Which is potentially risky play if anyone remembers this. decent reveal of the secret traitor btw, she's coming in like a real wildcard and feels like she's running rings round the other traitors at this point, setting narratives and plans, will have to see if anyone catches this. but otherwise team Jessie, only sane woman in there it feels like sometimes (though this is a pretty great cast on the whole)

love seeing standard deviation fix all (well, some) of the issues with other rankings simultaneously proud and painful seeing Marnik so relatively high on both metrics, second-highest non-winner via SD

I enjoyed the atmosphere of this very much. Plus the thought out nature of such a show, how it takes into account the vastness of the world, questions about supply chains are raised and answered, those left unaffected are naturally and randomly demographically spread out, Manousos' journey up to New Mexico, I very much appreciated the whole process of it, plus Rhea Seehorn did wonders carrying most of the show. Hope we can get a second season in a reasonable timeframe. Excellent philosophical work, they did a great job of showing the characters of those left as individuals, plus the show's natural commentary as an pro-individualist text jives well with what I see are the hivemind's parallels with AI and it does feel like a very good show for Gilligan to go to following his others.

The Venezuelan situation took most of my political winds over the weekend but let's give something a go here. Domestic (UK) Keir Starmer stays in place as PM, even after the locals, which are less a disappointment for Labour purely because of the context of them being almost entirely favourable areas for them and so it's hard for Reform to trumpet the wins they did last year when they win control of five councils at best, three of which were already Tory-held. General good economic conditions continue but the government is continually dogged by occasional scandals and people constantly feeling like they have less money than they should. Reform still hold first place in the polls by the end of the year, but only just, as, England-wise at least, pretty much all 5 parties lie somewhere in the range of 17-23%, and election nerds are being edged to the point of breaking by the chaos an FPTP election would cause on these numbers. Your Party quietly disbands after winning less than 10 council seats in the local elections. Scratch that, they can't do anything quietly. But they do disband. PC and SNP win their respective elections in Wales and Scotland, Reform do get in both places in reasonably significant numbers (fail to become the opposition in at least one though) and spend the remainder of 2025 finding scandals emerging from these national politicians. International Trump invades Greenland, why not at this point, by which I mean plonks more military there without asking permission, the EU and the rest of NATO pontificates about whether to do anything but ultimately decides to leave it alone rather than go to war or risk their economies collapsing over a frozen island not even on their continent, Denmark isn't happy but can't do anything about it, Greenland is now listed with dotted lines and ambiguous ownership for at least the next 3 years. Trump spends much of the rest of the year talking about doing the same to the Panama Canal before doing the same thing there in the autumn without consequences. We end the year with him noisily talking about invading Cuba and are genuinely wondering whether a world war will start at some point. Midterms are not as disastrous for the Republicans as we hope, partly due to disinfo across red states but also partly because the median voter is callous and/or disaffected, but the Democrats do take back the House. Lula wins an incredible 4th term in Brazil, he and Sheinbaum begin the workings of a Latin American pact, not openly anti-American but aimed at preventing more nonsense like January's abduction, early stages though and doesn't really achieve anything by the end of the year. Ukraine war ends with Crimea and most of the Donbas ceded, I predicted this last year too but it's continuing to look likely. With peace, Russia is welcomed back into the international fold like they never left and so they're in perfect time for the Los Angeles Olympics (the Russian Olympic team were upset they never saw it in 1984). Israel manage to avoid starting too much trouble in the first half of the year, at least until they win Eurovision, which... sort of goes ahead but in a rather subdued manner with viewership slightly but noticeably down. Vain hopes Netanyahu's cohort will be defeated in the election come to nothing and another attack from an extremist group (Hamas or otherwise), gives them the green light to start things again. China doesn't invade Taiwan yet, rather chooses to continue to economically dominate. Recent news that BYD has overtaken Tesla will be punctuated by other Chinese companies like Xiaomi getting more popular, though this'll particularly hit in the automotive sector with others like Geely and Jaecoo making waves. World Cup is successful overall but the amount of group games is criticised for a number of boring matches, regardless at least one fun underdog team will make it to the quarters by simply dodging the big teams. The organisation of games particularly in the US will also be criticised with tickets not selling out in several group matches and heat being a major factor. Fidesz is not ousted in Hungary as that country becomes less and less like a real democracy, but the right-wing bloc lose power to Sweden and Magdalena Andersson becomes PM once again after having too short a time of it last time, though her and her party's aims to emulate their Danish Social Democratic neighbours on immigration doesn't make this an entirely positive development. The Danes lose power to a right-wing coalition, btw, because that's where that line of thinking eventually leads you.

This happens a lot with Youtube comments, partly people so oblivious they leave generic 'beautiful music' comments or something to that effect, and partly bots themselves, dead internet theory and all. Oh true, I have thought that for safety I could go to older entries or an artist I know makes real music, but that does lose some of the discovery magic I'm here for, I might do that more than I used to though. Hopefully we don't go through an entire contest without uncovering any AI entries, and I think it'd be hard for them to win once it's known. That said, the tech gets better at doing what it's doing each day, so it's quite possible it becomes harder to notice them, duplicitous behaviour in itself of course. I've started looking at song credits and other provenance a lot more closely in the last few months. I don't mean everything I post to be speaking as an admin, you know - here I'm just someone who enjoys entering a song contest and wants it to continue healthily. Each other song contest runs independently and can do what it likes, but as there's a significant overlap in participants in most of them, I imagine it would turn out much the same.

Greenland shouldn't even be a question. You get people like Starmer pontificating about how 'the future of Greenland is for the Greenlandic people to decide' which, while may be one of his more forceful lines, doesn't go far enough, it shouldn't even be on the fucking table and the EU and every other international organisation under the sun need to make that very clear to Trump. He is not God.

Yeah, I personally would not choose to use AI art if I were hosting, even though I have limited artistic skills, I want anything creative I do on here to reflect me and my interests (hence I may appropriate an image from an anime or something, but I'd rather put together something bad in Paint without any existing images than tell a computer to create an image, particularly as I nearly always find the images it creates to hit the uncanny valley in some way), but I have no problem if some hosts want to use it as an aid for something inconsequential like graphics, I'm not going to get precious over what others do in that sense. I guess that for songs there's some closeness to varying 'artificial' aspects of songs like autotune, vocaloid programmes, electronic beats and such-like that then spills into a spectrum of AI-assisted and created elements, so there is some nuance, but I can normally make a decent judgement call after learning the background of a song on whether there is enough real, human, creative and original energy in it - which is probably what I'll have to do going forward, and if I find out that there is any LLM involvement, it likely will taint it for me except in really really light cases.