Category Archives: music

Homestuck Fan Album Review: Fondly Regard Illustration

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Introduction

First off, happy belated 4/13 everyone! This is actually my first ever Homestuck-related blog post since I finished my review of the entire comic in 2021. I tuned in to the premiere stream of this album, released for Homestuck’s 16th anniversary, and had a burst of inspiration to write reviews of all 32 songs. It’s not a tall order by my standards—I’ve done much larger music review projects before!

The concept of this album is the same as that of the Cool and New Music Team album .jpeg: the track art is made first, then someone has to compose a song based on each artpiece. I was sort of expecting the songs to be largely themed upon post-canon Homestuck media, but instead, most of them are about Homestuck itself, and I think that’s really neat. It shows that even nine years after the comic ended, fans are making new musical interpretations of its characters, locations, and story arcs. There are a few songs related to its spinoffs though. As a Homestuck fan musician myself, I know a few of these composers personally—Cecily Renns, koba, and Rainy (Andy) to name a few—but most of them are unfamiliar names to me. This shows that a brand new generation of Homestuck fan musicians has blossomed, and I love that.

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My quick thoughts on Eurovision 2023

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I just got done watching my first Eurovision Song Contest live! The finals just happened, and Sweden won as I expected but didn’t hope. My favorite this year was Finland. As promised, I will now discuss what it was like watching it.

It was super fun!!! As cheesy as a lot of the show was, it was also oddly charming and served as a great way to root for countries and banter about music. I watched the contest through the Swedish broadcast, which is one of the few that makes the stream publicly viewable worldwide. I will definitely continue watching it in the future; maybe next time, I’ll try using a VPN to catch the German or French broadcast, which would be a cool opportunity to sharpen my skills in their languages. I discussed the contest live on a Discord server focused on… sigh… Homestuck. Yes, everything in my life comes back to Homestuck, whether I like it or not, but that’s beside the point.

I won’t review every song in this post; that’ll be after I have reviewed every contest from 1956 to 2022, probably at least a year from now. I suspect that by then, I’ll write sprawling, overly detailed paragraphs about every song. For now, enjoy some quick and loose thoughts about the highlights!

Semifinal 1 (non-qualifiers)

  • Latvia deserved better and should have qualified. However, I mentally prepared myself for the likelihood that their gorgeous indie rock song in unusual time signatures wouldn’t, because it’s pretty niche. Why do they have so much bad luck lately? They haven’t qualified once since 2016.
  • Otherwise, all the songs from semifinal 1 that didn’t qualify are ones that I expected not to qualify, though I did enjoy Malta’s a lot. The qualification I least expected was Switzerland, who had a tacky ballad about war that felt rather impersonal.

Semifinal 2 (non-qualifiers)

  • Greece’s performance was unintentionally funny. It was a 16-year-old boy singing melodramatic English lyrics about how depressing his life supposedly is, but contradictory to the text, he danced like a goofy teenager at a party. It was pretty adorable.
  • I knew from the start San Marino wouldn’t qualify because their lyrics are bizarre animal metaphors for sex. Shame, because I genuinely like their rock song.
  • For this semifinal, I had predicted which songs wouldn’t qualify. I got five out of six right; I predicted Cyprus wouldn’t qualify, but they qualified and Iceland didn’t. Not bad, I’d say!

Finalists

  • Austria was a big fan favorite, singing about the unrecognition and low payment that songwriters face with exactly the right balance between comedy and bitterness. And yet, they scored around the middle in finals.
  • Portugal’s song was a lot of fun! It feels so extremely Portuguese to the core, with a characteristic Hispanic sound plus lyrics clearly in a Portuguese cadence. Mimicat is a great performer who never broke character once in the song—impressive because once she thanked the audience, she was audibly overflowing with nervousness. How did she keep her composure through the performance?
  • In contrast, Poland’s song is obnoxious generic radio pop music with a grating voice, my least favorite of the contest. I don’t know how the fuck it made it into the contest, but I had prepared myself for its qualification. Shows the value of pessimism!
  • I had prepared myself for Sweden being the winner, again so that I wouldn’t be too disappointed if it happened, which it did. That’s why I’m not that pissed off about it like so many fans are. “Tattoo” is an alright, marketable EDM song, and Loreen will go down in history as the first woman to win the contest twice…
  • … but I think Finland, the runner-up, will go down in history even more. They sent a masterful rap song reminiscent of Gangnam Style, and it was entirely in Finnish!!! Keep in mind that the winner of a Eurovision contest won’t always become its most iconic song. Think of the gorgeous classic “Eres tú” from 1973, the legendary “Dancing Lasha Tumbai” from 2007, “Run Away” from 2010 which became an Internet meme, and “Snap” from 2022, a super-popular radio song. I think Käärijä’s “Cha Cha Cha” will remain a beloved Eurovision classic for years if not decades to come. I hope this makes people who wanted Finland to win feel better—I wanted them to win too.
  • Czechia’s song was awesome too! I love how multilingual it is, and the chorus in Ukrainian is my favorite part.
  • When Belgium qualified to the finals, I screamed “YES!” louder than I have in years. Their song is so catchy, uplifting, and fun to sing along to with a great 90’s vibe, and I was worried it wouldn’t perform well since I saw people call it “dated”. It was a pleasant surprise to see it reach the top half in finals!
  • Norway’s representative, Alessandra, was really funny and cute. She made some goofy gestures pointing at herself in the interludes between songs, as if to say “vote for me! I know I’m your favorite anyway.” Her song was cool too.
  • OK, now here’s what I am pissed off about. HOW DID GERMANY GET LAST PLACE AGAIN WHEN THEY ACTUALLY SENT A GOOD SONG THIS TIME????? They deserved so much better! I know Germany has had a rough track record for the past decade or so, but this year they sent a total hard rock banger! And it got last place in the finals anyway for some stupid reason! Regardless of the bad results, this song makes me proud to be (half) German. Lord of the Lost, ihr wart wunderbar.
  • Israel’s song would have been my favorite when I was a teenager. I find it extremely cheesy, but undeniably fun, and that dance break made my jaw drop both times.
  • In Eurovision, Slovenia seems like the kind of country that doesn’t care about winning, but does care about having fun and showcasing their culture. This year, they sent a charismatic rock band of five guys in their 20s who like to party. Among the boys, they win the cuteness prize. Their song was entirely in Slovenian, intending to adapt it into a language of entertainment that everyone can understand, and it worked so perfectly! It’s a blast to listen to and always puts a smile on my face. I wish Germany in Eurovision was more like Slovenia.
  • Holy mother fuck, Croatia’s song was unhinged in the most wonderful way. Their song is shameless political satire in their own language, by a bunch of middle-aged guys who take pride in the outlandish and controversial. Also, the 3D animated ŠČ! on the backing screen absolutely KILLS me.

Who I voted for, if you’re curious

This was the first time people outside of participating countries got to vote, and as an American, I seized the opportunity. Each person got a maximum of 20 votes to spread across contestants, costing a euro per vote. I only used all 20 votes in the finals.

  • Semifinal 1: Latvia 2 votes, Portugal 1 vote, Czechia 1 vote, Finland 1 vote (I felt Latvia needed a little boost.)
  • Semifinal 2: Belgium 3 votes, Slovenia 3 votes, Australia 1 vote (Oh yeah, Australia sent a surprising banger too. I think they’ll stay in Eurovision for the foreseeable future.)
  • Finals: Germany 5 votes, Slovenia 5 votes, Finland 5 votes, Belgium 5 votes (You can sense my increasing investment in this contest from the increasing number of votes I sent each time.)

Concluding thoughts

Well, not so much concluding thoughts as introductory thoughts, since this is the beginning of my journey through Eurovision history.

Every year of Eurovision, there is something, or rather many different things, that fans are going to get salty about, and I’m not immune to that. While I had prepared myself for Sweden winning, an outcome I didn’t want, I did NOT prepare myself for Germany getting last in the finals. Still, I’m going to handle this salt like a mature adult would. *ahem*

I got so mad, was gonna cuss the jury out outside my house for everyone to see.

Wanted to trash their cars, tell the Eurovision fans how cruel they were to Germany…

Instead, I wrote a blog.

OK, in all seriousness, it was tons of fun to follow Eurovision for the first time, and I think I’ll have to accept it as my latest obsession. After all, I have over 60 blog posts about the contest to write! Surely this can’t be bad… right? …

*gulp*

We’ll see, OK? We’ll see.

A year later, I went to Malmö for Eurovision 2024. I wrote a blog post about the trip too!

Quick little announcement about my Eurovision blog post series

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For starters: I AM SO HAPPY THAT BELGIUM QUALIFIED FOR THE FINALS!!! I was worried that my boy Gustaph wouldn’t make it, but when he did… that was the loudest “YES” I had screamed in years.

Anyway, once Eurovision this year ends, I will make a quick little blog post describing what it was like watching my very first Eurovision Song Contest. This is so that I don’t have to wait a year or more before I write a blog post about Eurovision 2023. I will write a full review of the contest, song by song, once I’ve written posts about Eurovision 1956 to 2022. By then, my thoughts are sure to be a little different from today.

(Oh god. I’m really turning into a Eurovision nerd. What the fuck is wrong with me.)

(Uh… I promise I’ll make time to write my review of the MLP season 6 finale before I get too absorbed in the Eurovision posts.)

Introducing my Eurovision blog post series!

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After having finished a huge blog post series analyzing Homestuck, and soon to finish season 6 in a blog post series reviewing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, I’m going to start my third large-scale blog post series: reviews of every song in the Eurovision Song Contest, year by year. Basically, it’s an annual contest where a variety of mostly European countries each send a song to perform live, hosted in whichever country won last year—2023 is an exception due to the war in Ukraine. The contest is filled with controversy and drama, but it has an enthusiastic fandom that embraces all the absurdity.

But why would I, an American who barely even heard of Eurovision until last year, do such a thing?

Because I think it’ll be fun. Every Eurovision fan outside of Europe, kind-of-maybe-European countries, Israel, and Australia has a different story for how they got into it, and I got interested through music mashups. After a certain YouTube channel released a lot of mashups on the day of Eurovision finals last year, I went on tons of Wikipedia and later YouTube spirals about the contest because I have heard so many crazy things about it. It turns out this song contest, dating back to 1956, is an absolute rabbit hole! It has everything from spectacularly creative bangers to the dullest pop music of the time period. Everything from serious, heartfelt ballads to indescribably goofy dance songs that you’ll only hear in Eurovision. I also find it super interesting how the languages used have evolved over time and per country, so the contest perks up my inner language nerd.

In addition, despite living in the United States all my life, the contest has a mainstay country that I can call mine: Germany. It’s where my mother was born and raised, I can speak their language well, and I even own a German passport. In the contest, Germany has had an extremely mixed track record and only two victories, but they’ve loyally participated since the beginning. (Also, why haven’t they sung in German since 2007?! It’s the most spoken native language in Europe behind Russian, for crying out loud.)

After we find out the winner of the 2023 contest next week—my top picks are Finland, Slovenia, and Germany, but my honest prediction is Sweden—I’ll get right to it and review each song in the 1956 contest! I won’t have a consistent schedule, but the posts should come quickly at first. Knowing how my prior post series have gone, it’s safe to say my Eurovision posts will start off short and simple but gradually get overwhelmingly detailed, and I’ll eventually wish my early posts were more thorough and resist the urge to remake them. I also predict that my Eurovision post series will go through lots of pauses and take a year at least. Once I’m caught up with the present, I’m not sure if I want to review every contest annually from here on out. We’ll see what happens!

Here are two other Eurovision blog post series worth checking out: one by Erica Dakin, which is focused on the songs like mine, and one sadly deleted called Eurovision Scoreboards, which is focused more on the contests’ presentation and history.

And here are some archives of Eurovision contests commentated: a series of Google Slides by Ivan Alexander for 2000 onwards, and a spreadsheet by me with all German-language commentary I could find.

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Cookiefonster’s Tips and Tricks for Making Chiptune Covers

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Here’s a blog post that’s a departure from the content I usually post here. If I was a normal person, I would make a video essay about how I make the 8-bit covers of music that I regularly post to my YouTube channel, but I don’t enjoy video editing at all, so I’m going to discuss all this in a blog post instead.

I’ve lately come to realize that my style of chiptune covers is very different from what most people doing chiptune on YouTube go for: instead of making a reinterpretation of a song based on simple chiptune instruments, my covers are made on a basis of translating songs to Famitracker as faithfully as I can. Though I used to be a big fan of chiptune covers of all kinds, I now strongly gravitate towards such translation-based covers because it’s incredibly impressive when the overall feel of a song, whether it be hectic, dramatic, funky, or relaxing, is recreated within the limitations of an NES console (or more often, expansions thereof). It’s also because I enjoy transcribing other music much more than making my own music, so in a way these covers are really just transcriptions under constraints. A lot of people really enjoy this style of covers I do, and I myself think I have improved by enormous amounts since I started doing chiptune covers in 2016. So I thought it would be fun to make a blog post list my personal tips and tricks for translating music into chiptune form.

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Weezer (Teal Album): Album Review

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Today Weezer surprise dropped this album:

Seemingly playing off the popularity of their cover of “Africa” by Toto, this album opens with that cover and consists entirely of the band covering various popular songs, mostly 70’s and 80’s hits. And I have mixed feelings on this album.

For the longest time, I was familiar with many of Weezer’s songs but wasn’t aware of the band as a whole. My parents had to tell me many times that “Island in the Sun” was by Weezer and not Cake until it was drilled into my head. I got kind of but not really super into Weezer in early to mid 2018, where I realized many of their songs I already knew but didn’t know they made. Shortly after that point, I realized the band has their own very distinct personality, with their songs covering naive childish topics in this overdramatic, sincere way. I tend to catch on to bands’ personalities because Cake, my favorite band, has a very distinct “we don’t care, we’ll do what we want” personality.

I was there for the release of Weezer’s cover of Africa, which is notable mainly for the story behind it: some teenage girl really wanted them to cover that song, and they actually did it. The end result is a little odd, but different enough from the original and good enough to be a worthy piece of music, even considering that Africa is already a song that everyone loves. Weezer covering other hits has a lot of potential, and when their cover of Africa came out I’m sure it felt to many like scratching the surface; what if Weezer brought their personality into other popular hits? The way they did it and their choice of songs is a little weird to me.

The most prominent genre of music is 80’s pop, which makes sense considering how they clearly wanted to make similar covers to Africa. Those covers are done in a roughly similar style to their cover of Africa, and I’m not a big fan of how they seemingly decided to go the route of “hey, let’s do more covers similar to our cover that has a really funny story behind it”. 

Most of the other covers on the album are of older rock music, again done roughly like the Africa cover for the most part; if not in that style, usually done as typical rock music. The covers themselves are decent for what they’re worth and are very faithful to the original songs, which is a good thing because I’d almost worry they would have destroyed the appeal of those songs and made them more generic, but also a bad thing because these covers don’t have much of their character in them. None of the covers really stand out to me, except for one: the album closer, a cover of Ben E. King’s Stand by Me.

Stand by Me is by far my favorite song on the album. It replicates the mostly acoustic original song but with many more guitars and rock elements, and works in Weezer’s character masterfully, ultimately leading to a much different song from the original. This cover represents what the whole album could have been like. 

I wish this album was more like the final song instead of “Weezer Africa but it’s a whole album”. It’s not a bad album, just a somewhat underwhelming “this is exactly what I expected” experience for the most part. I’d recommend this whole album if you really liked their cover of Africa, but if you like Weezer in general, Stand by Me is easily the one most worth listening to.