There's still not really any news, so I'm still posting a song every day. I've got some spoooky ones for the month of October. Enough about me, here's the news.

• If you missed it, we have our first two artists! Belgium and Cyprus have internally selected their representatives for the 2024 contest already.
• We have some details about the next edition of Finland's national selection, UMK. They will once again have seven entries, and release one song per day from the 11th to 19th of January. The list of artists will be revealed on the 10th. The actual show will be on Saturday the 10th of February. This is really one to look out for, Käärijä was obviously incredible but the other entries this year were also very strong. 419 songs have been submitted for #UMK24
• Dates for Sweden's Melodifestivalen have also been announced.
• The artist representing Austria will be revealed no later than December.
• Luxembourg's national final has received 459 entries for its first Eurovision entry in 30 years. This is an impressive number for a fairly small country, good for them.
• There have been rumours that various countries will or will not be participating in 2024, but we won't know for sure until later this month.
• Junior Eurovision entries continue to trickle out, check the Junior Eurovision website if you're interested.

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Eurovision is partly about geopolitics, and as such you should be aware of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh / Artsakh. This CNN article is a good primer, although now somewhat outdated. Most ethnic Armenians have now fled the area, which is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan. This lies way outside my area of expertise, but the story hasn't been getting due attention, so I had to mention it somewhere.

For further reading I would recommend the Wikipedia article Armenia-Azerbaijan relations in the Eurovision Song Contest which features, among others, the story of how in 2009 the 43 Azerbaijanis who had voted for Armenia were interrogated as potential security threats. Outside of Azerbaijan's relations with the nation of Armenia and treatment of its Armenian citizens, it was one of the six countries involved in the "irregular voting" scandal in the 2022 contest. Ahead of the 2012 contest in Baku, Azerbaijan received criticism for its poor record on human rights, particularly LGBT rights.

Shout out to this post by @Halceon for prompting me to add this in.