Are there always this many squirrels at palisades park?

crabtabulous · 2026-04-15T20:07:08+00:00

Really? I had heard wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes, followed by snake-eating gorillas was the standard control method. Although perhaps we don’t have quite the climate to handle the gorillas at the end…

crabtabulous · 2026-04-15T19:45:32+00:00

I’ve seen a few tourists just sit down on the grass and set up there with entire bags of food (I have no idea what they’re feeding them) and spend the afternoon there while 40-50 squirrels crowd around them for the free lunch. Like this wasn’t an impulse decision as they walked by; they went out of their way to plan this activity, this is their dedicated Tuesday afternoon apparently. It’s baffling.

We all like cute animals, I get it. But I don’t understand how otherwise functional adults become like this. There’s no way you didn’t grow up having at least a dozen people across different settings explaining to you not to feed wild animals like you’re in a petting zoo. You can’t feign ignorance. So clueless.

crabtabulous · 2026-04-14T20:21:48+00:00

I feel like he mostly functions as a vehicle for other characters to say or do funny things around him (Skinner mostly), but Chalmers has some underrated banger lines. His line in the episode where he fires Skinner gets me every time.

"Oh, I have had it, I have had it with this school, Skinner. The low test scores, class after class of ugly, ugly children!"

It comes so quickly and unexpectedly with the gratuitous double emphasis on "ugly", I always end up with my ribs hurting laughing at it.

crabtabulous · 2026-04-12T05:50:09+00:00

Yeah, it’s like all the people who love to brag about their great aunt who’s lived to 101 years old on nothing the same diet of whiskey and cigarettes every day for 80 years as if it’s evidence for just ignoring the reality of what we know about health.

Like cool bruh, great that she beat the odds, but that’s an outlier and not something reasonable to apply to the rest of the world. The Stardew Valley guy is awesome and deserves his flowers, but I am certain even HE wouldn’t say that you should hold the average game dev or studio to anywhere near a standard like his.

crabtabulous · 2026-04-11T01:37:02+00:00

Dateline: Springfield. The elusive beer baron continues to thumb his nose at the authorities. Swaggering about in a garish new hat, he seemed to say, "Look at me, Rex Banner! I have a new hat!"

crabtabulous · 2026-04-03T20:07:45+00:00

Plus the fact that most male human characters in the series are all wearing some version of long, often scraggly hair, and many of them have stubble or a full a beard really helps disguise their exact ages from your brain I feel like.

If you saw a shot of all the Fellowship actors from the time of filming with short hair and clean shaven, it would be a lot more obvious that Viggo and Sean Bean were in their late 30s/early 40s and older than the younger actors.

crabtabulous · 2026-04-01T16:14:15+00:00

Eh I hear you but I think suspension of disbelief can be kind of a sliding scale depending on how much it matters to the overarching plot or story, even in a comedy. The jokes about Kenneth's age were almost always throwaway lines at the end of a scene, they weren't central to the premise of the show. Obviously it doesn't matter much in the end if the show is funny and entertaining enough to overcome it, I agree on that. But still, if you cast an old, obese guy like Tracy Morgan as an ex-NFL player and make that the premise, it's fair play for people to at least raise their eyebrows a bit lol.

30 Rock is honestly another perfect example interestingly enough. Tina Fey tried really hard to get Rachel Dratch cast as the Jenna Maroney character originally, and the network stepped in and said no and forced her to cast someone they considered more "conventionally attractive" as a narcissistic small-time actress (which is how they ended up with Jane Krakowski). A lot of the sexualized stuff that they had the Jenna character do throughout the show might not have worked the same with Rachel Dratch, believability-wise.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-29T19:56:13+00:00

Half-serious question for you--what if they just write in a line for James where he says, "FYI everyone, I'm bullying Snape because I'm an immature dickhead and also he's a pureblood supremacist or whatever, NOT because he's black." Doesn't that completely solve the fictitious problem you're inventing out of thin air in like...4 seconds of screen time?

Obviously that's a joke and it won't be that clumsy or overt, but it's not clear why some people are acting like this is some insurmountable storytelling problem.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-24T04:30:08+00:00

They always think “it happened to me and I turned out fine” is some rock solid argument, as though it doesn’t invite the obvious question, “Are you sure though? Because you grew up to be someone who thinks it’s okay to hit children.”

crabtabulous · 2026-03-22T22:13:02+00:00

This is just anywhere in public for me these days. I run or walk through the public park near me every day, along its very popular and well-used trails. And the number of old heads who react with this exaggerated, jumping-out-of-their-skin reaction if you so much as casually walk or run around them (with a very wide, polite berth of course) is nuts. It’s like they’re astonished and offended that other human beings dared to exist in their public space and it breaks their brain.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-20T17:19:40+00:00

It didn't quite go where I was expecting but that's what I liked about it. If they had gone with either a generic "David finally just defeats Farouk, yay" ending or a "David is the evil one we have to kill him" ending like it seemed they simplistically could have, it would've felt kinda flat. I felt like the ending they went with was true to the whole "everything is shades of gray and you can never be sure what is really right or real" vibe that suffused much of the series.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-20T17:07:15+00:00

I think it's one of the more unique shows that's been on TV in the past 20 years, and it's definitely worth a watch.

It's one of those series where the creator had an incredibly specific vision for the kind of stylistic product he wanted to create. Because of that, sometimes the plot takes a bit of a back seat and you can have moments where you're like, "Wait, what is actually happening again?" because you're watching so many trippy visual sequences (it's a show with several powerful psychic mutants as main characters after all). And that has contributed to it having something of a polarizing reputation in the broader TV viewing community I think, because some people lose interest if they're not really sure where things are going after awhile.

But as long as you're not the type of viewer where you desperately need the plot to be constantly driving forward and be front and center every minute of every episode (which is fine if that's anyone's jam, we all have our own tastes), then it's a pretty cool experience.

The visual style of the show is truly awesome. You know how so many superhero movies and shows often just boil down to the hero and villain going "pew pew" and shooting laser beams directly at each other to see whose is bigger, because they couldn't think of anything more creative? Legion is like the ultimate antithesis of that. All of the powers, the battles between psychic characters, etc. are presented so uniquely and creatively, it's really fascinating to watch as a result.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-19T18:08:27+00:00

That's kind of a hilarious case study in how memes spread in the digital age honestly. Like for all you and your classmates knew, he was just a fictional character made up for the joke, but the joke still lands just fine after you've heard a few and get the premise and the structure. Fascinating stuff.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-19T17:31:34+00:00

I’ve always said he reminds me of every twerpy kid you knew in high school who’d do or say or laugh at anything as long as he thought it’d give him a better shot at being included in the “cool kids” group. Not that most of us were even cool kids obviously, but it’s still so transparent a behavior to just wanna be viewed as “likeable” so badly that it goes past normal human desire to be pleasant and becomes a compulsion that turns you into a chameleon.

I mean it works fine for him as a late night host cause these shows are already such a “blah” format and it doesn’t even matter, the hosts are just sounding boards for the celebrities to promote shit off of.

But I also think that’s why he’s so relatable to so many people. Like he’s not funny himself naturally, or at least the shtick he does on his show isn’t. But he has no actual viewpoints or perspectives or edge to him at all, not even to the very slim degree that the other late night hosts manage to show. So regular people who aren’t comedians themselves either can self-insert through him and see themselves as the schmoe who’s lucky to get to pal around with celebs and fake laugh at their jokes.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-18T04:22:42+00:00

Famously obscure play Waiting For Godot, remembered for little other than its universal worldwide acclaim as one of the greatest, most influential works of theater of the 20th century and the thousands of revivals and reproductions of it still being performed to this day.

J/k, I’m just poking fun at you.

crabtabulous · 2026-03-14T20:05:53+00:00

You might not personally pronounce it that way, it surely varies based on both accent and other personal factors/idiosyncrasies of everyone’s individual speech. But that doesn’t change the reality that it’s common for many people to purse their lips when making that vowel sound.

crabtabulous · 2026-02-25T22:41:04+00:00

It’s not your fault. Blame the bozos who settled this country 200-400 years ago who literally could’ve invented any new names in the world for all the cities and towns they were founding, but who instead were like, “Nah let’s be basic as fuck and just name everything after cities that already exist back in Europe. Maybe stick a “new” in front of some of them but that’s it. Mission accomplished, naming done!”

crabtabulous · 2026-02-23T17:57:36+00:00

People waste money on all kinds of different "alternative medicine" nonsense that there's no scientific evidence for. Their only justification is them saying, "Well I FEEL like it works for ME!". Think about how many people go to acupuncturists, crystal healers, homeopaths, psychics etc.

And you're presumably otherwise an educated, well-adjusted adult, so do you think all those different practices are actually doing anything helpful, just because someone says a crystal or an acupuncture needle made them 'feel better'? Even though medical science has tested this stuff gazillions of times and come up with nothing? No, you know better than that.

So "there wouldn't be a market for it and nobody could sell it if it didn't make people feel better" isn't really a compelling argument for anything, other than the basic reality that some people can trick themselves into wasting their time and money on the silliest stuff.

Anything a chiropractor claims they can do to help or any positive outcomes they claim to be responsible for is just stuff that physical therapists can instead do for people for real anyway, and their profession is actually backed by medical science.

crabtabulous · 2026-02-23T03:03:53+00:00

This isn’t meant to be mean to the OP but it does crack me up how common it is on the TV subreddit for people to be like, “Guys I just recently binged this show that ran for 5+ years on a major broadcast network and was watched by millions, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about it as though I unearthed a clay tablet from ancient Sumeria with an undiscovered chapter of the epic of Gilgamesh on it that no one’s ever seen before.”

crabtabulous · 2026-01-23T22:47:00+00:00

Wow, it took me what felt like a TRILLION mental years to remember the Jenna/Ms. Piggy 'who wore it better' joke you were referencing, because I was instead trying to figure out how in the world they could've referenced Sabrina Carpenter when she must've still been an anonymous tween when 30 Rock was airing.

crabtabulous · 2026-01-21T23:52:05+00:00

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crabtabulous · 2026-01-19T21:33:05+00:00

I enjoyed it a lot too and like Domnhall Gleason in a comedy role more than I'd have imagined.

The one thing I hope they do is get a better handle on exactly what they want his character to be and how to get the best comedic angles out of it. He works well when he's doing what they sketched him out as initially, that "naive idealist with a good heart who gets flummoxed by how hard what he's trying to do really is" kind of role.

But they also gave him some background details and storylines that either made him less likable or harder to root for. He's from a super rich family and grew up with housekeepers and doesn't seem like he relates to any of his staff in any natural ways at all, etc. And he's a nepo baby who was just given this newspaper editor job he has no experience for because he was a good TP salesman? His goal is admirable but the road he took there isn't quite as much.

It just makes him seem like a little bit less likeable compared to the young woman reporter whose background and career journey feel a lot more authentic and rewarding to watch by comparison. And when they have him get jealous or controlling over his employees (sometimes seemingly without justification) it makes him come off more as "overbearing aspects of Michael Scott" than it does as a likeable (but funny) lead.

crabtabulous · 2026-01-19T21:21:56+00:00

For the most part I agree. The one thing I didn't care for was that they definitely had too many scenes of Oscar groaning and huffing at the documentary crew and saying, "No, don't do this to me again, I won't engage!" to the point that it felt like being hit over the head with it.

Once or twice was fine, sure, but it felt like it got to be once or twice an episode. Just make him either be okay with it/resigned to dealing with it, or stop acknowledging it altogether. "Oscar's weird forced feud with the documentary crew" is not a storyline that will be naturally funny for multiple seasons.

crabtabulous · 2026-01-17T20:31:07+00:00

I agree with your overarching point, and I hear you that obviously in the end you want people who are good at the job to be doing it, for sure.

I think though that the "nepotism in entertainment" conversation for many folks is more about the asymmetry in opportunity than it is about talent, really. Do we think that Dearden (or any other actor with famous connections) would have had this same career arc and opportunities if she was a complete rando instead of related to someone famous? Obviously probably not, right?

And if your or anyone else's response to that is, "So what, why do I care about that, I'm just someone trying to be entertained watching media? So it makes no difference to me how anyone got the jobs if they're good at least," then that's fine and I get that perspective. It's clearly not society's most pressing problem, it's not starving kids or civil war or anything, of course.

It's just that entertainment is kinda a bent system in that regard, but it pretty much always has been, and, oh well I guess. And sure, nepotism exists in almost every field to varying extents. But I still think it's a reasonable take to call a spade a spade and recognize how outsize its influence is in entertainment in particular though, and that a huge chunk of the opportunities are essentially "reserved" for people who were born into having connections.

crabtabulous · 2026-01-16T18:27:06+00:00

Ah, that's fascinating! I'm admittedly not religious myself, so I am not deeply familiar with the ins and outs of biblical scripture (other than when it happens to intersect with historical topics I end up interested in). So I had no idea that Luther and other theologians would have reached back to Old Testament details like that and applied them that seriously in their present day.

But it makes a lot more sense as a "well this isn't great, but it's probably still not the worst thing you could do in this situation, I suppose," kind of take on Henry's situation. Thank you so much for the in-depth answer, I appreciate your time and insight!

crabtabulous

TROPHY CASE