I had some very good sandwiches and salads during my visit to London; the rest was mixed (even the ethnic food, which I thought would be safe).

I think it depends on what you’re looking for in a restaurant experience. Having lived in Japan and being a second-language speaker of Japanese, I will sometimes seek out Japanese restaurants specifically so that I can chat with the wait staff or workers behind the bar and temporarily soothe the feeling of missing a place dear to my heart. I’ve had some great conversations with restaurant owners and employees who seem genuinely eager to talk with me about their old home as well as my experiences in the country. Also there is a lot of bad, inauthentic Japanese food out there, and usually if the restaurant is mostly staffed by Japanese folks they can provide the genuine article (or at least help you steer clear of Americanized dishes).

So for me this comic rings painfully true, but I’m a rather specific edge case. Generally I don’t care who made the food, as long as it’s good and authentic (I have been to plenty of restaurants where the staff were the same ethnicity as the restaurant, but the food itself sure wasn’t!)

Are you me? I would do this because I didn’t have anywhere else to practice Japanese outside of class. The first Japanese restaurant I went to the experience was great; the waitress was first or second gen and seemed tickled that this random white girl was trying to communicate with her in broken Japanese. The second place I went the waitress replied with embarrassment that she was Korean. I didn’t try again after that.

Best foods to give crows

Lol, no idea whatsoever. Also it took me way too long to figure out this was four shots of the same building, not four different castles.

Sixteen Tons (1946), timeless lyrics.

Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.

Not to be a cynic, but I’m not sure how relevant data from two years ago (survey conducted spring 2024) actually is, given the fast-placed nature of AI development/adoption.

I haven’t seen campaign one (since I started with two), but I’ve heard it has a rough start. I’d be curious what episode people think campaign one started turning around on, since obviously Vox Machina became quite popular in its own right, even if Might Nein is the campaign that cinched CR’s mainstream fame.

Archer takes a huge nose-dive in quality, though. I found season 9 (Danger Island) practically unwatchable, as if they’d fired all their writers and hired a new team from temu, and haven’t been able to continue to the end. (I felt bad for the voice actors, because they still bring it like always)

Personally I consider The Good Place one of the rare shows that is solid all the way through without a single bad or weak episode, however the end of season one is certainly where it goes from great to fantastic.

IMO DS9’s s1 is way worse than TNG’s, but that might be because TNG has a nostalgia factor for me from watching random episodes as a kid, and so by the time I did a full start-to-finish watch-thru I already knew the characters well and understood that the series would get better, whereas I was an adult when I first watched DS9 and went into it completely blind (after watching the first two-parter episode I nearly cried, because I was on a mission to watch all of the 20th century Star Treks, and there were seven seasons of this to slog through!? And now it’s my favorite Star Trek series of all time.)

Technically a streaming series rather than a TV series, but the second campaign of Critical Role (Mighty Nein). I started watching the series after seeing how popular Critical Role was online and that Mighty Nein was recommended for CR beginners, but I really didn’t get it at first; it seemed so boring and slow. Still I stuck with it (listening to it in the background while I did other stuff), and I remember there were two specific moments where I finally understood its popularity:

I think the comedy and overall quality of the early episodes is pretty solid, making those not bad episodes per se but rather deceptive ones. I personally enjoyed how the series takes its time in settling into its drama, and suspect it was an intentional metaphor for how the surface glitz and glamour of Hollywood obscures its dark underbelly.

Hmmm, that would make another good asklemmy thread: series with deceptive beginnings that obscure their true genre…

Apparently it depends on whether you consider the series premiere as one episode or two; Wikipedia (which I used for reference) lists it as two separate episodes, providing a total s1 episode count of 20, vs imdb which lists it as one single episode, providing a total s1 episode count of 19. Memory Alpha lists the episode as s1e19, and I’m inclined to trust those nerds. At any rate I edited my comment to include the episode title for clarity.

Regardless, yeah, I think it’s probably a turning point episode for a lot of folks, and it’s the first of many war introspection episodes that help make the series timeless.

I feel like season one was trying too hard to be The Office, and then in season two it sheds that to become its own entity. I’ve heard that the writers sincerely considered s1’s less-than-stellar critical response and made changes to s2 accordingly (e.g. making Leslie Knope more likable and less dumb). It’s definitely a “don’t judge it until you’ve gotten at least part way through season two” series.

I remember watching American Dad’s premiere and being excited for the concept but disappointed by the execution. You can tell there’s aspiration to be a good parody of the contemporary political climate in the first episode, but iirc it’s undermined by its crassness.

The Orville also struggled to get its footing in the early episodes; maybe Seth MacFarlane just does better once his series gets established?

My go-to example for this is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Season one is overall quite rough, however s01e19 “Duet” (second-to-last episode of the season) is IMO the first episode that shows true glimmers of promise. In season two the series starts to find its footing, by season three it’s proven itself to be Star Trek gold, and then the series manages to maintain its quality through to its seventh and final season.

Obligatory “fuck AI,” however I’ve reluctantly found that the AI summaries can be helpful on occasion, such as when deciding if a video with a clickbaity title is actually worth watching, or when I’m on YouTube looking for a solution to a problem (in which case the summary can sometimes get me the content way faster than watching the video). So of all the dumb shit YouTube has done to their platform in recent years, I’d argue the AI summaries fall on the “actually not that bad” end of the spectrum.

Silco from Arcane.

I often struggle with media villains, finding them unrealistic or unconvincing, but Silco is just so well-rounded and well-written, he elevates the quality of every other character he interacts with. In a series full of near- and actually-superpowered people, this weak, middle-aged man is the most terrifying and influential of them all.