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Chicago Redshirt

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Everything posted by Chicago Redshirt

  1. Ben mentioned being on tour and surviving on only Taco Bell because that was all they could afford...there's an actual Taco Bell commercial about a band that similarly lived on Taco Bell, linked below Coincidence? (I always thought this is a commercial that backfires -- why would I want to eat the food that a barely successful band is forced to eat because their promoters are cheap?)
  2. People with better Survivor memory banks can chime in, but I don't think it's generally the case that winning tribes/teams wait for people to return from their journeys to partake in their food rewards. In the specific case of Q/Kenzie/Tiff, it doesn't seem to me that Q cared that they already ate and he didn't feel any less camaraderie or more upset about them eating. At least, i presume that if he was salty about it, that would have generated a talking head about it or some body language indicator that it bothered him.. He was still on a high of not-losing that I doubt it did bother him.
  3. I think it would take the patience of a saint after 11 days of basically no food to sit around for what presumably was an hour or so minimum, possibly as many as two, with a platter of tempting treats and say "politeness means we will wait for Q to return before partaking." All they needed to do IMO was do what they did: save Q the approximate third of the reward he was due. Sucks for Q if they saved a little less than a third, or if it meant Q was relegated to third pick of everything. (Or if they literally were touching pastries to divide them in thirds, one of which was left for Q because I don't think most players would want any other contestant's meathooks on their food. but they might be beyond caring as to that score)
  4. It's interesting...Is Tim a sexist because he suspected that there might be a girl's alliance forming, or was he right to suspect it? There clearly had been talk that we were shown about both the women on that tribe targeting a man, as well as the "Charlie's Angels" of an alliance of Charlie and the three women. In either case, Tim would be in the line of fire as one of either two or three targets. It seems that Tim thinks he is tight with Maria, and when the two of them are relating he doesn't strike me as trying to boss her around or being misogynistic. The saddest Tim-related thing this episode was that he got the title quote, which wasn't that exciting and came in a gross conversation. I am sure that there were plenty of better choices but none are coming to mind at the mo.
  5. Some people might find it annoying to have to wade through all the live thread insta-reactions to get to the more informed commentary. People speculating "Is ________ going home?" or not catching something happening live when rewinding or hindsight might make it clearer isn't everyone's cup of tea. (FWIW, I'm not one of those people and often read the live thread even though I'm not typically able to participate in it). Anyway, for those who might want one thread, it's not a major inconvenience to start reading the live one and then jump over to the regular one. For those who want separate threads, it wouldn't be quite so easy to figure out where the live comments end and the post-show comments begin. My mileage varies. Nothing I love more than someone going out with a pocket idol, particularly when they are someone who in their own mind are the bestest Survivor player evah, as Jem seemed to think she was. I will take a moment from the shallow end of the pool to regret the loss of serious eye candy. I am interested to see if the Island journey can result in a cross-tribe alliance. It feels like people have not really tried to mix things up beyond the original tribal lines for quite some time, but I may be wrong about that.
  6. I don't know how much TPTB care about or measure fan reaction, but if this board is at all typical of what the greater Survivor fanbase thinks or how it thinks, I can't see an invite back to Survivor happening. He was pretty awful at game play. He wasn't endearing or entertaining IMO. He didn't last very long. If he was faking, there might be some entertainment value in him being like "Psyche!" and playing a whole different game. But if he is really how he presented himself, he probably needs some therapy or more to deal with those mood swings. Other than people who got cut for medical reasons, has Survivor ever brought back someone voted out this far before the merge? Not counting people who had done well in a previous season, came back for an All-Star season and then didn't get far. I have had the idea of a No-Star/Second Chance Season where the entire cast was people who were booted 1st through 3rd, but a) that may be a crazy idea, and b) I don't know if that happened that Bhanu would do much better.
  7. True, Bhanu lied to his tribemates there and there are probably other falsehoods he told either castmates or in his interviews or in things that are left on the cutting room floor. The "I'm not an actor," for instance,. but he has an IMDB page with acting credits doesn't strike me as truthful. So again there are at least a few possibilities: Bhanu could be faking much of his backstory and personality and reactions, including the "I'm honest" part. (But if that's the case, to what end? And why keep it up in interviews after the game is over? Is he that committed to the bit, even after getting seemingly all he could?) Bhanu could recognize that even though honesty is the best policy, some lying is probably called for as part of Survivor (and real life) in certain situations. Telling people openly "I have no vote" is an invitation to vote someone off since they can't use their Shot In The Dark to save themselves, and they are unlikely to rally troops to their side. He could rationalize other lies he told in similar ways (I WAS an actor, I'm not now; or even though I make money through acting, the person I am here on Survivor is authentically me.") Or Bhanu could think lying is always wrong but was driven to it by the Dark Side and immediately regretted it so confessed the truth to Q.
  8. I'm sure they could have explained the marriage not happening without showing the exact dealbreaker. If I were to guess, even what we saw was an edited version of that fight. I have to assume that Chelsea specified which of Jimmy's friends he slept with and a whole lot more that LIB opted not to show to avoid being sued by whichever friend it was. But it was apparent that Jimmy wasn't going to go through with the marriage at first sight of non-Megan Fox Chelsea. Love for him was definitely not blind.
  9. I can't pretend to truly know what conception of God Bhanu might have. But I would imagine that he -- like most believers -- conceive of a God/god/gods that do not predetermine any outcome but can intervene in mysterious ways and/or for purposes that are not entirely clear. It's hard to conceive of one's self as having absolutely no free will at all, and of everything being scripted, especially if you throw an all-powerful and all-good entity in the mix doing the scripting. Assuming Bhanu was not just acting, it's not uncommon for people who are religious to be frustrated at what they believe to be an unjust outcome, or a puzzling outcome. Even if someone believes in 100 percent predestination, the crying and begging would be part of the predestined outcome. I don't think by any conventional definition of "blasphemy" (either showing contempt for God, or pretending to be a god) that questioning God's will in the way Bhanu did would be blasphemy.
  10. Without going too deep, there are going to be different philosophical/religious models for how God/gods might work, assuming his/her/its/their existence. Some people might believe everything is absolutely predestined to happen as it does. In such a scenario, God essentially does orchestrate all the actions of Survivor (and elsewhere). God caused Bhanu to be on Survivor, to make the choices Bhanu did, to get voted off when he did, etc. No matter what people might have wanted or how awesome or poor Bhanu might be at this game, he was always going to be selected for Survivor 46, always going to be booted 4th, always blather on about winning a million hearts, etc. Because that was what God wanted. Some people might believe that God sets things in motion and basically takes a laissez-faire attitude to most everything, potentially intervening here or there, but mostly leaving people and things to their own devices. In which case, it's Bhanu's own attributes, plus luck, plus the interaction with various people and their attributes and intentions that leads to consequences. And I'm sure there are numerous other things in between and outside of these.
  11. I assume we will eventually see what happens. But if Maria (?) or whoever got the sloppy-seconds Beware Advantage note goes to vote and there's the typical parchment there, they may put together that she does have her vote and thus someone's been sneaky. Or she could think that it was a screw-up by production, or that production just is not counting her vote. We have seen in past seasons people who didn't have a vote had a note saying in so many words "You don't have a vote. Go back to your seat." But the person who thinks they have a Beware advantage may not know that/may not put it together after several days in the game/may think that Production has changed it up for whatever reason.
  12. While the dominant strategy in Survivor includes deception, I'd guess that there are people who did well and who even won playing an "honest" game. I would say that several recent winners, Yam Yam, Erika, and Gabler IIRC barely did anything sneaky at all. Heck, even Dee mostly only lied by omission. Rupert built a brand of being an honest player in his three seasons. I'm sure that people with better memories of Survivor (most people, lol) could come up with other contestants who went pretty far seeking to play an honest game. So it's possible that actual superfan Bhanu could have hoped to build on such examples. It's also possible that Bhanu is just delusional/ACTING/had no such people in mind and just thought that he would be a pioneer in playing the game honestly.
  13. To be fair, we haven't seen very much of anyone off of Yanu to form much of an opinion of who they are. And while mileage may vary on things like how much charisma people might have, there are a couple things I like about Hunter so far: 1. Outside the game, his willingness to be a teacher at a rural school that needs it rather than pursue med school seems lo suggest he has both a degree of intelligence and altruism that are not common among Survivor contestants, and suggests he will be good at the outwit part of the game. 2. The amount of puzzle stuff in his Survivor hoarder garage suggests that he walked the walk of a Super Fan rather than just talking the talk, BHANU. 3. His singlehandedly lifting his team on his back the other week to win a challenge suggests he will be good at the outplay part of the game. I am open to him demonstrating any number of bad traits as we hopefully shift to more coverage of non-Yanu contestants. And there's a good likelihood that Peachy will end up slobbering over him, since he is seemingly the kind of dominant male challenge beast that Peachy prefers. If so, that might make his ranking go down in my eyes. But I could see why people like him.
  14. In addition to DVDs and streaming being things that would allow him to watch every episode of Survivor since he got to America, I wouldn't be surprised if one could watch CBS programming in 2000 in India. Plenty of poor people have access to television of their own or of friends, even in foreign countries. And despite having been born into poverty, his family's circumstances might have improved between when he was born and when he was 16ish, which is approximately how old he was when Survivor debuted. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if he is falsely claiming that he had seen every episode of Survivor. It seems hard to reconcile having watched that much of the show with him having no clue how to play the game.
  15. It made me sad that Survivor would not spring for the rights to play a snippet from "Jump." Not a huge Van Halen fan but that song makes me happy because it makes me think of the 84 Cubs. Not that I'm a particular Cubs fan either but still... The question is whether Jem (without the Holograms) can get a payoff from doing so. If she can, then arguably it is worth it. If it causes people to realize she's "playing too hard" or lying or what not, then it probably was not. But at the very least, there's some risk-reward there that I can respect, unlike the "Hey person with no allies and no game skills, we want to fool you into playing a fake idol even though if you actually thought to play your shot in the dark AND succeeded, we'd have a perfectly acceptable backup plan in voting off Bhanu." play.
  16. I was holding out some level of hope that Bhanu might either a) be faking being as pathetic as he apparently is or b) might have an Emily-from-last-season renaissance and go from one of the most annoying castaways IMO to one I was rooting for and might hope to see in a second appearance. But nope. He was who we thought he was. (h/t Denny Green). Or is he? Could this all been an act? If so, seems unlikely to achieve any goal for Bhanu. His 15 minutes of fame are up. I tend to doubt that he will be able to parlay this into another Survivor or reality show appearance. I could see production wanting to spice this up or entice applications, maybe. I know I would be terrible on Survivor -- can't really swim, old, fat, not used to roughing it, I have sleep apnea and so I would drive tribemates insane with snoring and be sleep-deprived in addition to starving. But my ass would do better than Bhanu did. So I could see a bunch of people at home deciding to apply on that ground. It's now two seasons in a row where one tribe is noticeably weaker than the other two. They simply are going to have to realign the tribes next episode, won't they? I think creating the fake idol to Jess was pure Mean Girls-ery. They could have sweet-talked her into thinking that the vote was Bhanu, for instance, and stopped her from using the shot in the dark that way. And even if she played it, that's like a 17 percent chance it succeeds. Not enough justification to go to those elaborate lengths. They just wanted to pat themselves on the back for being so clever as to outwit someone who would believe that at this stage of the game he would give up a bonifide idol to save someone he wasn't particularly close to. We will see where Jem goes with trying to create the suspicion that the idol is still out there. But there are a couple possible directions. She could throw suspicion on a particular tribemate that that person has the idol and thus needs to be blindsided. She could reveal to someone she wants to get closer to that in fact she has the beware advantage and laid out this trap (a strategy that could in fact backfire).
  17. It might be an interesting twist in cases where one tribe is forced to sit people out, it's the other tribes that get to select who sits out. Rather than tribes resting their weakest members, the underdog sucky tribes might get a chance by forcing out the Hunters of the world to take a seat.
  18. You would think so. And yet, most seasons on Survivor, there are people who have no frigging clue how to start a fire with flint, no clue how to build a shelter with the materials that are available every season, self-proclaimed super fans who seem to not have digested such Survivor Strategy 101 as "Don't be bossing everyone around, or you'll be making yourself a target," "Don't tell obvious lies that can easily be caught like telling multiple people that they're your No. 1," "Don't tell everyone about your immunity idol or advantage," "Don't fall for the fake idol play -- real idols are more sophisticated than anything that can be put together with materials available to players," "if you can't swim, maybe take some lessons," etc etc.
  19. I hope it was. I hope that down the road, Bhanu takes off his mask and is like "A-ha! My game was to play the role of a pathetic sad sack so that people would feel sorry for me and let me goat my ass all the way to the FTC and you fell for it!" Finding out that Bhanu was merely ACTING would make however many more unseemly displays of weepy, OTT, paranoid Bhanu worth. As it is, if this is his genuine set of emotions, I'm sort of scared for him and sad for the screening mechanisms of the show.
  20. There was a lot going on in the episode, so it could easily be missed. But Randen had complained about his right hand not working earlier, and was sitting around the camp with it looking (to me, anyway once it was raised) noticeably rather limp. He had a confessional about how he was going to likely have to skip the challenge and how much it sucked to not be able to contribute. If what we are left with was he pinched a nerve by sleeping in an awkward position, it seems like something that could have had such a quick onset. But it felt like to me we got as much backstory as there was/could be. Someone should explain to Bhanu that a mermaid with a dragon tail would be a half-woman with a dragon tail and not much mermaid at all. Unless we are envisioning 1/3 human, 1/3 fish and 1/3 dragon. He should have gone for a fantasy creature whose top half might seem pretty and harmless like a unicorn or fairy.
  21. It is a little unseemly for Bhanu to basically be high-fiving about someone having a serious medical condition and for him to be crediting to God. I think the Big Guy has more important stuff to do than saving Bhanu's sorry ass. Then again, I recently watched a bunch of the Blues Brothers, and maybe Bhanu's quest to win a million hearts is part of a mission from God. '
  22. 100 percent agree that Chelsea was shitty to break the confidence, and that Jimmy would be right to take that as a dealbreaker (although I think that the deal was broken for him from the moment he saw she didn't look like Megan Fox.) While not condoning Chelsea's action, I understand where it comes from. She knows that Jimmy slept with FWB. She knows that Jimmy texts and hangs out with FWB a lot. She knows Jimmy has googly eyes for Jess. She certainly has a lot of insecurity, but that's not helped by Jimmy's demeanor. Looking at Jimmy in the best possible light, he is someone who is at least somewhat disappointed with how Chelsea looks and is struggling to maintain the connection that they made in the pods. Alternatively, he's known for most of the real world time that he has no intention of marrying Chelsea and is playing out the string for air time or to not seem like a superficial jerk. I think that all this creates a feedback loop where even someone who is more secure than Chelsea would be questioning whether Jimmy is trustworthy. I have some sympathy for the friend. But even if Chelsea had not said anything, the issue would likely still have come up. By appearing on the show, they agreed to a situation where strangers would be speculating on whether Barbara and/or Maddie had done it with Jimmy anyway. At the time of their appearance, people on Reddit and elsewhere were wondering if Barbara had slept with Jimmy based on body language and some of the questions and things she said. Now maybe that thought might not have been put in their minds if there hadn't been a preview of the "YOU FUCKED HER!" outburst. But I think even what, nearly 40 years after "When Harry Met Sally," there is still the widespread notion that women and men can't truly be friends without some level of sex getting in the way. I have some sympathy for the other friend. Assuming for discussion's sake that Barbara was the one who slept with Jimmy and Maddie didn't, people are still going to nose around in Maddie's business. But then I come back to that there's nothing wrong or embarrassing with either of them (or both of them) having slept with Jimmy and their consenting to being on LIB in the first place, so...
  23. Don't remember Jimmy saying that, but assuming he did, that strikes me as a weak reason to ask for confidentiality. If Jimmy's friend hasn't told her new partner/doesn't tell her new partners that she and Jimmy slept together, it's on Jimmy's friend especially if Jimmy is going to be as prominent a part of her life as he seems to be. It isn't something in general that needs to be hush-hushed that she's not a virgin or that she specifically slept with Jimmy. Again, not condoning that Chelsea betrayed Jimmy's trust. She shouldn't have done that.
  24. Let me articulate a little more why I feel it is ridiculous. And in retrospect, maybe ridiculous is the wrong word. The friend in question hasn't been directly identified by the show. Now that might just be editing by LIB. Maybe Chelsea 100 percent outed the woman. We viewers can jump to the conclusion that it's probably one of Jimmy's female friends who met Chelsea, Barbara and Maddie, but it isn't for sure. If it is Barbara or Maddie, they both agreed to appear on the show. She put themselves in the narrative, knowing that she and Jimmy fucked and knowing that she and Jimmy text and talk constantly. If you know anything about reality or reality shows, you should expect that would come out that you slept together. Yes, she could have suspected that she'd only be portrayed as a good friend who happens to be a girl. But that seems a little naive to me. But the main reason I think it ridiculous is that we aren't expecting Jimmy's friend to wear a scarlet A for having fucked him in the past. It's not something that is going to have the septa from Game of Thrones walking behind her with a bell and saying "Shame!" while she's driven through the streets naked. Assuming the truth is as presented -- they slept together once, decided they don't work as a couple and remain close friends -- who really cares in 2024? Most members of the public probably won't. Admittedly, the internet contains gossips and people are speculating about which one it was and digging into the social media history of them. But at least some of that is driven by the mystery of it. If Jimmy had simply said "Barbara/Maddie/whoever and I had a fling but now it's over," I don't think there'd be nearly the same level of attention. Yes, it probably isn't a great feeling having thousands of people speculate about you. But in the long term, not a big deal that you had consensual sex with a guy once. Most people who know them probably either already knew they'd fucked or suspected it. This is a different issue from Chelsea betraying Jimmy's confidence -- of course she shouldn't have done that. In other words, I don't think it is wrong for Barbara/Maddie/whoever to want their privacy. A little naive, and if it's Barbara or Maddie, they volunteered to at least somewhat give up their privacy. However, I tend to doubt that is Jimmy's true motive in wanting to keep it confidential that he'd slept with a friend the one time. I think it is suspicious that he asked her to have it be confidential in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if Jimmy -- who has been either lying about his true intentions and feelings or been very confused about things from the moment he saw Chelsea -- asked her to keep it confidential because he and the friend have an ongoing thing or did it more than the once. So the large part of my thinking it is ridiculous is the notion that Jimmy was all Sir Galahad protecting the honor of his fair former bedmate when a) it's not a dishonor and b) I suspect ulterior motives.
  25. I don't think they explicitly said. But some folks are traditionalists: it's Dad or nothing. I don't remember if the show established that AD's dad has passed, was not approving of the possible marriage, wasn't available or what. Also, some people don't get "given away." As to Jimmy/girl friend with benefit(s), I dunno. I find it plausible that they just had a fling that they moved past. The notion of him trying to preserve her "honor" strikes me as ridiculous. I think Jimmy has almost certainly tried to hook up with Jess since the show wrapped filming, and almost certainly succeeded.
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