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COOL ocean facts!! Humboldt squid (up two two meters in length) are known to attack people who are diving among them at night! In one of the two most thoroughly documented cases a nature photographer Alex Kerstitch was attacked by multiple humboldts at once who started rapidly pulling him downward, dragging him almost 30 meters deeper into the ocean in just minutes! They were able to tear off some of his equipment but thankfully not his mask, which would have definitely killed him, and they left him covered in bloody cuts!

An even nastier case was ONE OF the times they ganged up on Scott Cassell, a former sniper assassin and underwater combat specialist who now apparently hunts down wildlife poachers (holy shit???), aside from being a sea warrior he is like a lead expert on specifically these squid but his underwater powers and love for them did not stop them from dragging him down so hard they dislocated his shoulder and the pressure change ruptured his eardrum!

This is his own webpage about squids repeatedly beating the ever loving shit out of him and how they will do it to you, too:

Something else I'm not sure if people know or not, unless of course you've ever eaten them, is that cephalopod tentacles are pure solid muscle tissue. When they're outstretched they're more noodly of course but squids can contract them like short fingers as you might have noticed!

Think about how dense and tough that must be! A bunch of them all clenched together in one tight cone! Scott says they will ram into you with this at full speed

......."A large squid moved to within two feet and flashed again. Mesmerized by the strobe effect, I didn’t see that another squid was rushing in from my left. Bam! It hit me with a tentacular strike that felt like being hit with a baseball bat square in the ribs. Shocked by the power of the strike and unable to breathe because of a cramp in my chest, I turned to see what had hit me and saw four more squid headed toward me"

I’m not, actually. A good hostess knows that her first priority is the comfort of her guests, so if someone uses the wrong spoon? NBD. If someone else starts being a dick about it? You find a way to shut that shit down post haste and redirect the feast of reason and the flow of soul.

What I AM a dick about is brazen hypocrisy. And as I was rewatching and taking screenshots for Nefarious Purposes, I happened to pause on this, which (setting aside the fact that forks weren't in popular use at all in Northern Europe and North America until the end of the 1700s, much less fancy types for different purposes) feels like an easter-egg for etiquette nerds from the set-dressers:

Like, poor Ed. He never stood a chance.

But that’s not his fault; he could have been schooled in the proper use of flatware from birth and still would have been stymied by this mess. There are pieces from AT LEAST 10 different silverware sets here, and practically nothing is in the right place to facilitate any sort of reasonable progression through a meal. Also? There are just so, SO many duplicates.

A 12-course meal should go: hors-d'oeuvres, amuse-bouche, soup, appetizer, salad, fish, main course (usually a red meat or game meat dish), palate cleaner (sorbet), second main course (usually a fowl dish), cheese course, dessert, and end of the meal dessert (often with coffee to promote digestion)

Starting left to right, we’ve got: A - Dinner knife. Should be directly to the right of the plate. It COULD be part of the service to his left, but even if that’s the case, that means not everyone has the same number/type/placement of implements, and that the spacing of guests is too close to properly accommodate all the place settings, so I’m going to assume everything on camera is meant for Ed.

B - Butter knife. Belongs on the bread plate.

C - Soup spoon. Belongs as the outermost spoon on the right side of the plate.

D - Place spoon. Belongs to the left of the soup spoon on the right of the plate.

E - Seafood mallet. I can’t really find anything about where this goes in a place setting, and I’ve only used one where crabs or lobster were the main/only course. My instinct is to say it should be in the amuse-bouche spot (outer right, save 1) with the lobster fork in the corresponding spot on the left of the plate, but I could be wrong.

F - Fruit fork. Fruit is served at the end of the meal. This one goes closest to the plate on the left side. G - Oyster fork. Yes, hors d’oeuvres come first, but this is the only fork that goes on the right of the plate. Thanks for playing.

H - Escargot fork. Ok, the fuck are they serving at this meal? You’ve got 12 courses. You pick ONE item for each course. Based on the silverware so far, we’re going heavy on the hors d’oeuvres. At least it’s on the correct side of the plate?

I - Salad fork. A new course? Be still my beating heart. And yeah, it’s in the right place.

J - Dinner fork. Also a new course, and also in the right place. Will wonders never cease.

K - A FUCKING TERRAPIN FORK. Oh - you gonna serve a chunky broth AFTER your main course? That’s an appetizer, you amateurs. You fools!

L - Escargot tongs. Sure. Why not there.

M - Fish fork. Like, you’re not even in the vicinity of the right place for this (to the right of the plate, in between the salad and dinner forks).

N - Ooops. There’s the lobster fork we were missing earlier.

O - That’s just an oyster fork from a different silverware service. If you were trying to pass it off as a dessert fork, those have 4 tines with a bar that transects the tines.

P - That’s just a butter knife from a different silverware service. Were you trying to pass it off as a cheese knife? Too bad that in a formal dining setting you have a special fork that does double duty for cutting and spearing cheese.

Q - Demitasse spoon. Coffee’s for closing the meal. This goes above the plate.

R - Sugar tongs. Those go with the sugar cubes in the sugar bowl, not at each individual place setting.

S - Possibly another terrapin fork? It’s hard to see, but whatever it is, it doesn’t go there.

A - these forks are identical, and they're both fish forks (the little notches on the outside tines are for picking bones out of the fish). Not a huge sin, though, if you don't have multiple specialty forks - it would do in a pinch to also spear veggies for the salad course. So these are in the right places.

B - Dinner fork, and it's in the right place.

C - Stede identifies this as a caviar spoon, but metal changes the taste - caviar spoons should be carved out of mother-of-pearl. This looks like a demitasse spoon to me, which should be above the plate to be used at the end of the meal with a coffee digestif.

D - Stede identifies this as an escargot fork, but those only have 2 tines. This is a cocktail fork, used for skewering a seafood hors d'oeuvres. It's in the right place, but it is a little weird that it's so conspicuously from a different silver set than the rest.

E - Stede identifies this as a lobster fork, but those are really distintive looking - long and skinny with 2 small hooks at the end (they look more like a fondue fork than anything else) for rooting around in the slender parts of the lobster carapace in order to get at their delicious leg meats. This is an oyster fork - the rounded bowl part is for slicing the membrane that connects the meat to the shell. It's an amuse-bouche course, though, so it's in the right place.

F - Dinner knife. Yup - that's where it goes.

G - Butter knife. It goes on the bread plate.

H - Soup spoon. Should go on the outside.

I - Two identical teaspoons. Like the fish forks, not really a sin to use the same spoon if you don't have the specialty spoon for the job. In this case, I'm guessing it's meant to do double duty as a place fork for a pasta dish and a sorbet spoon for the palette cleanser. If the soup spoon was in the right place, then these would be too.

J - Stede misidentifies this as a melon spoon. Melon spoons have a pointed bowl with a serrated edge for cutting the melon. This is just a fancy sugar spoon.

For E- Seafood mallet and L- escargot tongs, both should almost certainly be brought out with their respective dishes if and when they are served. IF for some ridiculous reason you are serving these things as your main course, maybe, MAYBE you could lay them out in the dinner fork place, but seafood is still theoretically a peasant's dish in this era. Rich people would not be serving lobster the way we do today. It would be unheard of.

Also, in regard to a comment I saw in the replies, the differences between American or English or French layouts isn't especially relevant to the cutlery. All of these places put forks on one side, spoons and knives together on the other— not every high society clique was fussy about right or left. All of them did use a layout where you work your way from the outside in, because that is pretty much the only intuitive way to do it. The key principle of a high society place setting is that you are to keep your table looking clean, neat, and orderly throughout the whole meal. Chaotic or overcomplicated place settings violate this principle.

The general disarray, the different number of/types of silverware at each place setting (seriously - not a single one has all of the same utensils), the terrible spacing, and all of the mess going on in the center of the table? And then let's get to the particulars that I've labeled:

A - those are salad tongs. for serving salad - not consuming. Why would you put serving utensils out at an individual place setting? And it looks like they're in front of more than one plate, too. How much salad do you serve, Gabe and Tina, that you have SO MANY salad tongs?

B - this is an absinthe spoon. You put it on top of a glass of absinthe, balance a sugar cube over the holes, and pour water to melt the sugar into the drink. Only one for the whole table? Well, absinthe isn't my favorite digestif, either.

C - that is a soup ladle. Let me guess - you had not a single tureen aboard in which to properly house it?

This show fucks with and exaggerates on-screen visuals to indicate the inner landscape of the characters. Case in point: the moon that's bigger than it ought to be (but it is that big for them.)

Second case in point, and my current argument: the place settings.

While Stede is The Main Character of OFMD, in each of these scenes the audience is intended to be identifying with Ed specifically -- since the majority of us don't do this sort of dining on the regular, we too are in a position to learn from Stede-- with multiple things to remember about multiple very-identical-looking things. But because it's Stede, there is at least some semblance of sense-- what Ed (and the audience) sees isn't quite right but is... getting there.

At Gabriel and Antoinette's table, though-- Ed (and the audience) is confronted with the confusion and havoc of the setting, the things that are familiar but also the things that very much aren't-- and like a funhouse mirror that highlights all our insecurities, this thing that Ed is particularly unsure of-- and for which Stede is pointedly unavailable to assist-- stretches not just across his own plate, but takes up the entire table as well.

And so as Ed is overwhelmed, we are overwhelmed with him-- because no, these spoons don't make sense, and we are immersed in the panic and social failure of it all just as he is. If we'd seen a place setting that matched our modern day, or fuck, even vaguely followed the rules Stede laid out, the audience might be in danger of seeing Ed as not particularly clever or fast on his feet-- which we've been told isn't the case, but an easy place setting might've led to some cognitive dissonance with that concept. Instead, the audience-- and Ed-- are given a literally impossible dining scenario (pruning shears my god), and so it makes sense to us that he fucks up-- because we would've.

Notably, though, when he's recounting what happened, he does identify what tool he used on the prawn-- and lord knows I couldn't have. This shows that he did learn from Stede, and he was learning the pageantry, and very quickly too-- but his deeper insecurities changed the table for him, and for us, and rendered the task impossible in such a way that the audience was brought along for the ride.

JORDAN PEELE NEW KOJIMA BOYFRIEND

the outside of spike’s crypt:

and then angel would buy one of these types of signs and think it’s so funny

My friend finally showed me What We Do In the Shadows movie - and I loved it - and I drew this

even though I know

I KNOW