Meta stuff: By the way, am I the only one whose curiosity and paranoia are driven totally bonkers whenever that “-1 -10” Forbidden Thread bumps up after one of your own posts?
I just know they’re all mocking me for being a total nimrod. 
Nobody is calling you a nimrod in the forbidden thread, Choie. Normal and Pizza both asked for spoilers. That’s all.
We’re calling you a nimrod in the spoiled thread. Oops, should not have said that last part.
(just teasing!)
Aw, you’re a real mensch, Astral]. You didn’t have to reassure me, I was just joking (well, mostly).
I’m glad pizza is finally giving in to the siren call of the spoiler board. Sure wish I had that promise he should’ve given me to send me a pic of his face.
Hey pizza, this is just for you: (/choie performs time-honored thumb-on-nose ritual.)
OK, choie, I like this post much better than the Inner Stickler case, which sort of looked like you trying to appear harmless.
I will try to explain my votes:
I don’t understand why people are picking on the texcat vote. I voted for her during the day, because she had done nothing up to that point besides smudge people (not just septimus but choie and special ed as well), even though she was obviously around. I voted for her 10 minutes before the end of day, when septimus was like 5 votes off the lynch lead, and shadowfacts was 1 or 2. There is no way septimus was going to be lynched at that point. If I was scum, I should have voted for Shadowfacts because Normal and ATPG were telling everyone to pile votes on him in order to make him use his vote power. I didn’t like that, and I wanted to prevent it.
Red Skeezix vs. Septimus, in retrospect, it didn’t matter. At the time, though, I went back and looked at Septimus’s posts and found an inconsistency that I thought confirmed Red’s vig claim. Right after he claimed, Septimus is kind of babbling about being just a vanilla townie now, though he doesn’t say in so many words that he was shot at during the night. Then people start saying that Bulletproof is a useful ability, and Septimus stops talking about being vanilla, and gets extremely coy about whether or not he has been targeted. I figured that he had been shot at, but didn’t want to say so, because it would confirm Red’s story as vig.
My ShadowFacts vote was not very thorough, because I got hit really bad with the flu and trying to follow the thread made my head spin. He was sort of saying he didn’t think ATPG was scum, but he targeted him anyway, because he did think he was scum, and Normal was pointing out how unlikely that was. That was as far as I got in the thread before I got sick, and I still thought Red Skeezix was, or could be, vig, so I voted Shadow.
When Shadow flipped town, I figured Red must be lying. When he claimed Remorseful, that just nailed it for me. It didn’t make any sense at all. Why hadn’t he said so before? It was extremely relevant. He said he didn’t want to reveal his weakness, but how would it have hurt? Maybe he thought scum would trick him into targeting a townie, but he didn’t actually seem too worried about that, because he targeted pedescribe, who could have been anything. I didn’t believe it at all, and I was a bit surprised anyone did.
Anyway, those are my votes, so if people want to vote me for them, there’s not a lot more I can say. I have been squeezing this game in between family commitments and won’t have much time until tomorrow.
After reviewing choie’s voting history and posts, I am less suspicious of her than I am of Weedy. Her voting record is nothing great, but it does not look like scum trying to manipulate things. I realize choie is a professional writer, but I still feel that her posts have too much of an authentic feel to them for her to be scum. choie, if you are scum, then congratulations. You did an excellent job of writing some of your posts to give the feel that you are a flustered ignorant (in the game sense, not personally) townsperson.
You are right that at the time of your second vote on TexCat, septimus was behind by more than I thought. I forgot to record Inner’s unvote in the vote chart. However, when you first voted for TexCat, it gave her 4 votes to septimus’ five. Shadow only had two votes at the time. So you definitely helped bring TexCat along as an alternate lynch to septimus.
first of all, i like this effort. as others have said whether town or scum, well done. next, why are you doing this only now?!! grrr! if you tell me it’s because of Pizza you understand why some of us have not been as vocal.
that said i’ll address my case. i’ll comment about the others later. my voting to save Red several times, i think, is a better indicator of my being town. i argue that it’s unlikely that scum will blatantly keep voting to save a fellow scum who is under great pressure. if my record has been spotty, that can be true of town or scum. someone who seems always right, such as being part of a lynch of a scum or not being in the lynch of a townie, is more suspicious. that’s definitely something i will look for.
we have a four-day weekend so i can pore over this more unless my wife gives birth early. then all bets and likely my participation are off.
**When does the Day end?
And vote count?**
Day ends tomorrow (28th) at 5pm Central.
I think it’s:
gnarly 2 - Stanislaus, Mental
Mental 2 - Diver, choie
Weedy 1 - choie
which means that Inner and gnarly are yet to vote.
[oog] - best wishes to gnarly and wife! (and the soon to emerge gnarlykid, of course)[/oog]
…er and Weedy, obviously.
I’ve been looking over MentalGuy. There’s a definite shift in his attitude to Skeezix:
Day Four - talks himself into voting septimus ahead of Skeezix, saying septimus is more scummy apart from the No Kill. This is fair enough to a point, but note also his position on Shadow (my bolding).
This post raises some questions about Red’s claim to have failed to kill septimus on N2
…and here we see the switch. Again, my bolding. Shadow has gone from less suspicious than Red to more so, with no real detail being given for why. “His actions.”)
Now he rows back on the significance of No-Kills. At first, septimus was only more suspicious than Red if we ignored the No-Kill (i.e. the No-Kill looked very bad for Red). Now, there’s a new most likely explanation… Also note the volunteering to be vigged which, if you knew Red wasn’t a Vig, might be seen as “Look, look, how townie I am!”.
Now we come back to lynching Red or Shadow - but now he prefers Shadow.
Finally, with Shadow gone, Mental comes back to Red
but even when he’s locking, there’s still room for doubt…
It looks like a pattern of defending Red. Not so much in picking septimus over him, because they were both scum, but in moving Shadow from below Red to above without much explanation, and in the changing view of how telling No-Kill was (from having to be ignored to justify voting septimus over Red, to being most likely nothing to do with Shadow’s block).
I want to wait to hear what Mental has to say, but I may change my vote.
OOG - best of luck to you and your wife, gnarlycharlie. And holy crap, USCDiver, I just noticed you’re in NC. Hope you’re all okay down there.
Speaking of which, it’s possible I may lose power over the next couple of days. NYC is readying itself as if expecting WWIII (seriously, it looks like the pics I’ve seen of London preparing for the Blitz) and if we really do get hit hard by Irene, who knows if our power will hold up. Last time my building lost power was in, um, 2003 or whenever that massive blackout occured that took out half the Eastern Seaboard. My super’s even shutting down the elevators early this evening just in case, since he doesn’t want people getting stuck in 'em.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know that if I’m not seen as online over Sunday and/or Monday, that’s why.
==========================
Weedy, I’m surprised you found my diatribe against Stickler “safe”! Geeze, I’m still getting dinged for my vote against LightFoot, so I expected to be similarly crucified for posting suspicions about our putative MD. (Then again, I didn’t vote for him, so maybe that comes across as me being too wussy.)
I think some of your defenses do make sense. I can certainly empthaize with not having your head in the game. (Same to you, gnarlycharlie.) Still, the problem is that some of those votes do seem opportunistic, even if they weren’t intended that way. That’s the way the ball bounces in games like this, alas. 
gnarlycharlie, are you saying that the reason you’ve been reticent is that like me, you felt intimidated by pizza’s multitudinous posting? I can sympathize but, to go all meta again, you were chatting up a storm in Mystery and pizza’s in that game, along with similarly, um, vociferous folks like peekercpa! (Or has peeker been killed already?) So you seem to be able to hold your own with the noisemakers.
Stanislaus, you make good points. I do see some waffling there in MentalGuy’s posts re: the infamous Shadow/Red/septimus conundrum. Even though I have a tentative vote on him, I’ll will say this to play Devil’s Advocate for a second, if only to explain why I’m so uncertain bout him. The Shadow/Red/septimus thing was so confusing that many people were going back and forth on a daily, even hourly, basis. Even some of us (now known to be townies) who were completely certain whom to pick turned out to be wrong.
I guess I’m at the point where that whole argument starts to feel like a null tell to me, because most of us were all so confused that it’s as if any way people voted was an utter crapshoot.
There. End of my Devil’s Advocating. If I’m ignoring those doubts and just looking at your arguments, I feel more comfortable about voting MentalGuy.
I’ll be very interested in your thoughts on the remaining candidates, including Weedy, me, Inner and USCDiver.
Speaking of our illustrious doctor, I really don’t wanna harp on this, but something compels me to note that he posted today in the Mystery Mafia game. That’s right, he’s dead there, and he still chose to post there and not here. The hell? He hasn’t posted in this game since the 19th for pete’s sakes!
(Uh oh. I just had a scary thought. We haven’t had one of those Delayed Kills since LightFoot. What do you guys think, is it at all possible that Inner has been offed, and that’s why he’s been so absent?!)
Mods, is it time for a nudge? Obviously, if there’s an in-game reason for his not participating, I’ll understand if you can’t comment.
And after looking at it again, I realize Inner did not remove his septimus vote until after you had voted, so at the time of your vote, it was still fairly close. You could have even tied septimus with TexCat if you had moved both your votes to him. So, while it wasn’t likely that septimus was going to be lynched, it was possible, and you did help reduce that possibility.
@Stanislaus - When I voted septimus, I was trying to decide between him and Red. I felt fairly confident that one of them was scum, but did not really expect that they were both scum (especially since it was there conflicting information that made me think one of them was scum in the first place). So after septimus flipped scum, there was less a feeling that Red was scum. I was pretty much ready to flip a coin over Red and Shadow at that point, since I did feel that there interaction probably had a scum involved. I knew that if whichever of them got lynched first flipped Town, I would be voting the other.
In the last post you cite, I wasn’t trying to defend Red, since I thought he was scum, but I did think that he intended it to be taken differently than what players were reading it as.
OK, that could be true. I know at EoD he was behind, but I don’t know the timing of the votes and unvotes. I wasn’t thinking about him. I wasn’t even thinking about Texcat either, exactly, just that I had already found her scummy, and now ATPG and NP were pushing SF, almost hysterically it seemed to me.
I know choie has a friendly, open style. I learned the hard way in my first game not to vote people because I don’t like their style, so I think I shouldn’t necessarily clear her for her style either. Like, Silver Jan is “cheerfully confused” as Town or Scum; I imagine Pizzaguy dominates the conversation as Town or Scum. I think choie would be “chatty and naturalistic” as Town or Scum.
Choie, the case on Inner is not ‘safe’, it is harmless. Sort of “Oh, I’m such a newbie, I don’t have any idea what’s going on. No way I could be clever enough to survive as scum.” I think most people read your case against Lightfoot, went 
, and promptly stopped thinking about you with so much else going on. You did the same with a vote on Normal Phase on Day 3, when Septimus was under pressure. At this stage of the game, you can’t really afford to do that though, so now we get a bit more content. If you had voted Inner, that would be less suspicious to me, because scum need a mislynch and Inner is unlikely to be lynched, but you didn’t. You put a vote on Mental Guy, with the maximum amount of disclaimers, and one on me as well. Why not vote for charlie, if you find him more scummy than Mental Guy? I feel like you are slinging mud around to see what sticks.
vote choie
Wow, you weren’t doing much thinking about anything during a very tight vote, including one that pushed TexCat into no-man’s-land.
Well, at the risk of sounding like I don’t have any idea what’s going on, I don’t have any idea what you mean by this. I’m pushing people to take a look at someone whose activity seems increasingly bizarre the longer he decides not to post, someone whom everyone else seems to trust implicitly. I don’t see how this is a harmless thing to do. The reason I’m not voting him is because there’s no way he’s gonna be lynched, so there’s almost no point. But I do want it on record that I think his behavior is conduct unbecoming a member of the medical profession. 
But seriously, I also just want him to start participating or an answer as to why he’s not. For chrissake, we have someone who appears to be confirmed town – the only one left at this point – and he’s doing jack shit for our side. It’s frustrating as all hell, and I want to know the reason why. I’d also like someone who’s more trustworthy to help me understand why this might be. Such as if he’s been stealth-killed like LightFoot, a possibility I didn’t even think of until earlier today. (Now for all I know this isn’t feasible. That’s why I want people to at least answer my questions.)
I’m not saying “scum wouldn’t do that” regarding my questions re: Inner. Heck, I’m not really sure whether they would or not. It makes sense either way, to me – scum would probably be delighted for us to mislynch Inner (if a mislynch it would be), so I can see scum doing what I’m doing. At this point I don’t care about looking like scum or town, except that obviously I don’t want to be lynched myself for asking a question that I think the rest of the townies should be asking. And I also don’t want to be lynched because whether it’s of me or Inner, it’s one less townie in De’endee.
Yup, I’ve admitted I didn’t understand the case on septimus, and I didn’t like Normal’s style, and to me everyone was almost equally scummy at that point. So I figured what the hell, throw my vote at her. I’m not proud of that. Luckily no one paid attention to me. Now I feel like the Boy who Cried Wolf, and I guess if I get lynched for it, that’ll be what I deserve.
If you look at my percentage points (my method is highly scientific, don’t you know!), a grand total of 4 “trustworthy” points lie between gnarlycharlie and MentalGuy. I boosted MentalGuy over gnarlycharlie because of Normal, whose opinion (rather ironically, in light of my previous vote on her) holds more weight to me now that she’s proven townie. She was pushing hard for MentalGuy and she got murdered. I have to give that fact a bit of credit.
So as I already explained, MentalGuy got my vote, tentative though it is, because in addition to my own reasons for finding him less trustworthy than ideal, it’s my attempt to give the dead Normal a voice. It may be a daffy reason to vote, but hey, IMHO it’s at least as valid a reason as your current vote on me.
We’re fine. Long state is long. We got some clouds and wind and a brief shower here, but that was it.
Obviously GnarlyCharlie and Weedy are my two primary suspects. I know I am not infallible, though, so I wanted to see if there was any evidence that they are not scum together. So here are all the posts that they have made in the game that are to or about each other (I don’t think I missed any):
This first post is from yesterDay.
The rest are from toDay.
When I was spitballing ideas and suggested an inexperienced scum team, Charlie said that would include choie, Weedy, and Hirka. But he did not really say anything further about Weedy. If you search Romanic’s posts, he mentions Charlie once, but only to tell someone else that Charlie had already answered their question.
It sure does not seem like Charlie and Weedy had any reason to be concerned about one another. Charlie has voted me, choie, and Diver at various times, but never mentions even looking at Weedy. Weedy has currently voted for choie, and around midgame does a review of me, Diver, and Hirka, but does not mention Charlie at all. When I was pushing for a mass claim, neither one comments on whether they think it is a good idea or not, they just simply do not claim.
It seems to me these two are playing a strategy of “people will notice what you do, but they won’t notice what you don’t do.”
The one thing that does concern me, is that I don’t really recall either of them really talking to or about Stanislaus either. Stanislaus did vote Gnarly yesterDay and toDay, though.
It all happened while I was asleep. I live in Australia, so I’m time zone challenged. Of course that was the day Astral moved the deadline forward an hour as well, so EoD was at 8 a.m. I checked the thread half an hour before EOD, and Shadowfacts had claimed, and Normal and Pizzaguy were going off, and I had to read, and think, in a big hurry. I don’t even think I made a bad decision, because Shadowfacts was the right choice over Texcat, seeing as how he caught Red Skeezix (yes I understand it was a theoretical possibility that Septimus would be lynched, but no one was voting Septimus at 10 minutes to EoD. It was all Texcat and Shadowfacts). Bizarre that I am getting so much heat for it now.
You did not get that much heat at the time because we were all focusing on the Red/Shadow situation. It was noticed at the time, though. I posted the following the next Day: