You did vote for me yesterday, and I think if I had been in gnarly’s position, you would have tried to vote me off. That’s just supposition, of course.
Well obviously, yes. You and gnarlycharlie were/are my least-trusted survivors, as I’ve said several times now. Plus, if you’d been in his place, the train on MentalGuy would’ve looked exactly as scummy – presumably it would’ve consisted of the same people, in fact. So hells yeah I’d’ve voted for you over MentalGuy.
Is this supposed to prove something?
I’ve made the point before that it seems to me that Day Five could provide some clues to the identity of the remaining Lords of Slaughter. Now, with MentalGuy gone and flipped townie, we have another datapoint to consider.
As we all remember, the all-important Day Five vote ultimately became a duel to the death between good ShadowFacts and evil Red Skeezix. The question is: whom did the scum vote for? (There were a few other scattered votes for different parties, but they were all by known townies, so we can safely dismiss them – e.g. askthepizzaguy voting for Inner Stickler.)
Voting for Red Skeezix (scum):
- ShadowFacts 2x - town
- Suburban Plankton 2x - town
- choie - status unknown
- Stanislaus 2x - status unknown
- USCDiver - status unknown
Voting for ShadowFacts (town):
- Red Skeezix - scum
- Hirka T’Bawa 2x - town
- Inner Stickler 2x - town
- Lightfoot - town
- MentalGuy - town
- Normal Phase 2x - town
- gnarlycharlie - status unknown
- Weedy - status unknown
With septimus having been lynched on the previous Day, at this point there were three as-yet-unidentified scum left, assuming we had a total of four to begin with. As we now know, one of them turned out to be Red Skeezix. So who were the other two, and for whom did they vote on Day Five: ShadowFacts or Red Skeezix? (As I said before, all the other votes placed on other candidates were made by now-known Townies. We can ignore them.)
Common sense tells us that the Lords should have been doing all they could to keep Red from the noose. Again, their Godfather had been lynched just the previous day – they had to make sure they wouldn’t be caught short again. So I find it hard to believe that no scum other than Red himself voted for ShadowFacts.
Meanwhile, it’s certainly possible that at least one scummy Lord was canny enough to vote for Red Skeezix and hide his/her scumminess among the innocent.
Assuming these theories are true, it’s highly likely, nigh on certain IMHO, that either of the two survivors who voted for ShadowFacts (Weedy and gnarlycharlie) is scum, if not both; it’s also possible (though not as certain) that one of three of us (choie, Stanislaus and USCDiver) who voted for Red is scum. It would be astonishing to me if there were two scum hiding in the Red tally, but let’s face it, there’ve been some ballsy gambits on the Lords’ side of things.
Anyway, I just wanted to bring up this point again because Day Five’s votes were so conveniently split between two factions, with known townies comprising most of the pack. It just seems we can use this as a kind of primer or key to decode the rest of the votes.
Gnarlycharlie on Red v Shadow, prior to Shadow’s death (Italics and bolding are mine):
Couldn’t be clearer, right. It’s Shadow or Red, very unlikely that they’re both Town. gnarly’s gone for Shadow first - fair enough. But when Shadow flips Town, what’s the response?
Then Red claims Remorseful Vig:
…and gnarly locks himself in on choie.
Please. He played a good game, looking judicous on Red and Shadow, “unfortunately” coming down on the wrong side. But when he gets a chance to apply his own logic consistently, he ducks it. And by locking in on the only person who at that stage had even a slim chance of beating out Red.
**
vote gnarlycharlie**
I am pretty sure that Weedy is gnarly’s scumbuddy, but my strongest lead is gnarly. First things first!
Is that all decided then, or are you still willing to listen to me?
It seems like maybe I am not communicating very well, and probably haven’t explained my thinking on choie very well, so I’ll try and lay it out clearly.
If you go back and look through choie’s posts, on Day 1, she is posting, discussing, giving opinions etc. She votes for KellyCriterion, discusses the claims. Day 2 same thing, choie is still posting, votes for Silver Jan, goes back and forth with her, and also votes for Normal Phase. At the end of Day 2, septimus does the double vote thing and comes under a lot of pressure. Day 3, choie’s posting rate drops through the floor. She has 5 posts the whole day, and two of them are responses to people voting for her. She says she’ll ‘have a think’ about Septimus, and then never goes back to him. She comes up with a new twist on her case on Normal Phase and votes for her. Practically every post she mentions how new she is, how confusing it all is.
Day 4, Red Skeezix vs. Shadowfacts vs. Septimus
Choie has one post that day. She votes for Lightfoot. Doesn’t address any of the issues.
Day 5. Red Skeezix vs. Shadowfacts, rerun
5 posts from choie. She votes for Red, votes for Shadowfacts, realises that doesn’t make sense, unvotes Shadowfacts.
After Shadowfacts flips scum, Red is obviously going to be lynched the next day. At this point choie goes back to her initial posting style, argues with pizza, debates issues, comments on things. She has over 100 posts now.
The difference between her posting when scum are being debated, and when they aren’t, is really marked. She is happy to discuss townies, but doesn’t know how to handle it when the real scum are the topic. It’s one thing to create a bit of a persona for yourself, but it’s a lot harder when the persona is supposed to have different knowledge than what you do. Huge pressure.
I know people like choie’s style, she seems really open and friendly. I am not saying she is a fiendish mastermind who has constructed a tangled web of lies. That seems a little complicated. Instead she just picks and chooses what she posts about. Sure, she is new, and confused a lot of the time. That doesn’t make her town. I’m happy to believe that she didn’t understand why people trusted Lightfoot’s claim. I just think she chose to post about that because she didn’t want to talk about Red and Shadowfacts.
Yesterday, she made a case on Inner Stickler. It’s clear, it makes sense, it’s supported by quotes. You can’t say that choie doesn’t get this game, or that she’s too much of a ditz to play properly. She obviously can. She said before that she was a bit overwhelmed by ATPG. I think that’s probably true to a certain extent, but when he makes a case on her on Day 2, she responds perfectly calmly. Then she gets into an argument with him later, after Shadowfacts died. So she’s not that overwhelmed, when she doesn’t want to be.
She has also said that she found all the power role stuff hard to follow. That is another example of where she can post the truth, just by picking carefully. It’s probably especially hard to follow the debate when you have secret knowledge, and you have to keep in mind what other people do and don’t know. So she can post about how hard it is to keep track of the conversation, and how she doesn’t know who to believe, and get Townie points for sounding sincere.
Anyway, I hope people understand what I am getting at now. I have tried to wring the truth from the vote record. The information is not there for me. Choie’s behaviour, however, I find really striking. It has been very uneven over the course of the game but the pattern makes sense if you look at what was happening with Septimus/ Shadowfacts/ Red Skeezix at the time.
Yes, that’s right. I voted for Red, now known to be scum’s assassin, when most of the townies were going after ShadowFacts, our fellow townie. The only reason I started to vote for ShadowFacts was his four-voting mechanism – then I realized it was silly to vote against a guy whom I believed was town, just because he was using all four votes at once. So I unvoted him the same post.
I’m sorry, there really is no way to spin that as scummy. I can’t imagine anyone with something to hide admitting that mind-change in public. I’ve been forthright in everything I’ve said in this game, including my mistakes.
Town. He was town. I know you’d rather have voted for scum, but no, he was town. 
Annnnd I’ve explained this. At around Day Two or Three I started feeling out of my depth and irritated with the loudmouths in the game. I hated the way pizza was talking to Suburban Plankton (which was a good instinct) and disliked the auto-obeissance to LightFoot once she claimed (which was a bad instinct). The power role crap and the incessant discussion of Night actions was too convoluted for me and I just mentally checked out, feeling I had nothing of use to contribute and regretting having signed up altogether.
Then it turned out I was right on ShadowFacts. That Night, Suburban Plankton (whom I’d defended) was killed, proving him and Inner town, and my confidence and frustration with pizza’s attempts at murdering so many now-known townies grew. So yup, this renewed my interest in the game because my judgment wasn’t as horrible as I’d thought after all and I felt maybe I had something to contribute, even though I didn’t fully understand the role mechanics of the game. I thought pizza was getting away with murder, literally. (Well, not literally literally, but in-game literally, if you know what I mean. :)) And so I started speaking out.
Well, there have been only two scum lynched in the game, so it’s kinda hard to make that big a distinction. I admit I argued against septimus’s lynching. Heck, I still think his voting-at-the-last-minute was smart strategy and is how a clever innocent person would have played it, too. When it came down to Red vs. ShadowFacts – this was before the Bussing of Red Skeezix became scum’s plan – I voted for Red’s lynching, believing ShadowFacts over him. Again, Red was not being bussed at that point, as the vote records make pretty clear.
To repeat: we’ve had two “real scum,” for heaven’s sake. both of them several Days ago. How can you judge what I can or cannot handle? In fact, right now I think I’m talking to “real scum,” and I think yesterDay I voted for “real scum.”
If I wanted to create a stable, perfectly consistent persona, believe me, I could. That’s what I do for a living.
My goodness, how very strange for someone to decide when to post and when not to post. That really is unusual, isn’t it? We should all post completely consistently throughout the game. Let’s say twenty posts a Day, how’s that?
Of course you have been completely consistent in your posting rate, right? No, there have been ebbs and flows, which is true for just about everyone but pizza.
Because by the time ShadowFacts died, pizza had proven wrong time and time again, and yet he was still dominating the freakin’ discussion and even had the balls to push/demand/make ultimatums. He blasted people he thought were scum (all of whom were not) and demanded voting deals (“if you vote ____ twice then I’ll believe you’re town” or as he said to me, “you pick the right scum two times in a row, then I’ll believe you’re town”) that seemed utterly ridiculous and an attempt to purposely overwhelm us all by shouting at us again and again. I’m a shy, introverted person by nature, but I do get my dander up when I feel there’s something unfair going on.
Apparently you find it hard to believe someone’s mindset or playing style changing over the course of a game that lasts two months, particularly their very first game in which they’re getting their feet wet. (OOOH yeah, I said it again!) I think a reasonable person – or someone not trying to invent a reason to vote for an innocent townie – would be able to comprehend that someone new to a game would naturally have variations in her participation, trying to fit in at first, then feeling downhearted when making an error in judgment and suspecting she was a detriment to Town, only to gain a boost in confidence after some correct decisions/guesses.
Orrrrrrr, I could actually be sincere. Whether that gets me townie points or not, it’s the truth. Remember, scums have a board where they chat and plan strategy. If I had teammates, I doubt they’d have ever, EVER advised me to vote/unvote ShadowFacts in the same damn post, and admitting my doubts on ShadowFacts’s quadvoting. That was the stupidest freakin’ move I made in the game, but it’s honest because I have been utterly consistent on detesting the double-voting mechanic, so when someone trots out a quadruple vote, you’re darn right my hackles were raised. That’s utter honesty and consistency right there.
Of course it’s not, because my vote record, like yours, isn’t great.
It makes much more sense if you accept the actual reason for it, which is simply that I’m learning the game as I go on, had some setbacks and disheartening moments, and then returned with renewed confidence. That’s called being human.
Just a friendly reminder from your wonderful dungeon master:
Day ends on Friday, September 2nd, at 5 pm central time. Here’s hoping you murder the right / wrong person, depending on your team!
Well, we’re at LyLo unless I’m mistaken, and things are very, very quiet here in De’endee. Too quiet. I guess at this point we’re all talked out?
I know we have to kill all the Lords in order to win. Do we know what the scum’s win condition is? I suppose they just have to have an even number of scum-to-town? (That kinda doesn’t seem fair. Seems like there should be some kind of mano-a-mano way for two Townies to go up against an even number of scum. I bet we could take 'em. I’m scrappier than I appear!)
But seriously. So I’m suspecting gnarlycharlie and Weedy for most likely scum, but because I still can’t trust my instincts – I don’t know if I’m just irked at Weedy for being such a pain in my tuchas – I sorta kinda wonder about USCDiver. I find it hard to believe that no scum voted for Red Skeezix on Day Five, just as I find it hard to believe that all surviving scum voted for ShadowFacts.
Then again Stanislaus could be the most awesome under-the-radar scum ever, having seemed trustworthy to just about everyone. But I’ve been down that road and been proven wrong before (sorry again, Inner Stickler) so perhaps I should just take him at face value.
Weedy’s take on gnarlycharlie’s voting yesterDay appears to be that he’s innocent, which is why he didn’t double-vote on MentalGuy and (says he) wasn’t around for EOD. I, on the other hand, suspect he’s bluffing and was waiting in the wings just in case he was needed – since he wasn’t, he pulled a clever ruse to look innocently unaware that the game was tied (and that this put MentalGuy in the noose). But obviously I could be mistaken.
Stanislaus and USCDiver, what are your takes on gnarlycharlie’s voting yesterday? Or Weedy’s and mine, for that matter?
i haven’t read the recent posts yet but i wanted to say that i think stepping back has helped me think more clearly.
i will explain later because i’m currently giving my students their finals.
Vote USCDiver
Vote Stanislaus
Hmm. I suppose I’d better wait and see what gnarly has to say. But now we have one vote on everybody. That seems to be a situation that makes it easier, not harder, for scum to manipulate the vote.
On gnarly’s voting yesterday: his actual vote for MentalGuy is fairly consistent with the position he’d already established. But it is interesting that MG had just said that he was most suspicious of gnarly and Weedy - gnarly’s explains in his vote that he sees Mental as more suspicious than Weedy, but doesn’t give a lot of reasons. His non-existent double-vote I think is best explained by the fact that Mental had such a strong lead - gnarly wouldn’t have been worried (even as Town) that he might end up one vote from the lynch. So on that basis I can believe that he wasn’t in fact around, and got a bit of a shock when he saw how close it was.
I think I’ve been quite clear what I think about Weedy’s votes.
On choie - you tried not to lynch MentalGuy and to lynch the guy I’m most sure is scum. So I tend to think that is pretty townie. If gnarly *is *town, then I still don’t see why you’d prefer one to the other, as scum.
On Diver - voting because Normal suspected MG is pretty weak as reasons go. His revote came at 3-2, so really opened up a gap between gnarly and MG. Looked at as a vote, it’s not great.
I still think gnarly’s total history makes him the best suspect.
Man, I’m really curious about gnarlycharlie’s votes on Stanislaus and USCDiver. That’s pretty bold, considering I don’t think Stanislaus been a serious suspect throughout the whole game (maybe he’s received, like, one vote?). And unless my memory is even worse than I thought it was, gnarlycharlie hasn’t ever said a word about suspecting Stanislaus before.
So his vote strikes me as a strategic choice rather than a genuine suspicion. What changed in the past couple of days (literal days) to change his mind? Besides, I thought I was his favorite bete noire – I’m a little hurt that he didn’t pick me this round. Yet. 
I, however, will remain consistent.
vote gnarlycharlie
Of course this may change depending on the information he’s kept us in suspense of. Oh dear, I forgot, I’d better include a disclaimer for those who find my ability to actually change my mind disturbing and/or suspicious.
Legal Disclaimer: The aforementioned vote is not to be considered an inviolate commitment, and thus may or may not remain static throughout the Day. By placing this vote, Voter is in no way to be considered required to stick to said votee, and reserves the right to shift her stance and opinions pending further information as the Day progresses.
I’m eagerly awaiting **gnarly’s **explanation too, but I think he and **weedy **are definitely my two top choices for Today’s lynch. I could go with either because I think they’re both equivalent in terms of scumminess.
I will see what charlie has to say. I’m not very happy with either Stanislaus or Diver at the moment, because I feel they are misrepresenting me. Stanislaus tried to make it look like I double voted Mental Guy out of the blue, and it’s obvious that Diver hadn’t even read my post when he called it inconsistent. This Weedy/gnarlycharly story is very convenient for someone, but just because Mental Guy is dead doesn’t make his theory true.
That’s a little disingenuous when you felt the need to clarify that post multiple times.
(Just trying to keep the conversation going, as the hours are passing us by and it’ll be Dusk before we know it!)
USCDiver, what pings you about Weedy and gnarlycharlie? If I’m not mistaken, you were pushing at Weedy yesterday for her comments about not trust me vis-a-vis my voting for MentalGuy. Has any other past behavior or votes on her part made you suspicious?
Also, do you have any doubts about me (I’d assume you do) or even Stanislaus?
This question is for both you and Stanislaus: the survivors’ votes on Day Five were split between the top contenders: Red Skeezix (USCDiver/Stanislaus/me) and ShadowFacts (gnarlycharlie and Weedy). Do both of you think it’s likely that all of us who voted Red Skeezix on Day Five were town*, and that all scum only voted for ShadowFacts?
- Remember, none of the folks who voted Red Skeezix Day Five and subsequently died flipped scum.
Edited to add: Weedy, I didn’t get the impression from Stanislaus’s post that he was implying you’d double-voted for MentalGuy nearly simultaneously. So I don’t think he meant to misrepresent you… or at least, if he did, it didn’t work on me, anyway.
Day ends TOMORROW at 5 pm central time! Whoa!
Vote count coming in a few minutes.
Also, the hammer rule is still in effect. If half of the surviving players (rounded up) plus two lock their votes, the day ends. These locked-in votes do NOT have to be for the same targets. Merely locking in on someone counts.
Half+2 equals 5, which is coincidentally the number of living players. If you all lock in, I’ll end the day and post the dusk color. Just something to keep in mind if you guys have settled into your votes and don’t wanna just sit around until end of day.
Vote Count!
gnarlycharlie (2): Stanislaus [2724], Choie [2731]
Weedy (1): USCDiver [2710]
Choie (1): Weedy [2712]
USCDiver (1): gnarlycharlie [2729]
Stanislaus (1): gnarlycharlie [2729]
With these votes, gnarlycharlie would be lynched. Please check for any mistakes. I almost said “with this many votes, I’m pretty sure it’s right,” but then I thought I’d be setting myself up for some kind of ironic failure.
Now now, I saw you put only one vote on gnarlycharlie before you edited it, you sly thing! 
Caught red-handed!