Here’s another installment of my somewhat-unpopular WoWs on players. I’d like to remind Idle (and everyone else) that I’m trying to be fair, and that I’m not looking for everything to be scummy, just looking for interesting posts or patterns.
Idle Thoughts:
Claims Joel Robinson from Mystery Theater 3000, vanilla town, in his very first actual gameplay post.
In his second gameplay post of the game, he reiterates how townie his behavior is when he immediately claims. Reminds us that he’s “more likely” to do it when he’s vanilla town.
Does some off-topic posting about who he was in previous games and tells Ushi not to take Ed too seriously in a few posts. I’m not going to link to them, there’s nothing special about any of it. Just 3 solid posts full of fluff (to be fair to Idle, telling Ushi to calm down isn’t necessarily fluff, but it’s not really related to the game at hand).
Gets into a bit of a tussle with Suburban Plankton over his stance on claiming. SP believes Idle has been inconsistent about why he claims and what he claims, but I’m not really feeling this particular bone of contention. I think SP has just misunderstood Idle. Nothing strikes me too scummily here. In that linked post, he also edits. I generally find edits a slight scummy feel, but in this particular case I don’t find it that scummy. Chronos will call him out for this edit later, and I call him out on it even later still, so I think that’s been addressed.
Gives a light-hearted response to Ushi, advising him to develop a thicker skin. He uses a smiley face, but comes across as concerned and interested in helping Ushi.
Then he votes Ushi in the very next post of the game, “just because.” 10 minutes pass between this post and his previous, and he makes no effort whatsoever to build a case beyond Ushi’s reaction to Ed. Reminder: Ed is scum. This is the very first vote on Ushi, and no other cases have been made against him for Idle to be drawing upon.
Expresses surprise over the fact that Ed wasn’t voting for Ushi. Mahaloth has a vote count not 15 posts above his, so it’s interesting that that fact has escaped his notice. Again, this isn’t necessarily a scum tell, but I think it’d odd how little attention Idle is giving his own case against Ushi.
Says it’s “pretty obvious why I was voting for Ushimi.” Points to Peeker’s vote, and asks why folks are calling him out on his vote. In my opinion, it’s not obvious, and there’s a certain degree of revisionism going on in this post. This got discussed at length and the time, and I’ll address it some more when it comes up later.
Not really a part of my Idle WoW, but Scuba (Known Scum) follows Idle’s “it was pretty obvious!” post with an unvote of Idle. He says, more or less, “hey Idle, thanks for pointing out how Peeker cast a me two! vote on Ushi! In fact, Peeker is so much more suspicious than you.” Does this sound familiar to any of you? Scuba found Idle suspicious enough to vote for, but at the slightest resistance from Idle immediately withdraws his vote and puts it where Idle has suggested. Really not buying the sincerity of this conversation.
After some initial hesitation, he jumps whole-heartedly on the Spivak Noun express, voting for SP.
Immediately buys SP’s explanation, and jumps back to Ushi. Changes his tune about his original reasons for voting for Ushi in this post, too. Now he claims that he originally voted for Ushi because, and I quote, “he was insulting and I wanted to poke a little harmless fun at him.” Remember that “it was obvious!” post from before? In that post, he said his reasons for voting for Ushi were the same as Peeker’s. Peeker’s given reason for voting for Ushi was that Ushi was either over the top town or scum having a meltdown. Peeker goes on to suggest that Ushi might be doing this as part of an act. Nowhere in Peeker’s post does he say he’s voting for Ushi because he wants to poke a little harmless fun at him. I guess this is less obvious than Idle would have us believe.
Responds to Pleonast voting for him with some frustration. Explains (again) why he voted for Ushi the first time. Says “It was pretty obvious I was only trying to get Ushimi’s goat by voting for him after being such a hothead in the Ed debacle.” Again, this is not his orginally-given reason for voting for Ushi. It went from “just because” to “same as Peeker” to “to annoy him.” 1 and 3 are not mutually exclusive, but that pesky “same as Peeker” reason keeps getting in the way.
Pleonast votes Idle Thoughts soon afterwards. So much so that he votes twice for Idle. He is only the second vote on Idle, and Ushi is (at this point) looking like the clear vote winner. Their back and forth is townieish, but scum do this to each other all the time. Their votes are safe, and Pleo isn’t putting much effort into the vote. He attacks Wolverine worse than Idle in the post he votes Idle in. The voting twice thing is interesting… if Pleo were sincere about his vote, I again think he’d be more interested in remembering what he was doing. Could be a rehearsed vote.
Idle says regarding Pleo, “if you’re not scum or third party in this game, I’ll be very surprised.” This is after defending his vote for Ushi. He feels so strongly about this, he immediately votes Pleo at the beginning of the next day. Ushi, I’d point out, is not dead at this point. He thought Ushi was more likely to be scum the previous day (why else would he remain voting for Ushi?), and Ushi would seem the better target, since Ushi almost died the day before and a late-day bandwagon on Oredigger saved his life. But oh well, let’s just vote for Pleo, since “Ushimi is scum and… Pleonast is his scumbuddy who rushed to save him from a lynch yesterday.” He charitably adds that he’s “also willing to vote for Ushimi.” For the record, Pleo was the 6th vote on Oredigger, which I would hardly categorize as a “rush.” Pleo is not terribly in danger at this moment; he only has one other vote on him. This could be an early vote on a scum buddy, coupled with a “reason” to switch to (now known) town, or it could be nothing. I’m leaning scummy based on what else I’ve read of Idle, but this by itself isn’t the scummiest thing in the world, I’ll admit.
Idle responds to Chronos by saying “if we look at those who switched [to oredigger] first and hit paydirt, then chances are Ushimi could be scum too.” I have one major problem with this. Despite Idle saying this is what he’s thinking, it’s not what he’s doing. He picked the second-to-last voter to vote Oredigger, and is now laying down reasons for people to look at the beginning of the wagon. He just doesn’t seem terribly interested in building any further cases on Pleo, and seems more concerned with smudging a large swatch of people unrelated to his vote.
To Idle’s credit, he doesn’t unvote Pleo as Pleo starts gaining heat. Whether that’s because a town Idle truly believed in Pleo’s scumminess or a scum Idle wanted to ride out the bus for townie cred, content that Pleo would eventually claim detective-type thing and the heat would dissipate remains to be seen. Given the lack of sincerity between their votes on each other earlier, I’m thinking the latter, but this is up for everybody to decide on their own.
Goes back to Ushi immediately at the start of the day, with no new casemaking beyond his tenuous equivalence between Pleo and Ushi. He says it seems “stronger than ever” that scum were trying to save Ushi, but I’m still concerned by the disconnect between that statement and the fact that Pleo was the second-to-last person to vote for Oredigger. He makes no effort to look at Story, me, Wolverine, or Scuba, the first four voters for Oredigger.
Votes Cookies for one of the worst reasons of the game - despite acknowledging that known scum Pleonast outed Cookies as a potential threat to town, still postulates that maybe it was some crazy ploy between Pleo and actual scum Cookies. Just really not putting that much effort into his casemaking.
Scuba_Ben (known scum) does a WoW of Idle and concludes that the only oddities about Idle are his dogged pursuit of Ushi and a certain lack of participation. As my current WoW of Idle would hopefully show, there’s a lot more going on than that.
Idle points out that he went after Pleo instead of Ushi on Day 2. Scuba does a slapped forehead smiley and says “back to the drawing board.”
Idle then adds more defense of his voting pattern, and says that “the odds of both [Pleonast] and I being scum seems to have a very low chance.”
Scuba_Ben falls over himself to apologize, thanks idle for correcting him about his voting habits, and unvotes Idle. No mention is made of Scuba_Ben’s second given reason for voting for Idle, that of Idle’s lack of participation. This could not feel more rehearsed if they had tried. If scummy Scuba were honestly trying to bus a townie, I think he would have put more than 10 seconds of effort into it. This reeks of scummyness, and I’d expect a townie Idle to call him on it. Idle never does. If somebody voted for me for such terrible reasons, I know I’d make at least a token effort to defend myself. Instead, Idle follows it up with idle (hah!) chitchat.
Next, Idle immediately votes for Cookies, again at the beginning of the day, again with no additional casemaking or effort. “For all the reasons I posted yesterday,” indeed. If you remember from a few paragraphs ago, Idle votes Cookies because he suspects Pleo intentionally outed one of his own teammates in a bizarre ploy to no benefit to the scum team. And that apparently still holds enough water to warrant another vote today.
In a follow-up post, Idle says it would “be pretty stupid of scum to try to rid of their own.” This explains why he can’t be scum - both Pleo and Scuba have voted for him in the past. There’s a certain degree of irony, because Idle is voting for Cookies because he believes, for whatever reason, that scum actually WERE trying to get rid of their own. Why else would he suggest scum Pleo outed scum Cookies? At least he ends this post with an unvote for Cookies, but for unrelated reasons. He doesn’t believe Scuba would vote for a scum Cookies, so Cookies must be town. So… why was Idle voting for Cookies in the first place?
Defends his voting record against Pleonast. Says he hasn’t done anything scummy.
Votes SP based on a misrepresentation of SP’s stance. SP’s case is built primarily on Idle’s safe votes for Ushi and Cookies, and that he hasn’t really attempted to make a case against anyone else. SP does find Idle’s votes for Pleo to be townie cred bus attempts, but I don’t consider this to be the crux of SP’s argument, since he’s mostly concerned with Idle’s nonsensical claim that he must be town because known scum voted for him in the past. Idle defends against that by saying that SP is voting because Idle voted for Pleo.
There you have it. I hope this helps somebody.
