I’ve opted to review the posts of Astral Rejection (AR), not realising how prolific he has been. 90% of the reason is that he’s voted for me and that caught my eye. The other 10% is the shenanigans at around 10pm yesterday. That might have been enough on its own, but maybe I’d just have looked at his posts around then.
I’m not going to look at every post, just what I consider the significant ones.
[post=14936335]Post 26[/post] has attracted some heat. I read it at the time, and still do, as a simple cheesy pun.
[post=14938836]Post 66[/post]: I think AR makes a couple of good points here. Plausible speculation.
[post=14938902]Post 78[/post]: Votes Choie for suggesting Guiri’s vote for AR might have been in jest. I can see what AR is saying. I’m not sure I would have voted for it, but that’s just a difference of opinion.
[post=14939160]Post 84[/post]: Questions Gadarene on his vote.
[post=14941619]Post 169[/post]: Pushes Gadarene further, unvotes Choie and explains that he caught a hint of something that he can’t detect any longer.
[post=14942247]Post 186[/post]: Votes me. This is the big one, obviously (at least from my point of view. Others may tend to focus on his vote-jumping.)AR takes issue with me not jumping into a mess of Day 1 votes, fists swinging. Frankly, I don’t know why he expects me to.
I find early Day 1 votes are almost never worth commenting on. Eitehr they’re joke votes, random votes or drive-bys with the intention of getting the voted-for person to participate. What those votes have in common is a lack of any real justification.
In my opinion, nothing’s going to be learned by criticising them as they happen, they’re pretty much meaningless except for the voter and wheover is voted for. Any value we’re going to extract from them comes at the end of the Day (or more likely, future Days) when we have perspective and the evidence of several Days actions and role reveals.
Given that opinion, and the fact that my knee-jerk reactions cannot be trusted (as discussed in [post=14943631]post 272[/post], why should I jump in at the time? It’s going to waste my time and add to the fog. All I’m going to do is note them and carry on. If you don’t like that, tough. I’m not going to change my playstyle.
In fact, if I do jump in hard with early votes on Day 1, either I’ve found a smoking gun or I have a hidden agenda. Was there really a smoking gun there?
Inner Stickler mentioned my name and raised my grudge warning. It amused me to post that. AR started his game with a pun, but criticises me for opening my game with a lighthearted hail to another player who was trying to steal my thunder? Noted.[post=14942255]Post 187[/post]: Compares his post to one of Glee’s and asks Guiri and Gadarene why they singled him out for votes over Glee. Defends this in [post=14942677]post 229[/post].
We now come to the vote shenanigans.AR asks me why I haven’t weighed in on the main topics – a question already annswerd, see 272 and comments above – and switches to Gadarene, then (on having his error pointed out) switches back.
The actual vote switch isn’t as important (imo) as his explanation of why. He defends his change in [post=14943822]post 279[/post] as wanting to ensure no-one could jump from voting Gad to voting Visorslash and cause a sudden last-minute change in the vote lead. Now, that could be a respectable defence, if employed alongside an explanation of why he considered Gadarene more likely than Visorslash to be Mafia. In AR’s defence, he’s been pushing Gadarene about his vote all Day; against that you have to consider that Gadarene has voted for AR while Visorslash hasn’t. Inner Stickler suggests possible Mafia motivations, which AR admits he can’t disprove in [post=14943837]post 282[/post].
In [post=14943856]post 286[/post] AR says that he aimed to “preserve what town had selected as their lynch.” That could be a very interesting slip of the tongue. It seems to suggest that he knows that the voters on Visorslash include anti-Town elements, which raises the question of how he knew that. Alternatively, he might be a Mafiate pushing a Townie wagon further into the lead (which doesn’t have any implications for Visorslash, by the way).
Or it might be the gift of a clear conscience.
[post=14944165]Post 302[/post]: Claims he had not thought through all the implications and possibilities when he decided to switch. If he’s Town this is almost certainly true; if he’s not it’s a fib. Unfortunately we can’t tell (unless there’s a lie detector role in the game) without lynching him. Pity in a way.
It seems plain that AR has some suspicions of Gadarene, but failed to explain why he thought Visorslash was less suspicious. Consequently the vote switch does leave a bad impression.Enough of an impression to overshadow the very faint suspicion Silver Jan left me with? Yes, much more so. Couple this with his ignoring my playstyle, which he has been exposed to, and which I have already commented on once and had completely ignored, that’s enough for a vote.
Unvote.
Vote Astral Rejection
Although my voting post does not continue the string “anti-Town” it’s hard to see how anyone could find another interpretation for that vote. I quoted “If you are town, how would that help you/the rest of us?” and said I agreed.