I think my eyes are bleeding. OK, so today has been an exceedingly quiet day at work, and I had more free time than I anticipated. I just spent the last three hours (!) going through posts in a different way (by user rather than sequentially). I have many - probably an excess of - thoughts. I’d like to share them here. I’m dividing people into four categories here:
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STRONG TOWN: People who, for the purposes of my present analysis, I am considering to be very likely pro-town. I realize many of you disagree with these, but I have to start somewhere and this is where I’m starting. Their names, and my reasoning for each, should be found in one of my last few posts.
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LEANING TOWN: People who strike me as generally trustworthy, for whom I would be disinclined to vote at this particular point.
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QUESTION MARKS: This actually comprises two types of people: those who I feel have evidence of both town and pro-town leanings, about whom I am therefore uncertain, and those who haven’t given me enough information to develop an opinion in any direction.
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LEANING SCUM: These are the people I think are most likely to be the bad guys.
So…
CATEGORY 1 - STRONG TOWN
Pleonast, Zuma, Queuing, sturmhauke, JSexton, Autolycus, Rysto, Mennocchio, Blaster Master
CATEGORY 2 - LEANING TOWN
Fern Forest - one of our most prolific posters. I now consider her to be very strong town, for the following reasons. First, her post at 622, suggesting that the Mafia is trying to encourage us to lynch **sturm, Auto, ** and chrisk, has been the basis for my own thinking for a while now. Second, at 715 she called out nesta, albeit lightly, with utterly no prompting; I think scum will vote for and even call out other scum, but not so completely out of the blue. She has also argued that we should avoid going violently after those who make plays or suggestions that could be indicative of inexperience; I would expect Mafia to leap on signs of weakness.
Lakai - for the simple reason that s/he has had a very high signal-to-noise ratio throughout, was a supporter of Gadarene even when many of us were not, and seems to have a bead on the right way to approach the game.
Monkey Mensch - Did he read the parallel thread? I don’t know; I don’t think it matters. He might have been understating his own experience just to take the target off his back at night. All I know is that, as he himself notes in 1694, he has been willing to ride some very lonely bandwagons (for brewha and Aguecheek). This suggests town to me. He also did a few math-y posts, but I cannot manage to work through those right now.
CATEGORY 3 - QUESTION MARKS
Aguecheek - evidence in both directions. Generally seems to distrust people that I trust, notably BM, JSexton, and recently MonkeyMensch, on whom I’m currently leaning town as above. On the other hand, he argued generally in favor of fewer killings early in the game (400). Most in his favor, he argued against the escalating tensions that marked the middle-to-later part of Day 2 (in post 839). His position seemed to be that we needed more evidence to make a decision; given what we now know / think we know about the participants in the Queuing / Gadarene / BM / Pleonast / Zuma donnybrook, I’d think a Mafia member would have made more of an effort to encourage the battle, not defuse it.
ArizonaTeach - had early suspicion of both BM and chrisk/JSexton,, but had decent reasons for his suspicions in both cases and seems to have backed away from those two somewhat. Currently suspicious of Pygmy Rugger, which sounds like a good idea (see below).
brewha - part of yesterday’s chaos, but not a major part. Voted early against MonkeyMensch for vague reasons - he didn’t like Monkey’s early protestations of newbie-ness - but is currently accusing Fern Forest of posting without content, a charge with which I disagree. Not enough here to make a judgment one way or the other.
Fretful Porpentine - some very good recent points on the importance of keeping the Vig’s kills open to town discussion, and on the likelihood that the Mafia will not vote in concert. On the other hand, her most recent analysis seems targeted at JSexton and BlasterMaster, two people I believe to be town. On the other other hand, she has since amended that approach to aim more at two people on whom I have very little read - glee and kivvik. Other the other hand… there is no other hand. So I don’t really know.
glee - I got nothing.
howcow - on her, either. She seems very cautious in her approach.
Kat - as does she.
Kivvik - has generally defended Autolycus throughout. This probably means something; unfortunately, I have no idea what it is.
MadtheSwine - early in the game, threw around accusations pretty freely. Later, though, he caught out Pygmy Rugger at 860. He was back on Pygmy Rugger today, then unvoted Pygmy in order to vote for MonkeyMensch. He has since unvoted Monkey, but not revoted Pygmy. Again, I have no idea what, if anything, any of this means.
Malacandra - Honestly? He’s the only poster for whom participation in this thread hasn’t been the overwhelming majority of his time at the SDMB in the last few days. So combing through his posting history was much more difficult than it was for the rest of the players. This means nothing from a game standpoint other than that I can’t draw a bead on him either way.
StarvingButStrong - I haven’t had much to go on with her until very recently; I’d like to see how her recent analysis plays out before forming an opnion.
Suburban Plankton - ditto.
CATEGORY 4 - LEANING SCUM
FlyingCowofDoom - My evidence is way weaker than I thought it was, though. He has the appearance of a bandwagon voter to some extent, but so have many others in the first two Days. I have noticed that he has a tendency to post a lot of vote counts and vote corrections, giving him the impression of participating a lot without forcing him to do a lot of analysis. Trying to be helpful, or trying to keep the light out of corners he’d rather avoid?
pimaspinner - Where to begin? She voted Enfant Terrible for no particular reason (475) once others had gotten the voting started. She very bizarrely continued to insist that CaerieD’s crumb was Blaster Master and not Menocchio. Note that, as of post 712, she is not arguing, as others have, that the crumb could have been anyone; she is emphatically stating that it was most likely Blaster Master, which sounds incredibly specious. Of course, she backtracked on this and went with the safer “we just can’t know” explanation at 1003, but compare 712 and 1003 and see how different they read.
Then, at 984, she defends Pygmy Rugger, the only person to do so at that time, rather than wait for him to mount a defense of his own.
She was right there in the middle of the excitement yesterday, throwing votes around at every (presumed) townie in the bunch.
Finally, this morning, she first does the whole contradictory analysis, accusing me of being scum voting for scum, then casting doubt on Rysto for suggesting the Mafia would do exactly that. But hey, I’ve been “raising her suspicions all game” (post 1772), which explains why she’s been telling everyone about it for days, right? Like when she used my opinion of FCoD to bolster her own at 894! Or when she agreed with my point regarding CaerieD at 868. Oh, wait. She’s actually never mentioned being suspicious of me ever before, and agreed with me most of the times she’s even mentioned me. But suddenly, she’s been suspicious of me all game? <cough>SCUM<cough>
Pygmy Rugger - He might well be scum. He’s been a bit squirrelly the whole game. I do think he was disagreeing, not agreeing, with Suburban Plankton at 1814, so I wouldn’t use that as the basis for examination.