Welcome to your confessional!

[Joss Carter]

I guess it makes sense because otherwise you'd need to use a different word but it's just this weird vestigial aspect of a game that started as a TV show and is completely divorced from the TV format.

brb designing Survivor: Cargo Cult Island

[Lennie Briscoe]

I guess it makes sense because otherwise you'd need to use a different word but it's just this weird vestigial aspect of a game that started as a TV show and is completely divorced from the TV format.

brb designing Survivor: Cargo Cult Island

Hahaha, I originally said it was like a cargo cult but was afraid that would sound too insulting

[Lennie Briscoe]

I should update just on the tribe I think, as I don't know if I'll have time before the challenge ends between work and actually doing the challenge tomorrow, and want to get thoughts down before that happens..

Jake - Hasn't talked a lot the past couple days but I think he's super busy so that's not a big deal. I think Jake talked the most to everyone prior to that and is generally viewed positively as a result. The miscommunication over him thinking I liked Ace was interesting though, he might have a hesitance to broaching tough subjects? I mean I can't even take credit for that, Scruff said as much, or at least said it in my case. I don't know what that implies but it doesn't make me feel terrific. Which isn't to say I want to cut him or anything, just, you know, something to keep in mind.

Scruff - still my #1, still feel good about him. He also seems busy at work but generally gives me a lot and doesn't seem to hold my shorter messages against me? This is a flaw of mine, I feel like something with realtime communication would suit me so much better just because with PMs I spend so much longer on them for so much less content after editing and revising. Though at the same time it's an interesting challenge. (cut to Scruff's confessional saying "Lennie is fine but man I wish he'd say more")

Leon - We've connected some, we could be a lot better though. I've talked with both Jake and Scruff about a 4 person alliance with us and Leon just because they seem so high on him. They'll bring up (and this is more Scruff) keeping newbies safe so they have an enjoyable first experience, which is like, great if that's good for their games, but I'm not sure that would be the talking point if they didn't also see it as positive for them.

Hannah - Everyone at this point has said something positive about talking to Hannah though I think some of that was to communicate the subtext of "therefore I'm most willing to cut Ace". I really enjoyed our talks about gaming but our game conversations have been kind of stilted.

Paul - Still a lot of potential there I think, I should think about how to build this relationship. This is the kind of person where if we swapped together I could see it bringing us much closer. I mean, I guess that's true of everyone, but it could take a "I like this guy and think we could work together" relationship to more of a "This is my guy" kind of relationship depending on circumstances on the tribe we end up on.


In a broad sense, the tribe wasn't super active today, and I think that's just because people were pretty locked in even before the results that Ace would be the one to go and because people were genuinely busy, but it does give one pause.

If we were to lose this challenge, I could see Hannah going. I could also see me going because flash games are not my forte at all and I know multiple people have expressed the "we don't want to keep losing" sentiment, but if I can trust in the four of Jake/Scruff/Leon/me, I'd be safe.

[Lennie Briscoe]

Leon replied to me that he did the challenge for 30 minutes until he got bored. That doesn't make me feel great. Like I was assuming we'd all be like at least committing to putting in an hour (or roughly that). I went for the hour, pretty much, and my best score definitely improved substantially in the second half of that.

[Heiji Hattori]

Congratulations on immunity - you're now in the top x-teen! Your safe for another round and I figured I'd take your pulse. Did your ranking of your favorite tribemates change in the past couple of days?

[Lennie Briscoe]

Congratulations on immunity - you're now in the top x-teen! Your safe for another round and I figured I'd take your pulse. Did your ranking of your favorite tribemates change in the past couple of days?

It hasn't really changed but Jake did include this in his message to me post-challenge-win:

I'm really glad the elimination went well. I was pretty confident everything was on the up and up, but that's when you get paranoid, right? Working together seemed to be a strong move - I get the impression you've got the tribe pretty much wired, and I'm happy to go with that flow.

Like I don't precisely know what he's implying via "I get the impression you've got the tribe pretty much wired" but it's hard not to see it as "I see you as a threat in front of me", which is a red flag because he's supposed to be the threat in front of me! He has been semi-absent the past couple days though due to RL stuff so I can see why he might be feeling less connected at the moment.

To be clear, I don't think he sees me as a threat in the sense of he wants to target me in the short or mid-term, but I was really hoping to ride a narrative of "everyone feels good about jake" and if necessary eventually turn it into "...but if we're all good with him, who really is?", I'd much rather be behind the scenes. WTF, I'm not even good at this connecting shit, he's way better. Dude apologizes in this PM for writing such a short PM and it's literally the longest and most detailed out of any of the post-challenge PMs I've received, even taking out the youtube embeds and gifs.

[Heiji Hattori]

Does this mean you feel like Jake is threatening you? Or are you subconsciously threatened by him? What will your next steps look like in this game?

[Lennie Briscoe]

Does this mean you feel like Jake is threatening you? Or are you subconsciously threatened by him? What will your next steps look like in this game?

I mean, to reiterate, I don't think he's threatening me in the sense of, feeling like I'm in danger.

I honestly don't know quite how to take it. It's not good in any sense to me, but I specifically don't know why he would say it to me? I feel like the most likely answer is he doesn't think it comes across poorly, maybe he thinks it's a compliment? Considering how willing he was to be like just out in front right out of the gate, maybe he's just not thinking about that kind of thing, that being perceived as being at the center of things is a bad thing. But it is a bad thing and the fact that he might perceive me being there makes me wary, not necessarily of Jake but that he might a) not be the only one thinking that and b) potentially propagate that idea. I still think it's a wrong read though, Scruff is probably in a better spot than me?

[Heiji Hattori]

You've had a little downtime thanks to immunity. Any strategies you're implementing at this stage? Anything in the long run you're thinking?

[Heiji Hattori]

What's your thought process going into this challenge? Are you optimistic about your chances of doing well?

[Lennie Briscoe]

What's your thought process going into this challenge? Are you optimistic about your chances of doing well?

Honestly this seems really hard. I guess first identify what you think people will guess for you, then identify the people you think you can accurately predict and prioritize getting them accurate and then hope for the best with the others? It's frustrating because this is so easy to game if people have any ability to communicate at all, but with not being able to talk about it it seems kind of crapshooty. There's a part of me that would love to just alphabetize all the names and labels and assign them that way, with the idea that if anyone else does the same we'll at least get two perfect sets, but I have no way of knowing if it's crazy to think other people would do that or if they're already thinking the same thing. I'm not optimistic, but it's a one in three shot.

[Lennie Briscoe]

You've had a little downtime thanks to immunity. Any strategies you're implementing at this stage? Anything in the long run you're thinking?

Honestly like everyone seems to be busy or quiet, I think we were really relieved not to go to the second TC and kind of took a load off. Scruff and I had already sort of talked through what the next vote would have been, and I'm pretty sure Jake and Leon would be on board there, so there was no need to overstrategize.

I can't say have long-run plans though the one thing I will say is that like nobody really is up very late so I've kind of kept an eye on who appears to be active late night ET on other tribes (Rust Cohle and Kate Macer have stood out), I wouldn't mind swapping to a tribe with someone who matched my schedule a bit better.

[Lennie Briscoe]

Oh, also, on the point about alphabetizing, it occurred to me that a) you don't really need to alphabetize, just use the order they're in in the challenge post and b) actually the first two sets of traits are already in alphabetical order. This has actually made me seriously consider using alphabetizing. Like if we seriously were to try to think on every single adjective and role, a) there are going to be adjectives and roles that nobody self-describes as, and b) some of these are so impossible to really map to people that it's already a crapshoot. Like, even if I could come up with distinct traits for these roles, which I don't think I can for all of them, mapping those to this tribe seems an equally difficult task.

I'm seriously leaning towards just using the order from the post applied to the people in the tribe in alphabetical order (which, again, coincidentally is the order in our welcome post). I could maybe get a few points here or there trying to get inside people's heads but it seems just as likely to backfire. I talked about Jake saying I've got the tribe "wired", so what role am I in his view? The Brain? The Guy Behind the Scenes? The Inside Man? I could see arguments for all of those, and if I picked one, now I have to come up with a justification for someone else to be one of the other roles.


I have to admit, I don't entirely understand what the mods are intending/expecting to be the result of this challenge. For the record, I fucking LOVE Touchy Subjects as a Survivor challenge, it's maybe my favorite challenge of all time, and the fact that college Survivor games almost always include it is no small part of why I love college Survivor. But this isn't Touchy Subjects, and it isn't Majority Rules, and while the core idea of rewarding people for reading the social structure of the tribe is absolutely a great goal if that's the intent, I'm kind of pessimistic that this challenge will accomplish that goal very well.

My indecision here isn't really because I don't have a clear idea of where people stand in the tribe (and I'll admit it could be clearer or more certain), or where they're perceived to stand, but more because I think that using that view to then map these traits and roles to people is an incredibly difficult task even with near-perfect reads. We could all have completely identical views of where everyone stands in the tribe, but what the fuck does "The Wheelman" mean, you know?

Anyway, FWIW, I know it's an incredible amount of work to put this stuff together and I know the mods have undoubtedly talked about this and discussed it, so I really don't want this to come across as me just being a pessimistic jerk, but I do sort of feel like I'm missing somethng. I fully allow for the possibility (or even likelihood) that I'm just incorrect in what the goal of this is and this is accomplishing exactly what was intended.

[Lennie Briscoe]

So we lost, fucking great. Jake made some comment in the tribe forum about "oh this would have been easier if it was about how people perceived you" like yeah, that's what it was? I mean, it was how people perceived you perceiving yourself, but yeah, you were supposed to think "what will people select for me", not "what do I think describes me" and hope everyone's right, sheesh.

Things haven't changed a lot, Scruff and Jake have been super busy and the rest are a bit less communicative by nature, so things were kind of quiet the past couple days. I guess I'll give a rundown:

Hannah - Same ol' same ol', light conversation, nothing super deep.

Leon - We've kept up our conversation about music, we don't have a huge amount of overlap, it's mostly my limited taste in recent pop and rap. The rap goes over a lot better with me. Our connection is shallow and I don't feel great about it but Scruff and Jake were so insistent early on about not wanting to vote the newbie out, make sure he has a good experience, blahblahblah that I feel obligated to seem cool with him.

Paul - Honestly, I feel like Paul might be the player I'm the most like here? He seems to be able to connect with people but doesn't feel obligated to do so compulsively (more on this with Jake), seems to view things strategically. I could easily see a world where I'm closest to him on the tribe, but because I got in with Jake and Scruff early I may not have pursued this as deeply as I could. If we swapped together I think I'd feel really good about it.

Scruff - still feel good overall about him. We'd basically talked through the next boot a couple days ago so we're on the same page I think. Both he and Jake did the "gosh I don't have an opinion between Paul and Hannah, what do you think" thing, which is a little frustrating, I was mostly straight with both of them about my preference for Paul staying.

Scruff also does the "I'm open to any other plans you might suggest" thing, which I think is mostly true but also is "I'm open to any red flags you feel like revealing". To really show him that I trust him, I was kind of frank about not feeling the greatest about Leon, while being clear that I was in no way suggesting that Leon go this round. And I mean, I really do want his thoughts on this, I hope he can see that I'm trying to be candid about something I do think we might disagree on. There's also a tiny part of me that wonders if when he does the "open to any other plans" thing, he's hoping I'll suggest we flip on Jake. I don't think that's the case but it'd be interesting if so.

Jake - So after a couple days of radio silence because he was busy, we got to talk some more tonight. Jake seems really intent on having non-game conversations, he really values (maybe overvalues?) them. For instance, when he was talking about Hannah and Paul, he was like "Hannah I connect with but we never talk game, and Paul we connected but our conversations seem businesslike" and like, I responded that I don't really have a problem with business-like relationships? Look, it's fun chitchatting about interests but I'm not making decisions in this game based on whether we both like the same TV show or both like RPGs, I value an ally with a similar game perception far more. Jake's also really hemming and hawing about not expressing a preference either way early on and I don't really get it. Like I expressed a preference because I trust that I can do that to you so it's not the best that you're not giving me the same thing back.

Maybe this is pretty calculated, I dunno, like he could be thinking that he'd rather keep the person that his allies would be least likely to flip to? But I don't think it's that, I think maybe Jake really really wants to be The Good Guy or cultivate that perception. Maybe I'm wrong and Hannah versus Paul is truly an agonizing decision, or maybe he's tempering all his responses to me based on what he thinks I'm looking for out of him, but I'd much prefer him to just go "yeah, I'd rather vote out X." Or maybe he's just sincerely indecisive.



So I'll be honest, if I could make it happen without burning any bridges, my ideal boot would be Leon, I think I'd have an easier time working with anyone else. I don't want to hold timezone differences against anyone but even with the timezone he has a weird activity schedule, and setting that aside, I've had to work to connect at all. Hannah I think is hesitant to say much gamewise but at the same time I could see those walls coming down more in a swap situation where it's obvious we have too be each others' new #1s in the moment.

[Heiji Hattori]

I'm sorry that you lost. Your individual performance was decent. Have there been any movements or shakings since your last commentary?