Open 804: Popcorn Mafia Redux [Game Over!]

[MUSHSHAGANA]

HUB's entire push on me is bad OMGUS in an attempt to salvage his terrible slot

he literally just perspective slipped himself scum lmao

You'll need to walk me through it.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Okay. I've heard enough. Everyone has checked in.

If anyone still worries I might shoot them: your chance will soon expire. If I am going to shoot you, there will be no swaying or persuading me to change my mind.

You have one hour.

If you feel regret after I list my shots and you see your name, you have only yourself to blame.



In the meantime!

If ANYONE has a shot they would rather see taken, so much that they'll step in the path of any other shot, /spill/. If you don't have any PARTICULAR shot you want to see strongly, say that too but don't take up too much space doing it. I'm looking for people whose top shot is such a strong read that me letting it go is fucking criminal. I have a couple I'm eyeballing and I expect to see those people repeat themselves for this purpose, or I might forget and decide maybe they didn't mean it that strong anyway.

Phase 2 begins in an hour or so. I have a walk in bitter, freezing goddamned cold to take.

Yes, people are gonna miss this train. I do not care, I don't need a complete census.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Quick response before I leave, Dunn:

I am not thinking of shooting anyone in particular for any reason in particular. My mind is empty, my soul is open. I am, for this next hour, a pacifist butterfly, wafting on the breeze of public opinion.

When that hour ends, there will be judgement. Even I don't know what waits on the other side. Isn't that exciting?

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Time's up.

The trumpet has sounded. The rivers run red. The Worm ascends. I have assumed my wrathful aspect. Doom and chaos, you get the point.

If posts were made while I was typing this up and made it in before the deadline, I will assure you: I have read them and taken them into account in a merciful state of mind. (Hint: Thank you for your input, Cakez.)

That state of mind is now gone. If you had more to add, you should have done it sooner. Now there will be a reckoning.

Not_Mafia, Happy Unbirthday Boon and ScrewTheTells

, your time will come. Sit tight. I have figured you out, and yours being the first names I mention is no mistake. Well. One of you no doubt looks like one, but that's the entire point. Stay calm, all will come to make sense in time. Also, I don't want you fucking this up. You know who you are. But keeping the town in there keeps you complacent, and me saying this makes you aware that I'm watching for you to fuck it up so I can blast the scum out with no doubt. Like I said: stay calm.

SirCakez, unwnd, Imperium, petapan.

You are my lucky first contestants. All of you are my absolute favorite posters for hitting red after I pass. It would be a damned shame if I had to gamble outside of this list, because I would be feeling extremely worried if I missed on any other slot. Fortunately, two of you are also scum. Of this I have no doubt. Now it is time to determine which two.

I will address you in turn, starting with Imperium. After all, I promised I would. The petapan case, right? Right.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

So, Imperium. The petapan case. Impressive work, and a lot of effort.

Out of the gate: I'm going to simply discard the BoP part as it will /never/ be compelling to me, and there is nothing you can do to fix that. Simply put, I disagree with the entire premise on a core level (that people are incapable of playing below par for themselves, particularly under stress, which petapan showed evidence of) and this is such an intrinsic part of my belief system about humans that you simply cannot convince me with it. I will never accept it.

In other words, I'm doing you a favor. We will pretend it never happened.

This isn't to say that the arguments /inside of it/ have no merit taken on their own. Far from it, some of them are even quite compelling. And I won't discard those. In fact, I'm really giving you a lot of leeway here, because I'm /actively cherrypicking/ the parts of your first petapan post that I agree with. You aren't getting a benefit of the doubt, you're getting the whole damn doubt and some blind faith besides.



Can I trust that this is sufficient for us to say that I am giving you a fair shake? That I really did give you a chance to present your argument at its best? Yes? Good.

Fair warning, this is going to start really boring, because I'm simply going to skip all of the parts I disagree with.



So: let's start with the meekness of that first push. I agree. Skipping a bunch of spurious argumentation, then we find you mentioning that your approach to Norfolk wasn't likely to be coaching, even from the outside; that the slot looked too doomed to bother saving. I agree. And no punishment for bussing your first goon and (not mentioned) very little for a Godfather? Agreed! So far we're 3 for 3. In fact, I will say confidently that no matter your alignment and HUB's, you were not coaching Norfolk. There is nothing in it for you there, and there's no point. Done.

And then petapan talking about Dunn's nasty dirty no good fingerpointing at people "egging on" a shot that they had no real influence or say in. I want to address this in detail.

I was about to post about Lotus being an interesting shot with some potential, in fact, when the thread was locked. It was one of my walls AND I had real life on my ass, so I didn't even see unwnd say fundamentally the same exact thing. No point in saying it afterwards (until now, when I have the gun, also I want to come back to this whole point later), but... it did nearly happen. This is the entire reason why I was so vehement in pushing back on the concept of people "egging the shot on".

And I have literally no reason to lie about that now: I am in control, I can say or do whatever pleases me and no one can stop me. So I hope Dunn feels suitably shamed in public now. (Note: going through the ritual motions of apology with a middle finger raised in my direction is sufficient, actual shame not required, this is all very purposefully super fucking theatrical, have some fun with it.)

So yes. VERY LOUD agreement that the entire argument about "egging that shot on" is bullshit and garbage. And I will skip the rest of that first post. Because it's BoP and you will never, ever convince me.

But there's a whoooollllle other post to go through!



This one I will not be so kind with. But that's okay! We are 4 of 4 in agreement, nothing can go wrong, right?

Well, it sure looks good to start. I do the /same/ thing quite often. I'll make a push and I'll get loud, aggressive, I'll turn it into a war -- to sort /everyone else/. Because reactions to me pushing on someone else are often so much more instructive than reactions /from/ someone I'm pushing. So yeah, thumbs up here, all good!

Point of order here: unwnd never told /me/ "fuck off". In fact, I don't think he told anyone that. I didn't even get the sentiment aimed at me, unwnd aimed a "Kiss my ass" at Wheme and Cakez IIRC. unwnd seemed pretty resigned to me putting pressure on him. Which ... fair. That was sort of the point. Hmmm... I wonder why unwnd is in this list? Well, I'll address that soon.

Anyway, getting sidetracked. Wheme reaction. Yeah, I agree that doesn't look like pleased scum. I agree Wheme doesn't feel obligated to post as scum if that's a TvT. I don't agree that that says a damn thing about the alignment of you or petapan. Yes, it's a proof by contradiction. You have successfully disproved that this interaction was TvT in a world where Wheme is scum: congratulations. It says nothing about who's the scum, Wheme's alignment, or whether scum are there at all. It is, in short, poo.

And now the crux. The part that is the core of the argument from my perspective, since it isn't necessarily BoP -- you frame it in those terms, but the point still holds if you change the terminology.

And... I agree with this. It's in fact the reason petapan is even here. First, let me say, I gave him that out to see if he would take it. And he did not, which is credit to him, but he also knows my playstyle (granted, at a distance) and once I remembered that little fact, I knew it was pretty pointless trying to bait him like that. So I just let him sit pretty and think he was safe, out of the line of fire. Well... whoopsie.

And well, I would go into the fearing the shot thing, but I think that would be telling. There are layers here. Suffice to say, it is a good point. Do I agree with it? Imagine a big, drawn out shrug with a cartoonishly sheepish facial expression. Don't know!

Well, I do. You don't. That's the point, of course.

Moving along, chances to drop the gambit, bad timing -- hmm, I don't agree with the bad timing pointing to scum. The "big one" you mentioned would tend to make me scumread someone /more/ if they took it. Not going into detail, the reasons should be obvious.

And that last one is another BoP one. So... We'll just ignore it and call this done!



And hey. Listen. You may think I'm being unfair skipping those. It's like this: People fuck up. This is a foundational element of my entire way of parsing the world: no matter how flawless or good someone is, they will do things wrong. They will be as stupid as you can possibly believe and worse. There are no exceptions. You will see people be blatant, unspeakable idiots at the thing they are best at 100% of the time if you watch them closely enough. If you watch for long enough, they will chain idiotic decisions one after a goddamn other, gleefully screwing the pooch and they will apparently not give a single fuck.

Proficiency does have an element of "you fuck up less", yes. But far more important to it to me is "knowing how to recover from a fuck up". And even the masters, if they flub hard enough, will have to call it a lost cause. There is no one so good that they will not stick one foot in their mouth, use the other to kick themselves in the ass, and roll downhill to the landfill. No one. Ever.

Like I said before, I'm doing you a favor.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

P confident there AREN'T two scum in that group, but whatever. If you are scared of losing the game with a bad shot then just shoot us!

Hmmm.

No.

My apologies. You have to sit through this whole sorry godawful process. So does everyone else.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Ohh mush is saying they townread me then

Darn

I'd give you a gold star, but you already have it. How'd you get that? Who'd you rob? Give it to me. I need it for special gunbearing purposes.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Oh, that's a shame.

Fortunately, it won't be too long. It just makes one part of my decision more difficult. And hey, if I have too many doubts, I fall back to shooting you, right? So it's all fine.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

So, I want to talk about our first 4 contestants a bit and why they're here.



Imperium is someone who I trust to hit red if I'm wrong, yes. They're also one of the two (and only two) townreads I had before receiving the gun, which gives me some paranoia. Beyond all of that, though, Imperium is an important, vital part of this puzzle. Their flip almost certainly leads to a solve. They have the most posts in this game at a fair bit over 400, and I'm second -- with less than half that. They have probably more 1v1s than any other two players put together. They are informationally rich, and their alignment being confirmed will aid tremendously in solving, if nothing else.

However, I still can't fully move past the townread I have there. I would much rather hit scum than informationally rich town. So why are they here? Yeah, the paranoia isn't really enough. Well, two of the other players in this round are so closely connected to them that I think that their alignments are all interdependent. I think Cakez is always the same alignment as Imperium, 100% of the time, and I have major doubts about Cakez. And petapan is scum if and only if Imperium is not (TvT is possible). I am paranoid that petapan is not necessarily scum here. When I put those two in, I basically had to say to myself ... Imperium has to be on the list. It wasn't avoidable, because there is a very good chance I decide that that shot is extremely likely to hit red.



SirCakez's slot I do not like for all the reasons HUB pointed out (but this does not exonerate HUB -- saving that explanation for my second shot), and more besides. On top of that, Cakez does not seem to be approaching the game from a town perspective. I mentioned early on his "concentric" play which /still remains centered on the exact same position, 75 pages and 3 flips onward/, and his agenda-driven approach. He has made minimal progress in pushing more people on board the Shoot Norfolk/HUB Now wagon, and it is my belief that this is intentional; that this is a way to hard-distance without actually properly bussing.

Beyond that, he seems to be approaching certain players with more energy than the results seem to bear out. There's little evolution from Cakez in play, and yes, there are some blatantly opportunistic things happening there. Trying to get Norfolk's slot shot /while/ it was being replaced is particularly rough, but I wasn't a fan of "ah, MUSH got the gun because of me in her scumreads!" either. That seemed like a perfect way to muddy the waters and I immediately discarded it as regards his slot.

My only doubts come back to thinking that Imperium and Cakez are always the same alignment here, and the fact that /almost everyone else/ gives Cakez a townpass. So I can't just take that shot, though it is by far the one I'm most confident on.



petapan is the one I have done a bit of a loop on. Started off as null, obviously. Then I was scumreading him on the basis of interactions that were overly aggressive. Doubted myself, reread and concluded that there was some actual stress going on with petapan, and was able to give that a pass -- but still, a frustrating null. Tried to sort, pushed bait out for that wasn't taken, recognized that I was doing it wrong, and stepped back. Imperium's case framed it for me correctly: petapan looked scummy for entirely different reasons than the ones I first suspected.

It's, again, framed by Imperium as a proficiency thing, but it really isn't. Pointing out the tactic used doesn't fit the tactic claimed, a definite lack of evidence of scumreading Imperium "for real" during this "gambit," and so forth. I basically agree with that whole block of Imperium's case except for a big question mark and a minor quibble on what we'd consider scummy in terms of timing for taking an "out". (I find Imperium's reaction to my response to their case upsetting as a result. But they don't want to talk about it, whatever.)

petapan is here and not shot because -- again. I think that to a certain extent Imperium's alignment is tied to petapan's. It's weaker ties than Cakez, but it's there. And more importantly, I have a nagging doubt about effort. The reads-charts are not easy to do. I tried fact checking the Day 2 one for reads about Wheme (this is, to be clear, reads ABOUT one singular player for one dayphase, basically easy mode!) and got hopelessly lost. I don't know if scum goes through that effort when they don't have to. It obviously depends on the player, but petapan doesn't seem /quite/ so much like the sort of person who will build a mountain to climb if they have no other way to climb one.



Now... unwnd.

unwnd is here because of sheer, boiling paranoia. unwnd was one of my two townreads when I received the gun. unwnd is townread by almost everyone. unwnd is going to great lengths to interact with everyone without making too many waves (snapping at Cakez and Wheme [??? IIRC] notwithstanding). unwnd is one of the most friendly and helpful slots in the game to date. And yet, no one would call unwnd obvtown. unwnd is just sort of in the middle, like, a strong townlean. Despite more content than Dunn. Despite a friendly demeanor. Despite actively trying to steward conversation and debate in useful ways.

And for all my attempts and effort this dayphase, I could not make the fucker blink. I could not get anything out of him. Absolutely nothing to grab onto that could be potentially scummy and use to really get sortable content out of him. But still! Not obvtown! How!

Like I said. This is just plain paranoia. I am very good at getting content I can use out of people, and I couldn't get a handle on unwnd. Worse yet, I think if unwnd is red, scum can count on unwnd simply coasting to a win. I think this is the only time someone shoots in that direction, period. So I really, really want to give this a serious, final attempt. Out in the open with what I'm doing. I am trying to put the thumbscrews to you unwnd, because it is THE ONLY WAY I can figure out your alignment at this point -- and you remain unmoved. It unnerves me and makes me keep going "but what if...".

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Cakez, I didn't make any demands this go around. I put out that I'm trying to sort unwnd, and I explained why everyone else is both in consideration for shooting and not yet shot.

But fine. I'll drop the whole thing. Fuck it. Here's the straight talk, Cakez. Fun mode deactivated, no joking or bullshit.

It's dragging because I cannot parse the damn game. No one is doing anything I can work with.

When I have mechanical control, normally! Normally, I can force people to give me stuff I can work with. unwnd aside, I got stuff from everyone this time and I still couldn't work with it. It's not WIFOM dragging me down, it's everyone having equally good arguments (equally good non-WIFOM-related arguments! somehow!) in every 1v1, except for you, but /no one/ scumreads you but me and Wheme, so where the fuck does /that/ put me?

When there are 1v1s, NORMALLY I can parse them or someone else in the game that I can trust can parse them. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Every 1v1 looks like a mess. There's no weight and there's no pressure so there's no consequence and everything seems to stop and start at random.

I can't push a slot when I don't have the gun to get sorting, because there's no weight I can put on them, there's no /risk/. I can't push a slot when I have the gun, because they have no incentive to push back. So my self-directed scumhunting is completely failing too.

So I'm left trying to smash slots off of each other that HAVE NOT interacted in a potentially alignment indicative way, hoping for something, anything to spark a light that I can parse the game with.

Yeah, it's probably getting annoying, and that's because I'm fucking desperate. I'm trying to frame the game in some way that makes sense, and there's nothing. So there you go.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I don't have this problem in other games. But sure, it's a me thing, whatever you say.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Take a look at the problem from my perspective, though. The only slot. Literally, the /only/ one. That I actually, truly think flips red?

Cakez.

And /no one agrees with it except Wheme/.

You are mistaken about what I'm trying to do, in terms of the perfect shot. That was projecting confidence I didn't have to buy time and mislead scum as to how well I was doing. I am not confident in any shot. Everything is a shot in the dark. "Just shoot scum" does not work in this circumstance, because I have lost my ability to see the game that is being played. I'm listing off reads that seem plausible to me and everyone else in the game reacts like I have called the IC scum.

That means IF I make a shot I'm almost certainly going to miss. And not ordinarily miss, but catastrophically miss, because I cannot see what is happening in the game at /all/. It's all noise.

PEDIT: You're literally just running into the points where I'm making shit up while I try and get any idea what the hell is happening, Imperium. I literally don't have enough of a handle on the gamestate to say anything about it at all right now. THIS IS THE ISSUE.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

The last time I had a handle on the gamestate was about 24 hours before Lotus shot Duchess. Go look for yourself, me losing the plot should be evident.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Take a look at the problem from my perspective, though. The only slot. Literally, the /only/ one. That I actually, truly think flips red?

Cakez.

And /no one agrees with it except Wheme/.

You are mistaken about what I'm trying to do, in terms of the perfect shot. That was projecting confidence I didn't have to buy time and mislead scum as to how well I was doing. I am not confident in any shot. Everything is a shot in the dark. "Just shoot scum" does not work in this circumstance, because I have lost my ability to see the game that is being played. I'm listing off reads that seem plausible to me and everyone else in the game reacts like I have called the IC scum.

That means IF I make a shot I'm almost certainly going to miss. And not ordinarily miss, but catastrophically miss, because I cannot see what is happening in the game at /all/. It's all noise.

PEDIT: You're literally just running into the points where I'm making shit up while I try and get any idea what the hell is happening, Imperium. I literally don't have enough of a handle on the gamestate to say anything about it at all right now. THIS IS THE ISSUE.

So. My point on manipulating versus working with people is that you've muddied the waters to an extent where I don't know what you believe and I no longer have the patience to figure it out. If you approached this game in a different way, we'd be hashing out reads and going back and forth on them and developing them, but you've alienated yourself by taking the games and the fake confidence and the whatever to the extent that you have.

As far as the "to shoot Cakez or not to shoot Cakez" bit goes, have a slightly edited quote from Levi:

Believe in yourself… or believe in me and them…the rest of the town. I don’t know the answer. I never have. Whether you trust in your own strength…or trust in the choices made by reliable comrades. No one knows what the outcome will be. So as much as you can… choose whatever you’ll regret the least.

I can help you with the "what I believe" part very easily. I have some small faith that Cakez is scum, and that's it. Since near the end of Day 2, I've been throwing reads that look plausible to me at the wall and seeing how other people react. I don't believe in them, no, but they look like they aren't totally divorced from reality. If I had gotten reasonable reactions from enough people, I could use those to force my perspective to fit that, then rebuild from there. Unfortunately, the reads are indeed totally divorced from reality.

I wasn't joking about not being able to see what others see early in the game. Before the end of Day 2 I had townreads on you and unwnd, and at some point I lost them. And then I had no way to parse the game through someone else, because I had no townreads at all.

Have you ever had no townreads at ELo-1? Because that's functionally where I've been at this whole dayphase.

PEDIT: I'm not trying for a solve. I'm trying to figure out what is going on on a much, much more basic level.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I already did. It's fundamentally the same exact argument from allllll the way back on ... was it Day 1? It hasn't changed, because from what I see, Cakez's play hasn't changed. Which, given that was the issue that lead me to the scumread in the first place... well, it's made it pretty strong.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I think the post at the top of this page is a decent enough summary for most folks. That said: if I think about it, there's some other stuff that tends to ping me but which aren't things most people are sensitive to. May as well just rewrite it all out for ease of access.

Generally speaking: Saying one thing, then saying a contradictory statement under pressure -- feels less like stating beliefs than trying to evade attention. Making baseless assertions that seem like trying to force an interpretation (e.g. the whole Norfolk scumhunting thing). General gut feeling of the play being phony, i.e. fake, but not so much "simply acting" as it is "crafted for specific effect".

More specific to how I build out reads: Apparent lack of a coherent chain of causation -- I don't see how he gets from point A to point B, it feels like it's abrupt jumps instead of actual changes in thought process. Play is "concentric" -- instead of his play changing focus at any point, it takes a specific point (in this case, "shoot Norfolk") and centers all of his play on that singular point. All play that isn't directly centered on it is pushing back on people questioning it. Hence "concentric", his play reaches ever wider circles of the playerlist but the center point never changes, indeed hasn't changed since page 1.

Because of these things, his play feels agenda-driven: he has a specific goal (shoot Norfolk) and does not attempt to search around outside of that goal. When dealing with things that are not necessarily "shoot Norfolk", his statements are not necessarily logically compatible with one another, and there is no apparent shift in belief or understanding to explain the incompatibilities (since the conclusions he comes to do NOT appear to change alongside the statements).

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I’ve been super busy today, apologies.

I’ve decided to just shoot here: VOTE: Happy Unbirthday Boon

I can’t scumread it, but I can’t townread it either. I don’t necessarily trust the town here, because almost half of the players are not town. But I don’t trust anyone, and other people in the game do trust people. So...

[MUSHSHAGANA]

This flip makes me feel better. Yeah, I didn’t have any townreads... but if I know Imperium was town now, that gives me SO MUCH MORE CONFIDENCE about unwnd, my other game-start townread. I can’t see it but I can just blindly trust in it and work outward from there.

HUB being scum and Duchess being scum makes me think we hit two more no problem, then we’re trying to unbury the deep wolf.

One of those easy ones at this point, I agree, is Wheme. It makes sense in the game where HUB is scum and Imperium is town and I lose the plot.

I think petapan might be the other one. I’ll give him a chance to persuade me otherwise. (Also I am currently without internet, so I’m stuck on my phone and posting sucks and I don’t want to shoot without getting a chance to really type my thoughts up.)

[MUSHSHAGANA]

The deep wolf themselves, I’m withholding my thoughts on until I have a physical keyboard.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I won’t be shooting petapan this dayphase. I want him to have a zero-pressure chance to convince me he’s town.

I’m not saying I probably shoot Wheme, but I probably shoot Wheme.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I think we need to keep going on the route of shooting the universal scumreads
We can hero-shoot for deep wolves once the obviously scummy slots are cleared out and we (hopefully) have some breathing room for mis-shots

Exactly.

So, probably Wheme here, because no one is trying to save that slot.

Thanks for bussing your entire team away, scum.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Oh, should add a caveat.

If I get pinged hard enough that a slot is red, I will shoot it no matter what who thinks. See Death Curse.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Oh, no I was talking to the scum teamnot you Cakez

Pretty sure you ARE NOT the deep wolf.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Like if I take Imperium green, HUB red, and presume unwnd green, Cakez has to be green in that world. Makes literally no sense otherwise (even if I force myself to assume the HUB/Norfolk push was TMI, your Imperium spat made them way more valuable alive). Also I think the scumteam would be aware of how useful living Imperium would be to keeping me lost and confused if you were on it. Basically you’d be gamethrowing if you were scum this go around with the facts we have

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Also, making a note. Literally no one is trying to save Wheme but I note that STT and only STT is trying to specifically redirect to NM without saying Wheme is a bad shot. So I think STT is the third scum. Just have to figure out if the second one is peta or NM and I think it’s peta rn on this basis. Open to being swayed but tbh peta you’re the only one who’s gonna save yourself here

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Oh I suppose it could also be Dunn but idk seems sort of unlikely in this gamestate rn?

He’d be my sub in for the peta/NM spot if they go green. Think STT always goes red rn

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Then again Dunn’s dodged a lot of scrutiny. Then again also unwnd has and I’m pretty sure unwnd is green in this universe. Eh I’m happy with 2 caught scum really, the rest POEs to the finish no matter who holds the gun and how bad their reads are

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I still don’t have a real keyboard so nope. Also waiting on peta

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Gee I don’t know, does it seem like I’m ignoring it by telling peta he looks like scum and what does he have to say about THAT one huh? If so I cannot help you Wheme, sorry your role PM was red

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Wheme’s just shitposting and doing a bad job of distancing and trying to create false associations now. Damn. I was hoping he’d take a bit longer to get to the caught scum spams poo everywhere stage.

Well. I’m still waiting for petapan’s input anyway. Sorry folks.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I probably shoot tomorrow or the day after, depending on RL stuff.

You’re also mistaken about the chain of causation here. I scumread Wheme due to the gamestate, the fact I lost the plot, and the flips. It’s the most sensible conclusion because of who I had reads on, when I stopped getting legitimate reads, and what Wheme said where. I scumread you because everyone wants Wheme to go down but you would rather shoot elsewhere without disagreeing that Wheme is a good shot. This looks like trying to get a miselimination without looking too awful if I don’t listen to you.

You also should remember you have had not one single solitary correct read that you have made much noise about. I’m inclined to say “if STT is loud, STT is wrong.” That looks like scum when I take your playstyle into account. If you can be wrong you should be at your quietest, because your priors should say you have the lowest chance of being correct. Looks like the opposite from here: a quiet scumread on Duchess and a loud one on me. Quiet scumread on HUB and waffling on it, but loud as hell about Imperium.

You’ve been very loud about NM. Wonder what happens there?

Hey, unwnd, remember when I said to watch STTs results to read there? This is what I meant.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

That took forever to write and my hands hurt. Back later.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

oh, but also, i'm pretty sure at this point mafia have realized any possible path to victory goes through me and they need to get me shot, which explains wheme's abrupt turnaround on me where previously he gave absolutely no indication he was scumreading me

Compelling. I’m sold.

No, really. I’m able to actually parse the game again, and I see what you mean. If you’re not in the POE, the scum team has zero chance of even being able to try and sow doubt in the POE, let alone do better than that. If I’m calling me, Cakez and unwnd town 1000% of the time, that’s ALREADY a solve, but I’ve shown that I can be led to second guess. If I do, the game can end up in a 2v1 ELo finale, and those are decent scum odds: town only goes to ELo because scum has outdone them, and for no other reason.

If I have 4 names in the list, even second guessing isn’t a path to a scum win. At best, it lets them get the POE down to a 3v1, where they always lose anyway.

I’m sold. If I have doubts on that last scum, I’ll toss you the gun to clean the gamestate up for everyone, otherwise you’re in.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I’m not arguing. Got what I needed from petapan. I just need a keyboard to actually type up final thoughts... like I said, tomorrow or day after most likely.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

You were still pretty loud about Imperium on Day 3. See, unlike your other reads, with me, Imperium and Not_Mafia you made a point of emphasizing your confidence every chance you got. If our names were in your post it was nigh guaranteed to include a mention of how scummy we were.

Contrast the Duchess read. I literally didn’t even know you had a scumread there until after Duchess flipped. You mention it one time and drop it post flip. Or the HUB read, which, let me go grab the receipts for this one. This sucks and is tedious but it’s worth it.

Or not because guess what, you don’t mention scumreading HUB/Norfolk once for all of Day 3. Not one time. Your one mention is that you want to give HUB a chance to establish themselves in the player list. Oh, or I could count the pun post, but I am unwilling to call a funny wordplay joke a serious statement about how one reads a slot. That’s simply a cop out.

During Day 2, I spotted you mentioning Norfolk, but always in the same breath as you mentioned Not_Mafia. Which was /also/ less then I thought, by the way. More interesting, however, was Duchess. Because I found your pre-shot mention of Duchess, and it’s a noncommittal “yeah I guess that could be scum but what if we shot over here instead?”

Yeah, Norfolk was red. Norfolk was also DEAD WEIGHT. Duchess was putting work in, big time. This redirection looks ugly, because Duchess might have salvaged their slot while Norfolk was doomed from jump.

Finally, STT, there is one last thing to consider.

What are you saying here right now that you couldn’t say as scum in this position? Why should I read this as you having thoughts and not panic spew as I nail the scumteam to the wall? Just like Wheme is doing, by the way.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I should clarify about Day 3 with Imperium: you were quick to bring up “Imperium might be scum” where HUB, who you claim to have had a strong scumread on, never once got a mention of being scum. I did not mean to imply that you were still yelling IMPERIUM IS TOTAL SCUM all the time, you left that behind when I got the gun and asked you to towncase them.

Oh, which reminds me. The one and only insightful thing I posted on Day 3 was pointing out how your tone and attitude changed DRAMATICALLY once I got in control. Including your reads on ... oh, everyone I posted about. You even started calling unwnd scum (yeah so did I, my excuse was I could not tell and was guessing). Which makes me think your team outnumbered you on the gun passing question, and you were trying to hold on despite them selling you up the river.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I probably am leaving out little bits that make it look like I’m skipping things but I’m typing on a phone and reading on a phone and there is no furniture here and I haven’t slept in 48 hours, just trust me when I say I have a couple pages of handwritten notes in front of me and it checks out.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

So, turns out I won’t have a keyboard. I’ll post last thoughts in phone form around after I find/eat food.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Alright. I’m doing three things other than this, so it’s haphazard and slipshod as hell. Also, I’m on the phone still, so I’m not able to do awesome arrangement of those thoughts. This is stream of consciousness brain puke.

First, I want to address the thing about STTs whole change in attitude. As I pointed out originally, that didn’t just apply to me and Imperium. That applied to every player in the list: a complete and total change in approach. Totally different way of communicating, which still isn’t totally back — this has certain missing elements, like, well, certainty, but also that sense of being unwilling to humor people they find incorrect. Not necessarily mockery, but a dismissiveness for sure. Not present here. I do not feel like the me v petapan thing would be enough to cover the degree and scope of the change — HUB got more consideration than any of STTs other scum targets have, and it’s difficult to break a whole personality overnight. Also think it forgets that the change there was only after I got the gun, NOT proximal to petapan’s push on me.

But most importantly, this latest one feels fake. I mean, it feels more natural than STTs earlier posts, there’s emotional wrestling and explanation of mental state to outline the overall trajectory. But that doesn’t feel like /STT/. Read a few posts from any other STT game, choose whatever ones you like, and you’ll agree with me: this isn’t normal STT posting. Period. It feels like someone who isn’t a rationalist and isn’t using Bayesian probability to reason through things. And STT, being a rationalist type, would you not agree that you are probably more self-aware than the average person? More calculated, and more conscious of how you present yourself?

The problem with that is that because you know what you’re doing as you do it and how it looks, every time you show evidence of the human being behind the Bayesians, you are WELL within your scum range still. Moreover! Scum-STT has more reason to appease me than town-STT, even if I have the gun, because town-STT wants to get the gun out of this fucking idiot’s hands and win the game already — if I’m intractable, town-STT probably doubles down unless it’s an ELo situation.

By contrast! Scum-STT has more survivalism than the average scumplayer, because of all the reasons I mentioned that town-STT doesn’t necessarily work with me, just applied to the scumteam instead of the town. More so if STT perceives the scumteam as incompetent.

So, that’s the deal there. I wanted that absolutely crystalline before I moved on. More thoughts in next few posts.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

My thoughts on Dunn are complex. But I like Dunn for town within the context of the whole gamestate.

So, let’s rewind to end of Day 2: i townread Imperium and unwnd, scumread Duchess and Cakez, and was focusing on sorting Dunn and petapan — who I was scumreading, but without much confidence. Suddenly, townreads gone, and the next post is Lotus saying he changed his mind. I need a mind blowing discovery to get me back in the gamestate, I tell Lotus as much while trying to not be too obvious about where I’m at, and then it’s a Duchess shot anyway. Well. GREAT. And then I get the gun! And I’m screwed.

(At least I prepped the gift box and Tyulpan mortar thing well beforehand...)

One thing to note here is that Dunn was not nearly reactive enough and wasn’t interacting enough with my townreads to disrupt them.

Now, one thing you’ll notice on Day 3 is Dunn pushes back on me a lot but never tries to guide my hand. At least five other players did, so I don’t think that’s necessarily scum-indicative, considering one is now flipped town and one was Cakez, who I townread. I think NOT doing it is more town indicative (lurkers excepted), because scum have a chance to guide me into a disastrous miselimination there; if it won’t destroy their positioning they should always try to get me on their preferred target, or at least echo someone else in hopes of guiding the next shot in that direction. Like. That’s nearly a game winner.

Dunn just throws his hands up like “I’m sick of this shit” when I unveil that I’ve been bluffing to try and get any content I can use out of the player list.This is Dunn’s chance to get into my townreads and save the game for scum, but no, instead... nothing. Makes sense enough as town, doesn’t make much as scum.

My one doubt is pretty flimsy, it’s the Day 2 Beetlejuicing Dunn did with me. It might mean nothing, but it’s still concerning to me and I think it’s enough to shove Dunn into my nulls. He’s top of them, because there’s a much better chance of petapan (very weak associative) or NM (based on only two posts in that ISO that seem AI to me) going red 3 from where I’m at... but it is nice to have someone for that last ELo slot, in case we go two red and two green and it’s all down to the wire. I think unless someone gets a galaxy brained idea, Dunn always loses against the other likely slots in endgame. Given I like unwnd and Cakez for the most townie here and I would hope none of my targets are both green and foolish enough to shoot in there without a very compelling reason that they for some reason haven’t shared... I’m willing to give Dunn the benefit of the doubt for now.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Time to address counterfactuals.

Wheme, if you’re green, somehow, your shot will decide the game. If you do it without serious thought, you are gambling for the entire town. I have no idea what the hell you’re seeing right now, but I cannot see it. Consider that you might be as blind to the actual game as I am to the one you are seeing.

STT, if you’re green, guess what: I trust you to do pretty well. Don’t be a complete fool about it is all.

If Wheme goes green, I have to step back to scumreading Cakez as a rule right now. The slots aren’t anti-aligned by nature, but because there is only one slot in the gamestate for why I lost the plot, and Wheme and Cakez are the only ones who can fill it. It’s one or the other. Helps that Cakez is pushing for Wheme pretty strongly, of course: miseliminating there always looks bad for Cakez. Now, of course, if I whiff on Wheme I die. This is, like I said, addressing counterfactuals. Giving my thoughts for extremely unlikely scenarios, because the unlikely ones are the ones I won’t be here for.

Think that covers it for now. I’ll shoot later tonight. My wrists are on fire.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Don't you want the gun, Wheme?

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Well, my hands have recovered. VOTE: WhemeStar

That was really forced, dude. If you’re green, congrats on your fake townslip gambit getting you the gun. Kudos. If you are red, please explain this in the post game, because this post was awful given the circumstances.



I shoot STT after Syryana flips Wheme as red, and then we can actually do the hard work, even if STT comes up green. Like I said: I trust STT to do good work as a townie... just, I don’t see any town in them anymore.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Good game to everyone but me. I don’t even know what lessons to take from this game because I failed on every level starting late on Day 2, and never got it back in line. I don’t even know how I landed in the position I did where I lost the plot in the first place. Sorry, town.

Not to say scum didn’t earn it, just that I was more of a scum asset than a town one.

Normally I like to reflect on the play of all the other slots to some extent, but I have nothing to reflect on here because the majority of the game was occurring in a pitch black room full of running fog machines for me. Sorry.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

This is interesting mechanically. Is the bomber strictly better though? What happens if the bomber gets shot before activating their bomb? Based on the above wording it would not result in a nightkill so in that situation it's worse than the current godfather trigger. Would make for a pretty intense game of chicken for the players involved, though. But it might encourage a meta of shooting without much warning.

It involves some chicken. And some strategerie.

But yes, if the gunbearer hits the bomber, the ability is lost. Use it, lose it, or get the bomber so townread he never gets shot. But it's also bad play for town to quickly hipfire just to try to hit this.

It'll be interesting. If it doesn't work well in practice, I'll can the idea.

I’m open to trying another round of this to help you test. I don’t think my performance here had anything to do with my living situation, and I think there’s value to the setup.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

It would be better but I have no furniture either here.

Picture me, huddled in the corner of a concrete basement and tapping away on my phone like I’m Gollum and I’m texting the One Ring.