All right! Here we go. First, as a small introductory comment. Please don't be misled by my join date -- I played one game back in 2015-ish, and this is my first game since then. So, I'm very much a newbie. I've read a few threads in the last few weeks to try to get caught up on vernacular, etc.
My general perspective on the thread so far is that a lot of the discourse stems from people joking and then others pushing it so far that it becomes actual discourse. It's a little hard for me to parse what is serious and what is not (though I did gather that the reference to me in 27 was a joke, haha). With that being said, I did my best to give a serious read-list with some reasons why. Still, it's so early that almost everything is more of a "lean" at best.
Lean town
GrandpaMo
: Someone who got caught up in a lot of the "joke-course" but it all comes across to me like a genuine attempt to transition out of RVS. I agree with the observation that Zyla's hard push against the no elim joke vote is strange.
Val89
: As you can guess from the beginning of this post, I was annoyed by Val's fake RVS wall because it started all of this confusing conversation, but I don't think it's a scummy thing to do. I agree with post 76 and would have made something similar if I was active... Post 72 to me is interesting and reads well because it shows that Val did some work looking into James instead of jumping straight to an OMGUS.
VFP
: Most of the posts so far have been fluff, with only I think one major post past RVS. But that post (57) was productive, giving several reads, so it was productive.
Null:
T3
: T3 has been in a few of the games I've read and I find him to be a bit of an enigma and hard to read... Hasn't given a lot of content so far. The meta claim about the self and lack of content makes me have questions, but it's canceled out by post 43, which I liked.
Lean scum:
Cook
: I'm just not getting any content. As mentioned in 76, post 73 showed that Cook is active but just not posting any content. Unless this is normal for Cook, I'd expect more from an SE.
MiniMegabyte
: Similarly to Cook, I haven't seen Mini before but I thought an SE would be playing differently, but maybe I'm just wrong. Posts 58-62 seemed like taking an obvious joke (25) completely at face value, and that's pretty much all we've gotten. It was weirdly defensive off of Val's joke-accusation.
Zyla
: It just seems weird to me to dig in so hard on literally one of the first posts in the thread, during the RVS phase. Additionally, the hero solve on 89 was a combo of that digging-in with a healthy dose of OMGUS. However, I have a doubt that I'm struggling to articulate, which is that I read a game in which Zyla turned out to be scum, and this game feels different. I read that earlier game not knowing I'd be playing with Zyla again, so maybe I need to go back and take a closer look.
JamesTheNames
: In general I agree with Val's logic, but here is something else new.
This really rubs me the wrong way. I don't see how tunnelling is productive? By nature, "tunnel vision" is regarded as a dangerous thing that closes one off to new possibilities. There could be times when tunneling is appropriate (i.e. more info), but at this point, it seems unproductive. Then, there's the
threatening
to tunnel. What are you trying to accomplish with this? The post as a whole reads like "back off or I'll tunnel you".
With all that said, I'll put my vote on
VOTE: JamestheNames.
Last but not least, a newbie question. If this isn't something people feel comfortable answering during the game I get it, but... does anyone have any tips for taking notes? Right now I'm using a Word doc organized by player, with each player getting a bullet-point list labeled with post numbers, along with a general section for reads at the top, but I feel like it's going to get unwieldy as the number of pages in the game increase.