Newbie 2025 | Lilies | Game Over

[Redados]

Two truths and a lie:

1. I'm scum
2. I'm not scum.
3. I will not tolerate any "noob" behavior from ShellyC this game after she fooled me last game!

[MUSHSHAGANA]

VOTE: Redados

There's no reason to ever put it out there that you /could/ be scum, right? Why would you let me doubt?

This is, officially, All Your Fault.

[Redados]

[Redados]

VOTE: MUSHSHAGANA

Reason: OMGUS!!!

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Unfortunately there is no way to escalate this to dizzying heights of petty tomfoolery, I have already used my only weapon.

[Tatsuya Kaname]

VOTE: MUSHSHAGANA

Reason: OMGUS!!!

Uhhh can you please try to steer away from using that as a reason? While we're still in RVS (or are we?), I find that reason to always be poor and/or scum-indicative.

[Redados]

Good point! MUSHSHAGANA voted for me. I am town. Therefore, Mush must be scum. Therefore, I vote for Mush. Facts. Logic. No emotional reaction whatsoever on my part.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

See, until this moment, I was very much still in RVS. But now, I'm on the line. I tend to jump the gun, so I'm going to lay out my case and see what other people have to say...

Why would a townie, who is trying to figure out who is Town and who is Scum, because they themselves do not know, assume they would be voted for only by scum? Surely they realize that no one has more information than them BUT scum?

Indeed, only with Town voting on anyone can that person be voted out, because if scum can vote by themselves and eliminate Town, it's a loss state. So clearly one has to be aware of the fact that the only way to mis-eliminate at all is by town voting on town.

Flipside: scum forgets that alignment isn't fully known outside of the scum team, and says "Ah, I have someone voting for me. What can I do to discourage this? Ah, right, I remind them that I am town, and therefore only scum would want to kill me." Which is true in a sense, but they aren't town -- which they can't let people know about, or it's a loss. So they play the game: "I am town, you don't want to do this."

Now, a townie could make that mistake (assuming their own knowledge is open knowledge, happens to the best of us), and it has some of the taste of a joke. And like I said, I'm prone to a paranoia of sorts. But I'm intrigued about how this occurred, and I wonder if anyone shares my feelings about Redados at this moment.

Of course, if everyone agrees that I'm maybe reading a bit too deep, I'm content to continue in RVS. So it's sort of a grey area for me currently.

[rocknil]

VOTE: MUSHSHAGANA

I don't like how her username is in all-caps. No decent town people would pick that name. It is giving me a scummy vibe. It is also triggering my OCD.

[shellyc]

Two truths and a lie:

1. I'm scum
2. I'm not scum.
3. I will not tolerate any "noob" behavior from ShellyC this game after she fooled me last game!

Noob behaviour lol, still feels great to crush you and Italiano as scum though. The problem is, why is this thread the General Discussion Forum all of a sudden after I was asleep?

[Redados]

By the way, what's the explanation of your vote?

Frogster, you haven't started by RVS (random voting). In a low info stage, why don't you vote?

Any special reasons from those PoVs? Just curious

The problem is, why is this thread the General Discussion Forum all of a sudden after I was asleep?

I'm not criticizing or praising (yet), but I am noting that there is a question in all four of ShellyC's posts.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Ah yes, the username. I guess that was inevitable.

My username is Sumerian using a very basic transliteration scheme. Under the standard scheme, it's muš-šag-ana, "Something In The Heart Of Empty Space", literally "'empty space'-'inside, at the heart of'-'What?'"

You can think of it as a rough translation of the sentence "There's something out there in the void." Sumerian is agglutinative, so it makes a single word for simple phrases like that. It's not a reference to anything, it's one of a short list of "names" of my own design that I am fond of.

It's in all caps because of the Armored Core games, specifically Nexus to Last Raven, where Kisaragi, one of the major weapons manufacturers, named their Armored Core parts as single words in all caps. In that case, they were Japanese mythological references, mostly Buddhist with a couple Shinto ones. The convention stuck with me. I would normally add a product code after the name to cement the intent (i.e. MUSHSHAGANA-00A4), but I wanted it to at least be possible to look at without gibbering.

As for why use all caps at all? I can't use mixedCase naming conventions anymore, because Homestuck ruined them. It's not a striking enough word in all lowercase, and it looks like a normal high fantasy orc name when you use Normal Capitalization.
I have a strong cyberpunk/techno-occult theme to all of my online presence, so I wouldn't dare do anything that could be mistaken for "high fantasy orc name".

So: MUSHSHAGANA it is.

[ItalianoVD]

Oh no. Shelly doing it again.

The only problem about this exchange is that this is not General Discussion Forum.

The problem is, why is this thread the General Discussion Forum all of a sudden after I was asleep?

@MUSHSHAGANA I can’t say you are thinking too deep. Last game I played with Redados I pushed him for listing a readslist on page 2, so I‘m probably not the best one to ask about reaching. Personally I’d like to think he is townie again, but not sure how he would play as scum. Aren’t we still in RVS? You have some time to determine if he looks townie or scummy.

[shellyc]

I am trying to generate information from the questioning. So you think that's a problem.

Something I want to point out is how Redados is scummy to me.
He started with LAMIST (saying it's cryptography), turns the thread into the general discussion forum, then votes with the reason of OMGUS. I would like to hear more from you, because I don't like how you are playing - a different vibe from your last towngame.

[Redados]

Oh no. Shelly doing it again.

Shelly. No sheeping!

I will not tolerate any "noob" behavior from ShellyC this game after she fooled me last game!

VOTE: ShellyC

@MUSHSHAGANA I can’t say you are thinking too deep.

It is going to take me some time to get used to Mush's playstyle. My first impression is that she likes to post flowery walls of prose which are hard for me to read and get the gist of. I will need to get better at slowing down and reading those.

[Redados]

I am trying to generate information from the questioning. So you think that's a problem.

Something I want to point out is how Redados is scummy to me.
He started with LAMIST (saying it's cryptography), turns the thread into the general discussion forum, then votes with the reason of OMGUS. I would like to hear more from you, because I don't like how you are playing - a different vibe from your last towngame.

I'm not going to apologize for goofing around in RVS.

[MagikHorse]

Finally got back home to see a whole lot of fluff before I've even gotten a chance to play. I hope this isn't going to be one of those all fluff no stuff games.

I don't like the lack of RVS vote from Frogster though. Even if it's not much a vote is still the only way for town to make any headway, especially at this stage of the game. As an SE he should know that.
VOTE: Frogster

[Redados]

Last game I played with Redados I pushed him for listing a readslist on page 2, so I‘m probably not the best one to ask about reaching.

Please give me credit for having not yet posted a reads list!

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Hmmm. I didn't think too hard on the "oh, Shelly asks many questions" thing Redados said, which may have been a mistake.

Reasons to say that:
Drawing attention to "fishing for ???" -- the information being gotten is on playstyle and game state changes. And that's not very scum-indicative. Unsure of why you'd draw attention to it -- say she's scum: put a fool in a rope factory and so on, you're just making it likely they'll play harder at hiding when they're role-fishing. And if she's town, it's a town thing to do, so it's very uninformative all around.
Drawing attention to curiosity -- which translates usually to a weak townread. But withholding any judgement makes that null. Hmmmmmm, don't like that. Smells of faking paranoia, though there's also past games to consider. So I'll call this one a toss-up.
Calling out a pattern -- usually only useful after enough of a "corpus", so to speak, has been established. I feel it's too weak to see a pattern useful for directing votes yet, and now that the pattern has been outlined it's unlikely to continue. So that's denial of useful information.

I have decided I don't have any reads on Redados, or anyone else right now, but that RVS is over for me. There's solid information to dig into, and I'm not touching on some of it yet for reasons similar to why Redados would NOT have drawn attention to Shelly questioning.

UNVOTE:

I'm awaiting more arrivals... and more engagement from the quieter folks so far.

Well, there's another arrival.

[Redados]

Hmmm. I didn't think too hard on the "oh, Shelly asks many questions" thing Redados said, which may have been a mistake.

Reasons to say that:
Drawing attention to "fishing for ???" -- the information being gotten is on playstyle and game state changes. And that's not very scum-indicative. Unsure of why you'd draw attention to it -- say she's scum: put a fool in a rope factory and so on, you're just making it likely they'll play harder at hiding when they're role-fishing. And if she's town, it's a town thing to do, so it's very uninformative all around.

This is a fair assessment. My first thought was that Shelly is asking a lot of questions and they're not good questions. Then I looked at each of the questions and I would say that one of those was a good question (re: Frogster). So I didn't want to jump and say that Shelly is asking bad questions.

However, I don't think that Shelly is asking good questions either and that her other questions amount to fluff.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

She asked several questions that were relevant.

Why I made my RVS vote -- I said I had an actual reason, that makes it a way to get game relevant information. In fact, that is the actual point of RVS.
Why Frogster hadn't voted -- obvious.
Why Frogster wanted to hear my reason in the specific ways he did -- not obviously game relevant, but there's literally not /anything/ to work with at that point, and it increases the amount of information she gets in his next post.
And the "General Discussion" comment is... making the exact same observation you're saying that you're making, but as a general thing ("why is everyone focused on fluff") instead of a specific thing ("why is SHELLY focused on fluff"). And for the record, one is more reasonable than the other, since I've written more fluff by volume than anyone else and I haven't seen anyone finger-wagging at me yet.

And since I think the game-state has evolved enough that I can write off attempting to draw more of it out, I'd like to point out that you contributed more fluff posts than she did. I'm counting the OMGUS vote, since it's zero information content by definition. Go back and count.

Stones and glass houses.

[Redados]

Why I made my RVS vote -- I said I had an actual reason, that makes it a way to get game relevant information. In fact, that is the actual point of RVS.

I don't think this was an important question. I don't think Shelly is wrong for asking this, I'm just saying that it's not substantial.

Why Frogster hadn't voted -- obvious.

I've already conceded this.

Why Frogster wanted to hear my reason in the specific ways he did -- not obviously game relevant, but there's literally not /anything/ to work with at that point, and it increases the amount of information she gets in his next post.

Not game-relevant and not super substantive. Again, she's not wrong for asking this.

And the "General Discussion" comment is... making the exact same observation you're saying that you're making, but as a general thing ("why is everyone focused on fluff") instead of a specific thing ("why is SHELLY focused on fluff"). And for the record, one is more reasonable than the other, since I've written more fluff by volume than anyone else and I haven't seen anyone finger-wagging at me yet.

I don't see it as an original observation, I see it as repeating someone else's observation but phrased s a question in order to make it seem substantive than it really is.

It is going to take me some time to get used to Mush's playstyle. My first impression is that she likes to post flowery walls of prose which are hard for me to read and get the gist of. I will need to get better at slowing down and reading those.

^Consider the above as me finger wagging at you.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I think that you're underselling questions 1 and 3.

1 is starting from zero. There is no information at all. There is, in fact, nothing at all. I am the only thing that exists, and I'm teasing "a reason" for my vote. Someone had to ask the question to get the answer, and she was there, at the first moments of the game, and she asked it. So did Frogster, but that's honestly irrelevant. With that little to work with? It's still substantive for the /state of the game/.

(Also, she is the ONLY one who asked for it in "normal human" style, without which you'd need to decode writing styles that are purposefully obtuse. So she actually managed to get useful information that otherwise would have needed someone else to ask for it multiple times.)

3 is starting from, oh, if question 1 is zero, call it two. The game state is so early that even fluff is helpful, because fluff builds a corpus of writing to cross reference later. And now that I've realized she's the only one wh asked for "normal human", I can safely say this /isn't/ fluff -- I teased a reason for my vote and Frogster asked for it in styles that aren't immediately useful for the other players. Denying information, you could quite possibly call that. Combined with the lack of vote, does that seem potentially indicative? Not to me, but I have different criteria than others.

You have a solid point on question 4. But agreeing with someone isn't a bad thing. And there's information to be had on the "how" of it -- though I don't think I'm ready to draw attention to that yet.

As for your fingerwagging: duly noted. But I don't intend to fluff the game too much from this point on. I was trying to encourage engagement, and now it is here. So my business is now getting down /to/ business.

[Redados]

Mush, thanks for your thoughts. I agree that Shelly's questions one and three were more substantive than I thought they were at first. I can admit when I'm wrong and adapt my opinion. I stand by posting that Shelly asked a question in each of her four posts.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Because people are sure to ask now that I've drawn attention to it, I might as well answer the unasked question:

"Why did you intend to give purposefully obtuse answers on request?"
Two reasons:
First! Because I misunderstood my audience. I come from very different internet circles, where humorous use of disparate, ridiculously opaque writing styles is the norm. I've been on here before, but that was three years ago and I was not joking about forgetting everything.
And last! Because I didn't realize how obtuse my muse would take me until the deed was done. It's possible to decode, but it's Kind Of A Lot. Those pieces would be sort of mildly received even in most of my usual online hangouts. But I see my dumb jokes through, even if they've failed: it would be poor form to simply say "Philosophy Machine Broke".