OOC Confessions

I'm really glad that posting challenges are being thrown out there right away. One of the things I'm hesitant about in any season is posting too often in my confessional right away, because that's always one of the first things I look at when I'm starting a game. Who's got posts? Who's talking in private already? And I'm earmarking that person as someone who needs to get gone the second I establish control.

Here's why: anybody who's posting in their confessional a lot is either someone who's paranoid or someone who's angling to be the go-to confessional of the season. That means they're a bad ally because they're either paranoid or they're going to make big (stupid) moves to get attention.

The alternate explanation is that they're someone who's got great relationships with the PWs, and they're responding to all of the "OMG it's you ILY so much PLZ MAKE ALL STARS SO WE CAN SLAY TOGETHER!" posts from the peanut gallery. So right away I just want to kill them because DAMMIT THAT NEVER HAPPENS TO ME AND I JUST WANT TO BE LOVED TOO! JUST ONCE!

Sorry, that got real for a second. But yeah thanks to the challenge I can finally post random shenanigans without impunity. Hooray!

OMG it's you ILY so much PLZ MAKE ALL STARS SO WE CAN SLAY TOGETHER!

...wait fuck I'm a host.

Apparently I decided to pass out from exhaustion and sleep on the study floor instead of writing confessionals last night.

Tonight I'll make better choices.

Okay, so, brief OOC summary of how we got to this point. (Dialogue for the cartoon is recorded and I'm about two images away from completion. They're really complex so it's taking a bit but tomorrow should be the day, I promise!) 

Original beauty tribe, I was in a three-way alliance with John and Jay. This seemed like the smartest move for me at the time, since Katie and Kelley both hadn't really been active enough to inspire a lot of confidence in me. I figured, hey, knock out the other girls, give myself a chance to be the belle of the ball and get the boys in my pocket. No problemo, right? 

Then swap one hits. We took Michelle and Jon on board, and that was a pretty significant turning point in the game for me. I came to realize that John was probably a bit too much of a control freak to be a solid ally for me in the long run. I've learned that it doesn't really pay to teach other people the tricks and shortcuts that I use to win challenges; I always figured, hey, if I'm giving you this secret, I'm essentially teaching you how to beat me. Shouldn't that make me a trustworthy person that you want to work with? But instead people usually look at that and go, "Holeh crap, Alexis knows all this stuff, she is terrifying!" Doesn't matter that I'm making my knowledge become your knowledge, the fact that the knowledge exists in the first place is usually enough to make people run for the hills. 

Aaaaand sure enough, John went to Katie and told her that he thinks I'm too dangerous to keep around long term in a merge situation. ORLY, John? 

Luckily I've been coasting by at this point by using the tried-and-true tactic of adopting the Lancer role on the team. The Lancer is never the leader, they're the person who's one step behind the leader, but doing their own thing. Think Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother: he's not the main character. He's not first in the credits. But he's considered better than Ted Mosby in every single department. This phenomenon shows up again and again. Tigger is better than Winnie the Pooh. Bender is better than Fry. And, arguably, the United States is better than Russia despite Russia being the only reason the Allies won World War II. (#NotSoBarbarianFacts) 

So, by being the Lancer to John, I'm with him, being party to all of his plans and schemes, but not getting any of the negative stigma. He brought Jay in as a third man, which I thought was a great idea. I would bet my left arm that Jay is played by the one and only Zavi (unless whoever played Ciera in season 3 is doing another spot-on impression, that is), which means that he'll be completely and perfectly loyal right up until the point where he isn't anymore. This is a great development, because it allows me to sideline Jay for giggly gossip about what a controlling uberthreat John is, and gives me a window into Jay's upcoming arbitrary betrayal. 

Adopting Michelle and Jon changed the game up quite a bit, because suddenly Kelley became a lot more expendable, and Michelle became a very useful potential ally in Katie's rebellion against John. With her on board we actually had a great shot at taking John out, but along came the blasted Exile box, and we swapped again. 

In theory this is the part where I'm way overplaying my hand. I've indicated to literally everybody on the tribe that I'd like to work with them going forward, and that obviously is not true in every case. As it happens, Max has done me the courtesy of completely ignoring me unless I talk to him, which is the surest mark of an ally that values you slightly more than a used tissue. 

For whatever reason, right now everybody seems way too trusting of me, which just goes to show that a pretty face will let you get away with just about anything, at least for a little while. (I'm sure it'll all come crashing down quite soon. I can't profess to be nearly good enough to pull this sort of thing off long term). Andrea originally was very tight with Max, but then I was able to show her that Max was crosstribing with John, giving us their puzzle times for the one challenge, etc etc. That got her firmly against him, which is excellent news for me and Katie. 

Where things got interesting here was that Katie, Andrea, and I decided to throw the challenge en masse to ensure that we'd have at least a tie vote this time. I talked to Jay about doing the same thing, on the grounds that it'd be really easy to pick off Beauty unless all three of us attended TC. Jay, for whatever reason, told Max about me and Katie throwing the challenge. I'm not sure why he did that, but Jays gonna Jay, I guess. Max, for some unearthly reason, decided to tell Jeff that he was the target (when he clearly isn't, and was invited to join us ladies in our domination) and spook him into winning immunity. So now we're going in three guys, three gals, and Jon is in the middle. 

Unfortunately for the boys, Jon approached me a while back, saying he liked me and wanted to work with me, and nobody would see the two of us coming, etc etc. So it wasn't too hard to trot out the litany of reasons why Max and Jay can't be trusted, and get him in line with the Girl Power trio. He actually told me a lot of the things that Max and Jay have been up to, which is sweet. The two of them have definitely been playing hardball, and I salute them for it. 

I get a bad rap for being a traitor. I call it a bad rap because 98% of the time it isn't true. There's a certain tier of friends that I will never betray. If you're in that tier, I will gladly throw my entire game away to save your ass, and I will never betray you. I'd quit first. If someone in that tier fucks me over, it's painful as hell, and I probably will hate the shit out of that person for a really long time. Just below that tier are my regular friends. I will work my ass off to save you as much as I can but if you betray me, oh well, you did what you had to do, we'll give it another go next time. If I wind up betraying one of these people, it'll be painful and I'll apologize my ass off about it, but it'll never happen without an insanely good reason. Then there are casual friends. We'll work together just as often as we don't. If we're not on the same tribe, we're not going to be together. You vote me out, cool. I vote you out, I'll apologize because I still like you and wouldn't mind working together. Then there are acquaintances. All bets are off, but in general I'm going to try not to betray you because you could be a good friend in the future. 

Bottom line - backstabbing is bad for longevity. I'm someone who needs to have good relationships in order to survive, and jeopardizing those by indiscriminately dicking people is just plain stupid. That's why I tend to get pissed off at people who accuse me of being a serial traitor, because it's actually incredibly rare for me to do it, and it has never ONCE happened to someone I considered a top-tier friend. 

Having said all of that, I think that I sort of screwed up this time and made one or two promises I couldn't keep. I don't have conclusive proof that Max and Jay are expressly against ME, so I don't have sufficient grounds to betray them. I know that they're against Katie, and that's actually not such a bad thing. Katie's a great strategist, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that at some point I'm going to outlive my usefulness to her, especially if I demonstrate strategic prowess in front of her. Letting someone else take her out early would be a nice way of getting her out of here without me betraying her. But that's not good for business just yet. The trick here is to make sure that there are great reasons to take out people who aren't me when the merge hits. Take out too many kingpins in the early phase, and there's no shadows to hide in. Taking out Max tonight will theoretically panic John and Jay, and force John to strengthen his bonds with me. That puts John into the crosshairs pretty firmly, and gives me some more maneuverability. It also strips away a prime ally for Ami and the other brains, puts Andrea firmly in our camp, and gives me a pretty satisfactory chunking of alliances to play against each other in the days ahead. 

It also really helps that Zoe and Jeff blew this challenge away. That'll give me some ammunition against them when the merge hits, and keep people from wanting to use them as swing votes. 

So, yes. In case you were wondering if I was actually playing this game, I am indeed. I usually forget to mention that sort of thing when I'm shticking and it causes people to wonder how the hell I manage to not go home every week. Hope that helps. 

So, before the haters can start guzzling Haterade over what's about to happen this round, I want to go on the record stating that Aphrodite actually did not throw this challenge. We fully intended to win it, but Matty sucks at life and lost it for us. If this was actual Greece, he'd be dead by now. 

I just want to make that fully clear, because last time I decided that throwing challenges was a good idea, I was very thoroughly informed that it is in fact a very cowardly idea, hosts don't host for that kind of shit, and instead what I should do is win challenges and let all of my allies get sent home. I don't necessarily agree with everything in that statement, and I think throwing challenges is a completely valid strategic option if it's warranted - even though I understand that it also sucks for hosts. BUT I didn't throw this time, and I don't want to be accused of things I didn't do. 

Probably PG is going home unless an idol screws up everything in life, and it sucks because Matty is never here and doesn't deserve to keep playing the game. What ultimately clinched it was that Jon wanted PG to go home, and Jon is the swing vote right now. Letting him call the shots is important, if I want to keep my Girl Power alliance with Katie and Andrea intact. So unfortunately PG probably gets a raw deal here, and I hate doing it, but I don't know that there's a better option at this point. 

So... lot going on right now, both on and off of the computer. 

For those of you not in the know, back in 2013 I got sidelined with an extremely nasty stomach infection that basically had me feeling... well, imagine that you ate too much Mexican food and then went on a roller coaster. Now imagine doing that every single day FOR A YEAR. As you can imagine this was not a thrilling time in the life of Alexis. I basically lived an episode of House, except instead of a brilliant cane-bound diagnostician solving my problem, it remained a complete mystery to the doctors. My test results were invariably negative for everything, my blood contents were all over the map, and they eventually started testing me for exotic foreign diseases because they had no other ideas left. Then the infection went away all on its own for reasons that were equally unexplainable, and I got on with my life. 

A week or two ago, the symptoms started up again. As you can imagine, I was thrilled to find out that my unsolvable disease was making a comeback. So now I'm on medication and got a bunch of X-rays done to try and head it off at the pass, but there's a very real chance that I'm going to wind up being sick for longer than most pregnancies last. So, in case you're wondering why it is that I suddenly dropped off the map in terms of confessionals... that'd be the main reason.

The other reason is my job. My rampant abuse of a loophole in the rules that allowed me unlimited cell phone use at work came crashing down with a shift in management, and I became the poster boy for extreme punishment measures. Seriously. I'm pretty sure if they could put up literal posters of me telling me specifically not to do shit, they would have done it by now. They made new rules on my day off, didn't tell me about them, then tried to punish me for breaking them. Then when that didn't work because a coworker told me what they were doing, they tried to retroactively punish me for breaking the rule approximately 500 times before it was created. When that didn't work because my supervisor pointed out that it was total horseshit, they decided to literally line us up and make us recite the procedure for getting fired for using cellphones at work. When we pointed out that we occasionally need them to do our jobs, they decided to spend several hundred dollars to order radio equipment so that we no longer have an excuse. 

This is the part where I need to step in and say that I am currently working as a valet at a three-star hotel and casino. Three stars. This is not the Ritz, this is slightly better than a Motel 6. My job is to take cars to the lot and bring them back. This is not a nuclear reactor-watching job, where a half-second of looking at my phone could cause Utah to be wiped off the map for several centuries. 

More confessional to come, I just want this bit up so that I can avoid penalties for next round tysm