2000-10-01 - 23:59:07

DL Survivor Confidential, Part 1

Excuse the pause, folks. I was working on some side projects.

As promised, here is my insider's look at the Diaryland Survivor contest. However, before I start I need to say a few things.

While I had a lot of fun playing Diaryland Survivor, in some ways it was rather similar to the TV show and in other ways quite different.

The biggest, most obvious difference was that there were no TV camera following us around, recording our every move. This seems like a silly point to make, but the fact that there was no window on the behind-the-scenes interaction among the players probably greatly reduced the fun for the people following the contest. Hopefully, I'll remedy that a little bit with these entries.

However, in terms of playing the game and the strategy involved, DL Survivor was very much like its TV counterpart. There were conflicts, alliances and so on. And like the TV show, the people who did the best seemed to have a strategy.

I did some thinking about my own strategy, especially after seeing the TV show myself. One of the first things that occurred to me is that my goal might not be to win the game. The thing I most wanted to do was increase the hit count of this diary, and I figured that I could do that best by staying on as long as I could. However, since I noticed that Richard and Kelly weren't the most popular people by the time of the final round on the television show, it seemed that it might be better to be voted off than become a complete bastard. Also there were some people on the island with me I couldn't see myself voting for.

So basically my goal was to make it through the first half, and see what developed after that.

When I submitted my Diaryland Survivor application, I thought I had a very good chance of being chosen, simply because I am the oldest Diarylander that I know. Seniority has it privileges!

Still, I was excited when I heard that I got in. To tell the truth, I wasn't familiar with the Survivor TV show, but I was looking forward to playing the game, which seemed more like a literary competition than a gameshow, at least at first.

However, there was some mild controversy at the outset, even before the first Immunity Challenge was announced.

One of the other chosen applicants, Francine (also mistress of Quoted) took exception to the fact that Kurt Vonnegut was my favorite author. She didn't much care for his writing anyway, and then she attended a reading where she got a negative impression of Mr. Vonnegut personally.

I've always tried to make a point of just enjoying an artist for what they produce, not who they are. Let's face it, people: how much would you care for your favorite musician in they were constantly lounging on your couch, hogging the TV remote, drinking all your beer?

I think Francine and I may have raised each other's hackles, in a very mild way.

I was looking forward to the first Immunity Challenge very much but my feeling of euphoria wore off quickly when I saw what the topic was: we were supposed to write a scenario of what life was like on the imaginary Diaryland Survivor island.

I was very displeased when I saw this topic - it looked like a very bad idea. You were supposed to write a short story using 13 other strangers as characters - the chances for offending someone seemed very high - and these were the people who were supposed to vote on whether or not you were staying on the island! Talk about walking on broken glass!

In retrospect, I was wrong. In fact, the topic was perfect because it was designed to cause conflict which would make the contest more interesting, but more importantly is caused the contestant to INTERACT with one another. Just writing a topical essay, say about favorite musical artists, would not have persuaded the contestants to bounce off one another.

But for all its good features, the story still required a lot of work, especially since I was only familiar with two of the 13 diaries involved. By the way, I say 13 and not 12 because CodeliaMeg, the hostess, was included also.

At the start of the competition I was reading only two of the diaries on a semi-daily basis: Bigboy and Akira. Bigboy had written me back in July, and once I started reading his diary I had to read the whole thing, a very jarring ride. Akira had contacted me after I’d only been writing Uberhamster a week and very sweetly offered to redesign my journal for me just after Sinnamon offered to do the same.

I had read parts of Pinup Girl's old diary because she had written me an email some weeks before. In my travels through Diaryland I had run across most of the rest of the Survivors, but was not a regular reader. Of the remaining ten the only diaries that I had not seen before at all were Well (Doug), Skeezix and Bill (Sanity Inversed).

I was very nervous about doing this assignment, so I thought it would be good to research each of the diaries, and look for little bits of personal data I could use in my little story. But first things first: I had to familiarize myself with the Survivor game.

I surfed on over to the CBS website and saw that the Survivor program had it's own rather large domain and there were summaries of each episode. This not only gave me insight into what life was like on Survivor Island, but how to play the game later on.

I then started reading the diaries, making note of things that I could use in my little story.

However, even as I was working on my essay I became aware that there were some problems with some of the other players.

First, there was a good deal of doubt that one of the Survivors, Amber, was playing at all because she hadn't responded to her invitation. Meg said that she had a replacement lined up, but that seemed rather unfair considering that the deadline for the first IC was only hours away.

The second problem was more serious. Pinup Girl had shut down her diary because it had been discovered by one of the people she had been writing about. She changed her name to PinupGirl and started her diary over again from scratch. I think everyone on Diaryland Survivor island was sympathetic to her plight - nobody who is keeping a secret diary wants to be outed. I ought to know. It was unclear whether or not she was going to be able to participate in DL Survivor. From my point of view, I was cursing myself for not reading her diary earlier. I tried to remember what I had read from looking at it before.

However, it suddenly became clear to me that I had to stop my research and actually start writing - there was only a little more than four hours until deadline!

So I tried one of my old tricks: I cranked myself on sugar and caffeine and began typing furiously.

That probably explains the manic tone of that entry: I was wired!

And like what usually happens when I am cranked like that, I totally overestimated how fast I could write. The deadline was less than a half hour away and I was only about half done. And, DAMN! The thing was LONG!

So, what else could I do? When I hit the nearest stopping point I just wrapped it up, and I posted it. I think I made the deadline with five whole minutes to spare. Gee, usually I like to cut it tighter than that...

I was pleasantly surprised the next day to discover that I had won the Immunity Challenge. Hey, this Survivor stuff was easier than I thought!

But actually, I was relieved. At least I wasn't going to be voted off in the first round.

(Continued...)