2000-10-08 - 23:59:22

DL Survivor Confidential, Part 2

There are times when it has been easy to write here, when the ideas and words just seem to flow out of me, and there are times when it is very hard, like right now.

Of course, when the words are not coming easily, that's the time you MOST need to write. I find that when I'm not writing there's usually a reason why.

I think it is this Diaryland Survivor Confidential I'm doing. I found out something the other day that sort of took the wind out of my sails.

I found out that Skeezix had lied to me when he said that there wasn't an alliance to kick me off. And he admitted it in his journal. Of course it means by implication that Magledoll may have been lying to me too, but I'm not so upset about that. Actually, I'm not really upset at all, just kind of disappointed.

It's just I feel like a real idiot now for going along with voting Akira off. You'll see what I mean when I get to that part.

You know, I think that it's good to stick to the truth, but if you're gonna lie, for the love of God, KEEP LYING! In this case, telling the truth only made people unhappy.

Instead of giving you all the exhaustive rundown I was planning, I'll just hit the highlights of what followed after the first Immunity Challenge.

Like I mentioned before, the idea that everyone had to put the other Survivors in their entries encouraged interaction among the other players. Because of what I'd written I had a chance to exchange emails and chat with Q, Mangledoll and Skeezix. They all seemed like nice folks.

The downside was that what I'd written about Doug (Well) had pissed him off. In his application, he'd made a running joke about how once, in a fit of boredom, he'd showed his cock on his webcam. So, I continued that running joke in my IC entry, but apparently he didn't find it funny when I did it. Truth to tell, I could find very little in the way of personal information about Doug by reading his diary. However, his own IC was very good and some of his subsequent entries were excellent. Especially poignant was the entry about watching all the divorced fathers in his apartment complex picking up their children for the weekend.

What Doug was mainly angry about, and I don't blame him, was that a number of the Survivor contestants seemed to be putting minimal effort into their Immunity Challenges. It was annoying that people who had been initially enthusiastic about the game suddenly were fading out when they discovered that a little work was going to be involved.

Even more disappointing was the participation of the judges. There were supposed to be 13 Immunity Challenge judges, one for each Survivor. At the first IC there were only twelve judges, and at the second only eight. Thereafter the number of judges stabilized at nine, but that still meant that over a fourth of the judges blew the contest off.

This plague of apathy was somewhat disheartening.

Until the third tribal council, the person I was interacting with the most was Q, but with that vote came the contest's first moment of real drama.

Before the poll for the third Tribal Council closed I got an e-mail from Akira, asking me if I was part of any alliance. The reason: she had gotten some anonymous emails, purportedly from two of her fellow survivors, saying that they were going to vote her off.

This unnecessary meanness pissed me off. I contacted the Survivors that I had been most friendly with: BigBoy and Q, asking them to vote to keep Akira on.

The third Tribal Council initially resulted in a four way tie with Akira, Sabine, Bill and Francine all receiving 2 votes each. In the tie-break poll, Bill, the only non-Diarylander in the group, got four votes and was exiled from the island.

This end-run action to save Akira from exile was the only "alliance" that I was involved in during my stay on Diaryland Island.

The next Immunity Challenge, the third, was actually a joint venture. The ten remaining Survivors were arbitrarily paired off into groups of two, and assigned to do an interview.

I was paired off with Skeezix, and the two of us did a chat on AOL Instant Messenger which Skeezix then edited into an interview. Of the ICs submitted, ours was the only true interview with give-and-take between the interviewer and interviewee. However, because we chose a somewhat silly premise - I was a contestant on a future Survivor TV show in outer space - the interview turned into a rather goofy puff-piece. Still, we got a couple of votes from the DL Survivor judges.

Of the five Immunity Challenges, only three were actually turned in: the one between Sabine and Mangledoll (which wound up winning), the one between BigBoy and Pin-up Girl (which should have won, in my opinion); and the one between Skeezix and myself.

Around this time, both Q and Francine password-protected their diaries. It was hardly a surprise that Francine put a lock on her diary - she'd been worried for weeks that someone at her workplace was reading her journal. Nobody could figure out what was up with Q though.

Francine, when her diary was non-padlocked, posted an "interview" between Q and herself where she asked Q questions, and all he did to respond was recite the tenets of the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program. Obviously the interview was totally Francine's handiwork - Q had pulled a no-show.

As for Squibnocket and Akira, on the day of the Immunity Challenge, Squibnocket simply posted an entry saying that the dog had eaten her immunity challenge and that she was not going to do it. She then proceeded to update twice more that same day. The story I heard was that Akira emailed Squib to set up an appointment to do the interview and Squib never replied. Bad show, Squib. It's one thing to blow off an Immunity Challenge, but its another thing to leave someone else hanging over it.

Since the alliance to save Akira, Q had been acting weirder and weirder. He claimed to have engineered the save of Akira, but according to Akira he then stabbed her in the back and voted for her. He also posted a list of people he intended to vote for, in the order he intended to vote for them. While it was heartening for those toward the end of the list (I think I was third-from-last) the people closer to the top would have to consider Q a threat.

The person on the top of Q's list was Skeezix, but Q emailed me saying he intended to kick off BigBoy next. I wrote back and told him that I didn't want to kick of Dan, could he choose someone else, please?

At this point it looked like Q was trying to get himself kicked off, and I think he admitted to that in his own diary some time later. He was acting erratically and some of his journal entries were rather offensive. Therefore he got voted off the island that round.

The business with Q left a bad taste in my mouth. Initially I had liked him, but the contest seemed to bring out all sort of sharp edges to his personality. Moreover, I felt like a dirty snake talking with others about who should be voted off next. I especially felt this way when chatting with Mangledoll and Skeezix. Both of them seemed too nice to conspire with, so I made a resolution not to discuss my vote with anyone still left on the island. As it turns out, there would be a certain ironic humor in this decision later on.

Things quieted down a lot after Q got kicked off. This was probably good for the remaining Survivors, but bad for those watching. Perhaps the interest level dropped after that.

Francine was the next person voted off the island. She had been putting very little effort into her Immunity Challenges, and in fact she seemed relieved to have been booted off.

Not so with the next exile, Squibnocket. She greeted the news of her bootage with a big fat "Survivor Sucks!" diary entry. When upbraided for her somewhat petulant behavior she said that she was just puzzled as to why she was voted off.

Actually, what was puzzling from my point of view was her attitude toward the contest. Initially, her diary had a lovely Survivor-themed design and she seemed very enthusiastic when the contest first started. However, her interest in the game seemed to wane quickly and she really didn’t seem to put much effort into the Immunity Challenges.

However, most importantly, she hadn't really communicated with any of the other Survivors. I had a theory that most people were voting to keep people they knew on the island and vote off people they didn’t know. Squib being voted off was the logical extension of this theory. Others, like Mangledoll, who'd taken the time to send cheery hellos to their fellow Survivors, garnered a lot fewer votes.

The seventh Tribal Council (the round of eight) ended in a tie between Sabine and Bigboy with three votes each. This was a rather upsetting result for me because I rather liked Bigboy, both personally and as a writer. To tell you the truth, he reminds me of myself, or at least how I used to be. I was always a great one for trumpeting my faults while hiding my virtues, and I think Bigboy his this tendency, too.

I tried to keep Bigboy on in the runoff voting between him and Sabine, but after another tie, Bigboy was voted off, 4-3.

Bothered by this turn of events, I dedicated my next Immunity Challenge to Bigboy. I felt I had nothing to lose since I was probably slated for being kicked anyway.

Sabine, who had been on the edge of being voted off the previous round won the Immunity Challenge this time around. Her entry was short, almost an epigram, but very powerful. It made me think that my entries were entirely too long. But I'm writing for myself, not an audience, right? Right?

At this point I was still refusing to think in terms of alliances, but this was a mistake. I needed to look at the voting and figure out who was on my side of things. This probably would have caused me to consider that Skeezix was voting for people I wanted to keep on the island.

Since Sabine, who seemed most vulnerable, was immune, the person who got voted off next was Pin-up Girl. In retrospect, it might have been better to keep her on from my point of view, but I felt she was primarily a victim of the "vote off the stranger" school of voting.

In the round of five, Sabine got her ticket home. She got five votes out of five, meaning that she had voted for herself. Maybe she didn't want to vote for anyone that was left, or maybe she was just tired of playing. While she can obviously write and her diary has a fine design, she didn't seem like she wanted to put that much effort into it. This is perfectly understandable. After all, nobody's paying us for it!

And now we come to the controversial round of four. The remaining Survivors: Mangledoll, Skeezix, Akira and myself.

The last Immunity Challenge was: if you could only take one memory from your life on earth into the afterlife, what would it be?

I'll be frank - I busted my ass on this one. The memory I chose was the first night my darling Lily opened her heart to me. I tried to give just the important facts, and I tried to avoid meandering off topic in my usual fashion. There was a lot that was in my first version that I cut out in the final edit. Still, I was rather proud of the final result. If I didn't win the last IC it wouldn't be because I didn't try hard enough.

The final vote for the judges was 4 votes for me, 3 votes for Skeezix and one vote each for Akira and Mangledoll. I would be immune going into the fateful round of four.

Looking at the other ICs, it was clear to me that Jason's was the one to beat. The memory he chose was the night he comforted a friend who got raped, an important crossroads in his life.

Reading that, I realized that Jason was taking the contest a lot more seriously than he had been at the beginning. Now, with the goal in sight, he was giving it his all.

And he didn't win. This pissed him off mightily, and he posted an angry entry, essentially saying that the Diaryland Survivor judges sucked, etc.

Basically, it was a temper tantrum because he didn't win.

Skeezix basic argument was that the judges passed him over because his entry wasn't about a happy memory, just an important one. Since I don’t know what criterion the judges used I really can't say. However, the voting was so very close: if one judge that had voted for me voted for him, he would have won, not me.

I didn't agree with some of the judges' decisions myself. Lily was even more critical of them than me, but I think she was a tad biased.

However, in as far as aesthetic judgements are concerned, it's hard to make concrete decisions about "good" and "bad". A lot of times it hard to say why you like one piece of fiction, or one movie, or one song better than another. It's all a matter of personal taste. Even the ancient Romans had a saying: De gustibus non disputandem est. Loosely translated: you can't dispute taste.

So, I think Skeezix was just getting emotionally carried away in the heat of the moment. He probably thought he had nothing to lose since there were going to be no more Immunity Challenges. That turned out to be a blunder.

The voting in the round of four was a two way tie between Skeezix and Akira. The voting was split right down the middle with Akira and myself voting for Skeezix, and Mangledoll and Skeezix voting for Akira. Supposedly in the early voting Mangledoll had voted for herself, but Jason talked her out of it. Similarly Akira was voting for herself early on, too.

There were two more re-votes, each ending in a 2-2 tie.

I made a couple suggestions to Meg: 1) There should be a special IC just for Skeezix and Akira, and 2) the Judges should break the tie. At the time I made these suggestions, I didn’t know about Jason's "the judges are assholes" rant.

I really felt that if Akira was voted off, I would be next. Early on Akira had said something about how she'd vote herself off before she'd vote me off. I had taken her at her word, and tried my best to keep her on.

Now that I think about it, it's funny. All along I had denied that there were any alliances, but really there were. Skeezix and Mangledoll seemed to be voting as a bloc, and so had I and Akira. Even though we had not conferred about our votes, we were acting as allies.

Early on, I was thinking that if I got to a point where there was nobody I'd wanted to vote for, I'd just vote for myself. I can't remember exactly when I'd changed my mind about that, I think it was around the time that Bigboy was voted off.

I was driving someplace, just thinking about life in general, when it suddenly occurred to me that voting for myself would be big act of self-betrayal. Of course it's easier to betray yourself rather than betray somebody else to their face, mainly because nobody hears you when you yell at yourself. It made me kind of sad to think how quickly I'd be willing to fink out on myself rather than vote for some other people who, let's face it, I hardly knew. After that, I resolved to not even consider voting for myself.

There's also the fact that voting for your self is technically against the rules; you couldn't do it on the TV show, but there was no way of preventing it in the eGroup forums.

But now it was crunch time. The 2-2 tie seemed to be unbreakable. Meg the hostess, who had been through so much with this crazy contest, seemed unable to make a decision about resolving the tie.

That night, while the voting went on and on, I was chatting on AOL with both Skeezix and Mangledoll. They both assured me that they were not in an alliance and that there were no hard feelings about my support of Akira.

I have to admit that I was not thinking 100% clearly that night. I had not been getting enough sleep, and was trying to conduct a difficult defense in Planetarion at the same time I was chatting with Mangledoll and Skeezix. Mangledoll seemed like her usual cheery self, but Jason seemed irate that his Immunity Challenge has not won, like he was owed a win or something.

I really should have stuck by my guns. It should have been up to Meg to find a way to break the tie. It was not my responsibility to end the deadlock, but I was tired. I wanted to conflict to end. I wanted the game to finish, so I agreed to change my vote. It was dumb, I admit. Skeezix should have been made to pay for his bad sportsmanship, but I really was not willing to get ugly just to win Diaryland Survivor. If there had actually been a million dollars at stake, it would have been another matter entirely, but in a game played just for fun I did not feel like being a hard-ass. So I let it slip away.

The plain fact is that Skeezix wanted to win badly enough to lie and double-deal, and I did not.

I remember a line that Paul Newman said in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'."

And so I was voted off in the round of three by Mangledoll and Skeezix, then Mangle beat Skeezix easily in the finals, 8-3.

After I was voted off Magledoll talked with me for a while on AOL IM chat. She seemed like her usual fun-loving self. She admitted that she was playing the game to win, and had been all along. Good for her!

However, looking at the diaries of Mangledoll, Skeezix and Akira, I see that they all link each other. They do not link me. I feel a little like an old shoe that been used and thrown away. I suspect this feeling will go away in a couple of days.

My goal in playing DL Survivor was to raise the hit count of my diary, and I guess I have done that, sorta. I notice, looking at my stats, that I have just about slid back to my pre-Survivor numbers, but I'll bet that's probably because I'm not updating. That's going to change soon.

And now that I've done this damn recap, maybe I can get on with my life again!