simplyme

To me, that season should be an example of how two people can both play good games in Survivor but the situations in the game (casting, tribe wins determining which tribes go to TC and who ends up in more conflict situations) have something to do with determining the winner. I don't think the word "deserve" should necessarily be used for winners because it is never an even playing field, and that's actually something that makes it interesting. Seeing who survives in spite (or because) of the situations that arise. Michelle played an excellent game and won. She made the right choices to do so. Aubry played a good game and lost. Every game is different. If they played again with one or two things different, who knows what would happen? I certainly consider them both great competitors. Kudos to both for doing what they did.

One thing I'm curious about is how do they decide seating arrangement? I feel like even from the little bits of TC that we were shown, who was sitting next to whom may have impacted the game and certainly impacted the ability to pressure players. If it is decided by vote order, with Will voting first followed by Sunday and then Brett, that isolates Will from being pressured the way Jessica was by having two alliance members between him and anyone else. There was also no time to influence Will, who was the most likely to flip on that side imo, since he voted first and Jessica almost last. (And of course, Jessica did get the black rock o doom, so focusing on her and people pressuring her made for good TV.) I just realized that I don't know for sure how seating is decided and I don't think it's player's choice. That started me thinking on how seating could factor in. (Could. I'm certainly not willing to say the whole game would have changed had Will or Jessica been seated elsewhere. It's just another tiny Survivor variable.)

Actually, she doesn't. See the quotes from an interview in her thread. She's aware that if she'd flipped, her game would have been completely dead. As difficult as it was to not flip and chance rocks, it was the right decision for her. Unfortunately, she was the one who got the black rock. Still, that was a 1 in 6 (17ish%) chance of her game ending versus pretty much a 100% chance of not being able to win if she flipped. She was playing to win, not for three more days. I don't see her decision as folly at all. It only appears that way because she actually got the black rock, but she had a greater than 83% chance of drawing a white rock instead.

But we don't know that Zeke thinks that. We only know that Zeke didn't want to work with Michelle, and that Michelle says she was misquoted when she said he said it was because of her religion. Even if she's just saying that now, that doesn't mean Zeke does not realize that different Christians feel differently, or that that was really his real reason. Michelle was obviously very open about her faith and we don't know what comments she made (aside from Marco Polo having dragons). I don't know that I would assume Zeke questioned anyone, including Michelle, about their faith. Or possibly Zeke made poor assumptions about Michelle because of the dragon story or... well, all sorts of things. There are people who are devout Christians that I love to work with and those who are devout Christians that I would prefer to avoid like the plague given a choice. I've never had to ask them a question about their faith. They've volunteered plenty to me on their own. That doesn't mean I have anything against Christians, but against certain Christians and the way they interpret and act upon their faith. If you aren't very careful in how you phrase that, though, people get "You hate Christians." Heck, some people probably still do get that no matter what I say. :P I don't hate them, but I prefer not to be around them.

Remember that Zeke and Michelle appeared polite to each other and did work well together during challenges. They didn't seem to cause any discord at camp. Zeke simply chose not to align with Michelle; he didn't stone her. I'll note that Will is Christian (I saw a few news articles where he focused on his faith) and Zeke doesn't appear (so far) to have a problem working with him. So Michelle could have been misquoted, or there was maybe something specific about her faith that was an issue for Zeke, or Zeke used her religion as an excuse to avoid working with her for other reasons. There are a lot of permutations of scenarios and feelings that could explain it. They seem friendly enough, so I'm not going to get too worked up about hunting down the truth to judge someone.

I think Zeke is very, very good at puzzles. So far it seems that if Zeke is on your team, the puzzle gets done a lot faster. I don't know that anyone else is necessarily bad at puzzles (there's probably a range), they just don't appear to be in the same league as Zeke. That was one hell of a two-fer. Wow. Now I just need to find and watch the old WKRP in Cincinnati turkey drop episode and my Thanksgiving viewing will be completely awesome.

Michelle has charisma to me. I would say her on-camera looks ranged widely for me from good-looking to awkward, but I suspect that in person I would get much more of the beautiful vibe. That said, photos like that work photo creep me out. I look at them and think, "Whose hand is that?"

My position would be that if Zeke hasn't commented on it, either it isn't true or it isn't our business.

Well, that's at least four of us that like/love Will's voice. I'm a sucker for certain deep voices. I blame my dad's musical tastes.

I love Will's voice. It has that nice, deep tone. As to the nasal accent others mentioned, I don't notice it at all. Granted, I grew up in an area affected by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift ) and don't tend to notice a lot of fairly common nasal accents. Count me as another person who thought Jay was referring to himself when he said he wasn't just a dumb surfer. I think he gets pissed off by the "Millennials have no goals and don't know how to work" stereotype and can't help responding even as he's willing to play along with the theme and work it for camera time.

I think Sunday was hoping to dump Jessica for Jay, but I don't think she was really thinking those numbers through. Sunday doesn't trust Jessica... OR Ken or David, so to replace those three, she'd need Jay, Taylor, and Will. That would probably alienate others. I think Taylor was hoping his bombshell would make people vote for Adam, but for that to happen you really need to have the fight before TC rather than at it. Jay and Will knew that and took advantage to vote for who they wanted to go home and just let Tayls screw himself and Adam.

Wow. Tayls voted for Adam. Jay voted for Taylor. Will voted for Jay. Yeah. Read that again. He did. This season is awesome.

I read him as someone who wants to be strategic, but Adam values relationships too much. So he puts himself in a weird position where he votes out Figgy because as the swing vote, he is essentially going to have to make a decision between two sets of relationships and that decision is undoubtedly better for his game. But he feels bad about it and he still wants Tayls to forgive him and like him. So he tries to own what he did (with that really awkward, "I screwed you. I did that." scene) but win Taylor over after that. It's tough for me to watch. He wants Taylor to be okay with him so much that he's doing stupid things to bond. "Hey, I'll keep your food secret, but you can eat it all. Hey, I think Will stole your place. Let's get rid of him and get Jay back for you. Hey, I have this advantage, and I'm going to tell you about it to show you I trust you. You told and I'm in trouble, but I still trust you, so I'm asking you what I should do now." My guess (and only explanation other than he found some mind-altering berries) is that he's prioritizing his guilt and need to fix that relationship over strategic gameplay, probably without realizing it. If Adam were being strategic, he'd realize Taylor didn't value him to begin with and Adam made a choice to sever ties and go with Ken and Jess. Trying to backtrack on that won't make Taylor value him. Tayls never did. Voting out Michelle is certainly not going to help. So Adam better have an epiphany soon that there IS no salvaging that relationship, because if it hasn'screwed him yet it may soon.

Actually, the recap points out something that I noticed but forgot to comment on until now. Will did have a LOT more wiggle room in his rig than others. He could actually move his wrists around enough that even I noticed without his bar getting pulled. I'm sure the rigs were adjusted for height, but they didn't do a good job of making sure everyone had the same amount of slack in the cuff-to-bar link. (Still, kudos for keeping both arms up and pretty damn still while balanced on a perch for that long. More wiggle room doesn't mean it was easy.)

My thought on Adam's "advantage" is that you take it. You don't have to use it unless it's to steal something important, but you don't leave it there for someone else to possibly screw you over. I think Adam really wants to work with Tayls and have Tayls be okay with him for voting Figgy out. I think that emotion, rather than strategy, is what was driving his sad, repeated attempts to bond. Yeah, I shouted at my TV, "OMG, Adam. Shut up!" Zeke was never going to work with Michelle. She has always been the person he trusted least on his tribe since the Mari vote, so removing her from the game is a higher priority for him than Taylor or maybe even Jay. David has also mistrusted Michelle since she tossed his name out instead of CeCe's. I still see the whole belching scene a week ago as meant to reinforce Chris, Zeke, and David as a threesome and stoic Michelle as the awkward fourth, which is pretty much where she was. She never bonded with them. So, if you're afraid Jay has the idol and you aren't sure WTF Adam is doing and don't want to count on his vote, you vote Michelle. No one who has actually met Michelle for more than two days sees Taylor as a bigger threat, except to their stomachs. For some reason I thought Hannah made the comment about Adam wanting to be with the Cool Kids, which I thought was funny since she'd been blamed for the same thing by some viewers when she got stuck having to choose and run numbers mid-TC. (And can we agree now that Adam and Zeke have apparently at least somewhat gotten over her terrible betrayal despite her inability to shut the hell up when they needed to process? What can I say. Hannah's doomed, but she's my nerd princess.) I kind of like when Jay has his buff around his head so his hair goes into that WhoVille almost-pigtails style. It shows off his cheekbones and simultaneously makes me laugh. I am so deep.

Did Jeff say Michelle was the first jury member? If so, I missed that. As soon as I saw a group of guys on the beach talking over who to vote out, I knew Michelle was toast. Will was safe. The guys think Jay might have the idol, and he might play it for Tayls... but not Michelle. Also, the guys like Jay more than Michelle, and they don't trust her. The saw her as dangerous. Tayls they just see as dumb and selfish. Adam came across as a blithering idiot.

To be honest, I live in a rural part of NY. It's completely possible. In 2008, Obama won my county. In 2012, he lost it to Romney by a large margin. This year, Trump had 4,000 more votes than Romney, which is significant in a small county with a declining and aging population. Most people I know voted Trump. The Simply family all voted HRC, though my father considered voting Trump for a while and then considered third party. Traditionally, none of us are straight ticket voters anyways. Hell, I haven't belonged to a party in years and think they're ruining the US. Now I have to figure out how to stop my mother from bitchslapping any of the neighbors. :P

I'm looking at a map of PA counties from the 2012 election and comparing it to this election. IMO, despite the rhetoric, HRC didn't "lose" PA. Trump clearly did win it. In the traditional Democratic bastions of Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties (where Pittsburgh and Philly are), she received more votes than Obama did in 2012. She outperformed what Obama did in several other counties, too, and was fairly close to his totals in the more rural areas. The big difference was that there were WAY more votes cast for Trump than for Romney. He brought out voters who didn't vote before. For example, in 2012 Northampton County results were: Obama.... 65, 014.... 51.6% Romney.... 59,242.... 47.1% Others.... 1,627.... 1.3% In this election, Northampton County results were: Trump.... 71, 384.... 50.0% Clinton.... 65,936.... 46.2% Johnson.... 3,647.... 2.6% Stein.... 1,363... 1.0% You can see that Clinton did comparable to Obama, actually getting a few more votes than he did in 2012. But you can also see that there were more than 16,000 more votes cast in that county this year than in 2012, and the vast majority of them went to Trump.

True. I wanted Lawrence Lessig because he wanted to reform how voting works. That would be nice. I'm really tired of getting stuck with candidates that the majority of a party dislike, but who have a fervent enough following to push them to victory because the support for other, broader-appeal candidates gets split between several candidates.

You say that like Republicans get along with Republicans. Not necessarily.

My brother was looking at the Canadian immigration web site earlier tonight. Apparently it was veeeeeeeery sloooooow. Wonder why that was? :P

I'm off to curl up in bed with my hot water bottle. Good things to think about: Survivor is on tomorrow. I'm going to sleep in. The sun will rise. If I suddenly turn tangerine, maybe half the population will think I'm a cool rebel. And I've been unhappy with election results before and survived, so let's not panic yet. I expect attempting to run a country with Congress may be more difficult than Trump expects. Hell, doing anything with Congress sounds like my idea of hell. :P

I was afraid this would happen. Twelve years ago (pre-Obama), some friends I'd made in college and I had a discussion online. Someone asked if we thought the US would elect a black man or a woman first. The guys thought it could go either way. Every single woman said, "Black man. Not even close." The guys didn't get it. But I look at this election, and I think of some of the people I know who refused to vote for Hillary because they "just don't like her" (she's a politician... what are you expecting?) but would have voted for her husband in an instant if he could run again, and it's hard not to think her gender made the difference. And that pisses me off. (Obviously not to everyone, but to enough people.)

I imagine Hannah started out just talking to Bret (remember, she's from Boston too), but the cop vibes didn't mesh with her idea of funeral director, so she started asking questions. Why? You probably want to know if someone is lying to you. It's good info to have. And if it makes someone else a bigger target than you or you can use that information, you do. I don't think it was benevolent, but it wasn't really malicious either. Strategic, sure, but not really mean-spirited, IMO. As AliShibaz stated, a neutral action in the game of Survivor. I will have to respectfully disagree with Ali (Hope I can call you that!) that Hannah's badgering of Zeke and Adam was morally bad and performed with evil intent toward them. It was stupid. It was socially and emotionally oblivious. It was an epic clash of different communication styles and emotional needs. But I do honestly think that Hannah, at that point, was very upset at the vote and felt she needed to explain and she needed reassurance. Zeke felt he needed to go off and process. Adam appeared to be almost trying to translate Zeke for Hannah ("He isn't saying he'll never talk to you. He just can't right now. He wants to be left alone."), and IMO he had the right idea but was stuck with two people who handle emotions very differently pretty much right after something went down. There are interesting theories and research about gender, communication, and values. While I highly dislike saying "This is how men communicate..." (or women) because there are so many exceptions, I find trends and theories helpful in analyzing interactions. You can look at Hannah's conversation with Zeke/Adam as Zeke and Adam having just lost status within the tribe, and they did not want to talk about it with someone responsible right then. Hannah, though, just had to choose between two sets of relationships and is trying to communicate for emotional reasons. It is very upsetting for her to potentially lose two friends, so she can't walk away without trying to fix it even though she's making it worse. They're all focused on their own needs.

Moved this post to the Race, Class, & Gender in Survivor thread since it had nothing to do with this episode. Sorry. :)