In post 65, Quilford wrote:Anyway sleepy times! I have reads but HAH you aint gettin none of that yet folks
In post 155, Quilford wrote:Me telling you my reads is not going to solve the problem of you not having any. Nevertheless, I basically did so in my most recent post.
In post 180, Quilford wrote:I'm not going to produce a reads list. But I will talk you through anything you're unsure about in my posting.
From the very start, Quilford keeps his reads list a secret from everyone. The only reads that could be inferred from his posts up to this point are a Townread on Mina, a scumread on me, and arguably a scumread on ETL (I'm not sure of he was actually scumreading her or just pushing her there).
Now look at his interaction with Mina.
In post 267, Quilford wrote: In post 266, Mina wrote:Quilford, as a fair warning I don't think you're going to get anything productive by continuing to argue with Alchemist at this point. I think the case has been made, and turning this into a back-and-forth might start to bog up the thread. Remember the adage about not convincing scum that they're scum?
YES, MOOOOM
In post 271, Quilford wrote:
I think I understand what was going on here, if you want me to explain.
The overall impression I get here is that he's acting very buddy-buddy to Mina, whom he's Townreading for *reasons*. He says he agrees with her on virtually everything, but he never shows us his own thoughts. He seems pretty attached to Mina and looks like he's trying to keep on her good side the whole game.
Oh hey! Thoughts!
In post 199, Quilford wrote:Regfan is wrong and we both know it, Mina. You know I would be a ball of catatonic gibbering nervousness as scum right now.
Nevertheless I will tell you more about my reads sometime soon, but it's 3 am and I have no idea why I'm awake so not now.
Alchemist is becoming increasingly desperate, his accusation to BBmolla of 'vote parking' and his attempts to bring other people's meta on him prove it. What matters is that he has not produced any read or gone through any process of scumhunting that was not in reaction to someone calling him scum. Anyone can lash out at their attackers when they feel their life is on the line, but
only town can convincingly display their thought process as they pick through pieces of people's posts to try and figure out who scum is,
and Alchemist has been doing none of that.
In post 201, Quilford wrote:You clearly don't know what scumhunting is. Scumhunting =/= posting reads lists.
Your assumption that I sheeped Mina rests on no solid evidence but on the presupposition that I'm scum, which itself is what you're trying to prove by arguing that I sheeped Mina. In fact, if you looked inside my Team PT you would see that at 8:59.17 am, a full hour before Mina made her reads post in thread, I posted a reads list basically the same as Mina's bar the position of two names.
This is the same thing as what you're doing when you accused BBmolla of looking like scum parking his vote. There's nothing to say that BBmolla isn't just town who is convinced of your alignment. You're just assuming he's scum and then using that to frame his actions as scummy, instead of any inherent scumminess in them. This is precisely how scum fake scumhunting, and you are doing it right now.
In post 203, Quilford wrote: In post 202, Alchemist21 wrote:You saw people start to scumread me and decided to hop on that wagon. You've been opportunistic, and you expect us to have some blind faith that you're Town?
Again, what you are doing is assuming that I am scum, and describing my behaviour 'in light' of that fact.
I can equally say that the fact that I hopped on your wagon after other people did is (1) not relevant, since I arrived at the conclusion that you were scum independently; (2) except in the sense that I was bolstered to vote for you by the fact that other people who I thought were town were now scumreading you.
Neither of us can prove either version of events. But you're the one using your version of events to argue that I'm scum, which is the thing you're supposing in the first place to build your version of events. It's embedded in the very language you used: 'decided to hop on', 'being opportunistic'.
These are the first actually substantial posts from Quilford, and they are all geared at shooting me down along with my scumreads on him and BBMolla. His main argument here is that I'm assuming he's scum, and adds that he came to conclusions independently, and nothing indicated BBMolla wasn't Town who just agreed with the wagon.
Look carefully at the bolded in the first quote. Quilford thinks only Town can convincingly display their thought processes as they figure out alignments, but up until this point his thought processes have been some big super-duper secret.
In post 400, Quilford wrote:Right.
Mina is definitely my strongest townread. Early on, she noticed that BPC, despite having made a couple of fairly incisive points (I particularly liked the olive branch comment in
#20 and the point about Mara's post being the type to draw attention to itself in
#56), wasn't actually drawing any conclusions from them. In fact some of what he was saying had a kind of 'defusing' effect: all of his points in posts
#56,
#71 and
#72, for example, kind of counterweight any scumpoints with townpoints. The points taken individually aren't bad—sometimes things just are alignment-inconclusive!—but because they made up the bulk of what he was saying at the time, it seemed that he was just being generally wishy-washy.
Now, I didn't notice that BPC was being cumulatively pretty fence-sitty until Mina pointed it out in
#74 and
#79. When I read those posts by Mina and had a second look at BPC, I was kind of thrilled to notice that there was this entire angle on BPC's posting that I had completely missed. So I started to lean pretty heavily towards Mina-town from that point forward.
My read on Mina was further strengthened when she posted nearly exactly the same reads in #144 as I had in my team's PT an hour earlier. I was pretty certain then that we were on similar wavelengths, and that accordingly she was more likely to be town.
The other town thing is the frequency and naturalness of how she posts her teammates' reads in-thread and compares them with her own. I really just think that, had she drawn scum, it would not be possible for her teammates to sustain this for so long.
I would like Regfan's case on me, though, just so I can confirm it exists.
In post 406, Quilford wrote:Okay so there's no googly eyes moment like I had with Mina with anyone else who I think is town.
But I do like Patrick, because he was the first to bring up Alchemist. Until then I was kind of iffy about Al, because Al was asking too many questions and responding to people's thoughts rather than having any original ones of his own, but I also thought he hadn't spent a lot of time on the site (he's definitely the least experienced player here)
#55 was too cheeky for newbscum, and he could just be newbtown. So I had kind of filed him under 'look into later' in my head.
But when Patrick brought up
#121, I was like 'maybe I should take a closer look'. Then I realised that Al had posted
literally no reads
, almost all of his posts were part of trivial back-and-forths with people, and that he had done no digging after people's motivations of his own.
So I credit Patrick with putting me onto my first substantial scumread. I also like his meta-awareness about how Day 1 lynches tend to pan out in
#311, because I find it very very relatable.
I am given slight pause by how easily he dismissed a lot of the early game in
#121, and I'm unconvinced by his read on serra, but on the whole I think he's likely to be Town and at the very least isn't somewhere we should be going with today's lynch.
In post 407, Quilford wrote:As I've mentioned above, BBmolla is firmly in the 'AAARGH' pile because on the one hand his blend of total nonchalance and utter self-conciousness strikes me as very town (I think it reminds me of me a little). Hilariously, though, I really don't like his reads, they seem pretty shallow and surface-level (I think
#246 is the
worst
reason to think Alchemist is scum, I don't see what BB is seeing at all in
#183), but how detailed can you get when you're only using max 3 sentences per post?? Which is how BB tends to roll independent of alignment if I remember correctly. In conclusion, asfhasjkfhaskldjh and I want you to go further into your read on ETL please.
I lean town on ETL because I think
#49 and
#52 contained a neat little flash of insight ("Everyones town until I find a reason for them being scum" seems very unusual to me too), and I like her response to BBmolla in
#370. However I feel like her posting has changed since her 3-day absence and it weirds me out a bit.
Marangal I am just flat-out not sure about. I really disagree with her reasons for thinking Alchemist is town and I think they are in conflict with the fundamental conceit of 'uninformed majority vs informed minority' (I really, really don't think refusing to push another wagon is something an uninformed townie would do), but she has explained them convincingly enough. I wish she would talk more about her scumreads, they don't strike me as particularly strongly-held.
In post 408, Quilford wrote:BPC is also null, as I've already said I didn't like his early fencesitting. I also hate hate hated when he said Mina was 'blatantly not caring about reads' in
#114, it seemed like hilariously over-the-top rhetoric in the way that scum are sometimes prone to (Mina also took issue with it, which is another reason I forgot to mention why I like her for town). But aside from his 40 hr absence a little back, he has been pretty engaged.
I have no idea whatsoever about serra. Like, none. I get town vibes and scum vibes off things but it's all gut. I should probably do some meta.
In post 409, Quilford wrote:I was starting to waver a teeny bit on Alchemist because he actually posted some reasoning for me being scum that wasn't 'uuuuh he's not scumhunting' without any further elaboration. But no, fuck that. His reasoning for his reads is still abysmal, there's just more of it now. I think most of my worry here comes from the fact that he's actually at L-1 now. In TM2012 I started to waver on Captain Ajax when he was really close to being lynched (until he made an awful fakeclaim), and he was scum, and I'm scared I'm going to lose my nerve here too, despite Al being my biggest scumread by miles.
Gah.
These are actually really good posts for showing us his thoughts, and for what it's worth they made me feel slightly better about him. I can see him reasonably thinking all these things when at the time he says they happened. The reason I only feel slightly better by them is the timing and how they came about. Did we get to see them around the time they happened? No. We see it several hundred posts after the fact and three seperate people had asked him to start engaging the other players. I think Town players would have given something (didn't have to be as detailed, but SOMETHING) around the time they stated feeling one way, or if not then at least when asked.
I'll end this by throwing Quilford 3 bones and a question or two.
1. When Quilford went on about how he thinks I'm the obvscum and why other people weren't seeing this, well, that's a lot how I feel about him. That planted a small seed of doubt in my mind that there was a small chance he may actually be Town.
2. I actually like his posts at the end there. They don't have to be as detailed, but if I see him regularly posting things like this from now on, he might be able to convince me he's Town.
3. ABR came in our PT today, looked over this game, and said he thinks you're Town. He also says Mina is scum though, and he wouldn't give reasons for either read beyond he knows Mina in real life.
Now the question. Say I'm lynched today. I flip Town. Who do you go for next?
I think if you actually turn out to be Town, then scum are probably comfortable with the TvT noise.