TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

[27ninjabunnies]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Also, Greg in last forum game came out super towny. He was universally read town by everyone including the mafia. I'm just not getting the same vibe from him this game. He's more mechanical here rather than read based. He says there's a reason to it but I'm not seeing it fully yet. But I don't think he is the lynch today.

Iso means in search of. Basically I was asking can you specifically look at one person's posts to see what they have discussed so far that way I don't have to re-read the entire game.

[27ninjabunnies]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

When I say dummy I really mean scummy btw. Damn auto correct. And guy reads is actually gut reads.

[rzr]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

on second thought I really don't feel like going back through all this, it wasn't you, bunny, who was going back and forth with tokzic when s/he came into the thread briefly? Id not my apologies
If it was, then wouldn't that be some nice distancing

[Charles Claythorne]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

okay i have less than 2 hours before i have to go to my next class and i want to shower so lets see what i can do reading these 34 pages

HI EVERYONE SORRY FOR INACTIVITY, I WILL FIX THIS STARTING FROM THIS EVENING AND A LITTLE BIT RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!

[Charu]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Mashi, it's like you knew you were on cue or something.

[Charles Claythorne]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the relationship between human consciousness and the inexorable flow of time constitutes a significant portion of the overall thematic content of the text. Time is represented as a force that the characters of the novel are constantly and unavoidably in conflict against. In their unstable existences, where the present is “already the past” (Woolf 90) and the future becomes a question of “[w]ho could tell what was going to last” (87), time erodes the permanence or objective truths that they strive to either obtain or hold onto. I begin with a close reading of the narrative to demonstrate the inability of the human consciousness to reconcile the past, the present, and the future into something of permanence before moving to a discussion of how the representation of conscious thought is impossible for Woolf or any other author to accomplish without creating a discrepancy between story time and discourse time. I then conclude with the argument that Woolf, keenly aware of this unavoidable discrepancy, models the structure and the tempo of her text in a way that further deepens its thematic content.

While time is perceived by the human consciousness to be sequential – that the past and the future are linearly connected and through the vehicle of the present we move from one end of the spectrum to the other – the subjective process of introspection that occurs within the minds of To the Lighthouse's characters regards the past, the present, and the future as all being coterminous with one another. For them, fragments of the past and hopes for the future inform their present states of being, and yet, paradoxically, the external flow of time ensures that the past is unreachable, the present is ephemeral, and the future will eradicate all.

Often times the past is more positively appraised by the characters in contrast to their presents or their futures, and it is through this difference of appraisal that the flow of time is marked as being in conflict with human consciousness. Take, for example, when Mr Bankes recalls that Mr Ramsay “had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition” (23). Mr Ramsay made a “definite” contribution to the field of philosophy, and the reason that this is perceived as worthwhile by Mr Bankes and Mr Ramsay is precisely because of its definitiveness, because it is something that is relatively solid and possesses some degree of staying power. Forced to live in a context where time is akin to “the sea [that] eats away the ground we stand on” (38), Mr Ramsay's book is valued because it is a legitimizing product of the human consciousness that is graspable, something tangible and not yet worn down by the erosion of amplification and repetition that the flow of time levies on both Mr Ramsay as well as his text. Similarly, compare Mr Ramsay's contribution to the philosophical canon to the fact that “[y]ears ago, before he had married, [...] he had walked all day” (57). Walking is a symbol of motion and freedom, of being able to navigate the world as one deems fit, but this freedom is eventually denied by time: “He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket” (57, emphasis added). Because the present is “already the past” (90), the past is valued because it makes something permanent of the moment, even if said permanence is only temporary and continually reassessed in light of new experiences and conclusions.

If permanence or objective truth is what the characters seek to obtain, then it follows that the present, which by definition is only momentary, functions as the stage upon which the battle against the flow of time is waged. During the dinner scene in The Window, the narrative says that Mr Bankes “thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time” (73). By creating a dynamic between his own personal work – which, like Mr Ramsay's philosophical writings, offer a degree of permanence – and the social responsibility of dining with his fellow houseguests, Mr Bankes assigns a differing degree of importance to each act, and this importance is determined based on the context of time. If Mr Bankes had had enough time to both enjoy the dinner party and work on his writings then he would not have had to make the distinction that one “is a terrible waste of time” compared to the other. The present is assigned a high degree of importance because of its potential to oppose the silencing effects of time's unceasing forward march. Moments in which the present becomes threatened by the imposing future are abundant in To the Lighthouse, ranging from being as forthright as Mrs Ramsay not wanting “James to grow a day older or Cam either” (49) or as subversive as Minta, Paul, Nancy, and Andrew thinking that “it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach” (62). High and low tide are time-based phenomenons, occurring in estimable and sequential phases, and are thus unavoidable for the beach-faring foursome. The tide, like the flow of time, is a condition which they must account for when they decide what to make of and how to proceed from their present situations. Recovering “the brooch which [Minta's] grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life” (63) is ascribed with the utmost importance because “[t]he tide was coming in fast” and “[t]he sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute” (64, emphasis added). The brooch is a symbol of the past that is significant to Minta's present but is threatened to be lost in the present due to the inevitable advancement of the tide, which is described using the language of time.

As is the case with the present, time's unhindered advancement also threatens the futures of the characters insofar that one day everything that they strive to make permanent will become the past, undone and forgotten. The sand dunes invoke a feeling of sadness in Mr Bankes and Lily “because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest” (20). Though she strives to capture fleeting moments in the permanence of her artwork, Lily thinks of “an earth entirely at rest,” one where human influence and society is no longer be relevant and all that remains is an unfeeling and unthinking landscape. Indeed, how can Lily Briscoe make something lasting out of herself and her artwork when one day there will be no humanity left to remember her? And what then is the point in attempting to make “definitive contributions” (23) in anything if in the end nobody “could tell what was going to last – in literature or indeed in anything else” (87)? Unable to retrieve the past, constantly at odds in trying to make the most of a present that at once becomes the past, and faced with the hopelessness that the future will forget them all and thus render the entirety of their lives a meaningless and “terrible waste of time” (73), the internal conflict against time in which all characters must be participant is one of great thematic concern to the text.

Since To the Lighthouse represents human consciousness and thought processes as bound to but nevertheless existing outside of sequential time – where past, present, and future exist and are judged in simultaneity with one another – it follows then that the representations of conscious thought in language cannot follow sequential story time as the discourse time required to translate nonverbal thought into the written word is not equivalent to the seconds or minutes in which these thoughts actually occur. Woolf utilizes a limited omniscient third person point of view, where the characters' consciousnesses make subjective appraisals of their reality which become represented in the narration through free indirect discourse. No one voice is permitted to dominate, and multiple truths may exist in tandem even if they contradict the others. In order to give equal weighting to the multiple internal dialogues that occur at the same time as one another, Woolf must pause the story time in order to explore the subjective appraisals of every relevant participant in a matter before moving forwards. Consider the moment near the onset of the text when Lily and Mr Bankes are pontificating on the topic of Mr Ramsay and Lily suddenly feels as if “the load of her accumulated impressions of [Mr Bankes] tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him” (23). The narration then goes on to describe the various sensations that Lily feels with respect to her relationship with Mr Bankes, but these sensations are said to occur “simultaneously” (23). If the average reader reads Woolf's prose at a pace of two hundred words per minute and the word count of the section that represents the torrent of conscious thought that Lily experiences is just short of that, then the sixty or so seconds that it would take to read the various strands of thought runs contrary to the rapidity in which they actually occur in both Lily's mind as well as the story's chronological time frame. Moments such as this, where the tempo of Woolf's text assumes that of a stretch or a pause, are necessitated if the mimesis of conscious thought is to be explored. Likewise, at another point Mr Ramsay is described as speaking “[v]ery humbly, at length” (29), yet the lengthiness of his speech is confined to the two word description of “at length.” Like Lily's paintings, which favor subjective representation over facsimile duplication, story time must be subordinate to discourse time when a limited omniscient third person point of view is utilized. However, this is not to assert that discourse time and story time do not ever coincide. It is not a coincidence that during the dinner party Mr Ramsay is said to have “hated everything dragging on for hours like this” (78) when chapter seventeen of The Window, which is when the dinner party occurs, is the lengthiest in terms of discourse time. Similarly, direct descriptions of action reject verbosity in order to equalize discourse time and story time: “He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back. He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes” (44).

Rather than allow the inability to accurately represent human consciousness in language in a way that remains faithful to both story time and discourse time act as a blight on her text, Woolf instead utilizes the formal structure and discourse of To the Lighthouse to deepen its thematic content and even further indite time as being an antagonist to human life. The narrative is presented in three sections that are of varying length and style. The first and the last sections, The Window and The Lighthouse, are longer in terms of discourse time than Time Passes, yet the story time of The Window and The Lighthouse spans less than a single day while Time Passes condenses an entire ten year period into a brief flicker, only 8% of the text's total word count. Woolf makes extensive use of the stretch and pause tempos in the first and last sections in order to legitimate the individual, demonstrating through the form of the text that human consciousness through its representation in language is deemed to be more important than the representation of the external events that are also taking place. The flow of time is paused, just as the characters desire it to be. In Time Passes, however, the tempo shifts to that of ellipses and summaries, where time flows uninhibitedly and the psychological conditions of the characters are demurred in comparison to the external events that occur.

Amongst the many different elements of fiction that Woolf employs in order to accomplish this contrast between the three sections, one of the most poignant examples is her use of parenthesis. In The Window, representations of consciousness are bestowed with prime importance since the majority of statements concerning external events are relegated to parenthesis. Consider the moment where Mrs Ramsay measures the stocking against James' leg and her various strands of thoughts during this moment constitute the narration of the scene: “disgraceful to say, she had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia ('My dear, stand still,' she said)” (25). By placing the external event in parenthesis, Mrs Ramsay's ruminations on Croom and Bates are assigned a greater degree of significance than the act of measuring the stocking is. This is true of The Lighthouse section as well, where external events such as when “Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with” (148) are also placed in parenthesis. Compare these moments of parenthesis usage to those present in Time Passes, where lengthy, verbose descriptions of the seasons and the effects that they engender on the physical landscape are on the outside of the parenthesis but statements such as “Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth” (108) or “[t]wenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (109) are brief in discourse time and confined between the brackets. The flow of time, here marked by the description of the changing seasons, continues on uninhibitedly while the human consciousnesses which were once held in high enough regard to override descriptions of external events are now kept brief and impersonal, demoted to mere footnotes in the overall course of history. Moreover, describing Andrew's “instantaneous” death as merciful highlights yet again that time is at odds with humanity.

On a more formal level, the three part structure of To the Lighthouse contributes to the text's thematic content through its resemblance to an evening that passes into night before returning again to day. Stylistically, the longer lengths of The Window and The Lighthouse relative to Time Passes can be interpreted as a reflection on the dissimilarity between night and day. At one point in Time Passes the narrative states that “the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible” (110). The “stillness” of the day is compared to “the chaos and tumult” of the night – contrast this description to the “stillness” of the pauses and stretches in The Window and The Lighthouse, both set during the day, to the chaos of the ellipses and summaries that appear during the “downpouring of immense darkness” (103) in Time Passes. Daytime is said to contain a quality of “brightness” or illumination, which symbolically allows people to see and thus discern their reality, yet the privileging of human consciousness that occurs during the day is snubbed by the “eyeless, and thus terrible” flow of time characteristic of the night. Similarly, the eponymous lighthouse, itself a symbol of illumination and guidance as well, sits upon an island that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the three part structure of the narrative: “It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there” (154). Like the island and the lighthouse that sit atop the sea, so too do The Window and The Lighthouse situate themselves above the flow of time; and like the dent in the middle of the island that the sea sweeps through, so too does the flow of time corrode humanity in Time Passes. In addition, the darkness and the tumult of Time Passes is as inherently bound to the flow of time as it is to the First World War. The section opens with a discussion of a terrible storm that is “coming up from the beach” (105), thus marking it as a foreign intrusion, as well as the statement that “[o]ne by one the lamps were all extinguished” (105) which harkens images of wartime blackouts. The section continues with descriptions of gendered violence, with Andrew succumbing to conscription and Prue passing away during the domestic act of childbirth, before concluding with the statement that “indeed peace had come” (116) which then dates The Lighthouse as occurring “in September” (116) 1919, after the armistice and Treaty of Versailles brought both the war as well as Time Passes to their end.

In conclusion, To the Lighthouse portrays the relationship between human consciousness and the flow of time as one that is always in conflict, where characters struggle in vain to gain anything of permanence in a world that slips away and changes with each passing second. Beyond the narrative, this conflict is also reflected in the form of the work to the extent that representations of conscious thought in language create a disparity between discourse time and story time that cannot be reconciled. However, this disparity ultimately works to the text's benefit as the psychological representation of time in The Window and The Lighthouse is contrasted by the chronological representation featured in Time Passes, where developments concerning major characters are undercut by their brevity as well as their confinement between parentheses. The symbolism of day and night also connects the structure of the text to its thematic content, as does its relevance to World War I. Time is the enemy of human consciousness, and neither Mrs Ramsay nor Virginia Woolf nor we ourselves are exempt from its effects.

i skipped to page 10 since i figured the first 9 would be spam and i was treated to this i love you chariplop

[Charu]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Go do your thang, babe. I'll be here when you're ready to dunk out the #MASHIREADS

[Charu]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

i skipped to page 10 since i figured the first 9 would be spam

Already off to a good start, and by good, I mean not so good, and by not so good, I mean you're baaaaaaad.

[27ninjabunnies]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

on second thought I really don't feel like going back through all this, it wasn't you, bunny, who was going back and forth with tokzic when s/he came into the thread briefly? Id not my apologies
If it was, then wouldn't that be some nice distancing

I know tokzic commented on a few of my posts calling me town and saying I had some great early on reads, but that is all I remember.

[Charles Claythorne]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Mashi, it's like you knew you were on cue or something.

were you guys summoning me to solve the game??? its my super power to arrive at convenient times

Working on channeling my inner Manti atm in order to break the setup
I \think\ if a few things are done towns chances go way up, namely involving EVERYONE in the game cooperating with hider-shenanigans

ha, i dont even remember the setup that that tsundere-chan!!!

[Charu]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Bunny...

I haven't really prodded you yet, I realize.

It might be bad of me to say, but I feel like I can't really judge anything from you right now because I have no idea how you play.

If anything, all I would have to say about you, spoopy bunny, is exactly what others have already stated. You're kind of in the back of my head, and I don't know if that's a good thing for me to do.

Sunfan the woof can maybe provide a reason I should be worried about you!

...

And now I realize you probably feel that way for everyone here except sunfan. Oh man... THE JERK I AM!!!!

[Charles Claythorne]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Already off to a good start, and by good, I mean not so good, and by not so good, I mean you're baaaaaaad.

sry, i already knew the first 9 pages were golden because of your flood of posts, there was no need to verify what i already knew

[Charles Claythorne]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

Also wanna state outright I am not a fan of greggle's early shit posting back and forth with charu

which means by proxy I don't like charu's

but goddamn was charu on fire

To clarify my reasoning:

It's how they do that back and forth and not quite the back and forth on it's own

One of ya'll ain't town

I've mostly been skimming, but I think it's interesting that XelNya seems the first (or one of the first, at least) to bring up a serious notion for suspicion of someone.

btw @tracker/vigi
you haven't decided your role yet
the only situation where you're not completely dumb for choosing tracker over vigi is if both of the other town roles are forced to claim today, and town deserves to lose if that happens
pick vigi between the two

while it gives the hider one more target to die to, that shouldn't matter too too much if what I'm playing with works out

i do what i want!!!

I will choose to let this slide because my early shitposting was a bit awkward and I have faith in myself to get townread

but I am a \bit\ worried you feel this way

Of all the people in the game, why are you concerned about XelNya of all people being suspicious of you? And at Day 1 even?

Shit not only am I making it look like I give a fraction of a fuck, here I am giving compliments

Someone rush me to the hospital I might be sick or something.

I was feeling unsure of what I wanted to take out of XelNya's serious comment (i.e. was he a Human that actually was worried about something or a Wolf that decided to get some discussion going to look good, as two examples), but given his comment here, I think it implies that he wasn't really intending for his comment to have any major repercussions. As a Wolf, I imagine he would have some foresight before making the post about sunfan's and Charu's interactions. So the fact that he didn't seem to be thinking about it makes me feel he's slightly Human.

Sunfan do you have reads

Because honestly I'd rather see you put that effort into finding wolves than trying to supposedly "break" the game

Not that stacking the odds in our favor isn't good for us, but wolves use that technique to appear like they're being useful without using actual critical thinking

(And of course in doing so, they're harming town because they have an agenda)

While it's true that a Wolf will offer strategies beneficial to the Humans, it should also be recognized that Humans can do the same thing! Of course, if sunfan never brought up suspicions or anything, I would agree with your stance of seeing his reads, but I feel like it was rather too early for him to give anything of much substance at that moment in time.

Besides, if he figures out the setup, that's less work for me!

nah mittens don't mind me I'm just trying to make the best possible scenario for town

This is really sketchy

Why do you find it sketchy?

Dbp read on Greg is so good. What he is telling Greg is more towny than wolfy imo.

What was Dabackpack's read at the time? He had never explicitly declared by that point that he felt sunfan was Human or Wolfy. What about what Dabackpack said made you feel it was towny?

Pls don't.
discussing game mechanics almost certainly always ends up benefiting the scum team in some way or another. It also, as previously mentioned makes you appear towny without really putting much effort behind it.

Just commenting that this isn't always the case. Maybe something like "discuss whom the seer should seer" is something that can be taken advantage of, but strategies like "we should mass claim if such and such happens" or "we lynch these unconfirmeds and do this special powery uppy thing" and the like. In any game though, discussion of game mechanics should be read as a null tell, from my experience.

Here's some logical thinking.

XelNya saying not,giving a f,then posting nonsensical stuff is scummy.

Mr. P coming into thread attempting to make a joke to what seems like insertting self in conversation is scummy, but I like his response me calling his posts boring.

Everyone else is boring.

Do something. Impress me enough to where I want to come back.

I'm confused by your logic regarding XelNya. So then, if XelNya said he didn't care about the game and then stopped posting or posted serious stuff, would you think that's Human of him?

Not too sure what you mean about Chariplop, but I'm figuring you couldn't clarify since you were apparently phoneposting.

The Players of the Storm:
1 - DaBack of Packs - towny feel, one of the only people i notice pushing questions around
2 - Red Blastoise - I want a meta reading Xel seems to have a good one on RB, seems to be trying not sure if it's self pres or rep pres
3 - rzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzrzr - illogical
4 - storn420 - not enough to read really, just about everyone is acting the same way he is
5 - Tokzic ayy - i always beef with inactivity
6 - Plopadop - could get my vote, plop seems to have put his nose in just enough to be in the big picture but not actually stir the pot at all
7 - just a box that is round - same as plop, not my best town lean for now lol
8 - Clownpiece heidy - def trying harder than last time, maybe cuz Zenith isn't in the way, maybe because he needs to push an actual lynch
9 - XelNya the gif lord - beef with RB? never got any reading on xel's meta last game, so currently comparing here
10 - thesunfan of flags - charu? seems slightly out of character to humor 18 pages of bs lol, but idk sunfan well enough to say that
11 - THE Charu - sunfan? unless someone sheds osme light on his charuposting i think it will be really difficult to get a reading on him, though I'd tend to say this is standard. still digging through the plethora of posts so far lol
12 - Mashiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii<3 - null like tokzic
13 - 27ninjabunnies the lone bunny - seems to have a good handle here, one of my more towny leads but also she gives off the vibe she's good at pulling the wool over eyes.

my biggest focus' for now in no order are sunfan, charu, and bunny

If roundbox is in the same boat as Chariplop, why did you add "not my best town lean" to the read?

In what way has Clownpiece been trying harder to you?

looooooooooooooooooooooooooool

not really

remember how I was laughing at people for making these kind of reads on me?

lol this is the sunfan I know

this was partly tongue-in-cheek, but my accuracy thus far is 80% on D1

that's not a good reason for anyone to agree with me, but I can't really articulate why I'm getting those vibes from him

There are 10 Humans this game out of 13 Players, so the chances of him being Human from random chance alone is already approximately 76.9%! I am curious to know about why you're reading storn as Human though, if you can elaborate.

DBP- is now able to post as a wolf, which is good. Posts are good and I probably should have him leaning more town, but there were two different strings of posts where I felt like he wouldn't either arrive at the conclusion he arrived at or

darn this was the crux of my reasoning for believing he was human lol


okay i think ill take a shower now or something idk ill read the rest a bit later

[thesunfan]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

If wolves suspect someone is the hider, they would just kill the target the person is hiding behind. Obvious plays, man.

so? they would be doing this anyway and its honestly pretty easy to guess who someone would be hiding behind anyways

[thesunfan]

Re: TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

So sunfans plan is garbo since wolves will be able to alter their kill decisions if they know a player is targeting a wolf. If the hider targets the wolf, they die. The wolves will just pick from people who haven't chosen hiding positions, players who have chosen non wolf targets, and wolves can also look for people who have not been hidden behind and make decisions based off of that. Everyone hypoing vs a soft. The decision is pretty clear in my eyes as to which is more beneficial to town.

Softing is something that already gives wolves potential hidings from the hider, and even if more than one person does it, so long as the wolves are paying attention, which it is always better to assume that they are, then you're essentially suggesting the same thing that I am????

Yes, it does in one way or another, give the wolves someone who is never the hider because they softed that they would hide behind a wolf, and they lived. So what? There will still be plenty of people out of the pool, so long as everyone doesn't claim that they will be hiding behind a wolf, which shouldn't happen.