[Anders Ofvergard]

Hej mates! So sorry for my disappearance and delayed confessionals but I’m back, beautiful than ever

1 - How did your first week of gameplay, challenges, tribals, and blindsides go? Happy to finally have a weekend break?

2 - What did you think of the tribal swap? Shocker, much? Are you happy with the outcome?

3 - Now that you actually have some time this weekend to get to know your new tribemates, what are your opinions on them now? What are your thoughts on the forced swap power? Would you use it if you got the power?

4 - One last question since the Twilight Saga is on Netflix are you excited or no?

[Mark]

1. First week went fine, though it ended on a poor note for me getting essentially voted. I was definitely happy for the break though.

2. The vote out being a swap out was an interesting twist, though I was a little disappointed to fall victim to it. A whole new group to try and cozy up to. I sort of decided it wasn't worth putting the effort in to get to know this group, I'm already starting from a disadvantageous and that really isn't my forte to begin with. I had hoped on my last tribe they would value a good challenge performance and want to keep me around for that reason. On this tribe I decided to just try and make sure we won the challenge, but I worked towards that end too little and too late.

3. I have very few opinions about my tribe, I haven't really talked to any of them very much at all. I get the impression they're content to lose this next challenge because I'll be easy to vote out, which is a shame. I saw no effort from anyone to bring me up to speed on tribal dynamics which would be essential if we were hoping to complete this challenge in the standard fashion. The one thing I will say though, is that Jericho is either very obtuse or just doing a good job playing along with my underhanded tactics. I did lay it on a bit thicker than I really should have when talking to him though, so I just have to assume its the latter for now.

Still, my strategy for this challenge will probably fail because I waited so long to pull it off. I was just hesitant to go hard on it right from the start in case it went totally against the spirit of the game and would invalidate the challenge. I eventually figured I could just ask Jon if it was cool, but that was earlier today and most of the tribe already did the challenge ahead of time it looks like, which seems a little odd to me, since we have up until the deadline to gather all the info we need to make the optimal decision. Why lock in an answer ahead of time if a conversation a day later might recontextualize things?

4. Nope. I saw some of the first movie at one point, and I have no real desire watch it or any of the sequels.

[Mark]

Well, I guess we won the tribal ranking challenge anyway without the need for my strategy. I'm a bit surprised that multiple people didn't pick up on the fact that me creating an order in which we would take the challenge was supposed to correlate with the order in which we would rank our tribe. What else could I have possibly been intending to accomplish?

And Jericho especially, my original pitch to him felt just short of throwing in a "wink wink" with its subtlety, but he really just thought I was super into planning unnecessary start times.

[Mark]

Also, anyone reading this has probably noticed a trend of me mostly talking about the challenges. I've sort of come to realize that that's kind of the part of this I'm having fun with, even if my strategies sort of fall apart at the point where I need teammates to collaborate on them. Socially I'm already on the outs in multiple tribes, so rather than actually tackle that issue and solve it (which would take a lot of work and probably still not work out for me) I'll just continue to show up for these challenges and, hopefully, stick around by helping my team win them.

[Mark]

I also had an opportunity to bid on the Tribe Swap power today. I would have gone for it if it were cheap, but the price quickly rose to 8 coins. The only real reason to buy it would be if I wanted to swap early (not particularly) or if I wanted to prevent someone else from triggering an early swap (also not particularly). I'm happy to just sit on my coins for now, maybe having a few in my back pocket will prove useful later or maybe I'll just have a significant inheritance to dole out when I get voted out. Either outcome is preferable than investing in an advantage I would make very little use of.