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[Pa1mer]

Childs. Childs. Childs.

Chariots of the Gods, man. Hell, they practically own South America. Taught the Inca everything they knew.

Also that plan is really retarded.

I ain't gonna test myself because I already know I'm not one of them and it'd be a waste of time we don't have. I figure we should all just sit down and have a nice friendly conversation and see what comes out.

[Childs_Armitage]

Fine.

You test someone else, and we'll test your punk ass.

Palmer.

[W Brimlair]

Well I don't really like Mr. T's plan, and not just because I want to know what he did with the real Childs. Are Thing's all racist and think that all african american's say Mother Fucker and talk in jive all the time?! David doesn't do that, remember the spawn cartoon? Well, maybe he does say Mother Fucker sometimes...

Well actually, his failsafe plan "might" sort of make sense, but I'll have to think about the mathematics of it. How few people is few enough for you to want to failsafe it, Childs? It seems to me like the chance for a random dynamiter to hit a firebatflamethrower and really fuck over us humans is too high if the numbers get low and we know we still have one out there.

Plus, would a thing kill even clear a dynamite? If it's down to low numbers, maybe a dynamite Thing figures he can win if he clears himself for a turn and gets to assimilating that night too. What's worse is a human kill proves nothing either if no one knew who to throw at. It feels to me like that is giving too much power to the Things.

I'll run it through my Apple IIe style visual simulation software and see what the cute little pixely Human and Thing cells say, but it doesn't sound like much of a plan to me. I think when it gets to that point, smart assessment of the history of the game and of the attitudes of the remaining players sounds like a better idea to me than a random dynamite blow out.

You know what - and this isn't a race thing - maybe the mechanic at the antarctic station shouldn't be making the plans for a bunch of scientists!

That doesn't make me think you're a thing though, Childs. But I'm watching you; you and Clark.

WATCH CLARK

That's not a vote, he just says it like that in the movie.

[Childs_Armitage]

Cracka.

[Fuchsia]

Palmer, I like your plan, except it's too predictable. It cedes too much power to the Things: they know we'll be splitting our attention between tested and untested targets, and since the pool of untested targets is much larger than the pool of tested targets, they can safely convert untested people to maximize their chances of success. For the first few days, we should spend all our time searching untested individuals for the initial two things... unless we change our minds tomorrow, in which case we should go ahead and retest one or both test subjects from today. We should not commit 100% to a single course of action until it's mathematically impossible for things to avoid losing at that point.

I'm torn on the subject of self-testing with the bonus test. I don't think we should commit to it, necessarily. It's true that a Thing that gets the test is never going to test itself, so committing to the self-test agenda is guaranteed to find a thing. On the other hand, that means we're basically giving up one of our testing options in favor of a random player's affiliation being publicly revealed. Each person needs to ask himself: Do I think that the group can successfully identify a suspicious individual more than ~1/6th of the time? I feel like we should be able to, but considering how this has played out in the past, maybe we really are better off letting one of our testings be determined by Friday's dice.

[Fuchsia]

I don't know why I addressed that to Palmer; it's a response to Childs's plan, and should have been addressed as such.

[Pa1mer]

The test is a waste if it don't hit a Thing. Letting it tick down like a time-bomb would be fine if we're only worried about catching the originals, but there'll probably be a whole shitload more by the time that happens that it won't do a damn thing about. "Clearing" someone don't prove jack shit, it's just another miss and another place for a Thing to hide... or not hide, the better to waste our time testing and re-testing the same damn person.

[Garry_Gurton]

Now you listen to me.  The self test is REALLY POWERFUL.

If the randomly selected tester is human, then they can test themselves, fine, and no undue suspicions are raised.  Nobody has to play the "Did he waste it because he was A CROW OR SOMETHING?" game, and nobody can claim some kind of damned lie about whether they were or not.

If the randomly selected tester is, I dunno, a NorWESKEEEEER or whatever though, then gentlemen that man is fucked.  He's either got to show his DANGEROUS hand or try and convince us that his wasted test was in good faith, at which point we benefit because we then know what one person is and then also that the tester is either a monster or HE'S INSANE.

Just my opinion as, you know, the MASTER OF this station.

[Childs_Armitage]

My biggest concern is a cleared person getting turned.  I'll champion the cause of re-testing until my dying day (which won't be today, god damn it).  I'll concede that retesting old humans won't find the originals, so I'll simply submit that no person should ever be considered a bad test target.  Everybody goes right back into the suspect pool at the start of every day.  Agreed?

[Windows 7]

Goddamn radio's dead, and given that we're just standing around flinging shit for the first couple days, we should stick with the self-test option, and then go from there.

If that person refuses to get scanned, we either votescan him or just straight out dynamite him and use the scan on someone else.

Regarding re-scanning, we need to keep the option on the table just to keep the Thing honest.

[Fuchsia]

Now you listen to me.  The self test is REALLY POWERFUL.

If the randomly selected tester is human, then they can test themselves, fine, and no undue suspicions are raised.  Nobody has to play the "Did he waste it because he was A CROW OR SOMETHING?" game, and nobody can claim some kind of damned lie about whether they were or not.

If the randomly selected tester is, I dunno, a NorWESKEEEEER or whatever though, then gentlemen that man is fucked.  He's either got to show his DANGEROUS hand or try and convince us that his wasted test was in good faith, at which point we benefit because we then know what one person is and then also that the tester is either a monster or HE'S INSANE.

Just my opinion as, you know, the MASTER OF this station.

Guys, this whole scenario is something we've explored before. If you haven't taken the time to read through that already, you should do so.

The reason the self-test breaks down is because if you have a flamethrower, you do not want to waste time testing yourself. I fully expect one or both of our night-killers to burn someone every night, and getting to look at someone during the day is a way of ensuring that they're burning an appropriate target.

Like I said before, committing to the self-test means that we're basically admitting we have no way to identify suspicious behavior and we'd just as soon leave identification up to random chance. Sure, there's a 1/6 chance that self-testing is guaranteed to hit a thing, but there's a 1/2 chance that the person with the test is innocent, has a weapon, and needs all the info he can get about who to use that weapon on.

My biggest concern is a cleared person getting turned.  I'll champion the cause of re-testing until my dying day (which won't be today, god damn it).  I'll concede that retesting old humans won't find the originals, so I'll simply submit that no person should ever be considered a bad test target.  Everybody goes right back into the suspect pool at the start of every day.  Agreed?

This deserves reiteration.

Goddamn radio's dead, and given that we're just standing around flinging shit for the first couple days, we should stick with the self-test option, and then go from there.

If that person refuses to get scanned, we either votescan him or just straight out dynamite him and use the scan on someone else.

Regarding re-scanning, we need to keep the option on the table just to keep the Thing honest.

As much sense as this makes in the abstract, if we'd done this last game, we'd have dynamited one of our flamethrowers. As I said before, there are reasons to oppose self-test aside from being on the thing team. I'm not going to assume somebody is guilty just because they refuse to self-test, but it's definitely something to keep in mind.

[Fuchsia]

P. S. voting we test MacReady.

[Windows 7]

That 1/6 chance is going to increase very quickly, and it's the easiest way to consistently flush out Things.  We still have the votescan, and role isn't revealed with the scan, so we're not going to totally out a flamer, even if the self-scan seems like a waste.

The problem is getting people to consistently submit to the self-test.  Unless we commit to this course of action, Things will be able to vacillate their way out of the test.

Perhaps the action hierarchy should be this:

Self-scan
If no self-scan, demand that the person immediately scan someone else
If other scan hits innocent, immediately votescan the person with scan power
If other scan hits Thing, consider votescanning that person anyway, just to keep potential sacrificial Things honest
If person refuses to scan at all, just dynamite the fucker and scan whoever looks suspicious

[Fuchsia]

It's not a question of outing the flamers; it's a question of giving the people with the actual ability to kill things the most info. I also feel like committing one of our scans to always scanning the person who got the extra kit that day makes us too predictable and puts too much weight onto the question of whether the person who got the kit yesterday got assimilated last night. I'd prefer we sidestep that whole debate by focusing on activity level or other measures of suspicion.

[Pa1mer]

My biggest concern is a cleared person getting turned.  I'll champion the cause of re-testing until my dying day (which won't be today, god damn it).  I'll concede that retesting old humans won't find the originals, so I'll simply submit that no person should ever be considered a bad test target.  Everybody goes right back into the suspect pool at the start of every day.  Agreed?

No argument there!

I'm not saying we shouldn't re-test. But instead of worrying about who might be a Thing later, we oughta be figuring out who's a Thing now.

I don't like how free and easy Windows is with his dynamite. Fuchs, what you got against MacReady?

[Fuchsia]

I've been doing some math.

The probability of wasting a self scan is 5/6 (83.3%) on day 1. Ignoring the possibility of character death, the probability of wasting a self scan on day 2 is 81/110: about 73.6%. The probability of wasting a self-scan on day 3 took me two pages of work and comes to 2831/4500, or about 62.9%.

But actually, there are two tests each day; let's assume that we randomly select one person out of the 12, only excluding the person who's self-testing that day. Taken together, the chance that neither test finds a thing is 68.18% on day 1, 53.55% on day 2, and 40.03% on day 3. So, assuming we're self-testing, it will be the 6th scan of the game before we have better-than-even chances at finding a thing.

It turns out that I'm not capable of calculating odds for the scenario in which we ensure that every test is on a subject that's never been tested before. If we assume that every potential target for assimilation is equally likely, regardless of whether they've been scanned or not, then we'd have much better chances of nailing a Thing than under the previous scenario, but this would require us to commit to the course of action without the Things realizing we'd done so. So, I'm more inclined to always scan a new target, but I'm not committed to it, and I don't really care who we scan first, as long as we scan someone.

I don't like how free and easy Windows is with his dynamite. Fuchs, what you got against MacReady?

He hasn't posted since the initial roll-call. We can talk about the merits and dangers of different philosophies of testing until we all die of consumption by Things, but our endgame is entirely dependent on people with weapons knowing who is and is not suspicious. If you don't participate, the only way to know if you're suspicious or not is to test you. Palmer may be hesitating to go along with the self-test, but at least he's talking, and his refusal will be one more data point for the guys with guns to consider. Meanwhile, there are people in here that we basically know nothing about. We should test them.

[Pa1mer]

MacReady isn't talking, sure, but neither are Bennings, Clark, Copper or Norris.

Still, gotta start somewhere. MacReady gets my vote.

[NaulsTheCook]

Whats the happening yall. I was cookign some fried chicken when yall were hustling about MacReady or whatever.

[Windows 7]

Not voting until I see Palmer use his scan.  Thing has a lot to gain by minimizing the information we get.

[Pa1mer]

Couldn't agree more.

I flip out and test Nauls.