i can't believe i actually made the merge

i can't believe i'm suddenly in a fucking great position

i can't believe this is all happening after an entire game of fighting my ass off to stay every round

i can't believe it's not butter

i will get this merge tribe named after a pokemon if it fucking kills me

oh my god

i can't even trust fucking kat

i think i'm actually about to go full tilt into an alliance with julia and spencer and this is absolutely hilarious to me

Dana Lambert (11:53:57 PM): Can you just tell me one thing lmao
Spencer Duhm (11:54:27 PM): Sure
Dana Lambert (11:54:38 PM): Did you really buy a mutiny when you went to Ukiyo
Spencer Duhm (11:55:50 PM): I have a vote advantage
Dana Lambert (11:55:55 PM): I KNEW IT
Spencer Duhm (11:55:59 PM): Hehe
Dana Lambert (11:56:16 PM): As soon as you told me the story about sending your mutiny to Michele I was like
Spencer Duhm (11:56:19 PM): I'll probably play it this round
Dana Lambert (11:56:23 PM): Yeah okay not at all
Spencer Duhm (11:56:27 PM): Hahaha

so much has HAPPENED in one night i can't even wrap my head around it

i recorded a drunken video confessional last night but it was fairly incomprehensible so i will spare you and record a new one, sober, tonight

how is this what's happening

yikes @ me winning immunity and everyone seeing i said MYSELF as dark horse, should have thought that one through. not the sort of challenge i especially wanted to win

okay, so. i made a video but it was twenty minutes long and i think you would all rather just read about it tbqh.

the day of the tribal that sent brad home, spencer came to me and asked if i wanted to work together in the merge. i'd already pretty much planned as much so of course i said yes. he suggested an alliance of us and gervase. i told gervase in case he was having doubts still, and then spencer started talking to gervase, everything worked out wonderfully. spencer asked how i'd feel about working with jonny and marisa, which i was of course totally on board with. then he asked how i felt about kat and sydney. i said i would want to loop kat in at least, but definitely not sydney because i don't trust her. this is where things began to get weird. spencer thought kat was more loyal to caleb and eliza, which sounded super fucking silly to me if i'm being QUITE honest, and told him as much. then...

Spencer Duhm (5:51:50 PM): you should ask kat
Spencer Duhm (5:51:54 PM): who has the idol

idol? what? what idol? he tells me caleb has an idol that he bought the first time he was at ukiyo, presumably from Sakai pooling their points after winning the second challenge. and, apparently, he told kat. i talked to jonny, who apparently thought he had already told us about said idol (okay sure), and we agreed spencer was probably trying to make me doubt kat. i talked to kat after this and told her that spencer told me about caleb's idol. in hindsight her reaction was a little sketch, but i blew it off and told her that spencer thinks caleb told her.

fast forward a couple hours, and kat tells me she saw what spencer accidentally said in the merge chat, so i check it out.

[Merge!] (10:33:31 PM): (twisted_spencer) So Kat is telling people I told

wtf?

Dana Lambert (10:50:17 PM): Any clue what that's about
Dana Lambert (10:56:16 PM): ?
Kat Edorsson (11:01:40 PM): me being dumb trying to save caleb but i guess nobody wants to do that

so OBVIOUSLY this sends up major red flags! what! save caleb? what the fuck? i talk to spencer and he tells me that it's going around that spencer told me about caleb's idol, and my heart drops into my fucking stomach.

Dana Lambert (11:14:00 PM): Kat please please please tell me what's going on here because Spencer told me things that worry me lol
Kat Edorsson (11:14:09 PM): what did he say

it doesn't matter what specifically he fucking said, kat. clearly he told me something you said. just tell me what instead of having to drag it out of you because holy shit that doesn't make me feel like you trust me at all!

Dana Lambert (11:14:26 PM): He said that it's getting around he told me about Caleb's idol
Kat Edorsson (11:15:18 PM): i'm sorry. I really like Caleb and I was so scared when you said they wanted him out so i tried to save him. He thought Julia was with him but Julia told just told Spencer everything

i'm just so fucking crushed by this whole situation. here's kat, who i've trusted with just about every detail of my game up to this point, selling me out in an instant to try and save caleb. i got her to admit that caleb did in fact tell her about the idol. so that's fucking great. i can't even trust the one person i thought that i could do so implicitly. i didn't realize exactly how much our interests differed in the merge because we'd talked this whole time about working with jonny and the rest of original ki. i thought my closeness to spencer was helpful, not threatening.

so, i'm pretty tipsy at this point in the night, because i began drinking the second brad left in celebration, and i decide that if i can't trust my closest ally, i need to set up a contingency plan.

a julia-shaped contingency plan.

now, a brief interlude to sort of explain myself here, because my confessional to this point has involved a solid stream of criticism towards julia and spencer. they are two of my favorite people to actually speak with conversationally. spencer is straight up my favorite person in the game. i could go on about how much i adore him until you were all convinced i was moving to the UK to have his gaybies, so i won't. julia is lovely and spunky when she isn't... trying to get me to admit i have an idol :) :) :)...... but i love talking with her too. i've just had a lot of frustrations with them in the past because of the situation on Sakai v2 and the lies that they felt necessary for them to perpetuate. let's continue, shall we?

Dana Lambert (11:30:49 PM): I know you're stoned and I'm drunk but sometime tomorrow we should have a Serious Game Talk lmao
Julia (11:31:02 PM): hahaha
Julia (11:31:06 PM): that sounds awesome
Dana Lambert (11:31:09 PM): I think we need to be on the same page because I think we have similar interests we need to be on the same page with
Julia (11:31:15 PM): id you wanna have someone rn i'd be for it
Julia (11:31:18 PM): i compeltely agree
Julia (11:31:23 PM): what did you have in mind? ;)
Dana Lambert (11:31:58 PM): Well I think we both very much adore and want to work with Spencer and we both adore each other but were in positions that didn't exactly benefit being 100% honest with each other
Julia (11:32:26 PM): i think that would work out GREATLY
Julia (11:32:33 PM): im so glad you said that

basically i start telling her my side of things, that i really don't trust kat anymore after she sold me out with the intention of selling spencer out, and i need to regroup. i push to both her and spencer that i think an alliance between the three of us would be a really good idea and they both, of course, agreed. i think spencer and julia are in a similar situation that me and kat are, where they very much want to work together but things began stacking up with them needing to be on different sides. having an alliance of three with me gives them both a little more wiggle room. i know they'll likely prioritize each other over me, but i do feel like spencer trusts me more strategically. the group chat gets made, although we didn't talk in it much yet, and nothing notable really happens for the rest of the night besides talking to spencer as i get more drunk and he should be asleep because it's fucking 6am there.

oh, also, at one point i got spencer to own up to having a double vote instead of having bought a mutiny that he conveniently passed to michele right before she quit because i'm not a fucking dumbass and that was a blatant lie that i wanted to clear up.

~sleep time~

i wake up to a group chat sydney started of original ozato. yikes! at this point my plans are to blindside sydney because i don't trust her in the least. she's stubborn and aggressive and that's not the sort of ally i really want to have. sydney begins pushing an alliance of original ozato, gervase, caleb, and eliza. i immediately know that i have zero interest in this alliance, and i strongly doubt gervase would either. kat occasionally pops in to back sydney up, although she knows i surely have no plans of being true to this proposed alliance, and she tells me in private that she's just supporting sydney so she doesn't get mad at her lol w/e. i raise concerns about gervase and how hesitant he would be to work with sydney and she just keeps not understanding why my concerns are relevant, refusing to accept any solution but this one. the issue, i think, is this: sydney seems to think she knows her exact route from here to the finals, and she refuses to accept that there is any possible way these plans could go wrong. sorry, sydney, i want your ass out NOW.

i talked with gervase and, when i told him about sydney's idea, his only response was "lol", which might have well been "fuck no".

i later let spencer in on what sydney told me, once i'd taken a good long several hour break from talking to anyone about the game. we agreed i should tell julia so i brought it up in the group chat. this helped in making julia feel like i really trusted our alliance - now named boy problems after the latest single by pop goddess carly rae jepsen buy emotion on itunes - while also trying to make her feeling excluded from the other side. this seemed to work, if only enough to plant doubt.

briefly, jonny popped in and i debriefed him on the mess that the merge had become. so that was fun. i told him just about everything except the alliance with julia and spencer. :~)

the challenge came along and holy shit was that a disaster. james and jonny had gervase and i at the top of their cutlists which was pretty annoying to deal with. i understood that they needed something they could safely leave for a public challenge but shit like that could drive us towards the other side if they weren't careful. luckily, the other side was cutting us too, so it was fine! hooray! we were straight up outnumbered. marisa tried to be political and take out the people who weren't at the challenge, leaving me, gervase, and spencer to take out the other side all on our own and that clearly failed. it was interesting to see how things shook out towards the end, but i doubt there will be lasting repercussions. the biggest surprise of the night was that i won the second necklace for getting the most correct answers. it's not the best challenge for someone like me to win, because i'm trying to blend in here and now i just exposed myself as having pretty solid awareness of the game as a whole. i really wish the full list of who got which answers right hadn't been posted and if i knew that would happen i probably would have straight up thrown the challenge, but it is what it is!

spencer made a group chat for original ki, myself, and gervase, and we settled on sydney as the vote, much as i had hoped. things sounded pretty solid! gervase brought up eliza as a second option, as she had been courting him for an alliance. later, privately, we talked it over.

apparently eliza was pushing an alliance of me, gervase, eliza, kat, caleb, and EITHER sydney or julia. gervase and i, of course, have no plans of that being a thing at all. unfortunately this means that he's more inclined to vote eliza out so he doesn't have someone he's been lying to left in the game. i have the same situation with sydney. she'll be furious if i vote against her regardless, and i'd rather have sydney mad on the jury at final 10 than mad still in the game. i made an effort to convince gervase to boot sydney, knowing from jonny that original Ki was considering moving the vote to eliza to make sure gervase and i would vote with them not knowing we're going to regardless.

Dana Lambert (10:48:09 PM): The tricky thing is just figuring out Sydney or Eliza
Dana Lambert (10:51:17 PM): I feel like if we vote out Eliza we might be locked into sticking with this side until they can pick us off, but if we vote out Sydney then we still have the option of flipping if Ki wants to vote for Kat or something and we can just tell Eliza we're still down but we wanted to split Sydney/Kat first
Gervase Peterson (10:58:58 PM): That's true
Gervase Peterson (10:59:10 PM): I've made it clear to Eliza already that I don't really trust syd
Gervase Peterson (11:02:44 PM): So I think she'd be fine if we voted her out

i started talking to kat and she was paranoid that spencer and caleb were solid because caleb told her they made up. i knew from spencer that they had done that, but that he wasn't buying it whatsoever, and told kat as much. caleb is gullible, and spencer is persuasive. eventually, though, something interesting happened...

Kat Edorsson (11:04:15 PM): im wishing i was on the other side now. Caleb is scaring me
Dana Lambert (11:04:36 PM): I mean
Kat Edorsson (11:04:38 PM): and marisa/ spencer have been nothing but nice to me the past couple days
Dana Lambert (11:04:39 PM): You could be
Dana Lambert (11:06:02 PM): JFP still wishes he could work with you and we have room to manuever
Dana Lambert (11:06:32 PM): JFP/Spencer will try and make a move against each other eventually
Kat Edorsson (11:08:12 PM): alright well dont say anything to them yet, cuz if its spencer who is lying to you that would circle back around to caleb. we'll just stick with this train wreck situation for now and see what happens when the votes are read and go from there

this is music to my fucking ears. having kat back on my side with options would be great. what i told kat is essentially the reason why i feel so good about this side: jonny and spencer have to realize the other is their biggest threat right now, and as the numbers dwindle, one of them is bound to take a shot at the other. as long as one of them is around, i'm not the biggest threat in the room. the other side is a mishmash of nonthreats besides kat, and julia if she counts, so it would be harder to blend in. i just really hope things work out in my favor all around.

SO that's where things are at. sorry for the novella. i'm sure i missed something but so fucking much is happening and it's exhausting tbqh.

i'm so done right now

the vote has flipped onto a unanimous vote on gervase because everyone in this game is stupid and i hate them

who would have thought i'd get so upset over gervase leaving

my favorite part of the night: when spencer made a group chat with jonny with the express purpose of having backup in convincing me i'm ~trusted~ and ~important~

alright spencer, jonny just sent me messages i sent you that you sent to the Ki group chat, so please just fuck right off