Green Room - Week 5 - Day 3

[clauderainsrm]

There is poll happening right now:therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1155039.html

and another prompt that will be closing in a couple days  https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1154191.html

. Which means the two who survive the write off are going to have a small window if they hope to survive very much longer.

Honestly, there's hardly anyone with an entry in right now.  So maybe everyone is in danger!  :D 

Going back over some old seasons reminded me of ways I would give out incentives to people who submitted early. Which is funny, because there were still people who took pride at being the last ones to get their entries in!   :D

***

How has your week been going? Any plans for this weekend? 

Comments

[roina_arwen]

A theme is a cool idea, I’ve never really considered it, but so much (for me) depends on the prompts, you know?

Meta commentary is SO not my thing, lol!

[gunwithoutmusic]

The meta commentary was only in I think the second season I played? Back in the days where we were several tribes of like forty people each. I was young and got a little disillusioned with how important the social aspect is to Idol, and I would get frustrated when I would see entries that I deemed "not good writing" getting tons and tons of votes because they had made connections and people liked them.

It's easy to fall into that trap, and I think that a bigger part of the reason I've been not performing as well as I have in the past this time around is that I've been severely neglecting the social portion of it than it is about going strictly poetry (although everyone knows that poetry is like, the worst thing you could focus on if you wanna win).

Thankfully I have matured quite a bit in the years since then and learned that it's better to focus on myself than to worry about what others are doing, and to also find the good in every post by every player. All of us are here putting in our best effort and we should all be recognized for that. Are some players more practiced than others? Sure. But I look at some things I wrote when I was in my late teens and early twenties, just getting started, and I think, 'Gosh did I think that was good?' so it helped me understand a little better.

Now (well, this season is a little different since I haven't been as active) I try to encourage everyone and I always vote for everyone. Not particularly strategic but I love this game and I just wanna see everyone succeed.

As far as theming goes, I usually find that it helps me keep focus. It offers up an extra challenge but also helps with idea generation. When I played Survivor Idol, all of my entries up to the end were based around hikes I had taken, so when presented with a new prompt, I would start from, 'what hike have I done that I can relate this concept to?' rather than having to start from the topic alone. It can be limiting, but also fun to try and fit Gary's wild prompts to the idea I already had. :)

[roina_arwen]

I got a little disillusioned with how important the social aspect is to Idol, and I would get frustrated when I would see entries that I deemed "not good writing" getting tons and tons of votes because they had made connections and people liked them.

YES. This. It’s a writing competition but just like in the Survivor game, there’s always a social aspect, and on LJ especially, the size of one’s active friends list definitely played a part when posting the poll thread. Possibly (probably) many people would only cast a vote for their friend. Ideally, they would read and vote for others as well, maybe decide to join the community, but I’m not sure how often that happened.

I will say that while I don’t vote for ALL the entries in the poll, I typically vote for at least 75% of them. We have some seriously good writers in this group!

[murielle]

I remember your hike entries. I really enjoyed them.

I haven't been able to keep up with the social aspect of the game, either, this season. I'm focusing on the writing and the reading. When we have hundreds playing I cannot keep up and I feel terrible about that. This is a manageable group for me. ;-)

[gunwithoutmusic]

Yeah, I'm definitely not commenting as much as I used to - I'm reading but definitely not keeping up so it sort of would feel weird to be commenting on someone's third entry when we're on week 6. Maybe I should anyway, lol

[muchtooarrogant]

What, I thought we were all doing this for the comments. LOL

Dan

[roina_arwen]

My opinion is that comments are nice to get, and while some folks will go into detail about what they liked, others will just say they enjoyed it, and that’s fine too. It’s nice to know people have read your work and hopefully liked it!

[roina_arwen]

The size of this group is just about perfect - enough to keep one occupied but not so much as to be overwhelming. I’d be lost without my trusty spreadsheet, especially when reading pre-poll, when they are posted in random order!

If you don’t have a spreadsheet, I highly recommend it! Just use the last poll so you get all the names in alphabetical order, then remove the folks who got eliminated this week. I believe there are only 36 left.

[murielle]

I wish I were that organized. I just check to see if I've commented, surest way to not read and comment twice. :-)

[roina_arwen]

For me, it’s not just remembering if I’ve read it, but also if I’m going to vote for it.