Live tribal didn't help me downplay my threat status at all. There is still a chance Ron would consider tying the vote if I lose the challenge, especially if Pomfrey also loses the challenge.
I knew it was gonna be the fang, i dont know why i wasted an extra minute filling in the rest of the dropdown puzzle.
I forgot that g comes before h in the alphabet
And completing my arc from the beginning of the season, I spelled phoenix wrong AGAIN. If I lose by 4 seconds and get voted out Angelina had better enjoy that in the jury forum.
BUT i guessed that there would be a posting component and shaved some time off by having tabs open with the numbers 1-100 (I had to add in 9s). And I did as good as ive ever done on a crypto, I feel confident that I'm faster at jigsaws and unscrambling than these people and i spotted the fake clue basically right away.
Draco probably cant beat this, Ron would have to be perfect and Pomfrey might be able to, but she would really have to be at her best.
Last year's looked a lot tougher but the winning time was well over twice as long as mine here so at the very least I will be able to say I put in just about my best effort in the FIC
I was doing to update my rights of passage as soon as I won immunity to make them more accurate but then I remembered that saying accurate statements is antithetical to my entire approach to this game.
There might be some value in letting my fellow FTC players think the wrong thing about my relationships with the jurors. For instance I've been claiming I had a fight with Lockhart on his way out when we actually had a really genuine positive conversation where he said he was rooting for me and we shared our respect for each other. If having the wrong information about that disorients ton and Draco at FTC it only helps me.
Some things I did to overprepare for that FIC:
- researched last year's FIC and spent more than half an hour on that cryptogram itself.
- did about 20 practice cryptograms while looking up online what the best crypto strategies are. Wasn't solving any of them very fast.
- did about 10 practice dropdown puzzles
- Listened to an entire season (~9 hours) of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast where they practically went through the chamber of seacrest line by line analyzing it as if the book is a religious text.
- Queued up 100 tabs with word filters from 1 to 100 on my backup laptop in case there was a posting component.
- Listened back to the story from challenge 5 because I recorded it when Cedric was reading it and I now have a 5 minute audio clip of Cedric describing chamber of secrets lore that I don't know what to do with.
- Downloaded and learned how to use a clunky piece of software that is supposed to look at two pictures and highlight the differences between them. So if it was a spot the difference like last year I could reverse image search it and input the game version and the original version. Unfortunately every version of the software I found required that both pictures are the same number of pixels.
- Killed all the roosters within a 10 mile radius
I have two questions about the chamber of seacrest:
1) Why didn't the school just buy some mature mandrakes once students started getting petrified? In chapter 6 it says that mandrakes are an essential part of pretty much all common antidotes so there must be plenty of other mandrake growers around supplying apothecaries and St. Mungo' s. When you've got students in mortal peril you really need to ditch the buy local schtick and go order some mandrake drought on Amazon.
2) It's great that Dumbledore sent a Phoenix and all to help out but I honestly think the real solution here is a different bird. Go find a bunch of roosters and release them to wander around the school and the basilisk would have been dead by christmas.
I've seen a lot of players lie cheat and steal all the way through games and then they reach FTC and do their upmost to give an honest explanation of their game.
It's like they think the game ends when the power shifts to the jury and you have to promote yourself objectively.
(not in ways that are easily disprovable by ron or draco, but if there's a way to compose a more compelling narrative about what I confessed or how prepared I was for the game, I'm going to make some myths).
