Banned Books Mafia - Entities Win! Congrats Meesh, Seryanne and Rose!

[el Nynaeve]

I'm going to feel so justified later in saying I told you so.

[Liathiana]

Vote Count:

 

Seryanne (2): Ellianora, Meesh

Ellianora (5): Seryanne, DSage, Alanna, Rose, Lily

 

Not Voting: Luddy

 

Ellianora, the innocent Candide by Voltaire has been BANNED.

 

 

Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that — contrary to the teachings of his distringuished tutor Dr. Pangloss — all is not always for the best. Alive with wit, brilliance, and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.

 

This classic French satire lampoons all things sacred — armies, churches, philosophers, even the doctrine of optimism itself. In search of "the best of all possible worlds," Voltaire's ever-hopeful protagonist instead encounters the worst tragedies life has to offer and proceeds to describe each in a rapid, meticulous and matter-of-fact way. The effect is equal parts hilarious and shocking. (Imagine Monty Python circa 1759.) The book's phrase "Let us eat the Jesuit. Let us eat him up!" became an instant catchphrase. The Great Council of Geneva and the administrators of Paris banned it shortly after its release, although 30,000 copies sold within a year, making it a best seller. In 1930, U.S. Customs seized Harvard-bound copies of the book, and in 1944, the U.S. Post Office demanded that Candide be dropped from the catalog for major retailer Concord Books.

 

Day 4 has ended. Night 4 will end as soon as all night actions are in or by Oct 26, 7 pm CST.

 

Good luck!

[Toy and Minion]

Yep, that's it.  I'm done.  I completely lost my ability to play mafia.

[LilyElizabeth]

Well, we know who the mafia are now.... Seryanne, Luddy, and Rose.

 

 

[Alanna]

I love Candide! Just thought I'd throw that in.

 

Well, this sucks. This has also officially been the weirdest mafia game ever.

[Alanna]

Of course, I've only played two games, so that's not saying much ;D

[Toy and Minion]

I have never in my whole history of playing mafia been this so off base.  I need that vacation...

[LilyElizabeth]

Since you won't be playing, DSage, will you look over the game I'm writing for me? (When it's done, of course.) Unless you'd rather play. I'd rather have you play, of course. It won't be for a little while yet.

 

 

 

 

[mnwhiterose]

So, because we are the only ones that our Finder has not looked at, we are automatically seen as mafia? What if one of the people who has been seen as innocent is the Godfather?

[Toy and Minion]

The only possible one who could be mafia that I've viewed is Meesh.  And that is simply because I did not get a book name from her, just an innocent verdict.

 

Alanna and LilyElizabeth are clean.  End of story.

 

[Toy and Minion]

And yes, whiterose, you are in my sights.

[Liathiana]

It was a bad morning for the books. They had tried so hard! But in the end the prejudice and fear of the Entities prevailed.

 

First to go was Ludmian, the innocent Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

 

 

"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.

 

Huxley's 1932 work — about a drugged, dull and mass-produced society of the future — has been challenged for its themes of sexuality, drugs and suicide. The book parodies H.G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods and expresses Huxley's disdain for the youth- and market-driven culture of the U.S. Chewing gum, then as now a symbol of America's teenybopper shoppers, appears in the book as a way to deliver sex hormones and subdue anxious adults; pornographic films called "feelies" are also popular grown-up pacifiers. In Huxley's vision of the 26th century, Henry Ford is the new God (worshippers say "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord"), and the carmaker's concept of mass production has been applied to human reproduction. As recently as 1993, a group of parents attempted to ban the book in Corona-Norco, Calif., because it "centered around negativity."

 

 

The Entities laughed. They celebrated. Each looked at the three remaining books and grinned.

 

 

Seryanne, the Angry Parent, gleefully beat Alanna, the innocent The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain with a rolling pin and then threw it into the washing machine.

 

http://javamama.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/adventures_of_huckleberry_finn.jpg[/img]

 

Huckleberry Finn had a tough life with his drunk father until an adventure with Tom Sawyer changed everything. But when Huck's dad returns and kidnaps him, he must escape down the Mississippi river with runaway slave, Jim. They encounter trouble at every turn, from floods and gunfights to armed bandits and the long arm of the law. Through it all the friends stick together - but can Huck and Tom free Jim from slavery once and for all?

 

In 1885, the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned the year-old book for its "coarse language" — critics deemed Mark Twain's use of common vernacular (slang) as demeaning and damaging. A reviewer dubbed it "the veriest trash ... more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people." Little Women author Louisa May Alcott lashed out publicly at Twain, saying, "If Mr. Clemens [Twain's original name] cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them." (That the word nigger appears more than 200 times throughout the book did not initially cause much controversy.) In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York followed Concord's lead, banishing the book from the building's juvenile section with this explanation: "Huck not only itched but scratched, and that he said sweat when he should have said perspiration." Twain enthusiastically fired back, and once said of his detractors: "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." Luckily for him, the book's fans would eventually outnumber its critics. "It's the best book we've had," Ernest Hemingway proclaimed. "All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

 

Despite Hemingway's assurances, Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most challenged books in the U.S. In an attempt to avoid controversy, CBS produced a made-for-TV adaptation of the book in 1955 that lacked a single mention of slavery and did not have an African-American portray the character of Jim. In 1998, parents in Tempe, Ariz., sued the local high school over the book's inclusion on a required reading list. The case went as far as a federal appeals court; the parents lost.

 

 

Then Rose the Religious Zealot threw the Bible at Lily the innocent Doctor, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

 

 

In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

 

This 1970 memoir — the first of Maya Angelou's five autobiographical works — angered censors for its graphic depiction of racism and sex, especially the passages in which she recounts being raped by her mother's boyfriend as an 8-year-old child. (In the book, which was later nominated for a National Book Award, Angelou alludes to the Bible, writing, "The act of rape on an 8-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator can't.") The American Library Association ranked it the fifth most challenged book of the 21st century. The book's title refers to the 1899 poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the nation's first prominent African-American poets. In 1993, Angelou read an original poem at Bill Clinton's Inauguration, becoming only the second poet in U.S. history to do so after Robert Frost's 1960 speech for JFK.

 

 

And finally Meesh, the Godfather/Governement Official stamped a big red BANNED stamp on DSage, the innocent Cop 1984 by George Orwell. Then they all went out for brunch.

 

http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/richmond/2009/07/31/1984.jpg[/img]

 

Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written. Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, and the Thought Police - the language of 1984 has passed into the English Language as a symbol of the horrors of totalitarianism. George Orwell's story of Winston Smith's fight against the all-pervading party has become a classic, not the least because of its intellectual coherence.

 

It's both ironic and fitting that 1984 would join the American Library Association's list of commonly challenged books given its bleak warning of totalitarian censorship. Written in 1949 by British author George Orwell while he lay dying of tuberculosis, the book chronicles the grim future of a society robbed of free will, privacy and truth. Some reviewers called it a veiled attack against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet ruler's infamous "midnight purges," though, oddly enough, parents in Jackson County, Fla., would challenge the book in 1981 for being "pro-communist." The book spawned terms like "Big Brother" and "Orwellian" and continues to appear in pop culture — most recently as the inspiration for a political YouTube hit. The year 1984 may have passed, but the book's message remains as relevant as ever.

 

Summary of Events:

 

Day 1: Torrie is Lynched.

Night 1: Lily protects herself. Dsage investigates Alanna and finds them innocent. The Entities Ban Charis.

Day 2: Dsworn is lynched.

Night 2: Lily protects herself. Dsage investigates Lil, finds her innocent and the healer. The Entities attempt to Ban Lily and are foiled.

Day 3: Deadline extended by 24 hours but no majority was reached, Mystica was random lynched.

Night 3: Lily protects herself. DSage investigates Meesh, finds her innocent because of the Godfather role. Mafia targets Lily but fails.

Day 4: Ellianora is lynched.

Night 4: DSage investigatess Seryanne. Lily protects herself. The Entities nk Luddy. This makes the Entities equal to the innocents and thus their win.

 

Mafia quicktopic: http://www.quicktopic.com/43/H/nuxpDnRESPwR

[mmeeshal]

WOOOOOOOT! ;D ;D ;D

 

Lia, excellent game!  Thanks for running it! :D

 

I have a whole new list of books to read, too! ;)

[Seryanne]

Hooray! I can't believe we made it after my stuff-up :D

 

I didn't want to throw Huckleberry Finn in the washing machine though! *sobs*

 

Great game, everyone. Lia, thanks so much for running it, I really enjoyed it :D

Lily, well done on doubting me :D

[LilyElizabeth]

Thanks, Sery. You were the only one I was right on, though.

 

My ploy of protecting myself worked twice, but I knew it wouldn't work again. I never would have protected Luddy, though, because I was sure he was mafia.

 

Great game, Lia!

 

 

[Liathiana]

Thank you guys! ;D

 

I added a link to the Mafia quicktopic to the bottom of my last post if anyone is interested.

 

To explain something, the first night I gave DSage the innocence of Alanna and the name of her book. Then I worried about balance, it would be obvious if DSage investigated Meesh and I only gave "innocent" without a book name, thus making her role useless. I also worried having a Godfather in such a small game was a balance issue as well. I'm not sure I handled this well at all. The second night I told him I would again give an innocent/guilty with the role but that every night thereafter it would just be innocent or guilty. That way he had one chance to find the Godfather, if that role existed.

[Toy and Minion]

Yep, just my luck.  The only mafia I view is the godfather.  Ha.  I'm done for...I dunno, a long time.  Need to hike up a mountain and spend a hundred years in solitude and reflection or something.

 

Good game.  Bravo, mafia.  You just gave me the reins and let me ride the town right off the cliff.  :P

[Liathiana]

LOL *snuggles DSage*

 

Great game Mafia ;D

[Alanna]

I didn't want to throw Huckleberry Finn in the washing machine though! *sobs*

 

I guess I should agree since that was my book, but I actually really hate Huck Finn :P

 

Thanks for putting the game together, Lia! It was fun ;D

[mnwhiterose]

woot!!! We win! Great game, guys.

[el Nynaeve]

Well I did warn you people! :P

 

Good game though, really enjoyed it. ;D

[LilyElizabeth]

To answer the question as to why I continued to protect myself, I had two reasons:

 

1) My win conditions required not getting banned. I don't mind taking a hit for the team, unless I'm going to lose because of it. I want to win. It's a game. That's the goal, right?

 

and 2) It worked. ;)

 

 

[mmeeshal]

Yeah, as you probably saw in the QT, we had a lot of discussion over whether or not to attempt a night ban on you.  :D

 

It was somewhat infuriating to discover that my gut instinct to target DSage was a correct one, but of course what's done is done. :P ;)

[LilyElizabeth]

Yep. I saw it. You made me feel special! :)

 

And I'm really glad you thought I wasn't at the top of my game.  :P