Pokemon, Broken Noses, and Cheese

Wow this has been a busy week for me. Let me spell it out for everyone!

NEW POKEMON!  I'm not exactly the blogging scene for Pokemon this year, however nonetheless I shall spell out my thoughts, especially since Oz got Pokemon last live episode.  It's on my mind for sure. :D

I really expected Yveltal to be a dark/flying type to be honest.  It's a huge, big, badass bird of prey like vultare thing. Xerneas being a pure fairy kind of threw me for a loop.  I kinda suspected that it could be fairy, but I expected another type to go with it.  However, it seems that they are both based around Life and Destruction.  Very interesting...

But the new Pokemon <3  I'm sad that the cotton candy Pokemon is exclusive to X (because I'm for sure getting Y) but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get from a trade.  The squids peaked my interest the most.  The evolved form looks like an upside-down version of the pre-evo.  I can't wait to check it out!

If anyone was reading my twitter updates yesterday, they also know that my youngest cousin was sent to the hospital.  He thought it was a great idea to go halfway down the stairs in a fabric box thing that we have laying around.  I would like to say that he broke his nose doing it, but other than that he is doing great!  I live with seven cousins of various ages and it's always crazy over in this house.  However I'm happy that he's doing great!

One more thing- I have decided to watch Big Brother 3 for the first time.  The whole Lisa/Dani thing integrated me for sure but also I kind of want to watch something new.  Got to say, I finished the first week and I already miss Lori <3  However Amy may just be my favorite contestant of all time.  Southern Belle that loves Cheese and is just hilarious <3

Also she's amazing on Twitter as well. :)

ONE MORE THING!  Did you read the top ten on Oz this week?  If not then WHY NOT?  It's written by me and Ben Powell just because why not?  Here is the link to it.  It's over the top ten immunity wins of Survivor History.  So hurry up and read it already!

Well, that's all for now!  

~Heather~

Heather Has a Podcast.

Hey everyone!  Just wanted to do an update to remind everyone that if you haven't listened to my Ozlet Interview go do so!  I have the longest interview out of everyone (an hour two minutes) and I realized that my Oklahoma accent is strong.  What can I say, I'm a southern gal.  

Anyways, here is the link to my interview.  Here are a few things I'd love to comment on it.

~ I can do a better Cindy impersonation if I actually remembered the car quote.  
~ If I do have a fan club I don't know about I'd love to join it.
~ I should have remembered LividManda when I was talking about the cartoon deal.  I did get in a mention of "Hold Up Bro" Though!
~ Should have sung praises about Sophie.  Sorry folks!
~ Mine has to be longest Ozlet interview at an hour and two minutes.  So yeah. 
~ Ben getting my name wrong actually reminds me that both my old Cross Country Coach and former Manager both screwed my name up at one point.  My Coach called me "Ashley" while my Manager called me "Jennifer". Ironically, Jennifer, Ashley, and Helen are all names of fourth place Survivors. 

And of course, you could tell that mine was right before Ben Powell's interview because some of the things I said in mine was brought up in his.  My interview was just that awesome. ;) (Although I do have to say that Ben's was great too.  Great as in I agreed with him most of the time)

Finally, a present to Ben W. for being awesome in the interview.  I loved the praise he gave this blog even though I haven't messed with it in a while so yeah.  

Haha I love this picture.
Anyways, I'm working on a few other things, some for the blog and some for Oz.  So I'm going to be busy.  Also a few other things IRL that I need to take care of.  I'm finally getting my drivers license for one, which means my chance of dying on Tulsa streets have skyrocketed.  Awesome.

Not much to report today!  Keep a lookout for a few projects of mine however!  If anyone has a Survivor Top Ten request send them in!  I'll put pen to paper and get some ideas structured for you!

~Heather

Flop of an anniversary...

Hey folks time for another Heather Writing essay thing.  Now for a rant that I've had... for a long time.

Why Heroes Vs Villain’s isn’t an amazing season

(A.K.A Heather’s HvV rant)

For two years straight in the Survivor Oz poll of “Greatest Season” Heroes Vs Villains has walked away with the award.  This gets me confused.  I have always wondered what is the aspect of HvV that appeals to a lot of fans.  It’s not the case of the returning player aspect (reminding that my favorite season is Guatemala, a season which features returning players) but rather what happened and the edit of the season in general.  I’ve had a long standing HvV rant that I would happily speak had anyone asked, although this is the first time I’ll post it in its entirety, rather than speak it.

The first part of what is wrong with Heroes Vs Villains started before the season even aired.  The season meant to represent that tenth anniversary of the long standing series only used players that were seen in thirteen seasons.  This is without considering that no original players from Guatemala nor Micronesia was present and completely disregarding the full returning player cast of All Stars this is only ten seasons out of eighteen.  If I convert this into percentage only 55% of the seasons of Survivor were represented by an original castaway from their season.  Among these seasons with no representatives include the very first season of Borneo.  Heroes Vs Villains was set up as the big season celebrating “every” year it’s been on the air, unfortunately HvV failed what it was set out to do before it even aired. 

The second part is the castaways themselves.  Nine of the twenty players had already received their second chance on another season.  While many a people complained about the inclusion of Danielle (runner up of Panama) and Candice (best known for being the first contestant to willing switch tribes) I was complaining about seeing Parvati, James, Amanda, Rob, Rupert, Stephenie, and Cirie again.  I usually give a free pass to Colby and Jerri because of the format and they are the original Hero and Villain respectively of Survivor, however that is still seven people who I believe had no business being there and whose spots could have easily have been filled by players that we have yet seen again, perhaps from seasons that weren’t even invited to the tenth anniversary season of Survivor.  So far, this is two points of facts against the season in the casting alone and we are just getting started.

Heroes Vs Villains failed in being a tenth anniversary season before it even aired.  However it could be a great season even without that fact looming over it right?  Wrong.  I have the confessional count of HvV and it isn’t good. (Special thanks to my friend SleepTight from SurvivorSucks for Confessional data.)

Confessional counts are handy in getting a rough idea on the edit each player got for that episode.  Let me point out some surprising facts on the confessional data of this season.  Let’s start with Sandra and the fact that she spent six episodes in a row without a single confessional, or how about the fact that Courtney’s confessionals per episode average is .44 which is because she only had four confessionals despite on being the second jury member.  How about Russell getting 68 confessionals for the total of all of the season, with the second highest being Rupert’s 38?  How can this be a true All Star season when we see someone get a single digit confessional despite making the merge?  You get a sense of a balanced edited season if the confessional per episodes are around the same number, but Heroes Vs Villains was anything but a well edited season.

Now let’s get a look at each contestant who participated in this season.  For one, the “epic” characters in this season can be counted on one hand.  The Heroes tribe overall had the personality of a wet piece of cardboard and the Villains tribe had a few good characters, but are also overshadowed by wet pieces of cardboard.  I’d like to believe that casting was a huge factor in this, but the edit sure didn’t help with this either.  Also I’d like to point out that nearly every player had their reputation take a giant nose dive, this is completely ignoring the fact that no one but Jerri even improved on a past finish this season, discounting Candice and Sandra who finished in the same placing.  Let’s go through them all shall we?

Sugar- The “robbed” fan favorite from Gabon finally seen as annoying and grating and booted first

Stephenie- The underdog of Palau and played a strong game in Guatemala showed her self-centered Guatemala self and was second voted out.

Randy- Strong challenge performer in Gabon who was voted out third for being a challenge liability.

Cirie- Seen as a robbed mastermind from Micro and Panama but was idol’d out by Tom for being a threat.

Tom- The beloved winner and leader of the unstoppable Koror in Palau to the person on the outs and was voted out

Tyson- a lovable goofball in Tocantins who “voted himself out” by swapping his vote from Russell to Parvati (which by the way that choice had nothing to do with Russell.  From an interview (here) he pretty much had said that he wanted Parvati gone over Russell and switched his vote based on his own choice.  It was only edited the way it was to trick people into thinking that Russell influenced anyone out there.)

James- Does this need explaining? Okay, the fan favorite from two different seasons becomes a giant bully and gets voted out because of an injury in the only season were he didn’t make the merge.

Rob- Even though he did grow from his ASS expectance and became a father since then, he was voted out by the people he thought he could trust the most just before the jury.

Coach- While he was still the same old goofy Coach from Tocantins, he was thrown under the bus for screwing with the villains order of how they sit people out and had he was voted out in the same spot Tocantins he wouldn’t have made the jury.

Courtney- The main comic relief from China who was almost completely ignored and had a grand total of 4 confessionals

JT- The lovable fan favorite and winner from Tocantins to Dumbest Survivor ever.  Does this need explaining?

Amanda- While I’m not sure if Amanda had much of a legacy or exactly why she’s a hero, but this is the first season she gets voted out in.  Amanda is pretty unimportant in the long run. :/  

Candice- While people wonder why she is included, she was a record breaker in her original season for multiple reasons, but in HvV she pretty much did the same thing with flipping and didn’t improve in standing.

Danielle- Panama’s runner up that backstabbed Terry who got into an alliance out of desperation with Russell, left in tears because of Russell deciding to vote her out.  Also got a whopping eight confessionals despite being a huge part of the reason why Russell lost again.

Rupert- Not as big nor epic as he was in past seasons.

Colby- Probably took the biggest hit out of everyone in this season, the challenge dominator of the second season to “superman in a fatsuit”.

Jerri- Okay, Jerri is the biggest expectation to this list as she was widely loathed by everyone but really came together as someone who we can root for and love.   

Russell- Lost the exact same way as he did in Samoa.  See Russell is probably the polar opposite of a great player.  All he did in both of his seasons was flash around idols like crazy and that never impresses me because any idiot can play an idol to get out someone like Tyson or Kelly.  He didn’t know how to play Survivor as he voted out his own allies (Daneille) and made fake promises to those that weren’t his allies (Colby, Rupert) just to add the sting to it all.  How anyone can say that he was robbed is beyond me, except for the fact that HvV was just Samoa part two.

Parvati- I think this was the best showing of Parvati, who had a personality aside from one dimensional flirt.  However like Russell I have to point out that her double idol play was really overrated and could have played by any idiot who realized that their friends were in trouble.  Also just like Russell she wasn’t robbed.

Sandra- I hate that it was only her second win that won her the respect that she deserved in Pearl Islands.  She won using the exact same strategy in Pearl Island and Sandra finally getting the respect that she deserves is easily the best thing about this trash season.

Tl:dr this season was full off underwhelming characters completely ran on Idol Shenanigans.  If someone wants to point out a reason why this season is better than the 17 other seasons that I placed above it in my personal season rankings go right ahead and E-mail me. (HeatherNS17@ymail.com)  However a lot of seasons are better than the Russell show 2.0 and the season of character suicides.  Not to mention that Heroes Vs Villains was a flop of an anniversary season that only included reps from 55% of Survivor Seasons. 

  

Thank you for your attention.  Hope you enjoyed the truth tea. :)

Heather

Turning older

It was my birthday yesterday on the seventh.  I had a ton of fun and the fun still is coming.

I'm sorry for dropping out of this, I've been extremely busy with school and various things I had to get done, oh and Computer failure.  I've been also working on a few projects and stuff so yeah there is that.  However I shall keep it going throughout the month. :)

Has everyone voted in the Ozcars?  Well if you didn't then it's too late but tune in tomorrow for the announcements on who won.  I am so rooting for Brian for best pre-merge!

I recently finished my Cook Island rewatch, and I hated it. :)  I love Cristina though.  I love her now.  Also the amazing theme of the explorers theme with the Hidden Immunity Idol being a compass and the voting urn being a messenger bag. 

With the result of Caramoan, I just don't like the season for various reasons.  Mostly because it sucked.  Phillip was horrible, the reaction from it all was horrible.  It can be truly called "Half-ASS" because it is literally All Stars with the bitterness with just half the cast!  Congrats Probst.  You got what you wanted.  A season with horrible characters with most of the camera time, interesting players shafted by the edit, and a winner that you would gladly have sex with.  I hope you are proud of you "creation" because it's pissing me off.  Enough of this returning player nonsense.  Clearly Probst no longer cares about the quality of the show anymore.  It's just tiring.  I'm hoping for the best with Blood Vs Water but I have the lowest expectations with it.


So thanks for listening to my Summer rant!  I'll post more in the future btw. ;)

Dead Week... Again

Things I'd said I do- Tocantins rewatch (not up), Caramoan recaps (missed last weeks), long huge essay (one part is up).  I'm sucking at this aren't I? ;_;

Well I was sick last week.  I lost weight in fact I was so bad off.  So sorry for that hole.  Oh, and I'm no longer posting my recaps here.  They shall be on the S-Oz website unless I miss an update.  I think it's rather redundant to post it twice.  So, it'll either be here or there, and if it's there then it shall be linked. :)

Oh and my personal life updates because you want to know them:  My first year of college has less than a week left.  This Monday I'm moving back home to the Tulsa/Skiatook area.  I've done great!  And I'm coming back next year!  Oh and this summer I shall be rewatching a lot of Survivor seasons to review my list.  I'll be rewatching all 26 (yes including Caramoan) seasons in a random order. :D (god help me if RI or ASS is first...) then I'll write a little something, something about them.  So, I'm suspending my Tocantins updates after my fourth one (I have half of it done).

OH YEAH I'M ALMOST DONE WITH SCHOOL FOR THE SUMMER!!!

So yeah, I've been really busy.  Sorry I'll fix it.

Love yah always-

~Heather~

404 your Tribal Council is missing.

Sorry this was late.  I was busy most of the week with school and such.  I'm almost done with the year so I'm trying to set up for next year, as well as some other things.  So yeah. 

I'm also been working on the next Tocantins update.  I'm not leaving you guys out in the cold!

THE BLURB

First off, I didn't watch this live.  It was storming so hard we were under a tornado watch, so I just saw it on CBS later that night.

First off, Phillip left.  This episode is as good as gold to me for that. :D

As soon as they get back for the last Tribal Council, both groups go off and regroup to figure out how to move on from there.  In the SRU group, Andrea seems to be taking charge of those discussions; they decided that Renyold(s) is next.  Over at the three amigos, they decided to figure out where the next idol is.  By the way, why must they insist on planting those things?  I’m already tired of the Hidden Immunity Idol.  I say play it once and done.  Really good Survivor players shouldn’t need to relay on idols.  However, that’s enough on that tangent for the moment.

Remember that one preview that hyped up a Dawn meltdown, one that would drive her to quit?  It turns out that she has a retainer and in fell into the water and she can’t get.  She goes and calls for Brenda while having a breakdown moment.  I wanted to give her a hug.  Brenda finds it for her, and Dawn loves her for it. It’s such a cute moment, and Brenda finally gets a confessional.  I’d love to hear more from her speaking of.  Let’s say I got tired of Cochran and Phillip getting every single confession ever.  Although I didn’t like the Dawn bashing.  Not a fan.  However a great night’s sleep is what Dawn needed, and she was better in the morning.  However she looked ready to take out Andrea of all people.

So we get to the reward challenge, and it’s one from the last season of the Philippines.  Malcolm, who has won this challenge before, used Penner’s strategy of finding all the bags for everyone before moving on, however Reynold picked up on that and found his team’s bags a lot quicker.  Add in the fact that Sherri took forever on the Orange team, thus making this a victory for the purple team of Cochran, Phillip, Erik, Reynold, and Dawn.  Even though everyone seems to enjoy the reward of a swimming pool and food, Erik is annoyed by Phillip not using the shower and instead dirtying up the pool with the mud/rice combo from the challenge.  I would be too.  Phillip doesn’t really mesh well with the group now does he?

The immunity challenge is one of my favorite challenges from a past season.  Pearl Island’s merge Immunity challenge has come back.  Phillip decides to not participate in this challenge because of an incident that he had with water.  I call some shenanigans on that because he participated in the last immunity challenge, which had him submerged in water as well.  Oh well, Reynold wins anyways forcing Phillip and his not so stealthy Stealth R Us to change their target to Malcolm… except that he finds the rehidden Hidden Immunity Idol right in front of them.  They still are planning to split the vote between him and Eddie however just in case.

However, at tribal council, Malcolm pulled a fast one.  

He gave his other idol to Eddie so that the both of them could be safe at Tribal Council, as well as vote out Phillip.  He announces the plan, but Phillip tells everyone to stick to their guns, although both Brenda and Dawn want to take the chance to vote out Andrea.  However that was not meant to happen because of the seating arrangements, and the idols get played with Erik also voting for Phillip (or rather “Fillup”) and for the first time Phillip gets voted out of Survivor.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think this was the best move for Malcolm.  His best bet was to sell out Eddie.  Rarely does a minority alliance all make it to the end, the only examples I can think of is the Aitu tribe in Cook Islands and the Jalapao Tribe in Tocantins.  It’s much more common to see the less threaten person of that alliance to make it far and win, like Chris and Danni.  Also if Eddie and Reynold are on the jury, and Malcolm is up in the final three, they will be guaranteed jury votes for him unless Malcolm really screws up with that somehow.  Even then, I don’t think that he should have said that they were going to vote out Phillip.  Spring up a surprise or something.  I’m not a huge fan of this move and it will be another overrated idol based move to match Parvati’s double play six seasons ago.  There have been bigger and better moves in Tribal pulled without an idol play.  Leann, Brendan, Tyson in Tocantins, and Jamie are all vote outs that I would regard better than this one.  I really hope that they won’t rehide the idols, simply because there is no need to keep on dragging them around and using them to substitute social game play in a minority situation.  However we shall find that out next time won’t we?  

I didn't see the preview, but I'm wondering who shall be next.

Oh, and I need to us this Malcolm Tweet as the Tweet of the Week. "If anyone needs me, I'll be wearing nothing but war-paint dancing on top of a burning cop car leading a chorus of God Bless America"

God bless.

UPDATES

I'll be working on the second chapter this week, and the Tocantins update will be ready soon.  Not much else to say except for just hold on!  

Love

~Heather~

Sherri goes Sarah Palin

I lied.  Oops.  Tocantins recap will be up by Saturday hopefully.  You can blame the idiots in PoS for making me reply to sarcastic, witty remarks until it's not funny anymore.  F up guys.

Jk, I love you people.  Now to the recap. :D

THE BLURB

You’d think that after Corinne got blindsided, that Malcolm and friends would be worried about the game a bit more.  However they try to get back into the game not worrying about the sinking ship that they are on.  I loved the fact that CBS hyped up an alliance that was going to eat each other the first vote off of the merge.  Super-Alliance, sure let’s just call it that.  Malcolm wants to try to flip Dawn (who he believes is on the bottom of Stealth R Us) and try and get Sherri on his side.  

About Sherri, she’s now on team favorites.  Philip even gives her a nickname.  Sherri seems to have this weird, roller coaster of an adventure.  She was in power on Gota, then no more, and then gets separated from her main alliance on a swap, and finally she gets targeted at the last vote.  She’s now turned her back to the remaining fans.  It’s fueled by revenge, but it’s something that makes sense.  Because of this, she won’t go with the other fans because they sold her down the river the last vote off.  Malcolm going to Dawn about this is also a bad, bad idea.  Just ask Julia and Corinne, two people that were both voted out because of them telling Dawn something like this.  She must be such a lovable person that people are literally lining up just to tell her their secrets.  It’s a rather smart strategy, and it’s keeping her off the chopping block but putting other on, without even alerting people to what she’s doing.  She clearly knows what’s up.

The reward challenge is from a challenge in Nicaragua, the one where Fabio peed in the pool.  The reward is a classic beautiful waterfall with food.  After a few, nail biting rounds, it was the all male purple team of Eddie, Reynold, Michael, Erik, and Cochran that won it.  The guys try and get Cochran into the all male alliance, saying that they could fight against the female’s flirting, because you know that Dawn and Sherri have been playing that card all season long.  However Cochran isn’t into the guy thing and would rather be on twitter and hang out with the gals and Phillip.  By the way, Erik is still in this alliance?  After he voted out Corinne?  This season doesn’t make much sense.

The talks about strategy on each side brought up a lot of names.  On team Favorites Plus Sherri it seems that Malcolm would get voted out, while on team Mostly Manly Men, Andrea was identified as the leader of Stealth R Us, which makes sense because it’s not Phillip whom I think is nothing more than a mascot when it comes to that alliance.  Also Eddie and Andrea seem to have an adorable bond, though I think Andrea is just playing it up on the show to get more info.  Good on her.

Now we get to the immunity challenge and they are reusing another Palau challenge.  I’m not a huge fan of Palau, but Palau had a lot of water challenges so the more the better I guess.  The winner is the lovely Brenda.  Which, btw why has she gotten so little airtime in this season?  I hate the stupid jokes about “Who?” and “Wait, there is a *insert underedited player here* in this season?” because is too old and too beaten to the ground, but she is pretty much no even there.  It’s really odd that even winning immunity didn’t give her a confession, which I believe may be a record?

Now comes the pre-Tribal scramble, so the Fans and company want to target Andrea because they all know that Phillip is a huge joke.  However Eddie tells Andrea this in one of the oddest conversations I have ever seen, who goes to her alliance who decide to change the vote from Malcolm to Michael, as Michael would be the least likely to play an idol.

However, when we finally get to Tribal Council, it is by far an interesting night.  First of all, Phillip was on season 22 named Redemption Island.  Did you know that?  Second of all, Andrea had a bug in her hair.  Don't worry, Erik saved her from it.  Third of all, Reynold tries to play his idol, but Malcolm tells him that they voted for him and to give him the idol so that presumably Andrea goes home.  However it was revealed that Malcolm voted for Reynold for some reason.  At first I thought it was a failed attempt to get out Reynold to try and prove his loyalty to the other favorites, except that they all voted for the safe vote, Michael, instead.  However I'm not exactly sure.

However, Michael is made the first jury member of the season instead.  I wonder if this is going to be an eight person jury final three then.  I think I said this before, but nine jury members are way too much for a two person finalist, and I’m like in the 3% of Survivor fans that don't really care about how many finalists there are.  It would be refreshing to see a final two but I really only pay attention to the jury myself.

Well, that’s really all I have on this episode.  Next time it looks like something is up with Dawn.  She just needs a hug and to send off some more bread.

Today's tweet of the week comes from Malcolm! 

My most impressive Survivor feat to-date was convincing Eddie to actually vote against a hot girl. I think I broke his brain.

UPDATES

Did you love my first chapter on the big essay that I'm doing?  Yes?  Yes?!  Awesome.  Part Two I shall get up next week.  I'm not sure how many chapters there will be, but it will cover most, if not all, of the underdog winners, no matter the edit.  Like I said, next chapter I'm planning on taking on two of the biggest come from behind winners in Chris and Danni.  

Oh yeah.  I also found this cool website.  You can pretty much just ask me questions on there.  I'll answer anything.  Here's the link.   Get asking.

That's all for now!  See you next time. :D

~Heather~