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Pop CultureJune 3, 2018

Survivor NZ, Week 7: Farewell to two of the biggest characters of the season

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Luke Harries dives deep into the drink of Survivor NZ week seven, including a shock exit and a tense mud challenge. Contains spoilers, obviously. 

Would you believe, we’ve already made it to the halfway point of Survivor NZ’s second season?! The first half has already packed in more drama, sassier villains and fresher pizzas than we saw in season one, and with the merge just on the horizon, this game is only going to get crazier. This week we marked the midway milestone with an emotional rollercoaster of an episode.

Let’s recap the questionable challenges and iffy mathematics, as we say goodbye to not one but two of the biggest characters of the season.

Kicking and Screaming

This week’s reward challenge started out like any other – the tribes rock up, Chissy shows them a couple of chickens, and the tribes hear the rules to a challenge recycled from past seasons of US Survivor. Kicking and Screaming is the name of the game this week, and it involves one tribe member holding on to a post, and two from the opposing tribe trying to pull them off, and back through the mud to the goal line.

Survivor is usually pretty good at ensuring that any challenges involving physical combat only pit men against men and women against women, and this week we see exactly why that’s a good idea. I was a bit shocked to see that Arun and Dave from Chani – two of the biggest guys in the competition – were tasked with pulling Eve from Khang Khaw off the post.

It was clear afterwards that neither Arun or Dave felt great about this; no matter how much context you put around it, at the end of the day what I saw was two big strong guys wrestling and dragging one woman through a pit of mud. The whole thing played out on screen in a pretty troubling way.

Josh thinks Dave’s muscles might be “just for looks” but either way this is a rough deal for Eve.

I was super impressed with how Eve, Arun and Dave handled the situation. Arun was pretty blunt with Matt. “That’s just crap mate,” he said. “We don’t feel good dragging females through the mud like that.” In the end, Chani made a quick decision to forfeit the challenge. Eve was in good spirits, and took it all on the chin, but honestly I think it sucks that anyone had to be put in that situation in the first place.

Adam and Dylan weren’t totally on board with their tribe’s decision. Adam thought his tribe was being “very dramatic” about the whole situation, and I really don’t think I need to explain the irony here.

I’d also like to quickly mention my gripe with the maths puzzle in the immunity challenge. The answer was wrong! If you don’t believe me, google it! Technically it works if you solve it sequentially, but you can hardly call that “primary school maths”, Matt. How will kids ever remember BEDMAS if their favourite reality TV stars aren’t expected to?

Dave struggled with the maths puzzle, but to be fair I’m not too good with fake maths either.

It really wasn’t Survivor NZ’s finest week when it came to the challenges – I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

We Farewell JT

In an unfortunate turn of events this week, we saw JT make the call to leave the game, after being unwell for about a week. In the first few weeks of the season, JT played the game hard, and he gave us the strategy and drive to win we so desperately wanted to see. I’m pretty sad to see JT go out this way. Since we didn’t get to see his highlight reel on the show, I’ve put together a few of my favourite JT moments.

Feud Update

After I went to all that trouble of making a graphic for this section last week, it looks like it’s all over for the Adam vs Dylan feud – well, at least until the reunion show.

This week we saw Adam working hard at Chani to convince the rest of the tribe to get rid of Dylan. I think Adam finally realised it’s not possible to actually blindside someone when you are constantly letting them know how much you hate them, so we saw possibly the only civil conversation ever between Dylan and Adam this week.

Adam looks almost… tolerant of Dylan. I think this is his finest performance yet.

Strat Chat

This week, Lisa headed off to The Outpost for Khang Khaw, checking yet another item off her Survivor bucket list. Going up against Dave in a puzzle challenge, it’s no surprise (sorry Dave) that Lisa managed to come out on top. Lisa won a ‘steal a vote’ advantage and, upon returning to her tribe, gave one of the worst performances I have seen in all my years watching Survivor. Even JT, in the throws of illness, managed to figure out the advantage within about 30 seconds.

Dave didn’t leave The Outpost empty handed though – the clue he found next to his puzzle led him to an immunity idol – the first truly hidden idol this season, which will give Dave a huge advantage heading into the merge next week.

Dylan seems pretty confident going into this tribal, since he really feels he’s become an honorary member of Chani. Unfortunately his tribemates don’t feel the same way, with literally no one trusting the poor guy. Going into tribal, it looked like either Matt or Dylan on the chopping block, and even with Dave and Matt’s secret bromance, it looked like it could go either way.

Tribal Council

I’m bloody glad that this is the last pre-merge tribal council, because I’m getting bored of everyone being so tight-lipped! I need drama! I need suspense! I need last-minute plan changes! Matt asks something like “Are you feeling confident tonight?” and someone replies with “you can never feel too safe at tribal” and then Matt says something like “is there a plan going into the vote” and someone will say “we’ll just have to wait and see”.

Riveting stuff.

Blindside Rating: 6.5/10

I think Dylan was genuinely feeling quite safe going into this tribal, and I still think Chani should have kept him around – Dylan was never going to win back the trust of Khang Khaw in a post-merge game, and he poses much less of a threat than Adam or Matt. It’s probably the most disappointing spot to leave – just shy of the merge. I was hoping we’d get to see Dylan pulling faces at Adam from the Jury seats for the rest of the season, but no dice.

The Adam vs Dylan saga has come to a close (for now). I will be tuning in next week with great fervour to find out who or what will be next in Adam’s firing line.

Chisholm-ism of the week

“Definitely worth a nudge” was the deeply confusing way Matt described the mystery prize of this week’s outpost challenge. I tried googling “worth a nudge” for more clarity, but all I found was a Tripadvisor review for a Newmarket cafe by a user named “Durry-357”. Based on context I gather that a “nudge” is a good thing, but really, who can be sure?

Survivor NZ Quick Stats

-34 – The correct answer to this week’s maths puzzle

8 – The number of days I’m guessing those chickens will last.

2 – The number of castaways heading home this week.


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Pop CultureJune 3, 2018

House Flipper is the renovation simulator for the eternally renting millennial

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Born after 1980? Going to be renting your entire life with no end in sight? House Flipper is the game to simulate a renovation future you’ll never see. Adam Goodall reviews.

When I was a kid and my parents made me go to Mitre 10 Palmerston North with them, I would go straight to the part of the store where they kept the house paint. In that part of the store, Resene (or Dulux, or maybe Cabot) had set up a computer kiosk. Members of the public could only use one programme on the kiosk. In it, you were asked to pick a pre-furnished room in a house that looked like it had been built for a four-page spread in Better Homes and Gardens. You were then given a palette, the full range of Resene (or Dulux or Cabot) house paints. Tap a colour, tap a wall or ceiling or floor, watch it change from a reserved white to a powerful purple.

I’d play on that kiosk until my parents found the hose or lawnmower or whatever that they were after. I loved it.

Spot the Buble!

The first house I sold in House Flipper was a one-bedroom rescue. The victim of an electrical fire, it needed some serious remedial work: the walls were crumbling, the carpets were grey with ash and the doors were rotting in the frames. I went to work. I painted the walls sharp green, stripped out the bad carpet and replaced it with complementary beige, retiled the bathroom, mounted new weatherboards on the walls outside, installed a new shower and a new toilet and a new wall-mounted television. I put a poster of The Rock’s 2006 Xbox and PS2 game Spyhunter: Nowhere to Run on the bedroom wall because I like to leave a piece of myself in every house I renovate.

I spent two hours and $5,000 renovating it. I watched the sun fall and rise on the house as I worked. I sold it at auction to an artsy woman named Veronica for a $20,000 profit. She was disappointed there were no flowers in the house, but not that disappointed.

House Flipper is a renovation simulator that’s been near the top of Steam’s global bestseller charts for two weeks running. You play a young entrepreneur looking to make a fast buck on the housing market, buying houses, doing them up, selling them on to a loose cast of archetypes for a tidy profit. In between you pick up odd jobs for extra cash, cleaning out garages and renovating homes so people can move their grandmas out. This is the formula that did it.

Spot the Buble, again…

It makes sense, though. House Flipper gives you the freedom to design a house you’d want to live in. It lets you paint it the way you want. It lets you knock down interior walls and put up new ones. It lets you put up pictures without worrying about what the blu-tack or nails might mean for your bond. It lets you take photos of your house then sell it on, getting your foot on a property ladder that you can never fall off.

House Flipper is all about that fantasy of doing easy work and earning easy money. You can buy a house for $40k, renovate it for $5k and flip it for $60k without negatively impacting the housing market. There are no quick time events you can fail, no unreasonable demands from your buyers, nothing more complicated than clicking and holding the left mouse button. You have a level of control over these houses that is almost impossible to imagine in real life if you’re a millennial born into an international housing crisis with no signs of slowing. The apartment I live in will always have boring cream and grey walls, but I can paint this three-room townhouse ‘Amaranth Adventure’ and no landlord’s gonna be able to stop me.

This freedom is limited, though. House Flipper asks you to perform the role of renovator through rote patterns of highlighting, clicking and holding, and these patterns get gruelling as the houses you buy get bigger and bigger. Tiling a bathroom: buy a pile of tiles and put them on the floor, click on the pile, highlight a section of the wall, click and hold, repeat until you’ve run out of tiles in the tile pile, buy another tile pile and start again. Installing a toilet: click on a glowing screw or piece of plastic and hold until the animation has completed. Installing a shower: like installing a toilet, but it takes five times as long.

It’s not Buble, but it’s no better.

You can’t change the property’s blueprint, either. You’re allowed to renovate within the four walls you’re given, but no further. You’re allowed to tear down the interior walls, but the exterior walls stand strong against your sledgehammer. You’re allowed to extend the bathroom or make it smaller but you can’t change its location – someone who came before you, someone with more freedom than you, set the fixtures.

This isn’t a Sims-style ground-up home design simulator. It’s more like Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 or Farming Simulator 2018 or that programme on the kiosk in Mitre 10, one with boundaries and repetition and incremental progress. There are no limits to how your business can grow as long as you stick around and accept the limits to how you perform your business.

Typically in these types of simulator, the limits to how you play aren’t designed to be purposefully stressful: they’re designed to be calming, even meditative. Here, though, they’re constricting. Like that kiosk in Mitre 10, the design expressions available to you are ultimately shallow. Wall tiles come in a handful of colours, but none of those colours matched the bright, summery aesthetic I wanted for the first house I renovated. I painted that bathroom white. There’s only one kind of shower, only one kind of washing machine, only one kind of mirror. You don’t have that kind of control.

Spot The Rock – invariably better than Garfield or Buble.

There’s very little scope for discovery or surprise, and House Flipper doesn’t even seem all that interested in playing against that, in embracing the meditative state of performing labour digitally. You can upgrade your renovator, but the upgrades are almost exclusively for speeding up your labour – paint faster, tile faster, do less to finish your odd jobs. If the game knows that its animations are tedious, slow and pointless, what’s their worth in the first place?

I always complete the odd jobs. When I finish, I hang a picture in the person’s house, taken from the pictures I’ve downloaded over the years. A libertarian bro got a Minion meme about communism in his lounge. A couple with a three year old came home to a picture of Detective Pikachu complaining about cramps. A scuzzy party dude bought a house full of Michael Bublé pictures. It’s my way of asserting control over these places, of saying that I designed this the way I wanted to. That’s what keeps me coming back to House Flipper, even with all the frustrations. I liked its utopian promise that I could do what I wanted to a place, that I could design it the way I wanted and that I would be rewarded for doing so. Whether you’re a kid or a twenty-something renter for life, that promise is nice for a little while, even if it’s fake.

You can buy House Flipper on Steam.


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