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Magister Ludi

The normative aspect that I'm pushing is that expertise in a field should be conducive to answering questions from that field. I think this is a non-controversial point, and one that I think both Ted and Andrew Hart accept. The way many science questions are written now, especially at high difficul...

Magister Ludi

EDIT: double post

Magister Ludi

(For what it's worth, history questions generally fail to reflect what I learn in class, although since I do not study political or military history, that is to be expected, I suppose. I feel like I've gotten the most buzzes by thumbing through some political history books for fun as opposed to que...

Magister Ludi

I think there's an important difference between "people who read widely" and "people who specialize in an extremely narrow sub-area of a technical field." If anything, reading a lot of different books from different literatures is going to expose you to a lot of different author...

Magister Ludi

If anyone is looking for a free place to stay my basement has a couple extra beds and can accommodate a few people.

Magister Ludi

I don't know if this analogy was fair. In terms of what Jerry is saying about science questions, it makes sense to me, and I agree with Andrew and Ted that I think the literature at Nats was too difficult for the field (I frankly don't care about CO, I complained at the time, but I was wrong, so I ...

Magister Ludi

Ted, I have no idea what you're even trying to say. In all my exchanges with you, you have yet to put forth anything like a coherent theory of what should or should not be written about. I don't know what books you read and have never pretended to; I am restating, for the last time, my point regard...

Magister Ludi

However, I think your stance on literature ignores the reality of the field much more than does Ted's or Andrew's. If Ted is really suggesting that canonical authors and books are all people should be reading or are reading, or that they are all we should be asking about, then I understand brushing...

Magister Ludi

Andrew made the post I was going to make while I was writing it. Honestly, I don't know how many English majors need to tell Jerry what we study for him to believe us. Basically, a physics tossup on the Miller Effect is equivalent to a literature tossup on Joao Guimaraes Rosa or Vincente Aleixandre....

Magister Ludi

Is there any reason why a formal discussion thread hasn't been posted yet? I thought this was the best hard tournament I've played since CO 2008. While it definitely had the distinctive feel of Westbrook's style that over-emphasizes certain sub-distributions and neglects others, this was an exemplar...

Magister Ludi

Well, surely the best way to become a good literature player quickly is to read Atlas Shrugged and watch the movie as many times as possible. But short of that, the way I became a good literature player as a sophomore in high school (before I was a serious reader) was just picking a different book ...

Magister Ludi

Well, surely the best way to become a good literature player quickly is to read Atlas Shrugged and watch the movie as many times as possible. But short of that, the way I became a good literature player as a sophomore in high school (before I was a serious reader) was just picking a different book e...

Magister Ludi

While there's a lot of information still missing, I think contributors to QBWiki could do a better job accurately gauging the importance of topics, including their own selves, to quizbowl as a whole when they figure out how much text is needed to describe them. A QBWiki page doesn't have to be a co...

Magister Ludi

I remain unconvinced that even a prolific cast of ballot-casters knows what makes a player "good." My personal strategy has usually been to think about the players I'd least want to face , putting a little more emphasis on nationals-level questions than regular season (and of course, infl...

Magister Ludi

I'm not suggesting the high school rankings be run this way, but the collegiate player poll which would have more semi-retired players who aren't affiliated with any teams. As much as anything, the benefit of picking a committee would be preventing unqualified people from voting or preventing too ma...

Magister Ludi

Not to derail this "hilarious" thread with substantive comments, but reading all the discussion of the other rankings reminded me I wanted to post in this thread earlier. Basically, I think that whoever runs this poll should revamp the way it's done. As the poll stands now with only 7-8 ba...

Magister Ludi

I wasn't paid for Regionals 2010 until like 3 weeks ago and wasn't paid for Fall 2008 until seven months afterward, so we're still like a year ahead of schedule for average payouts.

Magister Ludi

Dallas Simons and I are on a team and are looking for teammates. Contact me if interested.

Magister Ludi

I am equally charmed and frustrated by your labeling of anything you have no interest in as "minor." In fact, that question on Indonesia had clues from two things: Max Havelaar and the books of Pramoedya Ananda Toer, who is basically the major Indonesian novelist of his time. It's quite c...

Magister Ludi

EDIT: Sorry I misread a post

Magister Ludi

I agree very strongly with Evan's argument. Last year in the HI thread I outlined my own writing philosophy as I believe that hard tournaments should have a range of difficulty in answers with the strong majority lying in the middle. I think it's fine to have a few questions on hard subjects testing...

Magister Ludi

Sorry to derail the thread, but Harvard had a hotel fuck-up and we are looking for any spare hotel floor space for two people to crash on. If any team has any extra space, a spare chair, or anything at all we would really appreciate it. My email is tedgioia [at] stapower [dot] net. Thanks in advance.

Magister Ludi

As a person who has been to a good number of operas but doesn't really get into memorizing aria names from operas I've seen, I also think it's important to try and ground arias in the scenes in which they appear (which can maybe alleviate translation troubles in some cases?). Some number of opera t...

Magister Ludi

Auroni is basically right. Aside from the transparency issues that listing Russian or Czech arias in the original would have caused, generally in the English speaking opera community these Slavic arias are referred to with English monikers such as "The Letter Scene" or "Lensky's Aria&...

Magister Ludi

The role of a tossup is to fairly differentiate which player knows the most about a given subject and this tossup and many author tossups at the ICT failed in this regard. Strictly speaking, this isn't quite accurate. There is a huge aggregate pile of "knowledge about any given subject" i...

Magister Ludi

(As an aside, people should stop writing questions on Harold Bloom because he is a mediocre critic who has managed his career so that he happens to be famous. He is kind of like the Ken Jennings of literary criticism, but thats an issue for another thread) I eagerly await that thread. Yeah, I'm sor...

Magister Ludi

So, I actually find this critique spurious. You seem to be saying "I've read some stories by Babel; therefore, a 'legitimate' tossup on Babel should only use lesser-known details from stories by Babel as its leadin." But I don't see how that's any more authoritative than the equivalent co...

Magister Ludi

Here's the Babel tossup: An Elif Batuman essay about this author "in California" discusses a conference attended by Peter Constantine, who translated this man's works into English. This author wrote about the death of the bees of Volhynia in "The Road to Brody," which appears wi...

Magister Ludi

I'll have a more thorough critique once I have a chance to look over the whole set at practice this week, but I'll mention a few things briefly here. First, NAQT must start giving aria titles in the original language, especially for tossups on lyric opera. I mentioned this to R. during the 2009 ICT ...

Magister Ludi

I thought the difficulty spread for ICT was one of its greatest strengths. I am strong believer that hard tournaments must have a range of difficulty for tossup answers and I like the idea of playing a national final with a tossup on Walden. I especially liked that the (very few) world literature to...

Magister Ludi

Well, I only had one profanity laced meltdown about question quality, which is a record low for me at a NAQT tournament. Seriously though, I thought this was the best NAQT tournament I've ever played, but I'm still annoyed that NAQT seems to ignore some of the most basic tenets of good question writ...

Magister Ludi

but not so much at removing things like the part of my article referring to the questions at ACF Nationals 2009 being "disastrous" (this being a setup to a joke whose punchline is no longer there, which Ted Gioia put in and which he himself may not actually believe). Sorry about that, I'l...

Magister Ludi

Oh, I wanted to single out UCSD's packet as the best (and most difficulty appropriate) packet we received. I'm glad to see Auroni et al responding positively to my overzealous critiques of THUNDER.

Magister Ludi

Not sure what's mysterious about all this: removing negative and funny things made the wiki less interesting and meant that people didn't want to edit it as much. So they didn't and now it's both boring and also useless. In particular, one of the things the wiki was most useful for was collecting s...

Magister Ludi

I personally also don't mind jokes, but I think the sailor scale thing (which I was the first person to remove, if you want to cast blame) is a bit more on the side of creepy than funny. Well, I find the fact you edit your profile so obsessively to include detailed accounts of your middle school ca...

Magister Ludi

I'll just say I agree with what Bruce said that I enjoy Ike's creativity in his writing and think it's much easier to teach someone to include middle clues or do other basic things rather than teach someone to be creative and to use proper research methods. I'll post one more time in this thread to ...

Magister Ludi

On the flip side, the world literature was representative of exactly the opposite of how people should write world literature and indulged in many questions on silly, quizbowl trendy topics like God's Bits of Wood, Inter Ice Age Four, Sabato etc. Also, I'm not sure why you're trying to get into an ...

Magister Ludi

On the flip side, the world literature was representative of exactly the opposite of how people should write world literature and indulged in many questions on silly, quizbowl trendy topics like God's Bits of Wood, Inter Ice Age Four, Sabato etc. I have often seen you criticize silly trends in worl...

Magister Ludi

Also, I'll say that the one thing I really appreciate about Ike's writing is that he will put in the work to find real clues. Ike is among the best in the game at finding substantive clues for subjects, especially in literature and social science/philosophy. I felt this tournament rewarded my knowle...

Magister Ludi

Going against the grain, I enjoyed this tournament quite a bit and Ike should certainly not feel "ashamed" of himself for writing it. It was definitely an odd playing experience as I had a bizarre statistical split, powering as many tossups as I got for ten, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I...

Magister Ludi

The stats should probably be changed to reflect that Matt Bollinger only played seven games and missed the second game against Magin's team, Weiner's team and Montgomery College.

Magister Ludi

Yeah, I think all major tournaments (especially ones in which there will more than a few editors packets) should spend one full day planning out exactly what they want their answers to be, especially spending time figuring out good bonus topics. I always surprised by how many topics for bonuses, esp...

Magister Ludi

I understand that Charlie, but I see some pretty specific calls for people to write for ICT in this thread. In fact, the thread was started due to a dearth of submitted questions for ICT. By my count, the letter signers as a group have produced just over one tournament's worth of questions in two ye...

Magister Ludi

To be fair, with Jerry and Jonathan working on ACF Nationals (and Matt feeling he is ethically barred from working on ICT), I'm not sure how many people on this list Seth expects to write for ICT aren't playing it. I signed my name on this letter and will be happy to contribute questions to the HSNC...

Magister Ludi

I'm on spring break the 3rd week of March, so If this tournament were mirrored at UMD on Saturday the 19th or Sunday the 20th I would play.

Magister Ludi

I counted tossups on poems as works. I think The Fountainhead and Ayn Rand novels definitely are classified as literature even if its ideological literature. I've seen serious classes where they are assigned alongside Orwell and Huxley. At first, I was taken aback when I saw "Call of the Cthulh...

Magister Ludi

This thread is the place to discuss the arts questions in the tournament. I edited music, film, and all the musical misc arts (opera/ballet/jazz). Rob edited all the painting and visual misc arts (architecture/sculpture/photography).

Magister Ludi

This thread is the place to discuss the literature in the tournament. I edited American and British literature and Rob edited European, World, and Ancient literature.

Magister Ludi

in the works-based humanities tossups, there is still, in my opinion, a heavy emphasis on knowing titles and brief summaries of lesser works compared to in-depth clues about the meatier stuff. I'm be interested to hear your thoughts about this matter because it was one of my main concerns while edi...

Magister Ludi

I edited British and American literature, music, audio misc arts including film, social science, and philosophy. I guess I'll comment on how I approached editing this tournament, which I think is similar to the attitude editors should take if they want to produce a truly accessible regular difficult...

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