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ThisIsMyUsername

On the subject of repeats, I want to mention the "spider" repeat: the spider mythology common-link tossup in the Florida packet and the spider literature bonus part in the Georgia Tech B packet, both of which mention Arachne. I mention this not as part of the piling on about the repeats (w...

ThisIsMyUsername

Hey guys. I wanted to ask about what exactly 'briticising' the set involves. Less US history, or are there other changes to the distribution..? Questions that Kyle and I think will be poorly converted because they are on American topics that are not well-known in the UK (primarily within History an...

ThisIsMyUsername

Also Josh from MIT is absolutely ridiculous. 31/5/2?!?! Quizbowl history people, has there ever been anyone else who routinely put up stat lines like that? I don't think I've ever even seen anyone toward the top of a regular-difficulty tournament have more 15s than 10s. Having more powers than tens...

ThisIsMyUsername

So that's where you're misunderstanding me. Arbitrary judgment is not the same as an ideology and my question was, like you say, intended for a more "abstract" (though I'm not sure if that's the right word) and less quizbowl-practical discussion. How people like Andrew, Tommy, or Jacob wh...

ThisIsMyUsername

To me, there would be a much greater chance that someone would have read / studied Herodotus or Cyrus the Great (for Queen Tomyris), whereas I can't think of a single topic that I would study that would lead me to know what an illuminated manuscript is (much less remember the name in a match). I am...

ThisIsMyUsername

Yale practiced twice a week for two hours each practice (I speak in the past tense here, since I'm referring to how I ran things, but I suspect Matt Jackson is changing little to nothing). I inherited the tradition from my predecessors of always dividing the practicing players into teams (I didn't r...

ThisIsMyUsername

If anybody wishes to speculate further regarding the eligibility of vague British entities, you are welcome to comment regarding whether you would allow John Lawrence to compete on behalf of the University of London (rather than King's College London, a constituent faculty of the U of L). I propose...

ThisIsMyUsername

Looking over the set, I came across a few small stylistic tics that I think Will should work to improve in the future. 1) Lack of Context. There were a lot of clues that were phrased in opaque ways that lacked the proper amount of context to help players buzz. Truly great clues should jog a player’...

ThisIsMyUsername

The Chopin Preludes tossup was wretched. Every single musical description is some vague, generic, and unbuzzable description; the only buzz-words are nicknames that are rarely used (a fact easily discoverable by Googling them; this leads me to suspect that Wikipedia had too large a role in this toss...

ThisIsMyUsername

I'm afraid that I'm in the "this totally sucked" camp that Matt Jackson describes: I thought this was the worst tournament I've played (obviously excluding tournaments that I've played only in practices). Part of this was that the average level of tossup construction was poor. There were c...

ThisIsMyUsername

I enjoyed this tremendously and thought it one of the most fun side tournaments I've played in my time in quizbowl. I hope you do this again sometime in the future.

ThisIsMyUsername

One of my pet peeves is this, because I see that as "this work" all the time. Even worse: "the eighth movement of this work" for the second movement of "Autumn." With collections like Op. 8, that just makes no sense (I can see that perhaps working with Alkan's Études, ...

ThisIsMyUsername

Although I liked last year's set much better (except for the music, which I thought was really well done this year), I still enjoyed this year's set quite a bit, so many thanks to Ryan, Mike, Aaron, Ted, and SteveJon. I may have comments once I have a chance to read through the set, but the only rea...

ThisIsMyUsername

Yeah, my Princess Casamassima tossup (admittedly not my greatest tossup to begin with, though; sorry) got edited in a way that makes some of the later clues confusing/wrong. Amanda Pynsent isn't raised by a dressmaker and she isn't the protagonist who must assassinate a duke; she is the dressmaker w...

ThisIsMyUsername

Yes, I think there is something wrong with writing a Jerome K. Jerome tossup this way, even at a side tournament. As far as I can tell, none of the other works you're talking about are in print! In order to have read them, I'd have to have borrowed a battered copy from the library, gone hunting for...

ThisIsMyUsername

These are all good criticisms, and I worried about a lot of these things myself. Certainly the stats show that I should have been more generous with powers, as Mike pointed out. I tried to make the easier answerlines have a smooth difficulty progression in the second half, and while I didn't always...

ThisIsMyUsername

I really enjoyed this tournament, especially in terms of answer selection (when I have a chance to read through the tournament, I may give more detailed comments), which was an excellent mix of sane and insane, with mostly the right kind of the latter. This tournament contained a lot of extremely de...

ThisIsMyUsername

Still seeking teammates for this.

ThisIsMyUsername

Thanks for a very fun lit tournament. I look forward to reading through the set when it is disseminated (hopefully soon?) and I hope you're planning on creating a discussion forum, since this set had some quite distinctive approaches to tossup construction (especially in the writing of tossups on ea...

ThisIsMyUsername

Now that YouTube can handle longer videos, someone should move the various quizbowl videos on Viddler (Jerry's videos from T-Party, ACF Regionals and Nationals 2009, and FICHTE; and the Minneosta vs. Chicago ACF Regionals 2009 match) to YouTube to get them more views. Most of them are pretty good ex...

ThisIsMyUsername

I would add Matt Jackson to the list of great myth players of the current era. The subject heading suggests that we were planning on doing this for other categories (as does the original post). How about it? Some questions I've had about great players in the categories that are dearest to me (but I'...

ThisIsMyUsername

There is plenty of room in the distribution for serious tossups on important artists of any stripe in the "other academic" section. I do wonder if John's explanation, which I think is an excellent way of framing the issue, undermines Tommy's film arguments a bit. It seems strange to me to...

ThisIsMyUsername

I think the best distinction between fine arts music vs. pop culture music is the context in which you would theoretically (or actually) study it in an academic realm. Art that fits in "fine art" is something you would study for the intrinsic value or style of the work in the same discipl...

ThisIsMyUsername

Here are my personal answers to your questions: 1) To what extent, if any, does someone like Jaco Pastorius, who considered himself firmly within the "jazz" tradition, is considered by many prominent jazz musicians to be important within the "jazz" tradition, and yet recorded mos...

ThisIsMyUsername

Agreeing with Coach Reinstein and Matt Bollinger here. You seem to know a lot about classical music in the real world, but very little about the realities of music questions in collegiate quizbowl. I'm very sympathetic to this, because I was in a nearly identical situation two-and-a-half to three ye...

ThisIsMyUsername

In the Northeast circuit, the best readers used to be Katy Peters (still probably hands down one of the best readers I've heard) and Jerry (before he left Brown). On a National level, the best readers I've heard are probably Yaphe, Jeff, and Matt Weiner. Actually, one of the things I'm proud of in t...

ThisIsMyUsername · Re: CO History Doubles: 7/22/2012 I should probably be able to help staff this.

I should probably be able to help staff this.

ThisIsMyUsername

Predictably, interest doesn't seem too great for the classical music tournament. We're definitely going to hold it eventually, but probably not for CO. We'll see. Enough people have put music down as one of their top preferences that I hope you still consider trying to run it during CO. (Though I s...

ThisIsMyUsername

Kevin Koai and I are playing this as a team.

ThisIsMyUsername

Lots of tossups in this set used had a sentence (or multiple sentences) of the form describe a work/comma/name the work in ways that are ungrammatical and potentially confusing. For example, in packet 9 tossup 1, we see the sentence "In one of his novels, a cat scratches the Adam's apple of th...

ThisIsMyUsername

I probably should have found a more descriptive lead-in for the Glazunov Violin Concerto clue (mentioning how the second movement is enfolded in the first movement), but you are certainly wrong about it also describing the Saxophone Concerto, and therefore about it being non-uniquely identifying. Th...

ThisIsMyUsername

I think whenever I see Yale play, John appears to be scoring more than Matt (which is always against top teams), but Matt finishes higher in overall scoring. I don't know what to make of this, but I have John after Matt simply because of stats. Well, this makes sense if you think about it. A perfec...

ThisIsMyUsername

Last year, we waited until after voting to have a discussion about how we were ranking people, which was not productive in terms of informed vote-casting. To avoid that, I thought I'd start some discussion. To me, looking at the stats from this year's nationals, there are eleven clear entrants to th...

ThisIsMyUsername

1. Music
2. Literature
3. Film

ThisIsMyUsername

Cernel Joson wrote:I'm not sure if I'm being read this way, but in case I am, I wasn't attempting to say that this year's nationals would be unfavorable to Yale. My only claim was "Buzzer races happen at ACF Nats, too."

No, that was not directed at you. Sorry if it came off that way.

ThisIsMyUsername

To be a little bit less harsh, I think you may be right that Yale has the more thorough knowledge base. I'm more skeptical of the idea that the lack of powers will really influence much, and I think you're underestimating the number of buzzer races that have historically occurred between top bracke...

ThisIsMyUsername

My vote is for a weekend of literature side tournaments. Also, I'd enjoy that classical music tournament, but I suspect the audience for it won't be all that large. A heartfelt second to the former, and the equally heartfelt hope that even if the latter does not materialize as a side event (due to ...

ThisIsMyUsername

Actually, I was going to post to the effect of requesting buzzers soon. Yale has only one functional buzzer at this point, so all other buzzers need to come from outside. Can any other teams bring buzzers? (Hunter? Kellenberg?)

ThisIsMyUsername

jonpin wrote:Hey, just checking in. I emailed you several days ago about registering. Could you confirm that Bergen's in the field?

Sorry. Forgot to make that update to the team list. Thanks for the reminder.

ThisIsMyUsername

This may be the most bimodal field in history. Any thought of doing a very quick rd of prelims to separate Schindler, Northmont, and Hunter from everyone else? Ridgewood may be here; not yet sure, but we'll sort it out this week. Is there a final deadline? The bracketing will depend on the final nu...

ThisIsMyUsername

Cheynem wrote:There was a music bonus that also used Alexander the Great's name as well.

I am not aware of this.

ThisIsMyUsername

No official Yale team is coming. I don't know if any individual members are planning to come as free agents.

ThisIsMyUsername

t-bar wrote: The official stats...

Speaking of which, it's been forty-eight hours...Are stats forthcoming?

ThisIsMyUsername

I think his point is not so much that that clue is too easy to be a lead-in at this level, but rather that it is easier than the clues that follow it, thus making the tossup unpyramidal. I would agree with him.

ThisIsMyUsername

Another thread bump to note a field update.

ThisIsMyUsername

My thanks to Penn for hosting this, and to Eric for head-editing this. However, I do have significant complains against this set, which I'll bring up in a discussion sub-forum, once one is established. I am thankful that Penn Bowl exists. It is wonderful to have a meeting between the Northeast and M...

ThisIsMyUsername

Yale is bringing three teams, and hopefully at least one buzzer. Something has cropped up that has made it nearly impossible for me to come and moderate, as I had originally hoped. I'll keep you posted, though, if this changes.

ThisIsMyUsername

I'm obviously not at all a science player, but reading through this thread gave me a couple of thoughts. I'm curious if people agree with these. It seems to me that there are several levels of competence as a writer. Here's a slightly over-simplistic breakdown: Level 1: The minimal level of competen...

ThisIsMyUsername

Just a thread bump to let people know that registrations are beginning to come in, and to happily announce that we have just received PACE Platinum certification.

ThisIsMyUsername

Yale is bringing one team.

And seconding requests for that field update.

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