2023 Chicago Open - Stories and Favorite Moments

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

If you have any amusing stories or favorite moments from playing the set, we'd love to hear them in this thread.

[everdiso]

I've probably already yelled this story at a lot of people, but on the economics tossup that clued economist Christopher Sims, my teammate, economist Christopher Sims, buzzed right on that clue and negged.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

At lunch, I was speaking about Age of Empires II e-sports with Ankit Aggarwal. To our immense surprise, John Lawrence understood what we were talking about based on player names alone (DauT, Hera, etc.) A couple of rounds later, our team got the trebuchet bonus and I swiftly 30d, giddily noting that I learned about the War Wolf because the Britons have a unique technology in AOE II named for it. Our mod and the other team burst out laughing.

This incident not only made my day, but also inspired me to resume work on the "Age of Empires II" set with Ankit. Get ready for a treat next year, y'all.

[Gene Harrogate]

I'd like to use this space to note some of my favorite submissions in American and World Literature.

• Bobrow et al.'s submissions on soda in poetry and The Sellout were both very amusing and some of my favorites to edit.
• I cut a Janet Malcolm hard part to use Brownstein et al.'s question on Sylvia Plath biographies. For reasons of topic and overlap, I had to cut a nicely themed Du Fu tossup and mutilate a great bonus on Fernanda Melchor.
• Besides very informative questions on the legacy of the Spanish language in Westerns and Makerere university, Mirkin et al. wrote a submission on Intruder in the Dust that was, I thought, a model for writing tossups on lesser-known works by major authors -- using the first two clues for memorable plot moments buzzable to anyone who has read the book, then moving into the secondary clues for which it might be famous to a broader audience, and finishing with basic summary information that conveys the book's relevance. I liked it enough to cut my own Faulkner tossup.
• Kasinski et al submitted a thoroughly researched bonus on the relationship of Emily Dickinson's poetry to contemporary scientific discoveries that, while unusable due to overlap, was one of my favorites to read.
• Cheng at all submitted a cool tossup on Samuel Delany that I would kept if not for having a large supply of questions on novels and genre fiction by the time we recieved the packet.
• Bollinger et al. submitted a well-written and probably overdue question on Eileen Chang.
• I would also like to express my condolences to Tagtmeier et al., who submitted six different literature questions on content already in the set.