2023 ARCADIA Specific Question Discussion

[The Blind Prophet]

This thread is for discussing specific questions in ARCADIIIA.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'm going to borrow the Eric Mukherjee/Mike Bentley style of running notes on the packets I played:

- Packet 1 -

• What a choice of tossup to lead off with!
• I get that you're talking about fixed cost as an aggregate quantity, but I think it's worth accounting for the fact that fixed costs are usually referred to in the plural; as written, the question makes it tempting to give a specific fixed cost. You might want to consider prompting on specific fixed costs, such as rent, or answers with semantically similar meaning such as "startup costs."
• A lot of the novel hard parts in this tournament struck me as quite rough, but cradleboards was a pretty cool one.
• Sur strikes me as a pretty tough medium part given this tournament's easier-than-regs/PB vibe.
• Having more Africana religion is cool, but asking about the beliefs of the Serer seems really hard; the bonus on the same answer at WAO (a much harder tournament) gives "West African" and I'd still argue it was one of the more unnecessary hard parts in the set.

- Packet 2 -

• Someone at our site got negged for saying "the lake in Beowulf" or a similar answer, which seems like it deserves a prompt.
• I feel like "cursed one of these objects" is really suggestive in the ring tossup.
• I should have remembered the archaic smile and apparently it's in AP Art History, but this medium still seems rough.
• Asking about thermal imaging as a general "technology" seems a bit odd to me; I feel like "this process" might be better.
• In agreement with the notes - Foer's novel hardly seems like enough for an easy part on 9/11 at this level.
• Differend is a solid choice of hard pard, though I think you could get away with giving Lyotard and asking for a new medium.
• Is clawhammer banjo playing a medium part now? Not sure how widely-present this knowledge will be in a broader audience.
• Incorruptibility is a novel, but very appropriate choice for a medium part in a well-themed bonus!
• Hindi from just Tomb of Sand seems really brutal for a medium; I get that it won a recent Booker, but I don't think it's widely read enough/made enough rounds in the canon yet to be at that level yet. Urvasi is a good hard part; the answerline should be fleshed out with titles, e.g. Urvasi Won By Valor

- Packet 3 -

• I think this tossup on lifetime earnings should use the word "dependent variable" early on to help specify what it's looking for; while I admittedly haven't read the Angrist paper specifically (which seems to include "Lifetime Earnings" in the title) I have run across similar studies which look at the impact of Vietnam drafting on how many years of schooling someone has, which ultimately reflects lifetime earnings.
• The Phaethon's sisters clue seems really early in this trees tossup.
• The players at our site, myself included, were generally impressed that the writers managed to toss up point groups without it being too obvious!
• I think The Time of the Hero wouldn't have been too hard ten years ago for a tournament of this level. Maybe it is now?
• Not sure this is avoidable, but "hippopotamus and crocodile" is a giant cliff in this hunts tossup.
• I appreciated the lead-in to this Teutoberg Forest tossup because my brother (who also played a lot of Europa Barbarorum as a kid) and I have talked about it before
• DOOM tossup is brilliant
• The beliefs tossup may/may not need a prompt on attitudes, I'd defer to better-read analytical philosophy folks on this though.
• Contra Caroline, I think the Sortes Virgilianae bonus part is plenty pinned-down. I'd consider wording it in a way that accepts descriptions, since I'm not sure everyone is going to know the preferred English translation and I goofed on the Latin a bit (though our mod was very generous)
• Very important (seriously!) to reject "transhumanism," which my rusty ass said after forgetting the correct term
• Standard-Type battleships strikes me as a pretty un-memorable and brutal choice of hard part; imo you'd have to be mega-deep on naval history to convert this, since those battleships weren't particularly decisive in US naval engagements.
• Hawthorne bonus is really elegantly tied together. Fantastic work.
• I really, really don't think Mishima is a hard part if you mention bodybuilding - a hard part on Sun and Steel would probably be appropriate for this level.

- Packet 4 -

• Pope tossup is a nice way of asking some Dark Ages history that doesn't get a ton of play
• I'm having trouble looking up the second clue in the ghazal tossup online - I assume it's translated from Urdu? This tossup seems pretty tough to me.
• The pirate flags tossup was easily my favorite of the tournament
• I think you can get away with naming Ruben Dario in the medium part of the Salome bonus
• It seems odd to just have Sacred War underlined as acceptable in the First Sacred War bonus part, when the instructions are to prompt on Sacred Wars
• The mirrors bonus part makes sense but I think it could do a little bit more to rule out "dots" with the Kusama clue

- Packet 5 -

• Bonsai tossup is a really neat and novel idea. I think you can probably extend the power mark here.
• Should the cetology tossup prompt on zoology?
• Strongly agree that this Portugal tossup needs more late clues; I would suggest drug decriminalization
• Enjoyed the choice of Mario Minitti as a hard part
• The One (from Plotinus) strikes me as a pretty brutal medium part
• It seems weird to require spearfishing given that you have already said "harpoon" and "trident"
• Subjective, but adulterine castles just seems really obscure to me (as an American) for a hard part

- Packet 6 -

• I don't think Desai is an outlandish tossup for this tournament
• Semantics, but I would change the first clue to say "It wasn't ever controlled by Portugal" in the Guangzhou tossup
• Agreed that the Our Town tossup is probably too easy
• Howard Shore score clues? Amazing.
• Coal miners as a hard part feels really guessable to me; I think you could ask for Harlan County and it'd be fine for a hard
• Clock Towers is an interesting hard part, but I'm just guessing conversion isn't going to be great
• I don't mind an occasional "History Channel history" bonus, but I'm guessing that a lot of teams will stumble over what exact wording you want with this "protection from witchcraft" medium part, even if they know what "apotropaic" means. At the very least, I'd make this "description acceptable" since there is no "name" being asked for. Also, Stonehenge feels kind of touch-your-butt as an easy.
• This Suzuki Shosan bonus seems like it has two hard parts. Nio is a hard enough answerline that I think it'd still be hard if you accepted analogous terms for similar statues (such as dharmapalas, which is a prompt right now). You could probably make Suzuki the medium part by cluing D.T. as well.
• I'm guessing "Mi Ultimo Adios" would still be a fine hard part if you named Rizal first, though this ordering works too.

- Packet 7 -

• In a weird brain fart moment, I buzzed with the answer "body parts of Horus" on the eyes tossup and didn't get prompted. That phrasing is in the giveaway - is it worth a prompt?
• I buzzed with the answer "desert storms" on the simoom clue in the sandstorm tossup. It looks like there was a directed prompt on "winds" - I wish I got the same prompt on my answer as I wasn't sure what additional information was desired.
• Love to see a solid Waste Land tossup talking about the various inspirations at this level.
• The Buddha sermons tossup gets kind of transparent very quickly; you say stupa and "later retellings" and I'm not sure how big the answerspace could really be at this level.
• I would strongly suggest re-ordering the mawali clue to put the Ghassanids first, as naming the Ghassanids first rules out the Abbasids.
• This altruísm tossup was the only one I thought was outright bad in the whole tournament; it seems extremely suggestive throughout
• This is very much an edge case, but on the heart tossup, at game speed I heard "text and this shape comprise the most famous graphic design by Milton Glaser" as "text in this shape..." so I buzzed with "square." Since we're after power, I think "text and a symbol with this shape" wouldn't be too obvious. I also agree with the comments in the packets that the Keith Haring clue is pretty hard to place.

- Packet 8 -

• I believe DuBois came up earlier in the tournament before this tossup
• Agreed that the late clues of the violin concerto tossup are pretty hard
• Accept Iskandar and other alternate language names in the Alexander tossup
• The Chekhov tossup is fine as-is, but I agree w/ Caroline that it might be improved with some reworking
• The Manchu art bonus is intriguing, but it strikes me as pretty hard and I doubt most people are converting any of these parts primarily from studying the visual arts. As-is, I suspect most people who get Guanyin are gonna guess it from the mention of kasaya and implying that it's a feminine figure with important iconography.

- Packet 9 -

• Nice to see a wider variety of Hindu deities getting tossups at this level, with Kartikeya
• I'd probably say "organization" rather than "institute" for the Sundance clue in the middle of the film tossup, just to make it a little bit less suggestive
• Power seems pretty stingy on the Hungarian Rhapsodies tossup
• "Optimal to use" is pretty suggestive language to put in the first line of a tossup on options, but the descriptions of first two clues are otherwise solid. You definitely need to prompt on derivatives, though. I see what the Black-Scholes assumptions clue is trying to do but don't think it's particularly useful, since those are pretty common assumptions when valuing many different things.
• The wisdom literature bonus part probably should give mods instructions for similar answers
• Old Masters seems like an easy part that a lot of teams will fumble over if they don't know the Auden poem

- Packet 10 -

• IMO, the placebo effect tossup gets kind of obvious when you name the FDA and describe a clinical trial; at the very least, that's harder to figure out than the next clue
• I don't think this NSA tossup adequately rules out Mossad with the Stuxnet clue, given that Unit 8200 seems to be part of the IDF and there were allegations at the time that that Mossad was in on Stuxnet as well
• Love the idea behind early clues in this Tenochtitlan tossup, though I think the first sentences clues are all testing about the same depth of knowledge.
• Lugalbanda probably doesn't need to be name-dropped early in this Cedar Forest tossup
• I recall that Matt Jackson and I thought agamas would be a bit tough for a hard at ACF Nationals 2022 and so Matt Jackson wrote something else. No empirical basis here, but I'm guessing it's pretty tough for a hard at this level as well.
• LASSO should probably prompt on broader answers such as regression
• I think Machado de Assis is a fair medium part at this level; Bras Cubas seems closer to a hard as written
• I don't think the Ardabil bonus part would be too easy if you said "a carpet named for this city"
• This Excel bonus is hilarious; COVID is probably a bit too touch-your-butt for an easy
• The human nature bonus part says "accept descriptions" but does not give any instructions on what sorts of descriptions are acceptable

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

Had fun with this set - apologies if any of this comes off as too harsh

1
tossup on c-sections was delightful
cute theme to this thailand tu
maybe prompt on "photoreceptor protein(s)" before mention in the giveaway? (skill issue on my part heh)
bonus part on p2y12 seems really brutal! I'm sure just having it on ADP or ADP receptors (or like purinergic receptors) would still serve fine as a hard part

2
would probably be nice to flesh out grendel lair answerline
sundiata tu is nifty - the nine witch thing may be hard to distinguish from any other mythological mentions of the trope? I think there's some similar thing that happens in some third tier arthurian romances
ditto on the face/smile thing being kind of tough for an m (and to be honest just confusing) - In particular by going between two things my teammates and I actually talked ourselves out of saying "smile" because "why would that be on a tube-like jade vessel"
superantigen bonius is good - was really weird to play a bonus part on g proteins a round after rhodopsins tho

3
I found the group tossup a bit frustrating since "point groups" came to mind at first but I kind of immediately dismissed it because it felt like a wholely inappropriate answerline wrt difficulty (skill issue perhaps) and also because I Couldn't tell if it was somehow actually a tossup on character tables

4
ditto on comment on mirror bonus part w/ kusama

5
might be good to make forgiveness first answerline in this tossup - in general the most likely to be given answer should be there for ease of mods?
surface area tossup had at least 2 negs at my site on the supercritical co2 clue w/ porosity even tho "specific" does rule it out

6
chromatography tu felt a bit frustrating - was stuck on "Which form do you want?" since mentioning a specific wash tends to make me inclined to think it's a bit more specific
houses tossup could probably add explicit instructions to answerline that mentions these are mostly(?) witch houses since this seemed to confused moderators
minor feng shui but mentioning solomon linda in a tossup in a packet w/ a tu on disney is a bit silly
I think the desai tossup was a bit too hard for the set and also kind of has this issue where it says kind of immediately this is a common link on authors (at least) one of whom is probably an indian immigrant

7
I think it's a little suboptimal to tossup eyes and clue a bunch of things identified with them mostly since from what I can more than half of the things themselves are associated with the sun or moon
I didn't really like that this sand/duststorm tossup just immediately said "This is some sort of event that occurs when there is a lot of wind and has a distinct color because of a mineral"
this elimination tossup works fine w/o just namedropping chugaev
holy crap cranach the elder was a medium in this bonus?!! Also may need some sort of instructions on a beehive? My teammate was pretty adamant it was actually a beehive

8
calibration was a cute tu and I liked a lot of the early clues chosen
why is all of bagua/pa kua underlined? The first syllable in each of these means "eight"
this guanyin m felt kind of hard
the first king of wessex was not alfred - it was cerdic
IV bonus part should have instructions for parenteral - it's also kind of weird to both acknolwedge in the clostridium answerline that c dif isn't considered the same genus anymore and still cluing it

[henrygoff]

the first king of wessex was not alfred - it was cerdic

sorry about that--I think I meant that clue to either say "great king of Wessex" or "first king of the Anglo-Saxons" and it somehow got homogenized into that sentence. I'll fix that for the next mirror. The Cranach and mirror bonus parts will be tweaked, as well.

[raytonlin1]

I didn't play this pack but I think the Daniel Inouye answerline in packet 14 could use a pronunciation guide, I could definitely see a moderator negging someone for using the correct pronunciation if they don't know it

[linpaws]

I enjoyed the tournament overall. Below are the tossups that I think need fixing or are otherwise problematic (some of them are typos so should be fixed before the next mirror).

TU 1.5: I think you can Gettier this (before power!) using the fact that "The Origin of the Work of Art" and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction are both German. So ideally this question would either not mention art at all or be changed to a tossup on the movement/school for Frankfurt School.

TU 1.8 on Kagame: The word "Benin" should be Burundi (I almost negged because of this).

TU 1.20 on entanglement: "States have this property if they cannot be decomposed as a sum of (*) product states." This clue is wrong, as any state is a sum of product states. Maybe it should be changed to "cannot be decomposed as a product state."

TU 2.7: Saying "this country's massacre" is ambiguous for Indonesia; it should say "a massacre perpetrated by this country" or something instead. (I did neg because of this, though I should have realized based on earlier clues that East Timor would not be the answer.)

TU 4.1: "Modules are analogous to these structures defined over rings": analogous should be changed to analogues, as otherwise the sentence is saying something different semantically, which is wrong. Modules are being defined over rings, not vector spaces. Then for algebras, the clue would be correct if we add "over a field" but maybe that would reduce the difficulty of the question.

TU 4.15 on Zhuangzi: Maybe this is intentional but name-dropping "Hui Shi" makes it really obvious that the text is Chinese.

TU 6.3: In general, I think this tournament is too hard a difficulty for it to be ok to have the answer line "chromatography". But at the very least, technique should be changed to "general technique."

TU 6.8: Maybe it's just me but I don't think there were enough medium clues for this question. Chrysippus (a very famous Stoicist) is namedropped halfway through.

TU 7.7: I really did not like this question. It felt like me to be a common link on the word "sequence" or the concept of an "infinite number of things" in a way that was really confusing. For example, Borel-Cantelli just requires an infinite number of events; there is nothing really sequential that is necessary about them. So I was quite confused about what sort of object was being built. I think the question would have been a lot better if it was on one of two possible themes: diagonalization arguments or sequential compactness. For diagonalization arguments, there could be more clues about Cantor's proof and also about related results in analysis that use diagonalization like Arzela-Ascoli. For sequential compactness, it could focus on nets and also the difference between that and normal compactness (possibly with answer line compactness), e.g. discussing the long line. This is just my opinion though.

TU 7.14: I would prefer the probability clue to actually mention the "degeneration of probability" which Hume talks about (the degeneration argument/thesis), i.e. actually use the word degeneration. The next clue is copy principle which is a large cliff, and so it was frustrating for me as I knew the degeneration of probability, but wasn't willing to risk buzzing on Hume as that specific word wasn't used. Otherwise it's hard to play philosophy questions when many thinkers discuss the same concepts.

TU 7.18 on elimination: There was a buzzer race in my room (I didn't take part) on Chugaev, so I agree that there's no need to namedrop it.

TU 8.14: "Shallow water waves" should be added to the answerline since that's what the KdV equation is describing.

[vydu]

TU 1.20 on entanglement: "States have this property if they cannot be decomposed as a sum of (*) product states." This clue is wrong, as any state is a sum of product states. Maybe it should be changed to "cannot be decomposed as a product state."

Thanks for the catch, fixed!

I Couldn't tell if it was somehow actually a tossup on character tables

I tweaked the SALCs clue a little bit to hopefully get around this, now it says:

Mulliken symbols like A1 and B2 are used to label the rows of 2D diagrams whose columns correspond to elements of these objects. SALCs transform with the irreps of these objects.

[rdc20]

There was a bonus where “Petri dishes” was an “accept but do not reveal” option for the first part followed by a third part where Petri dishes was the answer. This setup basically guarantees that any team who correctly answers Petri dishes for the first part will miss the third part. I think prompting on Petri dishes for the first part would be a better way to handle this, but the entire bonus might be better if reworked to keep Petri dishes out of the first answerline entirely.

[etotheipi]

Some notes I made during the tournament, unfortunately only focusing on negatives because I was very tired. Apologiesif anything in these notes has been fixed already and I'm just misremembering what I heard today. Hopefully they're still of use:

packet 1:
- on rereading, in the Dada TU, "Tauber-Arp" could use a PG ("TOY-ber-arp"?)
- is knowing that the Edgeworth box is a thing really hard part material at this level? (anecdotally: I know aggressively little econ and got this + not the medium) especially coming off P2Y12 lol

packet 2:
- I feel like the caves TU should have dens as an alternate answerline, given that Donne calls it such in "The Good-Morrow" (which I think is a perfectly valid way of knowing that clue)
- "a ruler with this name" on the Catherine TU feels explicitly inaccurate, given that none of the women in question probably did very much ruling (less flippantly, I don't perceive the word as applying to wives of rulers, just like I'd take issue with a tossup that said Melania Trump "led" America or something). why not just "a person with this name"? (I buzzed on the Vives clue and negged with Henry for this reason)
- perhaps it is not ideal that the first two lines of the Ockham TU respectively tell you that this is a tossup-able individual thinker before Descartes and after Aristotle. this TU should also accept whatever his latin name is
- as someone who is very, very opposed to the idea that modern military technology is something a well-balanced person should care about in the slightest, the AWACS clue in an Earth Science TU feels very gratuitous
- loved the Brazil TU!
- though I got bled out of power, having a full description of terza rima in power seems very easy for this level
- Mandelstam as a hard given two lines of the Stalin Epigram that really sound like lines of the Stalin epigram seems odd
- perhaps space out the part on G proteins from the earlier packet's opsins TU? not sure if this is something people care about
- droughts given "narrow tree rings" seems like a very solid easy - not a medium
- Lorrie Moore was a very well chosen hard part IMO
- I got owned by this incorruptibility bonus (hard only!), but I think the lack of a comma between "people" and "who" completely changes the meaning of this easy part. Right now, this reads as "the Desert Fathers were sorts of these people who [on top of whatever is the definition of these people] practiced extreme seclusion."
- Urvasi is... a medium? am I just not up with the stock?

packet 3:
- what's the answerspace for the toccata TU after the first line ("musical form that was in vogue at about the same time as ricercars")?
- sweetgrass seems really guessable (book about Native American botany from 2013). i'd be surprised if that weren't people's go-to guess for plant given book about Native Americans
- why not put "snake-in-the-eye" in the answerline of bonus 11's third part?
- bonus 13 might have been my least favorite in the set, both because of my aforementioned dislike for "do you know Words for Military Technology Things?" (which, since when was any of this actually important to know?) and because I think it screws with the player to have the answer to a hard part be a Named Thing with the most generic possible name. I know quizbowl loves its "things have names" hobby-horse, but parts like these always make me question what the point of any of this is.

packet 4:
- the vector spaces TU played pretty badly in my room, since it jumped from a nontrivial category theory clue to a very terse clue that I think anyone who's taken an abstract algebra class would immediately know? in other words, if you actually wanted to stop and think about the first line, you were very much punished. since the category in the firstline, according to nLab, seems to be that of finite dimensional vector spaces, I think the answerline should include that
- considering that the operative clue in the third sentence of the tu on popes is "pseudo-Isidore," it seems pretty harsh to not rule out "Frankish emperor" somehow
- novels should probably be underlined in TU 8
- HELLP syndrome in power for pregnancy seems absurdly generous
- why say "high-impact" in the ammonia TU, given that if they weren't high-impact they wouldn't be being clued?
- the drones part, as currently phrased, makes me think that you want a specific sort of drone. also, perhaps this is just me, but I don't see how this bonus is other academic and not just a very unfocused history bonus.
- if you're going to ask for a clade of dinosaurs and not an individual species, you should probably make that clear in the question. there were a couple of instances in this set of indicators, while being "technically correct," really served to lead me away from the correct answer (another is "starry night," another is "program" for Doom, though I think the latter is a skill issue and thus haven't written about it)
- salome part should accept In The Name of Salome

packet 5:
- at least two people at GT noted that the "text" TU was absurdly guessable, since the answerspace for it is realistically just "text" and "images." more important to me, in no world has this TU anything to do with math.
- I found the theming for the power of the Cuchulainn TU very fun
- the idea for the metaphor TU is very fun, but one figures out pretty fast (at "metonymy") that we're looking for a figure of speech of some sort, and the only one I can think of (other than metonymy) with a substantial theoretical literature on it is metaphor
- the Africa medium part seemed pretty egregious to me - I cannot imagine a team not guessing that even with nearly zero knowledge of the poems involved, and the anthology fill-in-the-blank alone (i.e. not accounting for fraud) isn't a medium part I wouldn't think
- Enneads and the One seem to be about equally difficult (I'd put enneads as easier, actually, because it's a title and those are always easier)
- Ellmann common link was a cool hard!
- at the cost of outing myself as a Handke supporter, I have a few issues with this bonus. first of all, I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that Handke denied the Bosnian genocide - from what I've read (incl. A Journey to the Rivers), it seems to me that this is just a buzzword internet article writers use, and whatever his actual perspective is is patently not nearly as simple as this. more importantly, I don't find the lens of "let's theme a bonus around this modern and not-über-canonical author's work, but let's also roast it" a good idea in quizbowl. one asks about specific non-canonical literary works to interest the reader in them - calling said works racist or "edgelord narciss[ist]" (and thus attacking not just their politics but their literary merit) is really not a good way to do so. I get my taste in literature insulted enough without having to worry about quizbowl questions doing this to me also

packet 6:
- Lesbos TU was a fun idea, though I don't know if it really needed to dip into Plath (who had already had a whole bonus to herself!) and thus amlit. there could easily have been another clue from Baudelaire, that poem is filled with incredible lines
- tires is earth science?
- did Poynting vector get changed to a hard? or is trace the hard? both seem solidly like mediums
- I didn't like the stone bonus, partly because, in a set where lit is distributed by region, I expect effort to be taken to make most questions stay within the region they are categorized in, partly because the theme is really weird (authors who said vaguely philosophical things about stones?), but also because the Samuel Johnson anecdote is more a philosophy clue than a literature one IMO.
- this is the second easy part on Christianity in two packets, leading me to almost miss it

packet 7:
- seconding Andrew's comment that the dust storms TU is horrifically guessable - I guessed it at "meningitis" because what else was it supposed to be?
- I'd say the same of the "sermons of the Buddha" TU, given that you make clear that it's something that can be retold. i also guessed this TU in power, so I'm not just saying "guessable"
- in my analysis class (from Zygmund's Measure and Integral), Lebesgue decomposition was given as a sum of two measures, one of which was absolutely continuous and the other of which was singular. this seems to be a pretty common form, and confusion in this regard (I've never seen the tripartite decomposition) led me not to buzz on this clue. why not just say "a probability measure can be expressed as the sum of two measures, one of which is singular and the other of which has a kind of this property, in Lebesgue decomposition?" I think this makes the clue far more gettable for people who have learned the decomposition in either way (I also think dropping "singular" helps orient the player).
- how many poems are there that have famously undergone heavy revision from another author? the first line (of the Waste Land TU) seems to clearly indicate that, and I can only think of The Waste Land in this vein
- do the things in the "linear" TU actually have anything to do with each other? especially since you conflate implicitly both the high-school (y=mx + b, i.e. "affine" - and you should probably accept this) and the actual mathematical (y = kx) definition of "linear" in the question, which seems unideal.
- "storytelling" as an easy felt read-your-mind - I very much was confused as to what was being asked for, and ended up saying something stupid like "oral poetry" (which is what bards do, to be fair).
- Brown Girl In The Ring seems brutal for a hard
- is Cranach the Elder not an easy at this level given Luther? genuine question
- binocularity also suffered from the "reading the author's mind" problem, especially because an acceptable answer like "having two eyes" sounds almost too embarrassingly stupid to say out loud

packet 9:
- this isn't my area of expertise, but I cannot believe that the first line of the Jutland TU is in any way uniquely identifying, given that "fleet in being" is just a generic naval tactic that is commonly used. I said something stupid like "Lepanto," but I can't imagine even a player with knowledge being able to buzz here just because of how generic the clue is.
- does the butch cassidy... tu deserve a prompt on just "sundance"?
- both I and my opponents were convinced that the word "subject" in the night sky referred to a person until we realized what was going on, and I don't think "visual subject" actually does anything to make this clear. as I said above, it's technically a correct indicator, but one that feels very mean to the player. why not just say "it's not a person" or something along those lines?
- I thought the refugee camps TU was very cool, though it surprises me that there are zero alternate answerlines for this
- I'm curious if the second line of the plunderphonics hard part differentiates it from, e.g., vaporwave. I guess it doesn't have to, but... feels mean, I suppose.
- functionalism as a hard seems really weird, since, that's basically what the word functionalism outside its philosophical context would mean
- the Prespa agreement hard seems like the symptom of a terminal case of "Things Have Names" to me. I'm just not convinced that knowing its name actually means anything other than "I have a good memory for names," since the name (as opposed to the general thrust of the agreement) is just not very important in the scheme of things IMO
- El(l)iot Ortiz? it's probably been fixed by now, just wanted to note it if it hasn't
- R. Carriera was a cool hard part choice, though I flubbed it
- two cringy joke leadins in a row is too much, no? (bonuses 17, 18). I thought this set had a good deal too many of them; they're really not fun to hear when you're not in a great mood.

packet 10:
- I'd be curious if negs of "Skagerrak" or "Kattegat" happened frequently on the Oresund TU, or if I'm, you know, just skill issued
- I am told (by someone at Tech who knows CS) that the choice of pivot element in quicksort is arbitrary, not random - these of course are not the same thing
- it seems like a stretch to say that the piety/justice thing happens at the end of Euthyphro. also, given that the entirety of the dialogue is just Socrates exploring "whether or not piety is a part of X" for different X, I'm not entirely sure how buzzable this clue is
- does "particle detector" on the particle accelerator TU deserve a prompt? I buzzed on the November Revolution clue and said this - though I assume it doesn't apply to the earlier clues.
- maybe make clear that you need both "Spanish" and "Muslims" (by removing the space between their underlines) in the moriscos TU?

packet 11:
- in a set with length caps, spending a whole line of a TU on a completely irrelevant piece of trivia that is merely mildly amusing (the first line of the Derrida TU) seems suboptimal. especially considering that there's so much to Derrida's thought that's undermined in quib, just as with practically every philosopher TBH.
- yeah, having a Philippines linguistics TU after an easy part on Tagalog seems very unideal. I sat on this tossup and lost it precisely because of that
- I think the Nora Helmer TU desperately needs another clue between the minimalist adaptation (I'd be surprised if many of the people who Care About Plays care overmuch about nor pay attention to contemporary performances of them - I certainly don't) and the extremely commonly used Lu Xun stuff
- might three-legged also accept three-footed and equivalents?
- it seems dubious to characterize "Mr. Difficult" as about the "rewards of reading... other difficult fiction," since as far as I remember that essay consists of Franzen whining that experimental literature is too hard for him to read or something.
- do you want a French translation of collective effervescence in the answerline?

[mico]

I apologize for the Catherine neg. Your point was brought up in earlier mirrors and I corrected it to "a royal with this name," but didn't catch all of the sentences.

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Thank you for all the feedback, Arya! I appreciate how it varied from small scale things like improving grammar to thoughts on question conceits. I wanted to quickly respond to a few points I thought worth discussion.

packet 7:
- I'd say the same of the "sermons of the Buddha" TU, given that you make clear that it's something that can be retold. i also guessed this TU in power, so I'm not just saying "guessable"

I just removed "retellings" here to eliminate the context a bit more, thanks for the thought.

packet 9:
- this isn't my area of expertise, but I cannot believe that the first line of the Jutland TU is in any way uniquely identifying, given that "fleet in being" is just a generic naval tactic that is commonly used. I said something stupid like "Lepanto," but I can't imagine even a player with knowledge being able to buzz here just because of how generic the clue is.

As another data point, I actually buzzed on this clue the first time this question was playtested. I think it's pretty notable to know that Germany was trying to compete with Great Britain on the high seas, but failed and returned to their strategy of more sucking up British resources and time versus naval control. I understand your point about maybe adding some more context, but its hard to do so without dropping a year, specific names, or get into more jargon, which I think would clog up the question.

packet 9:
- does the butch cassidy... tu deserve a prompt on just "sundance"?

So the film's title is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and I've never really heard to referred to as just "Sundance." However, I see your point from the fact that the Sundance Festival is clued it would be helpful to prompt on just "Sundance." The indicator in those clues is "a character from this film" so I don't think that prompting is necessary nor accurate, even if it would be helpful to players making a reflexive buzz.

packet 10
- maybe make clear that you need both "Spanish" and "Muslims" (by removing the space between their underlines) in the moriscos TU?

When I opened Packet 10 to check this a few minutes ago, the underline was there in the question. I also had a "Note to moderator: please read answerline carefully." I'd be interested to hear if there was an error at your site with how this answerline was interpreted and played so I can make it clearer.

[etotheipi]

packet 10
- maybe make clear that you need both "Spanish" and "Muslims" (by removing the space between their underlines) in the moriscos TU?

When I opened Packet 10 to check this a few minutes ago, the underline was there in the question. I also had a "Note to moderator: please read answerline carefully." I'd be interested to hear if there was an error at your site with how this answerline was interpreted and played so I can make it clearer.

Oh, there wasn't an error at the site. I just noticed the typo when scrolling through the Dec. 9 version of the packets, and wasn't sure if it had been fixed since then.

[Heiliger Dankgesang]

Oh, there wasn't an error at the site. I just noticed the typo when scrolling through the Dec. 9 version of the packets, and wasn't sure if it had been fixed since then.

I just uploaded the version of the set that was played yesterday in the Packets subthread. Apologies for not getting that up earlier this morning.

[vydu]

- do the things in the "linear" TU actually have anything to do with each other? especially since you conflate implicitly both the high-school (y=mx + b, i.e. "affine" - and you should probably accept this) and the actual mathematical (y = kx) definition of "linear" in the question, which seems unideal.

- does "particle detector" on the particle accelerator TU deserve a prompt? I buzzed on the November Revolution clue and said this - though I assume it doesn't apply to the earlier clues.

The linear tossup was meant to focus on EE-ish topics, particularly linear time-invariant systems and linear circuits; originally power clues focused exclusively on LTI systems but this ended up being unwieldy so I replaced a couple of them, which probably gave it a more scattered feel. The lead-in is still sort of control systems-y, though. The points about conflating affine with linear and prompting on detector for the November Revolution clue are valid and I've made changes to account for them.