The Quizbowl Resource Center

Nabonidus

Victor Prieto wrote:When will WAO 2 be clear?

WAO2 is clear for discussion purposes but isn't uploaded yet as we're doing a close read in the Discord (https://discordapp.com/channels/2752793 ... 8336210944) to help us fix some remaining issues.

Nabonidus

That's Les Chevaliers de McGill to you

Nabonidus

For McGill's year-end awards ceremony these were the three nominees for Best Individual Question Written:

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I don't remember many other specific questions (I suppose I could check my notebook sometime) but I remember that this question set, despite occasionally erratic difficulty, had quite a few answerlines and clues that were Cool Things to hear in a tournament. (On a related note, could I see the toss...

Nabonidus

"Witness for the Prosecution" Oh boy! Did this tossup get cut, or folded into the Agatha Christie TU? (As a Billy Wilder fanboy, I'd love to see the original version, if anyone wants to post it/PM it to me). I believe Derek folded it into the Agatha Christie tossup. Original tossup: One character i...

Nabonidus

May I see the tossups on square planar, Cassandra, milk, ravens in myth and Andrew Jackson? May I also see the bonuses on DNA Binding and Greco - Roman Geographers? In Anne Carson’s translation of the work in which this character appears, this character defines words from that work’s original langu...

Nabonidus

But the main reason I'm posting is to give kudos to whoever wrote the bonus on "poets who appear in Alejandro Jodorowsky's Endless Poetry ," since I was planning on writing a bonus with that exact theme. Even more kudos for resisting the temptation to make the hard part on the too-hard-for-regular-...

Nabonidus

CPiGuy wrote:his surname is Backmaker.

I'm pretty sure this was a subliminal thing from the word backwater in the first clue. Thanks again for pointing this out.

Nabonidus

- In the same packet (Mich B I think) that alt history bonus had "winning the civil war for the CSA" as the last part, even though that was mentioned as part of the first book, which made it really confusing. I wrote the original version of this question, and the easy part was originally "Gettysbur...

Nabonidus

The bonus about bronze stuff with an easy part of Boxer at Rest seemed too hard. Chabon / Hornby / Ginsberg -- was Ginsberg the easy part, and if so, are we expected to get him from his song lyrics and the fact that he's a Buddhist? Egan / Cloud Atlas / Joyce Carol Oates -- what the fuck? this was ...

Nabonidus

Aaron Manby (ironmaster) wrote:McGill - honestly I have no idea how good we are, I don't even know which three of us would make the best support for Derek.

Not you, with that attitude

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The behavior exhibited by McGill and Chicago makes me really question whether the people making those arguments are willing to maintain a cordial and friendly relationship with other people in the community. My apologies on behalf of McGill for whatever Joe has been saying - he just had a bunch of ...

Nabonidus

Is there any chance Sebastian Drake, Sam Baker and myself could play tomorrow from the same computer? (I'm aware that would require a bit of team shuffling - sorry about the late expression of interest but all of us have only just arrived in Montreal.)

Nabonidus

...yeah, that was some pretty terrible (and kind of insensitive) phrasing on my part, sorry. I'm not even sure why I mentioned the western blot in particular; I meant to say "I wouldn't have complete trust in an HIV diagnosis done on stored tissue samples from the sixties", since according to my res...

Nabonidus

I want to open discussion about the substance of one of the questions: the one about early victims of AIDS. I enjoyed that because I saw "And the Band Played On" a couple of months ago (highly interesting and recommended, though not a great film-as-such, and with a strangely naive anti-sex posture)...

Nabonidus

I could also staff if I don't get into the event itself (which seems pretty likely).

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I think I've been added to the staffers list erroneously since I've never posted in this thread before... but I am actually willing to staff this. Oh shit, sorry dude. I mixed you up with Joe Su, the other guy from your school with a short name. No worries. I only noticed it while coming to check i...

Nabonidus

I think I've been added to the staffers list erroneously since I've never posted in this thread before... but I am actually willing to staff this.

Nabonidus

Another thanks for the tournament and for the very flattering Saturday night shenanigans.

Nabonidus

Here's the non-painting visual art pack I read. It wasn't originally written for MORE WEIGHT and therefore wasn't written to be ungettable.

Nabonidus

This was significantly more fun than I was expecting it to be. I would like to thank especially Peter Cordeiro for his packet, and not Joe Su, who keeps going out of his way to remind me about that one time I confused Carl Orff with Hans Zimmer.

Nabonidus

I should really learn not to answer questions about specific poems with the surnames of people who never-to-my-knowledge wrote poetry.

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I would like to join the newly-emptied waitlist.

Nabonidus

bmcke wrote:EDIT: It was also nice that he didn't spell "quizbowl" with a space.

Why is quizbowl spelled without a space? Isn't the intent to mirror "[Blank] Bowl" events in college football?

Nabonidus

Skepticism and Animal Feed wrote:any quizbowl penetration into the public eye has to be at least partially personality-driven.

Agreed. I suggest we spend a couple years staging an epic wrestling-style storyline, except consisting mainly of subtle literary allusions.

Nabonidus

Regardless of who was or wasn't a prime minister, this whole thread makes me think that guy who said political and military history were overrepresented in quiz bowl was on to something.

Nabonidus

Many people have argued to me on many occasions that they find questions more difficult in general when they don't provide a lot of contextual details. Those are probably the players who, like Jerry, want to feel like they're "moving closer" to the answer as the question progresses - they want to t...

Nabonidus

Disclaimer: I know very little about art except for the exasperating postmodern stuff that involves shocking people with a frozen-blood sculpture of your own head or getting plastic surgery to look like the Mona Lisa.

Nabonidus

That's one good example. Another example that may be closer to what I had in mind was my much-maligned-at-the-time tossup on Tony Judt in Nats 2011. While that question may not have been optimal for that particular context, it, and things like it, are actually the kind of stuff that you encounter o...

Nabonidus

I'm not sure what "studying academia" means Sorry - I typed that really fast as I was about to miss a 10:30 meeting. Pretty sure I meant to say something along the lines of "studying the sort of stuff one might expect to learn as a motivated student in whatever academic field, independent of howeve...

Nabonidus

Jarret - that seems to me like that sort of thing that would be used as an individual clue for common answer questions with answer lines like "patricians" (or "women's rights in China", or "the rice industry"...) Ike - my question was not so much about whether people should be rewarded for studying ...

Nabonidus

You're not wrong, Derek, but this game isn't even close to being a perfect mirror of academia. In practice, there is usually a significant difference between regular "pursuit of academic interests" and specifically trying to get better at this game. The most obvious thing to point out is that a lot...

Nabonidus

When I write for hard events, I am sympathetic to the "career/veteran quizbowl player" who has taken actions specifically to get good at this game....and, conversely, my questions are probably less sympathetic to a player whose knowledge is less derived from a specific/direct attempt to learn "quiz...

Nabonidus

I'd like to thank my perfidious teammate Joe for going out of his way to snitch on my grad status and ensure I wouldn't receive any form of undue recognition

Nabonidus

Black Miao wrote:good point, this will certainly put you higher on my player poll

Ha. If I'm on the the top 25 list I will literally eat my shoe.

Nabonidus

Jordan and Derek aren't even powering as much as those three at ICT despite way weaker teammates, and their generalism wasn't enough to take their teams very far If you're looking at overall stats, these measures are highly correlated: there's a reason I went from scoring 38% powers before rebracke...

Nabonidus

Jordan and Derek aren't even powering as much as those three at ICT despite way weaker teammates, and their generalism wasn't enough to take their teams very far If you're looking at overall stats, these measures are highly correlated: there's a reason I went from scoring 38% powers before rebracke...

Nabonidus

Masked Canadian History Bandit wrote:Stefanie Schoeneman

is from Alabama, which has apparently seen fit to overlook Neil Young's epic diss track and resume diplomatic relations with us

Nabonidus

All the same, using the Canadian players I actually know... your math ranks my teammate Joe Su over Jordan Palmer and Jay Misuk, both of whom are far better players than he is. A little further down, my other teammate Sebastian Drake (who only buzzes on inorganic chemistry and British military histo...

Nabonidus

[Whoops, I didn't see that power/neg ratios were already included in the OP. Please delete this post.]

Nabonidus

In terms of state capitals in which to have your Greyhound bus catch on fire, Montpelier's got to be pretty low on the list.

Nabonidus

McGill's history/math/econ/art player, Sam Baker, couldn't play this year because he forgot to apply for his student visa.

We replaced him with Daniel Lovsted (our top DII scorer) for ACF Regionals, but he couldn't make it to Nats.

Nabonidus

I agree with Rob. In addition to the Shakespeare clue (which gave me the unfortunate experience of having "Kenneth Branagh!" shouted into my ear from a distance of several inches) the dentistry scene from Marathon Man is really famous and I actually thought the middle part of the question was intend...

Nabonidus

Here's the tossups in Editors' Six: Fifth Column, Candida, Baudolino, malaria, Oberlin College, Black and Tans, Licinius, Abydos, cross section, arrythmia, metric space, coupling reactions, the Seven Sages, Baba Yaga's hut, A System of Logic, Delacroix, concerto grosso, Great Britain, inflection, G...

Nabonidus

Oh, I don't disagree from an in-game perspective. By "odious" I merely mean "boring, time-consuming and probably not useful outside of quiz bowl".

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Well, I agree with Marshall. I'm not a history player, but the notion of "list-based studying" sounds pretty darn odious to me.

Nabonidus

I would just like to point out that Bela Tarr is one of the most lauded directors alive - Satantango even made it into Sight & Sound's poll of the top 50 films ever - and I'm actually quite surprised that multiple people in this thread consider him more obscure than some of the other stuff in those ...

Nabonidus

That moment when you punctuate your last tossup at ACF Nationals by waving a physical copy of Dictionary of the Khazars at the reader.

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15 minutes ago, when I discovered that none of my teammates knows what a fig is.

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The Last 20 Stanley Cup Winners wrote:I'm staying at McGill to do a MSc in Human Genetics.

Copycat.

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