The Quizbowl Resource Center

Stinkweed Imp

Anyhow, that's probably the most I've actually applied myself to studying for anything-- my quiz bowl study methods are usually reasonably casual. I'd also be interested in hearing about more casual methods, especially when they've been proven to work well. Top players' tendency toward self ...

Stinkweed Imp

Since Naveed has already leaked my secret carding session, I might as well post the thread I've been meaning to asking people to share their study routines. I'm more interested in hearing tales of legendary study binges than looking for advice (except maybe how to stay motivated during legendary ...

Stinkweed Imp

Paolo Uccello I don't mean to single out this question too much because I thought the visual art was overall very good but I think the low conversion of this part can be attributed to The Hunt in the Forest being a solidly-second tier work by an already very difficult artist (it's not mentioned in ...

Stinkweed Imp

While I appreciate the confidence, a significant portion of those cards are actually Kai Smith's and are therefore completely unintelligible to me

Stinkweed Imp

Columbia look like d2 favorites coming into the year, but that tournament is impossible to predict this far in advance. Columbia's remaining players look like a lock for a top bracket team, and any of their incoming freshman could easily become major contributors if they elect to take the ...

Stinkweed Imp

I saw a post in the high school section about a way-to-early preview of next year and it made me realize I have no idea who's good. Take this as an opportunity to discuss who's good.

Stinkweed Imp

I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen any mention of what I thought was the most distinctive feature of the set, which was the tendency for the history questions to clue extremely recent scholarship. Here is an inexhaustive list of history tossups that clued work from the last two decades: I ...

Stinkweed Imp

I find claims of high question quality hard to believe considering no sample questions are posted anywhere and there is no publicly available information about writers. Regardless, if this email is indicative of LIQBA's general attitude and the information about next year's nationals on their ...

Stinkweed Imp

My famed "casual players" (who make up somewhere between a quarter and a half of PUQB) each spent dozens and dozens of hours last year coming to practice and staffing tournaments. Purdue hosted ELEVEN tournaments last year (CNS, SCT, UCT, four high school tournaments, and four intramurals) and sent ...

Stinkweed Imp

necroing this old thread in light of recent discord conversations to say that I disagree, and that "description acceptable" questions should be kept to a minimum, for three reasons: First, overuse of "description acceptable" can promote sloppy writing. Every clue should point clearly and uniquely ...

Stinkweed Imp

I posted recently about how I think quizbowl answerlines have gotten a bit out of hand in recent years, so I figured it would be best to expand on my thoughts a bit. It has become common practice for answerlines in common link questions to accept any of individual titles/names/etc that are clued in ...

Stinkweed Imp

I would not necessarily be opposed to the existence of a tournament written by AI questions if the questions were of equal quality to questions written entirely by a human. However, quizbowl writers as a whole don't give themselves enough credit for doing what is in essence highly specialized ...

Stinkweed Imp

I'll be briefly returning to UC Berkeley, and am looking forward to playing some non-online quizbowl.

Stinkweed Imp

I completely agree with Naveed's post. Prompts are entirely a result of the gameplay needs of quizbowl, such as when a player gives an answer that is entirely correct but needs to be distinguished from a similar-sounding wrong answer (like L yndon Johnson ), or a player gives answer that is not ...

Stinkweed Imp

Could I see the conversion data (if available) on the Mildred Dresselhaus tossup?

Stinkweed Imp

I'm a little skeptical of the concept of aphantasia, or at least it being as common as some people posit. When asked to visualize, I'm solidly a 5 but I have a very strong "minds eye" idea of whatever it is. Visual art has always been my best quizbowl category, and the only one I find mostly ...

Stinkweed Imp

I think this is my least favorite kind of player mistake to have to penalize, but things have names. Description acceptable answer lines have their place in the game, but every question can't be a description acceptable approach to the answer line. Regardless of the correctness of this protest ...

Stinkweed Imp

I am not an NAQT writer or editor but I’m certain the intent of that phrasing was to provide a linguistic clue regarding the origin of the word ‘Kristallnacht’ rather than attempting to provide any historiographic commentary.

Stinkweed Imp

Pick your favorite category (like lit or FA or sci, not some bs like 19th c. Bolivian architects) and devote your off-season to locking down that category. If I were you, I'd pick one of the "big 3" (sci, lit, or hist) and just grind that. Any study method works. I personally cluemine the QBReader ...

Stinkweed Imp

I was going to post my own anglophone perspective but I basically agree with Andrew, so I'll just add that quizbowl is an unusual context where it is both normal to encounter a word only in writing and have no opportunity to clarify what the meaning is, so it may be necessary for writers to ...

Stinkweed Imp

many players "Many players" think a lot of things. The reality is that (even if 22/22 packets become more common) an incredibly wide range of possible topics has to fit in a small distribution, and increasing the distribution of one subcategory requires taking away space from all of the other ...

Stinkweed Imp

With how much the list has expanded in the past few years it might be worth organizing it into smaller groups of introductory texts for people looking to learn a category for the first time vs reference works for question writing or in depth study vs high-quality academic books on quizbowl subjects ...

Stinkweed Imp

A somewhat similar situation that has happened before and, as far as I know, is not clearly addressed in either ruleset is when a player is thinking out loud in the process of answering a question, such as saying "well that work is [W] so the answer is [X]." It can be difficult for a moderator to ...

Stinkweed Imp

At Kevin's suggestion (on Discord), I did some "alternate history" to explore various feasible scenarios. Had the tenth game not been played, our A-value would have been 1.6 higher. This would have been enough for us to go up one spot. This means that our A-value went *down* for playing a game in ...

Stinkweed Imp

Point (xi): personally, I separate my cards into decks by top-line category (history, literature, fine arts…) because I think it controls the chaos a bit better. I do not agree with people who make a deck for every 1/1 subcategory, though, for the same reasons you stated. Separating cards into m ...

Stinkweed Imp

In case I haven't been coming off as Heideggerian enough: the main problem with this sort of technology is not that it does bad work, but that, by letting us fail or slack without consequences, it makes our work worse. Insofar as writing quizbowl questions is essentially an artisanal activity, AI ...

Stinkweed Imp

How do you decide which protests to resolve?

Stinkweed Imp

Should a protest be upheld, simply put the time the cycle took back onto the clock and then play the replacement on the clock, and if more time is still there, then continue. If there's no replacement needed, then add the time between the buzz and the beginning of the next cycle back onto the clock ...

Stinkweed Imp

As with the examples above, the timeout itself was the make-or-break decision. The timeout wasn't the make-or-break moment (assuming no team would make the mistake of calling a timeout when they could have run out the clock), the other team getting the last tossup was. You should do whatever you ...

Stinkweed Imp

I think "momentum" is far too ephemeral a concept to be measured by a scoresheet. While keeping in mind the fact that you might need a timeout to stop the clock in a close game, if you feel yourself getting tilted or wanting to confirm the score or needing a drink of water or whatever else you could ...

Stinkweed Imp

By far the most important thing is just to prepare before your events with study and practice - no specific ritual is going to benefit you more than this kind of preparation I think everyone can benefit from the ritual of getting plenty of sleep before tournaments, staying hydrated, and eating ...

Stinkweed Imp

The question on Japanese photographers in packet 6 was really good.

Stinkweed Imp

*i feel there should be a good name for the room created by this policy. "overflow room" would imply that woman are some extra, nonessential component of the quizbowl community, which is wrong and harmful; "female room" or anything like that is also not ideal. i propose "ao3," short for ...

Stinkweed Imp

I'm pretty strongly opposed to teams splitting at Regionals in order to qualify more teams (or any other reason). ACF Nationals is a highly exclusive tournament for a reason, and for newer programs or players even qualifying for it should be considered a significant accomplishment. An established ...

Stinkweed Imp

I would hate to see a forum argument derail a good cause so I'll happily make a donation on Dan's behalf if he decides to not play this tournament.

Stinkweed Imp

ErikC wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2023 5:34 pm packages

Stinkweed Imp

too many things i like for a top 40, not quite enough for a top 100

Stinkweed Imp

1. Clash of the Clash The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go” The Clash, “Rock the Casbah” 2. Country Crossover Corner Willie Nelson, “Always on My Mind” Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, “Islands in the Stream" 3. Disco Holdouts (Pick One) Rick James, “Super Freak” Lipps., Inc, “Funkytown” Kool and t ...

Stinkweed Imp

1. If you are writing an answerline on a person who shares their last name with another person who is reasonably "canonical" (i.e. Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler), require their first name or initial consistently, or only require last name consistently (the latter would probably be preferable in ...

Stinkweed Imp

1. Packet submission increases the cost to play quizbowl. This is true. Is this true? The questions used for ACF fall have to come from somewhere, and if they don't come from packet submissions ACF will have to pay people to write them. This would increase tournament costs, which have been ...

Stinkweed Imp

or just use this one

Stinkweed Imp

Under the ACF rules, such protests should only be filed during the first 10 tossups of the game , and changing such protests retroactively seems to violate the spirit of the rule in this situation. The spirit of this rule appears to me to be to prevent teams from holding up a tournament by ...

Stinkweed Imp

Heart Of Glass vs. Down in the Tube Station at Midnight Radio Radio vs. Burning Love Friend of the Devil vs. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood Roxanne vs. Fooled Around and Fell in Love Lust For Life vs. Baker Street Marquee Moon vs. Let Your Love Flow Highway to Hell vs. You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) ...

Stinkweed Imp

Contra my esteemed colleague Prof. Boyd, I think this is a reasonable middle ground when there's suspicion but no concrete proof... Saying "someone at TO online cheated" is really saying "someone on this list of people cheated." Rather than throwing suspicion on one person, you're throwing ...

Stinkweed Imp

One could easily make the same argument about this forum - that many high school students have quite reasonably decided that forum discourse is inane and not worth engaging with, and this means that there is nobody to rebut "git gud" ideology. I don't actually have any solution, but perhaps people ...

Stinkweed Imp

Didn't these people all join Quizbowl about 8-10 years ago? Surely the effects of difficulty inflation would be much harder to overcome now than it was back then. I wasn't around back then so I wouldn't know, please correct me if I'm wrong. If anything, there has been difficulty deflation in the ...

Stinkweed Imp

A team of four decent freshman who play semi-regularly and then study hard their junior and senior years should be nationally competitive. Is this not already true? A UG team has finished in the top bracket of Nationals every year since 2009 (at which point the stats don't list if a team is UG or ...

Stinkweed Imp

I think this further proves Justine's point because, despite their hard work, it took them so long to get to this upper echelon of play. Certainly it isn't impossible for undergraduates to get good, or even dominate, but it requires a considerable amount of effort on the part of such undergraduates ...

Stinkweed Imp

I want to clarify the point about graduate students. I don't think many people have a problem with graduate students playing because they're graduate students, but rather the problem is because they've been playing for so long. Experience is a pathway to many advantages some consider to be unfair ...

Stinkweed Imp

Here are hastily-calculated bpas for the first round of mirrors. A few sites had incomplete buzzpoint data, so these values should be considered approximate at best.

EDIT: added teams

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