The Quizbowl Resource Center

Birdofredum Sawin

I think the point here is more "why do cross-disciplinary questions need to go anywhere?" If we're going to rehash fundamental topics like "should there be any cross-disciplinary questions in NAQT," it might be a good idea to open up some separate discussion threads? My general ...

Birdofredum Sawin

I don't think the bonus is "fatally flawed," I just think the following: Delmore Schwartz is already plenty hard. Sure, Summer Knowledge might have won the Bollingen, but you have to have really, really deep Schwartz and/or Bollingen knowledge to even know that. This question doesn't even...

Birdofredum Sawin

Well, like, there was a bonus that I got where the "easy" part was Caprica. I mean, I know that this is the prequel to BSG, and I figured that out from the clues, but I couldn't remember what it was called. I don't have cable, so I don't watch things like the Syfy (ugh) channel and the on...

Birdofredum Sawin

A good chunk of the literature was ok as well, but there were many questions that just ended up being incredibly vague and had entirely unhelpful clues. Some bonuses were outrageously hard and lacked easy parts, and more than once, the most famous thing about some bonus answers wasn't even given as...

Birdofredum Sawin

The interminable shitwave of trash in this SCT really ruined my experience completely. Oh, you caught a bad bonus because it's on a show on a network you don't watch? Screw you, you get nothing! Endless bonuses demanding you identify some obscure-ass actors, ungettable things about some stupid show...

Birdofredum Sawin

Yeah, I wanted to chime in about the variable bonus difficulty, which I see others have started to comment upon as well. I don't regard this as a flaw for which the editors of this set deserve to be castigated; rather, it's emblematic of the confusion that's been endemic in recent tournaments over w...

Birdofredum Sawin

Oh man, Philly Experiment! I also played in the 1995 tournament, which was the summer after my freshman year of college. My team (which was me, Guy Jordan, and two people I forget) lost in the finals to, I think, "Three Boys and a Goy." I want to say that the game went to the last tossup, ...

Birdofredum Sawin

This thread may be running into the sand, or it may be gathering new life. Anyway, I wanted to post something about "recycling" clues and the canon, and this seemed as good a place as any to do it. To make my point, I want to consider the following tossup on Wallace Stevens, which I have j...

Birdofredum Sawin

Obviously, we all get knowledge from different sources. Many of us are avid readers. Much of that reading is from primary material, a lot of it is secondary stuff like book reviews and so on, some of it is just random essays on this or that topic, and a lot of it comes from class. None of those sou...

Birdofredum Sawin

So I assume that Bruce's "pet point" in this context was either unrelated to my post, or in fact was lining up behind it? (Inasmuch as reading things like "the New York Review of Books/TLS, popular biographies of authors, etc.," as discussed in my earlier post, has nothing whatso...

Birdofredum Sawin

I started to read this thread, but despaired only a few posts in. Regardless, I'll weigh in and suggest that what I take to be Ryan's central dichotomy -- between "Tier 1" knowledge (e.g. "I read Moby-Dick, now stand back while I buzz on this lead-in describing Chapter 37 of the novel...

Birdofredum Sawin

Man, are we having this discussion yet again? I'll weigh in and say that while Seth is surely right, at least in the pure good of theory, I still sympathize with Ted's perspective. To offer a more succinct version of Ted's point: Could someone produce a critique of geography questions in quizbowl wh...

Birdofredum Sawin

Sure, I can believe that it isn't just inexperienced writers who are responsible for this phenomenon. Maybe there are three kinds of people who do this kind of thing. First, the relative novices I referred to in my previous post. They don't know any better, and we can't expect them to be discerning ...

Birdofredum Sawin

In theory, yes, this burden would fall on the writers. But I'm assuming that a lot of the people who do this kind of thing are people who just don't know any better -- they are relative novices to quizbowl, and all they can do is "look at recent tournaments and take what they find there as exem...

Birdofredum Sawin

I'm going to begin this post with an anecdote. At VCU Open, there was a bonus on the oeuvre of Edwidge Danticat. "Another stupid Danticat question," I said to my teammates. "She comes up at every fucking tournament these days!" Then we sat down to play the CaTO/TaCO, and the very...

Birdofredum Sawin

This tournament was ok. I didn't find anything to be excited about in this set. As usual, there were some incredibly dubious answer choices, including a whole bunch of things that were either incredibly obvious from the start or were unanswerable by anyone until the end. The bonuses were pretty var...

Birdofredum Sawin

I usually find myself in agreement with Ted's posts, but this "questions about 'poets' should exclusively be about their 'poetic' works" proposal strikes me as really unsound and arbitrary. In general, modern quizbowl prefers that tossups on literature consist largely of clues derived from...

Birdofredum Sawin

After editing four CO trash tournaments, "actual life" beckons. Consequently, I've handed the reins of CO trash to the extremely capable Michael Arnold, who will be in charge of next year's event. I've enjoyed working on the tournaments over the last five years; thanks to everyone who help...

Birdofredum Sawin

But I'm almost in equal opposition to tossups that lack any technical clues, as they can be gotten by people with no musical knowledge too early in the question. The question I have to ask here is: should non-music people really be getting music tossups before the last two or so lines? I was under ...

Birdofredum Sawin

Again I'm disturbed by this tendency to defer to so-called experts when determining what is and isn't askable in quiz bowl. Do we really want to say "Charlie Dees and Hannah Kirsch haven't heard of this, so it shouldn't come up"? Compare this to Jerry's post -- he doesn't say "I am a...

Birdofredum Sawin

I'd like to contest the notion that to be a "music player" necessarily implies "being interested in hearing more questions based on technical descriptions of musical scores." I consider myself a music player (both in terms of being extremely interested in classical music, and pre...

Birdofredum Sawin

Anyone who has a copy of the set should feel free to make it available online. (Or, if you are an online archiver of questions and want to make the set available, get in touch with me and I'll email it to you.)

Birdofredum Sawin

For what it's worth, the distribution was 6/6 TV/movies, 5/5 music, 4/4 sports, and 5/5 "other" (including comic books, video games, trash lit, weird quasi-academia, tossups on "homunculi," etc.). We adhered to that high-level distribution pretty rigorously, but the sub-distribut...

Birdofredum Sawin

Before the discussion advances too far, I wanted to thank everyone who made the tournament possible. First, thanks to the invaluable Donald Taylor, who pitched in with logistics, writing questions, and generally with the averting of disaster. Next, thanks to people who helped out with additional wri...

Birdofredum Sawin

It appears that the only two iterations of the Tönnies (the Chicago and Berkeley ones) have both been completed, so feel free to post comments, critique, unmitigated praise, etc. I'll be posting some expressions of gratitude, and perhaps some overall comments on the set, at some point in the future.

Birdofredum Sawin

I'll cast my vote for a Bay Area mirror of this.

Birdofredum Sawin

What's the word on whether the lit tournament will be played Saturday night? Brian and I, at least, are interested in playing it.

Birdofredum Sawin

To answer a few questions: This year's set will either contain (a) tiebreaker tossups or (b) an extra packet set aside for a finals round, but not both. In keeping with the autocratic tradition of this event, arbitrary team names will be assigned either by myself or by the indispensable Donald Taylo...

Birdofredum Sawin

As far as free agents go, if nothing else, you guys probably can be added to a Berkeley team, since some of our players may be recruited into staffing. Is there any interest here in running the literature side tournament on Saturday night? I'll be playing BASQUE (as one of those "Stanford"...

Birdofredum Sawin

It's been a while since we had a field update. As far as I can glean from this thread and what people have emailed me, the field is now as follows: Team List: Dan Passner, Ted Stratton, Mike Cheyne, Evan Nagler Chris Borglum, Billy Beyer, Seth Kendall Nathaniel Kane + RIT people Greg Sorenson + &quo...

Birdofredum Sawin

I wrote the Lucy poems tossup. In fact, the first sentence contains clues which are of central importance in 20th-century literary criticism. "Against Theory" is a very important essay which people read and discuss widely; and they chose "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" because tha...

Birdofredum Sawin

Yeah, I don't really mean to hate on a tournament produced largely by novice writers (as I said, I had no idea that was the case, as Matt didn't mention the fact in his announcement of the switch to Penn questions). I'm not sure that criticism at this remove would be any help, but I will say that so...

Birdofredum Sawin

I don't think anyone's ever called PB Trash a great set. Most of it was written by rookie question writers and editors (I wrote 10/10, and Bentley contributed a packet, but basically everything else was done by folks in their first year of college-level question writing), and yeah, the inexperience...

Birdofredum Sawin

So, these Penn questions were not so great, in addition to being a bit dated. I'm not sure why people thought these rather perfunctory questions were just fine, but they could have used some work.

Birdofredum Sawin

Unfortunately, I just received word that the tournament cannot be completed by this weekend. As recommended by Matt, I am looking into exploring a previous TRASH tournament from UPenn's Penn Bowl this previous January. I await an e-mail from that TD and will update everyone on the status of the tou...

Birdofredum Sawin

Yeah, I agree with Matt here. The thinking behind the "lame," as I understand it, is "you'll be able to tell from the first sentence of the bonus whether you'll be able to do anything on this question." But that only holds true if the bonus lead-in is something like "Name th...

Birdofredum Sawin

Can you share your interpretation of how, eg, spelling questions were jettisoned in the mid-90s, or some other obviously beneficial change took place? It's empirically not the case that either nothing has ever changed, nor that nothing should ever change, so surely there must be some agreeable proc...

Birdofredum Sawin

If there's stuff that currently gets classified as popular music in trash and is truly artistically-and-culturally influential and gets two thumbs up from real classical music scholars across the land, perhaps it could make it into an "all academic" distribution through "other fine a...

Birdofredum Sawin

So this thread has now looped from (a) "let's dump geography from ACF" to (b) "maybe we should think harder about what is involved in dumping anything from ACF" to (c) "let's dump trash from ACF (nationals)." I continue to be in favor of spending more time thinking abou...

Birdofredum Sawin

I'll admit my question-writing is not up to par with everyone else here, but this is my take on Matt's idea of a Wyoming tossup: The Popo Agie Wilderness of this state includes a glacial carved valley surrounded by granite peaks known as the Cirque of the Towers. A large collection of columnar basa...

Birdofredum Sawin

With all due respect to Dwight, I will once again assert that attempts to account for the distribution on the basis of factors extrinsic to the game (e.g. "relevance of a topic to a 'well-rounded' education") are doomed to be rationalizations of the status quo. For example: In my mind, we ...

Birdofredum Sawin

I think that the burden may also lie with people, who cannot credibly claim they are unaware of what "good question" means, to answer the challenge to produce any examples at all of a good geography question, or to explain what sort of wacked-out metaphysics leads you to think that the 40...

Birdofredum Sawin

This thread is getting a bit weird, but I want to stick up for (what I take to be) Ted's position. (Disclosure: I myself am a mediocre geography player who derives little pleasure from the category.) As I understand it, Ted is making the somewhat Burkean argument that the ACF distribution has evolve...

Birdofredum Sawin

Bumping this because I've edited the original post with whatever info I have been able to glean (from emails and this thread) on who is going to be at the tournament. If I've assigned you to the wrong team, or if you aren't on the list and want to be (in whatever capacity), please let me know. In re...

Birdofredum Sawin

I don't think the bonus difficulty fluctuated enough to really mess things up; in particular, I don't think that's why we beat Stanford in the play-in game. Looking at our play-in game with Stanford: they answered the same number of tossups and had one less neg than we did. They also had slightly b...

Birdofredum Sawin

Just stepping in here -- the editors cannot edit a packet that they have yet to receive. I know that doesn't apply to the editors packets, but it's impossible to have all the questions ready when the last packet submission didn't come in until two days before the tournament started (correct me if I...

Birdofredum Sawin

Well, I'm mostly on Yaphe's side when it comes to getting tournaments done in a reasonable time. I think the way that most people (both these days and in the past, though what's relevant is now) tend to procrastinate and not properly plan out what they're doing is straight fucking nuts. Now, I thin...

Birdofredum Sawin

The Burmese history question had a part about SLORC, which seemed well below "Chicago or beyond" difficulty. SLORC has been a tossup answer at past tournaments, I believe. Violating my own rule about sidetracking threads: Jerry's QBDB yields a single mention of SLORC (it isn't an answer, ...

Birdofredum Sawin

There were huge problems with this tournament. Many of them were my fault. Others were not. Jerry missing his plane was no one's fault but his own for scheduling a flight on razor-thin time margins. I am interested in helping analyze the real problems and developing suggestions for next year's Nati...

Birdofredum Sawin

Hey, I just got home from St. Louis and so am a bit late to the discussion. I was going to post a somewhat lengthy excoration, but Jerry has anticipated my critique of the tournament logistics. I won't say much more about that here, but it really is unfathomable to me that an experienced TD in charg...

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