The Quizbowl Resource Center

ThisIsMyUsername

Whether Jonah wants to do this or someone else wants to instead: If we're looking to restrict ourselves to data involving only common opponents, I think the most logical place to start is to run PATH for the five matches when the six superplayoffs top-bracket teams (Yale A, Berkeley A, Chicago A, P...

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I don't really understand how you're getting all that from what I'm saying. And I don't really understand who you're arguing against in your most recent post, or how your reasoning holds together. Let's take this piece by piece. My point is not that a team that scores the most tossups necessarily w...

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Obviously, I am not sympathetic to Andrew Hart's philosophy on what the player poll is meant to achieve. For those who are, though, I would be wary of measuring it using a statistic whose supposed soundness was entirely justified by this paragraph: My next guess was that squaring both team overall P...

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The greatest limit of this list, of course, is that it doesn't account for the many great players who are surely Top 25 material but did not make the top bracket--such as Itamar, Jakob Myers, Charles Hang, Caleb, and Kenji, to name just the most obvious examples. Even if one were to use PATH lists ...

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Here is a spreadsheet containing the PATH and category-by-category PATH for CMST. Not sure how exactly to interpret the ratio, though. I don't really understand how you generated these numbers, Adam. I just ran some calculations myself, and what we're doing doesn't seem to line up at all. Let me ex...

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A lot of our conversations within player poll threads tend towards proferring intuitions, and then looking to the stats to find support for them; or end up with everyone providing anecdotal evidence that their teammates are excellent players. I, of course, have neither the standing nor the wish to s...

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As the author of both the only John Cleese-themed Festivus packet and the only food tossup specifically on chocolates from the Crunchy Frog sketch, I would be remiss if I did not note that the Cleese-played character Eric Praline is not the manufacturer of chocolates in the Crunchy Frog sketch (as I...

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Also it's hard for me to have this much sympathy for ACF when most of what you're doing is taking questions that teams wrote and repurposing them. If you don't understand that editors literally pore over questions for hours upon hours, often rewriting them from scratch, rather than merely "rep...

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Benin Rebirth Party wrote:Is the slate of side events confirmed yet?

Yes, it's Chicago Open Trash 2018 and Imaginary Landscape No. 4.

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We can step for a moment from discussing how the tournament lineup for the quizbowl season should come together, to publically discuss what we want it to look like. Partisans of opposite sides of the other debate might find common ground on this. It makes life easier if the two discussions are not i...

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It's somewhat disingenuous to say that the scheduling work could be done by anyone and is already being done: this subforum isn't really managed by anyone and is far from a very active place, nobody has produced a formal schedule for the year that is easily accessible from the main page, and nobody...

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It seems totally fantastic to think some kind of laissez-faire regime, where the signal "This is a bad tournament" is by your own admission indistinguishable from the signal "My team was kinda tired and/or busy," will actually serve as some invisible hand incentivizing better pr...

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One model might be this. Affiliated programs pay a small annual dues, which compensates the members of the organization for their time and provides an operating budget. The members manage an official collegiate quizbowl calendar and try to harmonize tournament dates in a yearly scheduling discussio...

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It turned out that even when most of the online community says "You shouldn't write that extra hard tournament," it's very easy for some team to ignore the protest and just write that "Regionals+" event anyway. Since plenty of teams will end up going to whatever tournament is wr...

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I agree with all of the following premises: that there should be one place where one can see the schedule for the year, that this schedule might benefit from coming together via planning rather than happenstance, and that the process of organizing writing teams for tournaments could be more transpar...

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"Committee": one of the most soul-crushing words in the English language. What exactly is the disaster that this bit of officialdom is supposed to avert? Who are the rebel writers in need of policing lest they carry out their dastardly schemes of producing tournaments that people don't wan...

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I hope John does CO Trash next year. Actually, I'm planning to do a hybrid tournament that's literature, non-fiction, music, food, and film, where some of each category is "highbrow" and some is "lowbrow." This is contingent on my dissertation being in good shape by the end of t...

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Recent threads have reminded me: I'm seeking teammates for this. My Trash experience consists mostly of being the high scorer on teams that lose most or all of their matches. (Sometimes because I'm playing with people deemed "the worst trash players ," but often because I'm a niche special...

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While I always submit a film question to try and remedy this, the opera and ballet lobby is strong. Assuming the tournament divides Other Arts evenly between Auditory and Visual within each packet (which virtually every well-edited tournament does), it is simply not possible for film to get pushed ...

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You should probably talk to Cody to get him to tell you exactly how he automated packetizing for HSAPQ. For PADAWAN, he gave me HSAPQ's standard rules, I tweaked them, and he executed accordingly. Once editors actually tagged their questions by category, it took (according to him) about an hour to p...

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By the way, lest I sound too down on the current state of Thought writing, I would like to add that I that Thought Monstrosity was one of the best-executed set of Thought questions I've yet played in quizbowl (primarily with regards to answer-line selection), and is a good model to be emulated by fu...

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Unless I am mistaken (and someone should feel free to correct me if I am wrong), I was the first editor to propose and institute a "Thought" category (as independent from pure Social Science or pure Philosophy) in a collegiate tournament , four years ago. Marshall Steinbaum deserves a lot ...

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As quizbowl proliferates, more and more teams host tournaments. This is, in general, a good thing. But it does mean that many tournaments are directed and moderated by people who are not aware of the many highly avoidable logistical snafus that occur, and how to avoid them. I am going to list a few ...

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Coach Jim wrote:The above message is now a week old. Any update when the rankings will be posted for ACF Nationals?

Are you referring to this? (Released a week ago)

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I am interested in looking at the different ways in which writers ask about lit questions, to see the differences in how the are converted. For example a common format for asking about lit would be a "this author question", which typically has less deep clues about individual works, and m...

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To re-iterate what everyone else has said, I don't think anyone was impugning Yale. (I didn't even know that that was the site Eliza was primarily thinking of.) The difficulty I'm having here, Eliza, is that you are making a giant leap from "this policy would have greatly helped this tournament...

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The rule that you're proposing, Eliza, sounds like a potentially okay demand for a school to make in a specific dire situation that warrants it . But I think it is an overreach to try to institute as a normative rule. When a school puts in a bid to host, editors are supposed to ascertain that the sc...

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Thanks to John and Robert for bringing the France tossup to my attention. I did recognize the potential difficulties there and don't think I used a specific enough wording - if you're looking for a modern-day country, Josquin. I chose "modern-day country" because I thought that would offe...

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For the purpose of raising a larger point, I'd like to mention one question. And even though this is a music question, the point most commonly applies to history questions. The first question in the Editors 1 packet has early clues asking what country Josquin Des Prez is from. There are few major co...

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Thanks to UIUC for hosting. My apologies for the circumstances that curtailed the tournament's conclusion. And so, an even larger heap of thanks to Northwestern and MSU A for choosing to resolve things in such a generous fashion; and I'm sorry that OSU A was disadvantaged by this too. However, at th...

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Sigh. It is one of the greatest misfortunes of the English language that no country uses American spelling and British punctuation (each being a more logical improvement upon an antiquated standard). Some within America have been fighting the good fight. But until the MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, A...

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He initially announced it for CO 2018, and changed it when informed that there wouldn't be enough time, because of CO Trash. CO Trash 2016 didn't leave enough time for a normal side event. But it left enough time to play Will's visual film tournament, which we did. So, it seems reasonable enough to ...

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Given that Eddie has just ceded his spot at CO 2018 and that there were two other audio tournaments vying for spots at NSC and HSNCT, I would like to move the main site of Imaginary Landscape to CO 2018, with the possibility of running additional post-CO mirrors either on Discord, or at one or more ...

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I've uploaded the set.

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The Oxford mirror was the last scheduled mirror of this tournament. A couple of people said they wanted a Skype mirror, but neither Max nor I is available to run one ourselves. If someone still wants to set one up, please e-mail me in the next couple of days to discuss. If no plans emerge for this b...

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#5 Chicago: currently not writing a tournament I find it impossible to believe that none of the teams listed other than Penn and Oxford have the ability to put together a playable college tournament, particularly given that they even have the option of collaborating. Um, then maybe you should actua...

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As I understand it, the late winter / early spring open serves two main functions: (1) it affords retired players (upon whose benficent assistance we rely to write and staff many regular-season tournaments) another opportunity to play a tournament before the summer; (2) it serves as a "tune-up&...

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Drew Scheeler has agreed to write the film/tv and pop questions.

Ben Salter wrote:Will the set be available to hold a UK mirror? After the very successful mirror of IL3, I am certain there will be the interest to play this too.

Sure, I'd be happy for there to be a UK mirror. Whenabouts would this be?

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This is the announcement for Imaginary Landscape No. 4, an 8-packet set of auditory tossups. As of now, the tentative plan is to mirror this on both HSNCT and NSC weekends. I hope to run one or both of those mirrors myself. This is subject to revision based on logistical considerations. The overall ...

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Given that I have reason to believe that the market can sustain two auditory arts tournaments in the coming season (and, after all, they are in different formats: one audio and one traditional) and there are now plans to have yet another auditory tournament in 2019, I will plan for Imaginary Landsca...

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As you might imagine, I'm extraordinarily excited to play this. And I'll travel pretty much wherever is necessary. I'm up to bat to edit the next Imaginary Landscape, and those have traditionally happened every even-numbered year. So, I was planning on producing that for spring/summer 2018. If peopl...

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Neither Max and I can run a Skype mirror ourselves. But we are entirely open to such a mirror happening if staff can be found to run it.

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I'm not sure if this is possible given staff concerns, but I'd suspect a scab team could likely be rounded up yo avoid a bye. I also encourage anyone on the fence to join said scab team, becauze this tournament is going to be s wonderful experience. We have four staff right now (Saul, Ryan, Young, ...

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All of the teams for There Will Be Stock Clues have now confirmed, except for the team of Sarod Nori, Robert Lucas, Anirban Sarkar, and Justin M. If someone from that team could please contact me, that would be good. Assuming that they confirm and that no other team joins, we have 7 teams and will c...

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Actually, could you please post the "chocolate" tossup? I am now wondering why it was so difficult, but beyond early keywords and the answer line, I do not have notes. Here is the actual tossup: 3. The filling for one of these food items is “emptied, steamed, flavored with sesame seeds, a...

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Notes: on the vinegar question, apparently multiple rooms at VCU negged with "garlic" on hearing the clue "chicken adobo." I can't remember the wording of the clue, but that might have been a misleading setup. No, if anything the description was generous. My description mentions...

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I don't know how accurate the spreadsheet is (given its proclaimed "unofficial" status), but right now There Will Be Stock Clues appears to be sitting at seven teams and three staffers. If each of those figures were somehow to increase by one, that would be dandy. Either way, could those p...

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Thanks for writing the set, I thought it hit the balance you were looking for and I'm glad Aidan convinced me to play it by declaring that it would be "the highlight of [his] quiz bowl career." I'm pretty miffed that this set beat me to cluing mannish water in a tossup, which is great. I'...

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$5 per player

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This thread is for errata, to be fixed before subsequent mirrors of the tournament.

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