2017 WAO: Joey's stuff (phil, painting, Brit lit, &VisOFA)

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2017 WAO: Joey's stuff (phil, painting, Brit lit, &VisOFA)

Post by Red Panda Cub »

This is my first time editing a widely played set to completion (apologies for previous flakes) and I had a few ideas I wanted to stick to, some common across the categories, others more specific to one category.

Painting ---

I aimed to ask about trends, painters and movements, not specific paintings so much. I find questions, especially tossups, about specific paintings really dull for the most part. They can be done well, but it's hard to find a painting where the art historical things are important enough and numerous enough for it to feel worthwhile, so I decided to tossup 0 paintings. Perhaps I could have asked for more in the bonuses, at least as hard parts, but I decided not to. I think throughout the 16 packets there are four named paintings as answers (Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, Princes in the Tower by Delaroche, No.5 by Pollock and The Jack Pine by Thomson). The Rembrandt one I would replace with something else if I wrote again, but the others I am happy with how they are clued, because, to me, the meat of those clues is about the context and history of the works. I hope people liked that approach!

With the tossups I wanted to do things like in the Johns and Klee tossups were I talked about recurring motifs, since describing individual paintings is less fun/important seeming much of the time than asking about what recurring obsessions a painter had. I hope these worked for people as ideas, but do let me know if that failed.

Philosophy ---

I basically wrote this out of a combination of classes/lectures I've been too, journals I've read, reading lists and the SEP. That's why you were faced with a lot of named ideas and hard parts on thinkers in bonuses. This, I'm told, meant the category played pretty hard, but I really did try to keep things accessible/make it be about what I think people actually read about in philosophy. Perhaps I pushed too far in this direction, but I think this was born out of being pretty befuddled by philosophy at a lot of tournaments I've played for not reflecting the discipline at all. Not many people in QB study the subject, so that's fair.

Another major thing I tried to do -- tossups that reflect the influence through time of thinkers or specific ideas. That's why laws was about Plato and Raz and Hart, or beauty clued from Plotinus, Mothersill, Aquinas and Kant. Similarly, in a lot of tossups on thinkers I wanted to include clues like "commentator X says this philosopher's argument is Y" because there's generally not academic consensus on what an argument is, and most philosophy tossups are just readings of texts, which can make them hard to buzz on if they're not couched in concrete ways. So my hope was to hedge my lack of faith in my ability to clearly describe an argument by giving you the extra clue of "oh Adams works on medieval thinkers" or "huh Mothersill is an aestheticist".

Literature ---

I don't think I did that much novel stuff here conceptually, but I tried to pick some exciting hard parts and ask some important things that I think have been neglected (Woolf's stories, Firbank, etc., keeping the submitted Under Milk Wood TU).

Visual OFA ---

I got drafted in here in a relatively last minute way so I had less planned out thoughts for what I wanted to achieve, and some TUs, esp. in architecture, might have been a bit shaky, but I still think fun things were brought up that quizbowl hasn't explored so much: Cassavetes; studio pottery; tang calligraphy; Jean Vigo; James Turrel; Ed Ruscha's love of cheese.

Any, apologies for a rambling and probably mostly dumb post, but this is the vague summation of what I was going for. I'm looking forward to hearing feedback. :smile:
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Re: Joey's stuff (philosophy, painting & British lit [&VisOF

Post by cruzeiro »

Errata: Tom Thomson died (in 1917) before the Group of Seven "officially" formed in 1920; as such he's only associated with/influenced it, rather than actually being a member.
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Re: Joey's stuff (philosophy, painting & British lit [&VisOF

Post by Red Panda Cub »

cruzeiro wrote:Errata: Tom Thomson died (in 1917) before the Group of Seven "officially" formed in 1920; as such he's only associated with/influenced it, rather than actually being a member.
Thanks!
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Re: Joey's stuff (philosophy, painting & British lit [&VisOF

Post by cruzeiro »

Other bit of errata: [from Horton/Swift/Ankit], Michael Moore directed Bowling for Columbine, not Bowling for Columbia.
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Re: Joey's stuff (philosophy, painting & British lit [&VisOF

Post by ErikC »

I noticed there was an usually large amount of ethics tossups. It was an interesting break from the more text-focused or thinker-focused tossups most people write to hear harder questions on things like compatiblism, even if that meant I got less questions or negged (which I did a lot of).
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Re: Joey's stuff (philosophy, painting & British lit [&VisOF

Post by Red Panda Cub »

ErikC wrote:I noticed there was an usually large amount of ethics tossups. It was an interesting break from the more text-focused or thinker-focused tossups most people write to hear harder questions on things like compatiblism, even if that meant I got less questions or negged (which I did a lot of).
Ummm, while compatibilism is certainly part of a debate that has implications for ethics, I wouldn't call it an ethics topic per se. I would say that the only outright ethics tossup in this tournament was the one on virtue

Edit: If there were any particularly neg-baity clues or missing prompt instructions, please do let me know.
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Re: Joey's stuff (philosophy, painting & British lit [&VisOF

Post by ErikC »

Short-beaked echidna wrote:
ErikC wrote:I noticed there was an usually large amount of ethics tossups. It was an interesting break from the more text-focused or thinker-focused tossups most people write to hear harder questions on things like compatiblism, even if that meant I got less questions or negged (which I did a lot of).
Yeah I didn't mean to say compatibilism was ethics, that was just another thought on having harder answer lines. Now that I think about it most of it wasn't ethics, I just got the impression while playing.

And the negging had nothing to the questions, that was just me being a mood for neg.
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