The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone who came out to play Trash this year. It was a blast reading for you, and we hope you enjoyed the questions. Various intervening events prevented us from making this as polished a set as we might have liked, and to our moderators and players, we humbly apologize, and promise to return in two years with the most readable iteration of CO Trash yet, and ideally one without a 9/11 theme packet that comes as a surprise even to us.

(Please direct all complaints about readability, typos, and the like to Carsten Gehring.)

This year also brought us some new teams that we did a bad job seeding, and a few late roster shakeups also threw a spanner in the works; to those teams in prelim brackets that were unfortunately stacked, we are very sorry for our mistake and will do our best not to repeat it.

I will be posting some conversion stats and other threads shortly, but please feel free to comment on any general features of the set here.

Andrew pretty much describes things. The set was excellent. The two quibbles I had were the odd randomization and the fact that this set seemed to be more "vanity in interests" than the previous CO Trash.

Cheynem wrote:Andrew pretty much describes things. The set was excellent. The two quibbles I had were the odd randomization and the fact that this set seemed to be more "vanity in interests" than the previous CO Trash.

I'm interested to hear what "vanity" interests you felt were present in this set. I heard from various people that there was "too much Deadspin" (which is my fault), but besides that, I can't think of much in the way of themes from my own interests that crept into the set. I tend to write on stuff that interests me locally (usually when I see something that would make for an interesting clue or angle on a question), not from my broad interests. This can sometimes lead to clusterings (like with Deadspin--I read it daily so I find a lot of interesting sports material there).

I was mostly thinking of the Deadspin content. There seemed to be a fair amount of Minnesota content in the set as well (but perhaps I'm exaggerating).

My meager power count aside, this was a very fun set to play. The Minnesotacentrism was fine, but I thought there was a bit too much academic/quasi-academic content for a trash setting. That being said, I'm a big fan of "description acceptable"-caliber tossups, and I thought y'all did a great job pushing concepts of what can be tossed up in a gettable setting.

Cheynem wrote:There seemed to be a fair amount of Minnesota content in the set as well (but perhaps I'm exaggerating).

A quick survey reveals nearly all Americans currently reside in Minnesota, so this makes sense.

I enjoyed this tournament a lot. Well done and thank you to the organizers and staff. The high amount of Michigan content was unexpected but amusing.

I really liked the movie questions in this tournament. I liked the mix of old/new, indie/blockbuster, english/non-english, and other things that you could separate by. The movies I have seen were clued really well, like the Synecdoche N.Y. bonus.

Something I think I didn't really communicate in the last CO Trash discussion thread, and instead kind of distracted the whole conversation:

I found some music questions used a large amount of clues from other media that you don't find in other questions, especially in song tossups. In general, sometimes it felt like music tossups rewarded reading about music then actually listening to it. Part of this is just personal preference, of course, but perhaps a bit more balance between deep cuts and Neat Facts could be achieived.

Aaron Dos Remedios also pointed out there was some tossups on artists only really known for one or two songs (which he usually converted himself).

ErikC wrote:I found some music questions used a large amount of clues from other media that you don't find in other questions, especially in song tossups. In general, sometimes it felt like music tossups rewarded reading about music then actually listening to it. Part of this is just personal preference, of course, but perhaps a bit more balance between deep cuts and Neat Facts could be achieived.

Aaron Dos Remedios also pointed out there was some tossups on artists only really known for one or two songs (which he usually converted himself).

I agree with this point, and want to add that there were zero tossups on albums in the played packets (which isn't bad per se, but is symptomatic of this set's preference for a certain type of music questions).

Geriatric trauma wrote: I agree with this point, and want to add that there were zero tossups on albums in the played packets (which isn't bad per se, but is symptomatic of this set's preference for a certain type of music questions).

There was one on Daytona, a 2018 release, you may have forgotten. (Now that I say that, that tossup probably shouldn't have mentioned #MeToo in the first line because it immediately tells you its from the past year I guess.)

There were also tossups on Phil Spector (which was essentially a tossup on his Christmas album) and, in the finals packet, Open Mike Eagle (which was essentially a tossup on his most recent album). There were at least three bonus parts asking for album titles. I didn't make a comprehensive survey, so it's possible that there were other album or quasi-album tossups or bonus parts as well.

I tend to ask about albums that people listen to as albums (such as Carole King's Tapestry from the last iteration or Daytona from this one), and I sometimes write questions in a way that they're gettable at the end even if people don't know the exact album title (such as the two tossups above). Daytona was poorly converted even though it's been one of the best reviewed albums of the year, for instance; I think a tossup on Pusha T with similar clues might've played better, in retrospect. Tossups on artists or songs that sprinkle in album clues judiciously tend to be more answerable, in my experience.

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