Christmas Present (side event for "stanford housewrite")

[naan/steak-holding toll]

On this merriest of days, I would like to announce The Christmas Present, a relatively difficult tossups-only side event intended to be played at the “stanford housewrite” being hosted at various sites, as well as (probably) online. Since this is my present to the community, I will be writing it by myself.

The tournament will be focusing on two categories: “Beliefs” (or, as Dr. Steinbaum would have it, Things that are Not True) comprising Mythology and Religion, and “Thought” comprising Philosophy and Social Science. In order to assuage Dr. Steinbaum’s fears and make sure that truth emerge victorious over falsehood, “Thought” will comprise 55% of the tournament and “Beliefs” 45%. In any case, a somewhat less vague outline of the distribution can be found below:

(Per Packet: 20/0)

“Beliefs”
2 Greco-Roman myth/religion (mostly myth)
2 non-Islamic Asian myth/religion (about 50/50)
1 Christianity
1 Judaism + Bible (including New Testament)
1 Islam
1 non-Greco-Roman European mythology
1 African, Indigenous American, or Ancient Near Eastern myth/religion

“Thought”
1 Classical + Medieval philosophy
1 Early Modern and 19th century philosophy
1 20th century philosophy
1 Nonwestern Thought
1 Aesthetics and Literary Thought
1 Any Thought (more of the above, mixed, and/or historiography)
1 Sociology/Society
1 Psychology
1 Economics + Finance
1 Linguistics + Anthropology
1 Any Social Science (mixed and/or other categories)

This tournament’s difficulty is going to be modeled on that of SHEIKH, meaning that it’s roughly about as hard as I’d like ACF Nationals to be. Like SHEIKH, tossups will be between seven and nine lines long (with powers) and there’s going to be an emphasis on accessible answers so that a wide-ranging audience can not just play the tournament, but be engaged with a large portion of its content. Around 55-60% of this tournament’s answers are things that would be completely acceptable tossup answers at Regionals, about 25% are what I’d call “standard upper-level fare” and around 10-15% are answers that are either very difficult and/or haven’t really come up before. (Fair warning: this answerline difficulty distribution won’t be constant across categories, since I’m trying to make things seem “fresh” overall, and in any case I don’t expect this to cause too many problems).

The entry fee for this tournament will be $10 per person. The question set is approximately 50% complete as of right now, and will most assuredly be done by the time late February rolls around. There will be seven packets in total.

The suggested format for the tournament is doubles though I suspect there will be a need to accommodate depending on the site. In any case, I heartily encourage everybody to play!

[adosreme]

This side event sounds awesome and I really look forward to playing it.

[Urech hydantoin synthesis]

This is the best Christmas present I've ever received.

[Dantooine is Big!]

If only I could actually play this… Unfortunately, the UChicago mirror of stanford housewrite is on the same day as masonic state. Hopefully I can play the online mirror because this tournament looks amazing.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Update: This tournament is about 75% complete now.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Set is now 90% done.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

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