2016 Eyes That Do Not See General Discussion

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Mike Bentley
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2016 Eyes That Do Not See General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Use this thread for general discussion. Looking back at the set, there are a few things I would have changed a bit. There was a tad too much world art which I didn't think played very well (a combination of tough clues and a few misplaced ones like in the Babylon tossup). I think the set also ended up a bit harder than I wanted, in part because a few of the answers I thought were on the easier side weren't converted at least at the Stanford mirror (regents, Castiglione). At the same time, it does become more difficult each time to find easy answers I haven't done before (see the accidental repeat of bride of the wind).
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Re: General Discussion

Post by gyre and gimble »

Very fun, as always. Thanks again for putting this together. A couple of notes:

1. I think there were a bit too many common link questions (especially of the "name the common title/profession" variety).
2. I don't think it would be a bad thing to do repeats of artists that you've already asked about before. Works, not so much, for obvious reasons. But almost every artist has a pretty large body of work that could generate multiple non-overlapping, smoothly-pyramidal questions. Just a thought, in case you were running out of directions to go. Also, my sense is that there's still a lot of individual works at reasonable difficulty (counting things like The City Rises as "reasonable").

Which is, in short, to say I hope you keep making these tournaments!
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Mike Bentley
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

By the way, the slides are here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=1 ... der%2cpptx

I'll make them public once the mirrors finish.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Ike »

This discussion sure is thrilling!

I sure had a lot of fun. One thing of note: Ironically, we played a defective version of the forgery tossup since the online powerpoint reader we were using did not display animations. You might want to include that as a note for future mirrors / if you do another iteration.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Thanks Ike, I'll note that (and give that feedback to the PowerPoint team!).

A couple of other things I might as well note:

I ventured a bit more into history for some of the photography. I thought that was reasonably successful, even if one of these (the Futurama exhibit) was perhaps a bit too hard. It's something that I may explore a bit more in future versions of this tournament.

Looking back at the set, I agree there was a bit too much common link. The challenge is that many of the most standard answers have been done before, but I think it is an interesting idea to see how I can re-tread on some previous subjects in new ways.

I'm also disappointed there's so little Viktor Hartmann art anywhere. What I included in that tossup was pretty much the complete set of his works that I could find online or in print.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Ike »

Also,

Mike, I'm genuinely curious - what made you decide to tossup Charles Fazzino? My mom purchased a silkscreen print by him a while back (2002?) - up until this tournament, I assumed she had bought something pretty worthless. I had never heard him come up in quizbowl or even encountered him, but if he's someone people actually care about, I'd like to know more.

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Re: General Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

I saw a painting by him at an airport and was reminded that I thought his work was neat as a kid. He was included in more of the trash distribution than fine arts. That being said, it was hard to find good images of his work online that didn't just look like all of his other paintings.
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