2023 BHSU: Thank Yous and Acknowledgements

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I wanted to start a new thread to acknowledge the people whose work produced this set over the past two years.

Along with writing a combined 170 questions, in their categories and outside of them, Tejas Raje and Billy Busse provided an enormous amount of logistical and moral support throughout the process. Tejas wrote about half his questions outside the categories he initially took on and produced them on a consistent schedule that kept the set from going off the rails early in the process. He regularly flagged issues with our production plans that would have gone unnoticed without him, and insisted on holding us to the benchmarks we'd set. He was also responsible for all the funny jokes in the tournament, as opposed to the unfunny ones. Billy was more organized than anybody else on the team and wrote almost all his questions in advance, despite being in med school. Without Billy tirelessly and repeatedly working to correct issues with style and formatting, this tournament would have been an unintelligible mess. Basically, without these two, this set would have been a total fiasco.

We probably would never have decided to do this tournament without Rob Carson, who believed we could pull it off when the rest of us mostly thought it was a joke. Rob's ability to write questions that are both whimsical and well-constructed set the tone for the rest of the tournament, while his ability to give feedback on others' categories kept the set relatively cohesive even as everybody wrote on their silliest pet topics.

Ryan Rosenberg took the categories nobody wants to do: Geo and Social Science. His social science ideas were great and incorporated many of the advances that have been made in that category over the past ten years, getting positive receptions even from notoriously difficult critics. Ryan also wrote the fourth most questions for the tournament, with 73, with the large majority of those coming outside his assigned categories. Our ability to finish at all absolutely would have been jeopardized if he hadn't written so prolifically throughout the last few months of 2022.

Dylan Minarik wrote both the music bonuses that John Lawrence liked, which in itself is an enormous contribution to the tournament's success. Dylan also took Other History, a relatively undefined category, and filled it with an innovative, varied, and well-constructed set of questions. Dylan's generalism also enabled him to help us keep the set consistent by giving feedback on a wide variety of categories, including science, history, and popular culture.

Auroni Gupta edited the Other Academic and the popular music, two of the essential categories that set this tournament apart from others. Auroni also freelanced across many categories, including writing many truly outstanding questions for the World Literature distribution. The Tagore, We Need New Names, and Fanon tossups - just to name a few - were brilliant ideas that I don't think anyone else on the editing team could have come up with.

Aaron Rosenberg, Aseem Keyal, and Justine French joined later in the process, at times of great need. Aaron co-edited the music with me and saved it from being a frustrating mess; I would confidently say Aaron put more thought into each question than anybody else on the team, and as much as anyone I've ever worked with. To be honest, I really can't say enough positive things about Aaron's work on this process. At every stage, he was incredibly proactive about adjusting his questions and about asking to help outside of his assigned responsibilities. The religion, literature, physics, and mythology distributions, as well as every answerline throughout the set, benefitted enormously from Aaron's assistance. Whenever I thought a question needed a replacement I knew Aaron would have a great new idea + clues to suggest.

Aseem put an enormous amount of care and thought into every question he worked on in the painting and visual other arts. I often felt bad about how blasé I was about my bonus difficulty, seeing just how much precise thought Aseem would put into making sure every bonus was appropriate. He also proactively identified problems + overlaps and asked whether he could help with any trouble spots we had. Also, he wrote the Cambodia tossup that Nick Jensen got on the first clue, which was mind-blowing to witness.

Despite not having prior social connections to the other editors, Justine joined us late in the process and proved to be an exemplary collaborator. Besides having great ideas and editing skills in her own assigned category, Justine also provided valuable comments throughout the RMP and literature distributions. In particular, Justine commented extensively on the philosophy distribution, identifying many major issues with difficulty and technical accuracy that we were able to fix before the tournament. And every time we suggested a bonus part be changed, Justine not only cooperated but offered multiple viable solutions; every head editor should know what a relief it is to find a collaborator like that.

We also got high-quality freelance contributions from Morgan Venkus, Alex Damisch, Kurtis Droge, and Andrew Wang. Morgan wrote many of the most entertaining questions in the set and provided consistent support for us in many ways throughout the process, including getting in contact with Northwestern and, most importantly, compiling the subtitles for each packet. Alex helped out with logistical questions as well as providing feedback + freelance work on the music and religion, with a level of expertise in those areas unmatched by most other members of the editing team. Kurtis chipped in a number of high-quality questions at a time when we badly needed the help and in particular wrote the outstanding Cornwall tossup. And Wang contributed tons of useful feedback to all questions across the set, in particular having a basically unmatched ability to stress-test questions and improve the answerlines. Andrew also wrote much of the Other Academic distribution, so you have him to thank for, e.g., the beautiful tossups on Saturn and and Juggling.

I'm very happy with how the tournament turned out; if you were too, these are the people you have to thank.

[Tejas]

I would like to echo Matt's thoughts towards everyone who worked on the set, we had a great team and hopefully provided everyone a fun experience as promised. I also want to especially thank Matt; in addition to his always-great writing and editing, he put in tremendous work on the logistical side and it's thanks to that that we were able to complete the set on time and polish our questions.

I personally edited US History, World History, and Current Events, and also wrote across the set, especially in the rest of history. I also wrote most of the sports questions and some other pop culture. I didn't go in with any specific philosophy or aim apart from trying to provide variety and interesting clues throughout different areas of history, so hopefully players found the questions rewarding. I want to call out Ryan, Matt, Auroni, and Dylan specifically for writing some great questions in my categories to help finish those off.

Please feel free to reach out privately or post in this forum with any thoughts on my questions/categories.

[ryanrosenberg]

Yeah, I want to echo Tejas and praise the job Matt did on the set. This is the first time I've worked on a set of this difficulty and Matt was invaluable in giving instructive feedback on my questions and suggesting alternative ways to ask about things.

I'd also like to thank everyone who worked on the set. My collaborators were absolutely the primary factor driving my work, both by creating a friendly work environment and by pushing me to produce better questions because theirs were so good.

[Lagotto Romagnolo]

Echoing the above: Matt was not only an excellent supervisor and editor but advisor and mentor as well, even to those of us who have been playing the game longer than he has. To give some context: over the course of my career I’ve acquired something of a reputation as a competent if basic and unspectacular writer. I look back on many sets I’ve worked on in the past that way. Certainly, I was neither a groundbreaking writer nor a prolific one. When I joined this project, I was concerned that my writing skills would not measure up, that the best I could do was plug holes and fill out the set with standard topics and question styles, rather than pen the exciting questions that players expect from high-level QB these days, of the kind that Matt, Billy, Auroni et. al. had already contributed. But like Matt said in the announcement thread: this attitude was counterproductive. My awareness of my history with the game became a shackle and I was too concerned about how the questions and clues would be received. My fellow writers assured me that I was a valuable contributor, and that simple act had an outsized positive impact.

I view the situation this way: Quizbowl is a competitive game, question-writing is a craft, and inevitably some of the competitiveness will seep into the writing. On some level this is good: we always want to improve the questions, better ourselves, and give the players a fun experience worth their time. However, human nature being what it is, there is an inextricable tendency for this to degenerate into shallow one-upmanship. I am glad that this was not the case working on BHSU. Any time I felt held back by a lack of expertise, of QB meta-knowledge, or of imagination, Matt and the others were there to remind me that I still had a seat at the table. I also appreciate that these ‘favorite clues/questions’ threads are gaining popularity – they’re an institutional guard against our negativity bias – so thanks to Rob for setting one up here.

In case it wasn’t clear above, my colleagues on this set wrote some great questions. They deserve all the praise they’ve gotten and I was glad to work with them.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

I wrote a bit for this set, mostly in other ac, mostly aiming to have things that people would know about or that I thought would be generally enjoyable while also trying to make sure there would be clues people were likely buzzing on from “general interest” or “quizbowl adjacent content”. I hope people liked what I had to write! Thanks to Auroni and Rob for making my stuff much more workable and to everyone in the writing editing team for being a fun group and generally good friends, even that dastardly Matt bollinger, who robbed players of a bonus part on the 100 trillion dollar

[Jem Casey]

I liked what you had to write Wang