I want to start out by thanking everyone who worked on this set: Annabelle Yang, Ashish Subramanian, Caroline Mao, Daniel Cronin, Eric Gunter, Erik Novak, Grant Peet, Hasna Karim, Henry Goff, Jacob Egol, Jim Fan, Jonathan Shauf, Justin Zhang, Kevin Jiang, Kevin Thomas, Marianna Zhang, Michael Bucknall, Ophir Lifshitz, Payton Schubel, Raymond Wang, Ryan Rosenberg, Vincent Du, and Brandon Weiss. This set had a great collaborative culture, and everyone contributed outside of their own questions by playtesting, proofreading, commenting, and brainstorming.
The editors on this set were all fantastic: Annabelle Yang, Grant Peet, Hasna Karim, Henry Goff, Jacob Egol, Kevin Thomas, Payton Schubel, and Vincent Du. I took a hands-off approach as a head editor because I trusted them to come up with great content for their categories and they delivered and more. Each of them were instrumental in making this set what it is, and I want to recognize them for it.
- Grant Peet was instrumental in getting this set to completion; not only did he write and edit the most questions in the set, he also spent hours proofreading and fixing feng shui issues in the last week. Oh yeah and his history and current events were consistently playable and interesting. And he wrote great questions outside of his categories (the enthroned madonnas question in Packet 11, the World War II tossup in Packet 1). And he TDed the playtest mirror. An all-around star of a contributor.
- The dynamic duo of Henry Goff and Payton Schubel took such good care of lit that despite most of my prior editing experience being in the category I barely needed to write anything for it. I particularly enjoyed some of Henry's deep cuts on canonical topics (Stephen Dedalus, Bottom) and Payton's incorporation of widely-read-but-noncanonical books (Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop).
- Speaking of dynamic duos, Annabelle Yang stood out for her ability to work with others to help improve their questions and hers. Whether it was partnering with Kevin on myth, Jacob on music, Hasna on bio, or really any playtested question she could help out on, Annabelle provided subject matter expertise and a keen sense of how to clue things. She also filled in capably as a other visual fine arts editor in a pinch. Of the categories I can even begin to speak on, I really liked the clues in the Japanese Americans and pregnancy tossups, and the photograms bonus part.
- Jacob Egol was not initially slated to be the music/auditory fine arts editor, but stepped up when we needed it and did a more than creditable job. Jacob also did this while ably handling overall set logistics, which was a big boost to me as head editor to not have to handle. I particularly liked the musicals content Jacob wrote/edited for the set.
- Hasna Karim was a consistently-helpful presence in internal playtesting, giving great feedback and generally helping improve questions across a range of categories. She also edited one of the trickier 1/1s to edit, and did it while getting many fewer freelance contributions than other editors got.
- Kevin Thomas is a never-ending source of, well, Kevin Content: fantastical, probably gory stories and anecdotes about mythology, ancient history, and anything that sounds like it might be mythology or ancient history. You have him to thank for the spitting blood/playing dead/exploding bonus, the ovens tossup, and, in a non-Kevin-Content-but-nonetheless-great idea, the African-American myth tossup.
- Vincent Du edited chemistry, physics, and philosophy, wrote a good chunk of the social science, and gave lots of feedback on the music. Those are not easy categories to edit at all, but Vincent did it while coming up with lots of great ideas and finishing the physics well ahead of its normal schedule. Even I, a non-science player, could tell that the ferromagnetic transition tossup was brilliant. I, a social science editor, was thrilled to get hard parts on traditional ecological knowledge and soundscapes.
I didn't really have any overarching goals for this set: my two main thoughts were "produce interesting questions" and "don't get in others' way." In my categories, the first manifested either as tossups that drew deeply from canonical texts (first arrival of slaves in America bonus, "men" tossup) or from underexplored areas (policymaking, oil industry, the Census). I tried in particular to stay away from hard clues that people could osmose simply by playing the previous few years' hard tournaments, and tried to encourage others to do the same. I'm very happy how the first thought turned out, and somewhat happy with the second; I think I did a good job of letting people produce the interesting questions, and now is time to get in their way a bit to ensure the questions are maximally playable for future mirrors.
Thank you again to everyone who worked on this set, and thank you to the playtesters for the feedback you've already provided and the feedback in this forum. I suppose I should also thank the WORKSHOP editors for their work given the number of ARCADIA writers who have written for it (note: definitely do WORKSHOP if it makes you as good as these writers).
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!