2023 PACE NSC: Thanks

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Congratulations to everyone who played the 2023 PACE NSC! Making it to this tournament was a huge accomplishment. Thank you and congratulations to Barrington and Thomas Jefferson for an amazing finals series. I hope everyone from the top scorers to the new-to-NSC enjoyed their time. I wish you all the best.

If you had told me a year ago that I would have been a part of this project, let alone leading it, I wouldn't have believed it. But here we are today, almost 900 questions later, a champion crowned, and another season fittingly ended. It has been a tremendous honor to put together this set. When I was first nominated, I was doubtful. I'm very far from the savants and National champions big and small that have done this set in the past. But with a tremendous amount of help from almost one hundred people, we did it and I learned a lot about myself and what it takes to lead while doing it.

This set would have been impossible without the tremendous contributions of Michael Bentley. Working with Mike was one of those "meeting your heroes" moments. I remember asking multiple people at HSNCT this year about their favorite writer and sets, and I wasn't surprised when Mike's prolific output was the most common answers. Mike wrote 26.1% of the set, edited 3/3, proofed and found feng shui issues across the set, created the packets itself and distributed questions, checked character counts, was a QEMS wizard, and overall pleasure to have in set production. He was someone I went to often when I had logistics questions and was a great mentor. Mike: I hope I did this set justice and look forward to working with you in the future.

Joseph Krol was also tremendously helpful in getting my bearings on the set before transitioning into one of the most consistent editors I've ever worked with. He chugged out his categories early, was always ahead in terms of editing, and had time to sweep through others' categories too. His questions were always a great blend of fresh clues with difficulty-appropriate content that played smoothly. I was always humored by "having a think" about trying to distinguish "Krolisms" from "Britishisms" throughout production.

I was incredibly grateful for the rest of the editing team that put in a lot of time, sweat, and "for 10 points" into this set.

David Bass is shockingly new to the editing scene and its been great to watch him grow from a writer on MRNA to an editor on this set. David has is passionate, diligent, and possesses a keen eye for content. He did a great job of choosing precise clues and answerlines and editing ideas for the best possible playability. Whenever I saw a comment from David, I knew it was something that was going to make the set *that* much better in the final product. I am excited to see what new projects he will work on in the future!

Jordan Brownstein is new to editing, but I decided to give that quirked-up boy from New Hampshire a shot... ;). In all seriousness, this was the first set I ever worked on Jordan and I was kinda stunned by what I witnessed. Jordan casually wrote and edited a near perfect set of philosophy questions over a week in October. I remember I once asked Jordan to write a World History bonus, to which he sent back a an impeccable question perfectly calibrated in difficulty and theme 10 minutes later. On top of doing our advanced stats for the tournament, Jordan left comments around the set and was a huge help in making sure our difficulty and content were on par.

At multiple moments in set production, I was nervous about progress or felt overwhelmed with what needed to be written. That is, until Jaimie Carlson would ping our writing server and casually say "I have 15 tossups and 13 bonuses to playtest." Jaimie is so diligent in her work and was someone I could trust to perfect her questions. I think BritLit had the highest concentration of "holy crap, this is a great idea" questions ranging from the van Helsing tossup to the very funny bonus on "texts from Jane Eyre." I can't recommend her enough for her wonderful work.

I remember staffing with Athena Kern at 2022 ACF Nationals when they mentioned to me how much they wanted to get back into writing again. I was so excited when they came onto the set because their creativity and attention to content is second to none. They do a great job of finding meaningful and nuanced ideas that made the set pop in their categories. The Fatima and Reform Judaism TU's were two of my favorite in the set and examples of things that "only could have worked at NSC" for high schoolers.

Young "Fenny" Lee is the funniest editor you'll work with. But then they'll go from goofing off or poasting to writing and editing some of the best AFA I've ever seen at this level, with a degree of clue choice and expertise unrivaled. They had a profound commitment to getting feedback, and as a result, their questions were incredibly air tight and always got smiles from my room. Young's energy helped carry this set across the finish line and I hope that they continue to bring their talents to future projects.

Adam Silverman is a Terminator. No, I mean it. Biology and Chemistry are the two categories most out of my depth, yet when I asked Adam to take them up, he did it with a smile and even a shrug. Then he continued to chug out the most balanced, engaging, witty, and fun questions in those categories I had ever seen. I had little involvement other than a comment here or there: Adam championed his work and is in my mind the best science writer in quizbowl. His presence was always witty and brought such a positive vibe to the set.

I was a balding high schooler when Chandler West was the first editor I ever worked under. And I made them suffer with my fair share of bad ideas. But over time, Chandler and I's paths have crossed time and again so working with them on the NSC was like crossing a finish line hand in hand. Chandler has a great eye for scholarly context in AmLit and VFA, and constantly tried to incorporate those deeper, real cuts into their editing, which in turn ended up two of the strongest categories come tournament day. It's been an absolutely pleasure to get here with you and I am so hyped for the next steps.

But of course, this set wouldn't be possible without its writers. A huge thanks to Tomás Aguilar-Fraga, Ethan Ashbrook, Vikshar Athreya, Anson Berns, Matthew Bollinger, David Bass, Michael Bentley, Veer Bhatt, Michael Borecki, Jordan Brownstein, Jaimie Carlson, Benjamin Chapman, Tony Chen,
Charles Dees, Justine French, Halle Friedman, William Grossman, Gabe Guedes, Stephen Herritage, Tora Husar, Alyssa Jorgensen, Caleb Kendrick, Joseph Krol, Edward Liu, Young Lee, Chauncey Lo, Jonathan Magin, Lalit Maharjan, Juliet Mayer, Andrew McCowan, Joel Miles, Tim Morrison, Sharath Narayan, Yingzhi Nyang, Hari Parameswaran, Grant Peet, Quynh Phung, Sudheer Potru, Ana Pranger, Victor Prieto, Shahar Schwartz, Jonathen Settle, Noah Shiedlower, Adam Silverman, Clark Smith, Jon Suh, Annutam Ranji, Ridge Ren, Ryan Rosenberg, Andrew Wang, Kevin Wang, Chandler West, Jeff Xie, Will Yaeger, Charles Yang, and Steven Yuan. The vast majority of great ideas here started with these writers. I'm astounded by how well so many ideas can emerge over time.

I also want to highlight out PACE Mentorship Alumni: Andrew McCowan, Stephen Herritage, Steven Yuan, Yingzhi Nyang, and Edward Liu. Some of the best questions in the set were produced by these writers, and I can't recommend them enough for future projects. The mentorship program is less a "here's how to write" but more of a "here's how we can turn good writers into great." I strongly recommend this program to anyone interested.

Thank you to our proofreaders of Ethan Ashbrook, Tomás Aguilar-Fraga, Sadie Britton, Jordan Brownstein, Lalit Maharjan, Tracy Mirkin, Hari Parameswaran, Ryan Rosenberg, and Marianna Zhang. The set turned out really clean - especially in feng shui and content - because of their time and effort.

It's hard to imagine this set without the dozens of hours of playtesting and feedback from volunteers. Thanks to Henry "Bulkington" Atkins, Truman Bennet John Luke Broussard, Geoffrey Chen, Jacob Egol, Jim Fan, Taylor Harvey, Natan Holtzman, Chinmay Kansara, Hasna Karim, Arya Karthik, Michael Kearney, Evan Knox, Mitch McCullar, Colin McNamara, Michael Menkhus, Dan Ni, Richard Niu, Vedul Palavajjhala, Tejas Raje, Subhamitra Roychoudhury, Jonathen Settle, Ashish Subramanian, Kevin Thomas, Graham Troy, Nathan Zhang, and Ivvone Zhou.

Last but not least, thank you to the PACE Board for supporting the creation of this set and thank you Mia for believing in me from day one.

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I think the only thing I wanted to highlight was how successful set production was and why. We were 100% written by the end of April and had all of May to playtest and edit - though this process had already begun. This happened because we had a very aggressive style of writing throughout the year to beat the "mid-set slump" of question production. I can't encourage this enough as it really reduced the workload towards the backend of the set and made the "crunch" a lot less difficult.

[DavidB256]

My work on the 2023 NSC is my proudest quizbowl-related achievement. Huge thanks for Ganon and other folks at PACE for giving me the opportunity to edit physics and other science. Additional thanks to Ganon for his kind words in the previous post.

In April, I tried to quit working on this set after failing a Cell Biology exam. My semester was punctuated by six sets of grad school interviews, three in-person visits in different states, attending three quizbowl tournaments, organizing two, training for a summer teaching job, and touring apartments for my move to Maryland. I spent much of it sleep-deprived and floundering among classes, a stagnant research project, and multi-faceted quizbowl obligations. Due to some mix of faith in me and knowledge of the difficulty of finding a science editor, Ganon convinced me to stay. From finishing editing MRNA II at 3am in a hotel room the night before a grad school interview to not writing a single question for the NSC until after playtesting was several rounds deep to writing a Chicago Open tossup needed for playtesting during said playtesting while supervising my students in the gym, I have had a habitually terrible relationship with editing over the last year. The obligations that I have chosen to take on have had significant impacts on my relationships, grades, and my ability to work on the research that actually got me into grad school. I don't think that I have anything profound with which to conclude this account, but I advise others to be more careful than me when picking up quizbowl projects. I love the game and the community and the results that I've produced, but, if you expect to be occupied with other things for a portion of the duration of a project, you should not take it on; catching up is always harder than you expect it to be.

Thus, my job was only made possible by the awesome high-volume writers in my categories, which include, but are not limited to, Mike Bentley, Joseph Krol, Adam Silverman, Ben Chapman, and Lalit Maharjan.

I'm no logistics expert, but, as a writer and editor, I will declare with my whole heart that QEMS is significantly worse than Google Docs. I hate not being able to see all of my questions in one place before packetization begins. Re-packetizing to fix feng shui issues with QEMS is cartoonishly difficult.

Mike Bentley and I disagreed a decent amount. Some of what he writes comes from single, obscure sources, like the McDonalds promotion clue on Roots, that evades fact-checking. He believes in an OAc-ification of the canon, exemplified by the osci tossup on tunnels. A good majority of what he writes is deeply fun and represents a perspective that is uniquely divorced from academia.

Joseph Krol writes some of the most interested Earth sci that I've ever seen, exemplified by the hydrology bonus themed around knickpoints.

Adam Silverman is great to work with in every way. He's also ridiculously friendly. At the NSC, he made an effort to make sure that I was socially included among the other editors and olds. Adam puts a lot of love into his quasi-computational bonus middle parts, exemplified by asking for the oxidation state of atoms in triiodide and the proportion of heterozygotes in a population under HWE.

As I said in the MRNA II discussion thread, Ben Chapman is an awesome, diligent, hilarious science writer. I am beyond excited to see what he cooks up for Booster Shot.

Lalit Maharjan and I have disagreed a lot over our collaborations on 2021 Spring Novice, Boilermaker Spring Novice, and this set, but I believe that he improved a ton during work on this set. Lalit executed a barrage of rad tossup answerlines for this set, including electron AND positron, breaking circuits, Aztec soldiers, and the Voyager program.

Ganon Evans was a source of constant energy and positivity as leader of production. I don't really understand how he has a full-time job and puts as much effort into quizbowl as he does. He enforced a welcoming policy of "Never issue criticism that isn't paired with recommendation."

Our playtesters were great. Geoffrey Chen once kept me up like three hours later than I intended with a flurry of pointy, useful criticism. Arya Karthik has brutality down to an art. I really should have heeded their warning about the middle part on boundary sets. Jon Settle actually longposts with their criticism, based.

Edit: I intended for my comment about Arya's brutality to be a compliment. Apologies for the poor word choice.

[adamsil]

I want to echo the thanks to 1) the playtesters on this set, who provided the most detailed feedback I’ve ever received on science questions; 2) to Ganon, Shahar, Mike, Ethan, Sudheer, and the PACE mentees for submitting creative questions and ideas that I’d never have come up with on my own; and 3) again to Shahar, Hasna, Jon, Ethan, Ben, David, Marianna for providing additional specific, detailed feedback on preliminary and final edits to individual questions. They kept my warped sense of NSC difficulty in check throughout. My biggest regret from this tournament was not letting others' voices through in the bio and chem. The most flawed questions in my categories (e.g., the hard parts were 0% conversion, or early/transparent clue drops) were nearly always picked apart by this group before the tournament, but I was too stubborn to change them. So: thank you, and I apologize.

Thanks again to 4) Ganon and the other set editors as well. This was my favorite of the seven NSC sets that I’ve worked on, largely because of the large collaborative team and the aggressive timelines, which match how I like to work on big writing projects, too. Ganon did a terrific job managing the project, but I also wanted to personally thank him for encouraging a more whimsical and fun version of the NSC. Years ago, I would have been too self-conscious to write bonuses on eel reproduction or Microsoft Excel converting gene names into dates. It was gratifying to hear equivalently entertaining questions implemented across the board in other categories too, without sacrificing on intellectual rigor.

And a final congratulations to the players. I was frequently amazed by the knowledge displayed across the tournament. Your successes continue to validate the huge amount of work that goes into writing the NSC.