Dave Madden's Fantasy Universe
Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 11:57 pm
Dave Madden, you live in a fantasy universe. In your fantasy universe, you are the most excellent leader of the quizbowl universe that has ever existed. You are the best editor, you can run the best tournaments, you can be involved in trying to organize literally every circuit everywhere, while also coaching a team, and you have high schoolers and coaches all fawn over you, because you are a Jeopardy champion. Tell a bunch of people to buy their lunch at $3 per slice of pizza because their other lunch options don't really exist? Why of course, people will just pay you gladly, because you are Dave Madden! Write everybody $300 checks? Why not, because you are Dave Madden! Conscript high schoolers to bake you thousands of cookies on an insane timeframe, offer off their houses for strange adults to stay in, and declare that they are going to write an entire tournament in 9 weeks, despite them literally not even having a team the previous year? Well of course they'll do that, Mr. Champ, because you are Dave Madden! Staff a gigantic national with people you met on Jeopardy forums, and run them Jeopardy festival trivia nights rather than prepare your massive 200 team national tournament that's scattered widely across DC? Well of course the tournament will run great, YOU'RE DAVE MADDEN! Even though you had 0 involvement in quizbowl for an entire decade and it changed drastically over that whole period of time with lots of people putting in extremely hard work to make it to the top and perfect the game, you can just come back into the game and automatically be one of the biggest players in the game, able to go from being the head of New Mexico High School Quizbowl, to judge of the best players in the country, to Chicago Open editor, without doing a single thing to establish your credentials, because of your own pure, inherent talent to spin perfect quizbowl out of whole cloth. You are the top of the game, and your dominance as leader of quizbowl is confirmed by your swarm of high schoolers that love you and play your online tournaments.
You are the most delusional person in the game right now. I thought at first maybe you were a guy who was just ultra-enthusiastic but didn't know what to do to be effective, and needed to just be prodded in the right direction. I was wrong. You literally are so egotistical that you think you can do things like declare yourself the head of New Mexico quizbowl despite not living there, getting your paws into every other circuit that exists, or run a multi-site, multi-day 100+ team tournament without having any experience doing something like that, increase the size of said tournament to 200 teams after the first one is a miserable disaster, force the team you coach to write a tournament without having any experience doing so, and then put in a not very great amount of time on it, and think you can tell people that the tournament doesn't suck. All kinds of things you do are disasters. I was involved in your stupid goddamn national quizbowl awards thing, and if you think giving out a huge cash prize to players based solely on a single week of a few people nominating the players they've seen are good, then taking a poll of people at PACE, to determine that prize is an appropriate amount of work, you're off your rocker. It was a disaster, much like every National History Bowl has been, and much like your Ridgewood set was.
Fun fact: at the first NHBB, Rock Bridge used their bid to send a group of players from a school history club that was not in any way affiliated with quizbowl. The teacher, a guy named Mr. Priest, was so appalled at the direction that he would actually start ranting in class repeatedly over the course of the last year about what a horrible tournament you ran. THAT'S how bad it was to him. Stories like that don't make it out to the boards, because those sorts of teams aren't involved here, and when you get on and post about how so many teams thought things were peachy and get in these huge arguments defending your indefensible actions, you miss out on seeing the fact that, wow, you really ARE driving customers away who would otherwise be willing to patronize your tournament in the future because of how bad the tournament is.
You behave like other people don't exist to you other than as a means to an end. You literally are fine creating this whole Ridgewood tournament, and then doing so little planning on it that it has to come be partially salvaged BY A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD who is still willing to come out and tell people that the set sucks, while you continue chugging on oblivious, acting like your project (which you should have been properly heading up in the first place) was fine and having to get teenagers to do the work for you doesn't mean you're incompetent. This is not the first time you've made some of the world's craziest demands on other people because you have no remote sense of how to plan. Things like trying to make Jon Pinyan record your stupid tallies while he actually had a real job to do at PACE is a perfect example. What the hell are you thinking when you have people do this thankless work for when the whim strikes, as if making your projects coalesce is the most important thing that could fill anybody's day when they might actually have things to do.
What's sad about this is that you could be so much more effective than you are. All you would need to do is cut out the billion side projects you think you can haphazardly organize without bothering everybody, and instead focus solely on running History Bowl Nationals as efficiently as possible. If history bowl were streamlined, it could be a very fun tournament that a lot of teams will look forward to, and it could totally do a great job of recruiting new teams, especially because I do agree with you, giving better monetary prizes for good quizbowl would be a very good thing for everybody. Hint: NAQT and PACE both put in extremely large amounts of work, with way more people who are experts being involved in doing all of the logistic work, for far longer than you put in on your history bowl. Without that work, it was the worst boondoggle of the last year in quizbowl.
So in conclusion: you are a horrible editor. I saw your questions for Ridgewood, they sucked. I also saw your original history bowl regional set, and it was not very good. Your History Bowl nationals sucked both years by all reputable reports, and you are going to drive teams away from quizbowl unless it is fixed. Your national quizbowl awards was the single most worthlessly decided award I've seen in the game, and it's very lucky that they happened to mostly pick decent players who were deserving. You abuse your authority to make people do thankless work, for what reason, I can't fathom. You seem to think when you declare something will happen, it's not an imposition to force other people to do it instead of you. You also need to stop thinking Jeopardy means anything - Jeopardy forum members are horrible staffers of a national, Jeopardy participation also means nothing for your ability to staff, and nobody in quizbowl cares that you were on that stupid show. There is simply no way around that. You have not established your credentials: your biggest quizbowl achievement is running two disastrous nationals, and the only thing you've done effectively is hire a good company to write for a bunch of small tournaments you're involved in that don't require too much prep compared to a national and which seem to have run OK. You are no R. Hentzel. You're no Matt Weiner, either. And yet you have the gall to parade around like you have infinite street cred, and continue doing thing after thing that makes it abundantly clear that no matter how many people tell you you are doing something awfully, you can ignore them because you are apparently always right. And now, you're trying to force your awful (yes, horrendous, again, I saw it) Ridgewood tournament on unsuspecting middle schoolers? I'm sorry it has to be hashed out like this, but somebody needs to finally just tell you: You live in a fantasy universe. Stop it, before you do anything more to hurt quizbowl.
You are the most delusional person in the game right now. I thought at first maybe you were a guy who was just ultra-enthusiastic but didn't know what to do to be effective, and needed to just be prodded in the right direction. I was wrong. You literally are so egotistical that you think you can do things like declare yourself the head of New Mexico quizbowl despite not living there, getting your paws into every other circuit that exists, or run a multi-site, multi-day 100+ team tournament without having any experience doing something like that, increase the size of said tournament to 200 teams after the first one is a miserable disaster, force the team you coach to write a tournament without having any experience doing so, and then put in a not very great amount of time on it, and think you can tell people that the tournament doesn't suck. All kinds of things you do are disasters. I was involved in your stupid goddamn national quizbowl awards thing, and if you think giving out a huge cash prize to players based solely on a single week of a few people nominating the players they've seen are good, then taking a poll of people at PACE, to determine that prize is an appropriate amount of work, you're off your rocker. It was a disaster, much like every National History Bowl has been, and much like your Ridgewood set was.
Fun fact: at the first NHBB, Rock Bridge used their bid to send a group of players from a school history club that was not in any way affiliated with quizbowl. The teacher, a guy named Mr. Priest, was so appalled at the direction that he would actually start ranting in class repeatedly over the course of the last year about what a horrible tournament you ran. THAT'S how bad it was to him. Stories like that don't make it out to the boards, because those sorts of teams aren't involved here, and when you get on and post about how so many teams thought things were peachy and get in these huge arguments defending your indefensible actions, you miss out on seeing the fact that, wow, you really ARE driving customers away who would otherwise be willing to patronize your tournament in the future because of how bad the tournament is.
You behave like other people don't exist to you other than as a means to an end. You literally are fine creating this whole Ridgewood tournament, and then doing so little planning on it that it has to come be partially salvaged BY A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD who is still willing to come out and tell people that the set sucks, while you continue chugging on oblivious, acting like your project (which you should have been properly heading up in the first place) was fine and having to get teenagers to do the work for you doesn't mean you're incompetent. This is not the first time you've made some of the world's craziest demands on other people because you have no remote sense of how to plan. Things like trying to make Jon Pinyan record your stupid tallies while he actually had a real job to do at PACE is a perfect example. What the hell are you thinking when you have people do this thankless work for when the whim strikes, as if making your projects coalesce is the most important thing that could fill anybody's day when they might actually have things to do.
What's sad about this is that you could be so much more effective than you are. All you would need to do is cut out the billion side projects you think you can haphazardly organize without bothering everybody, and instead focus solely on running History Bowl Nationals as efficiently as possible. If history bowl were streamlined, it could be a very fun tournament that a lot of teams will look forward to, and it could totally do a great job of recruiting new teams, especially because I do agree with you, giving better monetary prizes for good quizbowl would be a very good thing for everybody. Hint: NAQT and PACE both put in extremely large amounts of work, with way more people who are experts being involved in doing all of the logistic work, for far longer than you put in on your history bowl. Without that work, it was the worst boondoggle of the last year in quizbowl.
So in conclusion: you are a horrible editor. I saw your questions for Ridgewood, they sucked. I also saw your original history bowl regional set, and it was not very good. Your History Bowl nationals sucked both years by all reputable reports, and you are going to drive teams away from quizbowl unless it is fixed. Your national quizbowl awards was the single most worthlessly decided award I've seen in the game, and it's very lucky that they happened to mostly pick decent players who were deserving. You abuse your authority to make people do thankless work, for what reason, I can't fathom. You seem to think when you declare something will happen, it's not an imposition to force other people to do it instead of you. You also need to stop thinking Jeopardy means anything - Jeopardy forum members are horrible staffers of a national, Jeopardy participation also means nothing for your ability to staff, and nobody in quizbowl cares that you were on that stupid show. There is simply no way around that. You have not established your credentials: your biggest quizbowl achievement is running two disastrous nationals, and the only thing you've done effectively is hire a good company to write for a bunch of small tournaments you're involved in that don't require too much prep compared to a national and which seem to have run OK. You are no R. Hentzel. You're no Matt Weiner, either. And yet you have the gall to parade around like you have infinite street cred, and continue doing thing after thing that makes it abundantly clear that no matter how many people tell you you are doing something awfully, you can ignore them because you are apparently always right. And now, you're trying to force your awful (yes, horrendous, again, I saw it) Ridgewood tournament on unsuspecting middle schoolers? I'm sorry it has to be hashed out like this, but somebody needs to finally just tell you: You live in a fantasy universe. Stop it, before you do anything more to hurt quizbowl.