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gyre and gimble

To be clear, the understanding from the beginning of the tournament (i.e., it was noted in the logistics email and printed on the schedule as such) was that finals would be played only if the top two teams had identical records, which, as Will said, was in part an unfortunate holdover from before H...

gyre and gimble

Under normal circumstances I’d want to play a final, but I had a bus at 9 and was meeting an old friend who I wanted to spend more time with. Moses had a train at 8 as well. Speaking for myself I can understand Will’s POV and can’t really add much besides what he already said about being tired and ...

gyre and gimble

Can we do Unanswered Question later in the day? One of my teammates will be driving back from Tahoe in Sunday morning.

gyre and gimble

As the years go by I find myself more and more weirded out by the idea of continuing to take this level of self-righteous glee in what was ultimately a really shitty series of events. In particular, And because of Andy's insane knowledge of Thailand, I personally will be celebrating by eating Thai ...

gyre and gimble

There seems to be a significant amount of interest for this and a few Penn people have said they would run it, I'll post in this thread if/when we confirm a date. Would love an online mirror. Personal request is, if at all possible, for a date to be determined before this Saturday, so I can decide ...

gyre and gimble

I thought that the set was pretty solid overall. Some questions dropped clues too early, but I'm sure the writers are already aware of those instances because people invariably complain in-game. The literature in general was much more stingily powermarked than the rest of the set (I thought science ...

gyre and gimble

Sorry to do this last-minute, but some work stuff came up and I have to drop from this event.

gyre and gimble

Now, the situation has reversed. I think the best regular-difficulty tournament (Terrapin 2016) and the best hard tournaments (stanford housewrite, TTIAC) have been housewrites. (It seems like many others agree with this general assessment.) And I think that these are on the whole better than the f...

gyre and gimble

I should have pointed out the specific thing that jumped out at me: the top Met museum exhibit on Old Masters painting (in fact, most of the exhibitions listed) got far fewer visits than its Chinese art show. Ah, I see. For what it's worth, I agree that we should be writing more questions on Han an...

gyre and gimble

The same goes for floor space at museums. Having been to many, many art museums I can say with confidence that the concentration of museumgoers gravitates heavily toward western art. It doesn’t mean much for a museum to have half its floor space devoted to Asian or African art if that floor space i...

gyre and gimble

OU's course offerings aren't necessarily universal; my own university's nonwestern art history course offerings are, for the next two semesters, roughly 1/3 of the total (there's no reason why this should be the standard any more than an Oklahoma-based level of representation should, but this shoul...

gyre and gimble

Since the field's expanded, I'll tentatively express interest. My case schedule keeps getting moved around but theoretically I am free for CO weekend.

gyre and gimble

I don't see how this is different from a tossup on "All the world's a stage" or "To be or not to be" or "Now is the winter of our discontent." Would you give 10 points for someone who says "the sleep-perchance-to-dream speech" or "the sea-of-troubles speech"? I wouldn't, and I don't think that's st...

gyre and gimble

A simlar thing could have happened in the Macbeth "tomorrow" soliloquy tossup, I buzzed and babbled a couple of lines from it, one of which was fortunately the "tomorrow" line. But what would have happened had I just said "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and then protested when negg...

gyre and gimble

In my earlier post in this thread, I accidentally spoiled some questions from the unread editors' packets that are being saved for next year. Perhaps it's hubris to think many people actually read my post, but in theory the milk has been spilt. So, here are the text of the questions, which are not a...

gyre and gimble

Ryan, your chart is a very interesting way to organize this discussion and I think it’s largely correct. I do think that it overranks Isaac (sorry Isaac) for his NAQT ability, at the expense of players like Kenji and Caleb who are much stronger ACF players (remember, ACF is the dominant format, eve...

gyre and gimble

Ryan, your chart is a very interesting way to organize this discussion and I think it’s largely correct. I do think that it overranks Isaac (sorry Isaac) for his NAQT ability, at the expense of players like Kenji and Caleb who are much stronger ACF players (remember, ACF is the dominant format, even...

gyre and gimble

Did anyone else feel that the editors' packets and the submissions almost felt like two different tournaments? I'm trying to figure out how much of this difference in feel was just the fact that I played the editors' packets against top-bracket teams... but I think there's more to this than just "g...

gyre and gimble

I wrote the majority of the poetry, other visual arts, and myth/legends. I'd love to hear how these questions played (both good and bad), as I wasn't able to staff the tournament. But before I get into the weeds, I want to thank everyone for playing the set. It's an honor to contribute to a question...

gyre and gimble

Galstaff, Sorceror of Light wrote:Chicago A has won the tournament outright. The second place game will be played in 10-250 at approximately 2:45 PM.

Not sure if this has started, but if it were livestreamed in lieu of a final I for one would very much appreciate it.

gyre and gimble

Will there be a final? And any chance it’s livestreamed or recorded?

gyre and gimble

I don't think anyone has mentioned Nathan Weiser- judging from the 4 rounds of Scattergories I played with him, he's quite good at film indeed. Nathan is probably better at film than anyone mentioned in this thread, excluding Yogesh, Will N., Matt L., and maybe Tommy (I haven't seen Tommy play that...

gyre and gimble

In gross violation of a post I made earlier in this thread, I'm now playing with Stephen Liu With all due respect, this seems like a...very strong team, given that a 10th team still needs to be created. I would have no issue with my team being split up. For what it's worth, this team is tentative -...

gyre and gimble

5) find clear, concise, and accurate ways to word clues, including selecting which aspects of the clue to mention (often the hardest part for me). I can't say I agree with the last point though—I've often been reading something, come across a quizbowl topic, realized "Oh wow, quizbowl has a somewha...

gyre and gimble

I'm not sure about the general situation since I don't know what Person B's criticisms actually were (maybe they were valid, maybe not). But I think your expectations of time investment are off-base: "up to half an hour" on a question is actually a really short amount of time. I've written a lot of...

gyre and gimble

Since I was spending up to half an hour writing and polishing each tossup or bonus, Person B's criticism has made it far harder for me to believe the time I am investing is worth it. Of the 10 questions I am scheduled to write, I have only completed half, and I'm already finding it more difficult t...

gyre and gimble

Hey if anyone’s looking to fill out their team with someone who may or may not be able to make it to this tournament, shoot me a message. I’m happy to play with anybody.

EDIT: I’ve joined Sam, Joelle, and Laurence.

gyre and gimble

One last thing - I'm hoping to not have too many super-duper-OP teams in this tournament. If you're a national champion or CO winner or someone of similar skill, try not to fill your whole team with such people! This looks to be a really strong field and I'm excited to have a lot of competitive gam...

gyre and gimble

I'd be really interested to see global detailed stats (Skype and CO combined), if it's possible with Ophir's stats system.

Also, since I haven't said so already, this was the best arts set I've ever played. It was well worth the half-day I took off from studying for the bar.

gyre and gimble

Women aren't that well represented in either category, as far as I'm concerned. Obviously the number of women relative to men in any "canon" is dismal and makes it difficult to write questions based on it, but it still feels like tokenism. Until women writers are a natural, unforced 50% of question...

gyre and gimble

It looked like the field was filling up so I put myself down for the last spot, but I don't have a teammate at the moment. I'm fine playing with anyone who doesn't neg too much.

Seems like expanding to 8 teams wouldn't be a bad idea though, if there's available staff.

gyre and gimble

To build on Auroni's first point, I sometimes like to be "wordy" in order to give players time to process a clue. If a tossup moves from clue A to clue B, I think a player who recognizes clue A immediately should get the tossup over someone who can't recall it right away but knows it. But that secon...

gyre and gimble

Great set, and really excellent for (as far as I know?) a first-time effort at this difficulty. I had a lot of fun playing, so much thanks to Noah for putting it together.

Will there be combined stats posted at some point?

gyre and gimble

This really has nothing to do with me, but if I may add my two cents: This isn't really a side event, since you're only providing 20 questions. I wouldn't worry too much about crowning a winner.

gyre and gimble

I was wondering the same myself. Byes wouldn't happen, but crossover games might. I like the idea of a full round robin. If there's only one packet for a final, is it better for the top two teams to play no matter what or only if their record is tied? I'm personally fine either way, but Jordan's go...

gyre and gimble

If the field stays at 10 for Thursday, what would the schedule be? I'd prefer a full round robin over a schedule with byes, even if that means there's only one packet available for a final.

gyre and gimble

I say this because I think this thread is likely to make zero progress if a whole bunch of people just post to say, "My teammate is really good at X. I saw him second-line a tossup on Y one time!" For what it's worth, I'm more interested in those kind of posts than in making any real "progress." I ...

gyre and gimble

Nathan Weiser should be in your top 25. I'm pretty sure he's the second best US History player in the country (after Jordan). He also put up 17 powers at ICT (I think the stats awarded me one of his powers, not sure). I'll also note here that Benji is a top-tier thought player. He got more than 50% ...

gyre and gimble

I think this kind of thing only really works for a category like science, where every team is only going to have one (if any) dedicated specialist. Otherwise it's too hard to compare. Maybe history is another appropriate category. But literature seems too diverse and dilute to really compare across ...

gyre and gimble

For us and Chicago, it was more that we didn't want to play a game where we could only lose a spot in the standings, when we both felt that we had earned "t-5." The tiebreaking thing should at least have been announced ahead of time. Being mad that I had to play a tiebreaker definitely affected my p...

gyre and gimble

Paisley Park wrote:Hey, Carleton submitted a packet last night, but it's not listed. Was it received?

Same.

gyre and gimble

Having already played the greatest part of the set the difficulty is regular/regular minus. This set is a lot of fun and contains a lot of fantastic titbits which haven't come up before so I don't think it will be a boring day of quiz for even the most calloused of veteran brains. So, this tourname...

gyre and gimble

I thought Cody was saying that the difficulties of all the easy parts combined form of a bell curve. So if you have 20 easy parts, maybe 3-5 are very easy, 10-14 are standard, and 3-5 are a bit challenging. Also I don't think anyone is claiming that the distribution is perfectly normal, or should be...

gyre and gimble

Try to balance "hard" hard parts with an "easy" medium part within the same bonus, and vise versa. The idea was to vary the groups of teams that you want to have to work for their expected number of points. When the hard part of a literature bonus is "hard," you're challenging the teams that expect...

gyre and gimble

For this year's Regionals, I tried to make every easy part truly easy/accessible. Maybe that was wrong; I don't know. What I really wanted to post about was something else I did: Try to balance "hard" hard parts with an "easy" medium part within the same bonus, and vise versa. The idea was to vary t...

gyre and gimble

I thought the visual arts in this tournament weren't that much harder than in other open-difficulty sets (if it was harder at all, on average). I think it was a little heavy on the "art history" aspects, in the sense that there were a bit too many context-based clues relative to visual clues. I don'...

gyre and gimble

The field cap is unlikely to change, due to room availability. Not that we've had many tournaments that were bigger than that in our region this year.

gyre and gimble

As you said yourself, you are a "theater person." So obviously, in your interactions with literature, you've encountered a lot more drama than is normal for most quizbowl players. Stephen, I think the main disconnect here is that we all are thinking of "theater people" (of whom there are a sizable ...

gyre and gimble

My main overarching point here though is to share my experience with drama and hopefully, shed more light on the fact that there is still a ton of passion for theater today (my roommate from high school constantly tells me how often he has to work for his theater clubs at Boston University and how ...

gyre and gimble

The first is what Auroni and Mike have more or less laid out—theater people exist in large numbers, just like poetry people (and "classic novel" people—bookstore space is a completely useless metric as long as the Ken Folletts and Patrick O'Brians of the world take up so much of the novel space). I...

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