The Quizbowl Resource Center

Banana Stand

Cheynem wrote: ↑
Fri May 08, 2020 3:43 pm
Why are Columbia and Chicago the only two teams booked for this hypothetical finals?

Because they’re the only S-tier teams this season

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I’m not going to say much about the distribution because I’ve seen these discussions play out a thousand and they usually don’t lead anywhere. Literature is the most “pure” category in terms of fitting the medium of a quizbowl question, and I don’t think there’s much disputing that. I’m sure this is...

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I will most likely not be playing this set if this Columbia mirror is cancelled, which is a shame since I’m sure it will be a great set. While I wouldn’t advocate for a mirror to remain simply because of my own self-interest, I’ve yet to see a good rationale for its cancellation and doubt there is o...

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Also, if you are willing to cash in some money, NAQT's frequency list for literature is a decently complete list of books and their authors. I do not believe there to be plot summaries in the lists though. Please, for the love of god, do not pay money for this. Keep reading the very famous books of...

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This seems like a fun tournament! Very interested in either writing or playing.

(Autobiography of Red was tossed up at CO 2016, btw)

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Thank you to those who have given me reps! I wouldn’t advise that you vote for me in the overall poll; my performances at both nationals have not warranted inclusion and I don’t think my uncharacteristically good PIANO statline is enough to do it. Instead, vote for my teammate Eric Xu who led us to ...

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I know that Matt Weiner, among others, has in the past advocated breaking out Nats into "divisions." As a stopgap, would it be unreasonable to do that even without using two different question sets? (After all, the lowest-placing teams often come to test their mettle against the toughest questions....

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Personally, I care more about the integrity of ACF Nationals as a “players championship” than I do about its expansion. Obviously, I’m not a member of ACF and don’t knows its priorities, but if the field needs to be 40 teams instead of 48 to ensure a full RR in playoffs which is almost unanimously c...

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This is slightly late, but I've finally played all the packets and I have to say that this set is not as hard as some people are making it out to be. The answerlines are mostly very reasonable (I'd say moreso than recent spring opens) and there was a lot of great early cluing. If you're playing on t...

Banana Stand · Re: Terrapin @ UMD (3/2/2019) Combined stats have games double-posted, btw.

Combined stats have games double-posted, btw.

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Jack Mehr and I are each writing a packet of hard (ranging from Nats to CO+), literature common links to be read sometime in mid-January on Discord. If this sounds interesting to you, indicate your availability on the following poll (times are EST). We'll be reading this in the discord tomorrow nig...

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I bought a set of Masterplots for my house so I know a bit about the encyclopedia grind. My best piece of advice is to be the most thorough on the outer portions of the canon, and to largely ignore the most important works in the canon. Studying Great Expectations or Moby Dick from these books won’t...

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I'll echo Jakob and say that reading literary criticism at this point isn't going to help you very much. I don't know your current level of play, but you're going to want to start by just amassing a lot of "author-work", "work-character", and "work-plot point" knowledge through reading packets, usin...

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Can I see the tossup on “In the Penal Colony“?

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TTIAC and Stanford Housewrite were both better than CMST.

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On Wednesday at 9 PM EST, I will be reading a 20 TU very hard short fiction packet in the discord. Every tossup answerline will be a character from a short story. I'll be doing a second reading of this at the same time on Thursday for people who can't make it Wednesday. These happened! Wednesday Sc...

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My favorite types of short fiction are poetry and non-fiction essays! (this sounds cool, though, I like these types of tournaments)

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Banana Stand wrote:On Wednesday at 9 PM EST, I will be reading a 20 TU very hard short fiction packet in the discord. Every tossup answerline will be a character from a short story.

I'll be doing a second reading of this at the same time on Thursday for people who can't make it Wednesday.

Banana Stand

On Wednesday at 9 PM EST, I will be reading a 20 TU very hard short fiction packet in the discord. Every tossup answerline will be a character from a short story.

Banana Stand

On the flipside, a tossup on Martin Guerre on the surface is just “some tossup on a French dude from 500 years ago” but I’d guess that a decent percentage(probably not quite a majority?) would have encountered him while reading/reading about Natalie Zemon Davis and her view of the case through a fem...

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Ditto on Cambridge, and I don't even think it's much of a hot take. Anyone who has played with/against Golfinos knows he's legit, and give him some teammates that can cover his weaknesses? Spooky. #7 seems a bit low, tbh.

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There are literally not enough weekends in the year to accommodate half of these. Imo, there are two major reasons for the use of housewrites. The first is for a team acquire revenue, and the second is that producing the housewrite will help with the development of their players since it forces you...

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Fun books that seldom come up in QB: "The Monk" by Matthew Lewis (a Gothic classic; the nuttiest book you will ever read) "McTeague" by Frank Norris (also wild) Fun books that never come up in QB: "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" by Choderlos de Laclos (probably my favorite book) These actually come up a...

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Heart of Darkness is so good, what is going on in here? Moby-Dick is worth a read, too. Fundamental part of U.S Lit that comes up all the time and is a really awesome experience(I think the cetology parts catch too much flak from people who claim to dislike it). Beloved is also really good. Kafka an...

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I think the basketball analogy works well here, if we view MattBo as Kobe and Jordan as Lebron(lol). Both are obviously insanely competitive people, but Kobe almost always seemed to "need" the win more than Lebron, and went to psychotic lengths to get it. Lebron is more reserved and only kicks it in...

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armitage wrote:This is in abysmally bad taste

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This is also going to be 7 packets, not the 8 from the original announcement. There's a lot of side events going around and we figure 8 packets probably won't be played at any site. I'll echo Eric's sentiment that we're happy people are interested!

Banana Stand · Re: Virginia Summer Open – 8/5/17 I'm down(to staff)!

I'm down(to staff)!

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This was very fun to read through. The annotations are a sweet idea. I would've gladly first line-negged Sonmi-451, forgetting the full name of the section. That priming tossup is also cool since the spreading activation effect should come up more. Wish I could've played!

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I can't imagine a team that doesn't do better or worse depending on their mood and how much sleep they got. Berkeley B's top bracket run looks very compelling - knocking off Northwestern after their cinderella run and Penn for good measure, wish I had a chance to do that at my first Nats. Seems lik...

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This is a good thread. Despite not coming anywhere near a spot in Nats finals, I've thought about this a lot since I noticed it watching/reading last year's finals(and 2015's). First, I'll say that as a spectator, it adds a bit of excitement to the matches. "Damn, this packet is really pushing them ...

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Eric Xu and I are going to be playing this.

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The literature in this set was really really good. It was very accessible across the board while offering a great challenge on interesting hard parts and early-middle clues. Common links probing core works of famous authors including the ones on teachers and the beach(which I unfortunately negged wi...

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This 'ol Cracker Barrel is tumblin' on, but don' mind me, I'm just passin' by before I get to my there destination in the ol' Big Apple. Yessir, New York City for some good ol' fashioned bowlin'.

I'm hammered and I hope Jordan wins.

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A bit of self-plagiarism never hurt: Delta Burke 2012 Question: This author wrote of an "Arhat who sought Heaven under a mountain of stone" before claiming "humility is beatness before the absolute world" in "Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain". This author asked, "Is this the sickness that is d...

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I sometimes come across plagiarism in old sets and just brush it off since most were written a decent amount of time ago, but I feel like having a thread to document egregious examples would be fun. This is not meant to be witch-hunty since most of the offenders probably aren't even active anymore; ...

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Could I see the tossup on Maad City?

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On another sitcom, one of these events led to Buster's relationship with Lucille Austero. Yeah, so I buzzed on this clue with "award shows," which is actually a correct answer given the way this is phrased. In the episode "Key Decisions," Lucille Austero gives Buster her phone number after he accid...

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I am happy to announce The Modern Age, a literature and visual arts side event consisting entirely of material from after WWII. This tournament will consist of 7 power-marked packets of 20 tossups(8-10 lines of 10 TNR) and two-part related bonuses, aping Kurtis' format from Listory and Skype Lit. It...

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Liberty-- J: Spends a bunch of time on Constant, who is, like, not a philosopher? A: Yeah, once again, if your goal when writing a philosophy question is to reward engagement with philosophy, you should clue philosophers. How is Constant not a philosopher? Eric Xu first-lined this tossup with somet...

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Gauging difficulty as a new writer is probably one of the most difficult parts of the craft, and something I still struggle with from time to time. A very important concept to learn is that tossup difficulty and answerline difficulty do not have to go hand in hand, and there are many ways to adjust ...

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Before any more rumors go around, I would like to make it clear that this set was largely completed at the start of the tournament. It's not really acceptable for it to be "largely completed" on the day of the tournament, but disregarding that, isn't it just straight-up fact that this wasn't even n...

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Thanks Jon(and Jacob), that's some really useful advice. I definitely agree that good/playable questions are better than no questions, and that not every question has to be perfect or even close to it. Reading excerpts is definitely something I've utilized before and will definitely continue, especi...

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Recently, I've been writing a lot of lit questions for both improvement and with the hope of eventually making something playable. One thing I've noticed as I've began to focus on constructing good pyramidal tossups on important topics is that I operate best on things I'd classify as "fringe canonic...

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I'm interested in playing this.

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He hasn't been mentioned yet, but Eric Xu deserves some love. Coming off of being the best HS player in the country, Eric received the usual "can this kid even play on regular difficulty?" before leading UVA to 3rd at Penn Bowl(where we lost by one tossup to Columbia) and a respectable finish at Nat...

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I'd be free on Sunday.

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I really enjoyed this set, especially the literature. There were a lot of interesting and buzzable clues from works I'd read. This isn't much of a gripe, but for the tossup on Charles X, I remember the Anti-Sacrilege Act being dropped first line which seemed slightly easy, especially compared to mos...

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Don't care about what your science player is studying? Always losing your own notecards? Personalize your dashboard to display notecards in your chosen areas

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Since you're new, you should probably just blow through a few sets to gain canon knowledge, but not so fast that you don't gain anything. That's your highest ROI strategy right now since you probably don't know that many pre-FTP clues yet and it's important you learn some of those and a lot of givea...

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