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gyre and gimble

I'd also like to give a personal digital bear hug to whatever wonderful souls picked Amin Maalouf and Cosmas Indicopleustes as hard parts and inserted the "hellburners" clue in the 80 years' war tossup. The hellburners clue was from Maryland A's submission. Amin Maalouf and Cosmas Indicop...

gyre and gimble

I'm not at all familiar with the Moreau painting. It's very cool . And yeah...if you're quoting a novel as a leadin, you *might* be writing a bad tossup: clueing a quote from Orwell's 1984 as a leadin is probably fine for a set; clueing a quote from Henry Greene's ~Loving~ probably is not, even for...

gyre and gimble

Re accusations of mean-spiritedness in my post: Note that I didn't call anyone a wanker (or, rather, synonyms thereof), nor did I (or Alston) impute anything of Benji or the editors as people, unlike replies to what we said. Let me define "mental masturbation," lest it come across as pure...

gyre and gimble

I'm not exactly sure what the excitement factor is, but the argument has a passing resemblance to some of the complaints about Andrew's "activist" editing style for Chicago Open 2014 (see here ). There was definitely a stylistic consistency across rounds that isn't always there--maybe thi...

gyre and gimble

I'll reply tomorrow to this very mean spirited post Joey reached out to me with this concern (which I'm inclined to believe is not unjustified). I told him: I found your post to be incredibly condescending, and tried to illustrate how your leaps in logic made it that way. I normally try not to be a...

gyre and gimble

I'll let Benji defend or accept the claims of misinterpretation if he wants to, but I'm gonna go ahead and say that Joey's philosophy post above 1) takes for granted an astounding number of assumptions about the correctness of Joey's own view of how philosophy questions should be written; and 2) is ...

gyre and gimble

Great set. I've been spilling a lot of ink in the Regionals discussion thread so I'll just chime in on a couple things: The version of the Hercules-Hydra tossup I played mixed Pollaiuolo slides and with Gustave Moreau slides. I buzzed on the third, misremembered which Moreau it was, and negged. But ...

gyre and gimble

Here are the stats from the Stanford site, in order of finish. Most of us played all of the questions, including tiebreakers (for a total of 109). Rahul and Aseem had to leave after 90 though. Stephen Liu: 34/14/22 = 540 Nathan Weiser: 10/4/5 = 165 Aseem Keyal: 3/9/8 = 95 Henry Baer: 3/3/2 = 65 Rahu...

gyre and gimble

I appreciate the points made by you, Andrew and Stephen, and I have no disagreement with you in principle, and while reading your list of clues/answers here it looks reasonable. Nevertheless I cannot shake the sentiment I had (one that was echoed by other players at the site, and apparently other p...

gyre and gimble

I'm curious - is there a breakdown of how much British/Celtic mythology was in the set relative to other traditions? It felt like there was *a lot* in the 13 packets I played, and I'm intrigued as to whether I was right to get this impression or not. Here's the full myth breakdown: Tossups Mesoamer...

gyre and gimble

The first adjective I'd apply to the three weaker categories I mention above would be boring. I can appreciate as a player that much of this was born from attempts to keep things accessible, and often this felt like it was the proximate cause. However, I can count on one hand the number of times I,...

gyre and gimble

Yeah I agree with everything Andrew said. "Quizbowlese" is often necessary and not necessarily bad. I don't understand the stigma associated with it. Also, I'm very perplexed about the Tavora complaint because I specifically made that question about the family for precisely the reasons Wil...

gyre and gimble

I had a lot of fun playing this, and I am personally very happy to hear that some of Carleton's questions made it into the set, for the first time in a while. Thanks to everyone for writing/editing/proofreading this! Thanks for your packet! But next time, don't submit a tossup on The Yakoubian Buil...

gyre and gimble

Here's a proposed revision to Brad's suggestion upthread. 1a. If you apply for an autobid, you must lock in your roster as part of your application. This is what ACF does. 1b. If your autobid roster needs to change between acceptance of the bid and ICT, you must obtain approval from NAQT. There shou...

gyre and gimble

I do think that furnishing two guest editors (who put in a lot of work writing and editing the SCT set) plus hosting (and staffing!) a large SCT should be worth two bids. Perhaps that should be one editing bid and one hosting bid, rather than two editing bids, if we wind up with another two-guest-e...

gyre and gimble

Mike Bentley wrote:Looks like Regionals is the preferred date for the Eyes mirror. I'm not 100% sure I'll be there for it, but feel free to run it without me.

Just confirming for everyone attending that we will be running this after the tournament.

gyre and gimble

We do not currently have such a policy (so teams are free to travel where they wish). In any case, this doesn't look any more exploitative than teams splitting up their A teams to qualify their much weaker B team, except this one may have involved an airplane ticket. Ike That's not true. If Chicago...

gyre and gimble

Might I recommend 16 packets of 21/21? It's the same number of questions, except they would all get used. (Assuming you're not planning to have 24 tossup rounds.) We're going for the same format as last year's MO, with all 24 5-line tossups being played in a game (or a timed format, whichever), wit...

gyre and gimble

As far as the current status of the Cambridge set goes: The British history and literature are essentially finished, in case there's a wish to start Americanising this set. It would also be mostly playable unamericanised - that's the approach we take with everything regular and above in the UK, and...

gyre and gimble

I don't understand why you're telling teams to not send questions and then charging them money for not sending questions. We're still letting them send in questions, but giving them the option of not doing so for an added penalty. We're not letting them send in questions for the +$50 deadline becau...

gyre and gimble

July 22nd is the most popular date for Chicago Open, so we're rolling with that. Unless I am mistaken, the only event on the docket besides Chicago Open proper is Auroni's literature tournament. Please post here if you wish for your event to be added to the docket on Sunday. Sarang Yeola and I are ...

gyre and gimble

So, I'd say the limiting factors are knowledge and ingenuity rather than distribution or norms. We should therefore encourage and praise efforts to reimagine staid history topics in refreshing ways. In that spirit, I enjoyed Jacob's tossup on the _printing_ industry for MYSTERIUM in historiography,...

gyre and gimble

My apologies that this is exactly the wrong place to ask this, but Stephen's post reminded me that "stanford housewrite" has not yet been posted to the archives (and its thread has been archived so I couldn't ask there). Does anyone have the capacity to do that? Eric, I just sent the set ...

gyre and gimble

It seems like this thread is more or less dying down, but I want to firmly reject the notion that European History has "been done." During a conversation pre-CO, I remember Chris Ray saying that European history has been hopelessly over-mined in quizbowl, especially relative to other areas...

gyre and gimble

I just sent in my nominations, but in case these two don't make it in, people should give them a listen:

Front Row Seat to Earth (Weyes Blood)
Music for Listening to Music To (La Sera)

gyre and gimble

I agree with all of Auroni's points more or less, but I wanted to comment on one in particular that I think needs some qualifying: Limiting the number of clues about details from artworks, and abandoning such clues altogether if there are none . This point may mark the largest departure between the ...

gyre and gimble

Chris Ray at Terrapin 2016 is a pretty legendary upset notwithstanding its recency. Great moments involve Chris literally licking his lips as the science tossup in finals 2 was being read before he completely shafted Max on that question, Chris beating John Lawrence to a music question using his &q...

gyre and gimble

Berkeley A beat Stanford A in the second game of an advantaged final. Thanks for playing, everyone! Stats are available here: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/3884/stats/combined_%28with_finals%29/. Some of the bonus numbers are a little off because tiebreaker tossups were not accompanied by...

gyre and gimble

A couple that come to mind are: ACF Nationals 2012, Yale B over Virginia A (albeit missing Evan Adams). Virginia finished the tournament in 2nd place, Yale B tied for 18th. Chicago Open 2012, Dharma and Greg Bums over In Soviet Russia, Tournament Edits You. A team of myself, Mik Larsen, Alex Gerten,...

gyre and gimble

Why does Penn occupy two spots, and MIT B one spot, in the Ivy League?

gyre and gimble

Thanks for all of your hard work, sportsmanship, and competition Matt. While working on ACF Regionals with you I realized that, at least during the time I've been involved in the collegiate game, nobody is as competent, responsible, and well-meaning a member of this community as you have been. Also:...

gyre and gimble

The holistic policy would work something as follows: I'm going to set the base fee at $Y dollars. Your packet may qualify for a minus $X, $2X, $3X and $4X discount as determined from a holistic evaluation of your packet- Mike Cheyne's bullet point list is a pretty good idea of what I'm going for. T...

gyre and gimble

As a side note, I want to caution against overvaluing creativity in question writing. I think there needs to be a balance between standard questions and creative ones, because otherwise it's easy to distort the canon. For example, do we really want a tournament where every tossup on literature in t...

gyre and gimble

I think this is a bad idea. As a person submitting questions, I have no idea what the editors' intended difficulty is or how a certain topic I write on fits in relative to other submissions and editors' questions. I wrote 6/6 for my team's CO packet this year, and I think maybe a third of that made ...

gyre and gimble

Stanford A will be myself, Benji Nguyen, Nathan Weiser, and Kyle Sutherlin. Stanford B is TBD, but they do lose Nathan, Kyle, and James Bradbury from last year's team.

gyre and gimble

I'll add more later, but I think Tommy had a much better career than Ted or Dallas and should be ranked accordingly. In the last analysis, Tommy was the consistent second best player on a team that won four titles, and was at various points a top 3 player in literature and science. It seems like th...

gyre and gimble

I take a lot of issue with the part of this where you say we should produce a set that is coherent with what is currently known and studied. My point is that certain artists are not studied or represented enough in quizbowl, and I therefore believe that writers should go into a set actively conside...

gyre and gimble

Stephen, I am now confused as to whether your objection is: (a) This tournament was too hard because all the art questions were on women (b) This tournament was too easy because all the art questions were predictably on women So which one is it? Does it have to be one of those? My objection is that...

gyre and gimble

I however, did not ask a single one of these artists because they are women. I asked about them because they are artists of great value, who are worth asking, who have been under-represented. There is value in pushing the amount of coverage that female and any other marginalized minority artists re...

gyre and gimble

I thought this was a decent tournament. I had fun playing it. It seemed to make an honest effort at presenting clues that were important and finding answerlines that are underrepresented. My main overall criticism would be that many clues were not "playable." This occurred most often due t...

gyre and gimble

Second, if staleness and size of answer space create issues, those issues exist around Regionals level. As others have correctly noted, this isn't a problem at lower difficulties. But critically, it's also not a problem at higher difficulties. ...we should also remember that not every tournament ne...

gyre and gimble

What I think reducing the myth distribution will do is reduce the strain on the content. I agree that mythology has a place, and that there are reforms to be made as it exists. But a major difference between myth and geography is the paucity of the subject material in the former. Geography writing ...

gyre and gimble

I want to make a couple of unrelated points. First, I want to outline what the mythology category is, or at least has been for a while. In terms of "why people are interested," I'd say it's closest to literature. It's fun to read, it provides us with insight into story structures, and it h...

gyre and gimble

I liked Matt's approach precisely because it does effectively increase the social science distribution (something that many people, including myself, have advocated) at the expense of one of the most overexposed categories relative to the amount of available material. The problem with this is that ...

gyre and gimble

Personal comments: the religion and myth were great - I could tell Matt was trying to set a model of what questions in these areas should look like going forward and I think he did. RM As Will alluded to earlier, I did take deliberate steps with Religion and Mythology to stake out areas of future e...

gyre and gimble

I guess the editors are free to do what they want, but I'm a little confused why Legends gives up 0.25/0.25 to Religion when Legends already incorporates a lot of religious material (a "prudent mixture"). Do we really need over 1.5/1.5 Religion (traditionally defined) in a tournament?

gyre and gimble

Can we get a new name since Isaac isn't playing anymore?

gyre and gimble

Cheynem wrote:Obviously sites can play anything they want, I just didn't find it optimal to list a set that some people would have already played.

Wouldn't it be more optimal to just list all the sets that are available to play? I really don't see the downside to listing CLEAR.

gyre and gimble

Would those folks writing side events for the "second summer open" be comfortable setting firm dates by which their sets will be completed? Some folks out in the Bay Area are trying to put something together and we think the weekend of August 6/7 would be best for us. But to decide what we...

gyre and gimble

You make a good case here that I should have put Austin in what I called the third tier, and after reviewing the stats with your strictures in mind, I agree that I underranked him. (Luckily, I haven't voted yet!) That being said, I don't understand the way you use ICT stats to claim that Austin's v...

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