The Quizbowl Resource Center

Magister Ludi

I can understand why this guy could find it "absurd" that quizbowl is the only collegiate program that allows graduate students to play with undergraduates because that at least makes a certain kind of sense. But, I'm tired of people claiming that the presence of grad students is responsib...

Magister Ludi

I'll just say it ended up being a blessing in disguise that the host was announced so late that everyone but Stephen didn't want to go, because I'm not exaggerating when I say I don't know what we would of done without Andy's last minute help to edit half the chem and bio.

Magister Ludi

1/1 American 1/1 British 1/1 Literature written in English 1/1 European and World (not in English) So it seems to me that what we have here is an additional 1/1 on anything in English, not excluding additional American or British literature, which has been done at several tournaments before. Much a...

Magister Ludi

Yeah what would be in the mysterious "literature written in English" that is separate from American and British literature?

Magister Ludi

Not that it matters, but the story is called "White Nights." Dostoevsky is a giant of Russian literature, if not just literature. What you're saying amounts to "ask about these four works of Dostoevsky and nothing else," which I'm in complete disagreement with. Dostoevsky wrote ...

Magister Ludi

[ On the other side, there are tossups that reward in-depth reading of things that people who have never played quizbowl before are most likely to have read well (i.e. things which “intellectually-curious people”, however recursively defined, are likely to know, things which are assigned in many cla...

Magister Ludi

Also I want to address Jerry's notion that I'm setting myself up as the "literature mafia." You notice I don't comment on every tournament yelling at people for poor answer selection, but rather post when I see specific trends in someone's writing that I find problematic. It's not like I s...

Magister Ludi

I think my philosophical critique might make more sense when I provide real examples for the set. To re-iterate I thought this was a decent set. I don't really care if Auroni listens to my critique, but after thinking about the questions there are a few persistent trends that are problemmatic in his...

Magister Ludi

As far as I can tell, the set of people in the "literature mafia" is equivalent to the set of quizbowl players named "Ted Gioia." To me, Ted's critique reflects a rather idiosyncratic (not to mention explicitly Anglo-centric) view of the quizbowl literature canon. Would I have w...

Magister Ludi

I'm going to try to respond to you in a constructive manner and not get mad. I'm trying to give you feedback that will make you improve as a writer and is not based on some attempt to personally insult you as you seem to imply. I'm not saying that you wrote a bad tournament but rather a decent one t...

Magister Ludi

I enjoyed this tournament and want to thank the writers for putting together a solid set. I particularly enjoyed the social science, visual art, and classical music. I was glad to see tossups on subjects such as Course in General Linguistics, which showed a commitment to spending the time to find su...

Magister Ludi

My point here is that completely different value judgments (about what is "excellent" or "important" or whatever) lead to basically the same results in practice, so long as your good quizbowl judgment is dictating the way in which you write questions. If I were editing the lit f...

Magister Ludi

These angry over-the-top posts are examples of what I called "yelling" at people who criticize the tournament earlier. Some younger players who made valid critiques of the tournament might get intimidated by angry posts and decide to retract their opinions and not participate in the discus...

Magister Ludi

Ok, so now we've gone from accusations of "posturing" to hints that I'm too stupid to understand Merrill. I don't think I need to respond to that; it would just look like I'm bragging or something. All I'll say is this: you haven't proven your point in here by a long shot. I have no idea ...

Magister Ludi

The tournament you guys want happened in February, and it was called ACF Regionals. If you want more tossups on the same three Thomas Hardy novels, go there. That'll test your deep knowledge of what you think is the "core canon." At this point I can only conclude that our notions of impor...

Magister Ludi

Jerry I think you and I may have irreconcilably different opinions about the existence of a literary canon, but I would suggest you take a step back and actually think about what I wrote. I specifically mentioned several times that I don't believe in one universal canon. I made sure to stress that l...

Magister Ludi

As I lay with my head in your lap camerado , The Unvanquished, The Pit, The Time of Your Life All My Sons, Dutchman, The House of the Seven Gables, WH Gass Billy Bathgate , The Comedian as the Letter C , The Changing Light at Sandover, WD Howells Pale Fire, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game , Barn Burni...

Magister Ludi

Hey folks, just wanted to say you shouldn't waste a vote on me because the purpose of the poll is to foster discussion about the best active players and unfortunately I'm out of quizbowl for the foreseeable future.

Magister Ludi

If people still doubt the validity of Questions of a Travel as a stand alone topic I am happy to elicit some endorsements from numerous students and teachers I know who discuss this collection constantly. Honestly it isn't even debatable that the stand alone collection is important. Once again I thi...

Magister Ludi

But my second major point falls in line with something Andrew Hart discussed in an earlier thread about the community's unilateral antagonism towards hard tossup answers. Sometimes people react too negatively to hard tossups. I don't mean that people should write lots of hard tossups or that someon...

Magister Ludi

I guess I'll say my piece about what I was trying to do with this tournament and what I feel other upper difficulty tournaments should aspire to. HI is probably the last tournament I'll ever write (certainly the last one I'll write for a while). Accordingly that gave me a certain creative liberty to...

Magister Ludi

I mean, the consensus so far has been Jerry posting twice, so it's a consensus of one. Not to say that the set was without its issues, but I think there were some very good questions in this set. For me, this tournament was just basically a confusing experience. If you want to write a tournament th...

Magister Ludi

I was a little disappointed about the difficulty and stupidity of some submissions to this tournament. Minnesota A submitted a literature common link tossup on "linnets" in poetry, which I can only imagine was some sort of self-parody. Also I see a common trend where a team writes 4 reason...

Magister Ludi

I just wanted to note that for two packets the unedited versions of my questions were accidentally put in, so there were a few repeats because of that. Fortunately the original unedited submissions that were accidentally put in the final packets rsather than the edited tossups were generally pretty ...

Magister Ludi

To whom should checks be made out? Hey, I need this answered as soon as possible. Thanks. Well, too late now. I guess we'll just pay out of pocket. However, we still need to know what's up with the packet Matt wrote. If one of the editors could make a decision on that sometime soon, that'd be cool....

Magister Ludi

I probably misjudged the Homer tossup. Overall I really enjoyed the painting at this tournament and on second look most of comments about vague leadins apply to literature. The few bad art tossups seem to be a clerical error where the unedited tossup was accidentally put into the final round.

Magister Ludi

Ted, I don't disagree that character bonus parts can be acceptable and even desirable. I've written several since I adopted the position I hold today. The way that the Penn Bowl character parts were generally executed, they either withheld an important character from the first part in order to make...

Magister Ludi

I think shorter tossup length requires that better care be taken to include lead-ins. When you write a 12 line long monster tossup, you can include some tidbits that practically no one will buzz on. A 6 line tossup can't afford to waste time with that. This does not mean that a 6 line tossup is a b...

Magister Ludi

In general, this was a serviceable set. I don't think it exceeded expectations or broke ground, but it certainly wasn't bad. Four trends I didn't like: 2) Lit bonuses with minor characters as third parts. Aside from poor execution on these (the minor Ibsen character whose first name is only mention...

Magister Ludi

I strongly agree with 3/4 of what Andrew said. Overall I really enjoyed the tournament, but it had a few systematic problems in the humanities. I'm going to discuss the problems in literature and arts first. 1) Vague and poorly chosen leadin clues for literature questions. Let me offer some examples...

Magister Ludi

Yeah I will staff this tournament and Dallas is going to play solo.

Magister Ludi

One small correction to the stats. In Harvard's game against NYU B we actually had 14 TUs and not 9. I got 7 TUs (rather than 3) with one neg and Andy got 2 TUs (rather than 1).

Magister Ludi

Heres the deal. There is no exact way to define what is serious "literature" and what is not. I find it ridiculous that some people in this thread seem to be conflating contemporary literature with trashy literature. No matter what definition we use there will always be countless books and...

Magister Ludi

Unfortunately we've lost the scoresheets. I think I speak for everyone when I blame co-TD Jerry Vinokurov for this oversight.

Magister Ludi

I usually agree with Jonathan, but on this issue I have to differ. I find that many question sets that adhere to strict line limits suffer from a lack of context in clues. When one is trying to write "concisely" I often find that this philosophy translates to questions that are overly gene...

Magister Ludi

I was disappointed with this tournament. I don't blame Eric because it seems like his questions were good. From the art questions I've read and the lack of criticisms of the science I feel pretty confident that Eric should bear very little responsibility for this tournament. I agree with Matt's post...

Magister Ludi

Thanks to Andrew for making this great thread. I think one of the simplest problems people have writing author questions stem from answer selection. I ask myself several questions before writing a lit question: "1- What knowledge is this question testing? 2- Is there anyone who is likely to hav...

Magister Ludi

"Hunter" won the one game final (295-230) over Brown in large part to the heroics of ZHAO ZHANG who arrived 10 seconds before Jerry was going to force Anurag to start reading the finals. I'm sure people will have some words about the disastrous logistics of this tournament, which featured ...

Magister Ludi

Harvard will be heavily editing this set over the next week to bring down the difficulty and edit out the typos. We would love to hear from people in this thread who actually played or read at the tournament to email us with specific bonuses or tossups they found problematic. I find it humorous that...

Magister Ludi

I have a paper to write tonight, but tomorrow I'm going to post a muddled tossup on "The Misfit" from VCU Open 2009 and a very good tossup on "A Good Man is Hard to Find" from MO 2008 to try to offer an example of how literature tossups can reward understanding. Also the VCU Open...

Magister Ludi

Harvard will probably host HI on March 20th; however, we just wanted to make sure that is the best possible date. We are trying to draw as many teams as possible to the main site. So, I wanted to ask teams that are considering traveling to HI: Which date is better for you? Which date will make it mo...

Magister Ludi

I emailed the set to George last week, but his hard drive is down at the moment. Once he fixes his hard drive then it will be available on the packet archive.

Magister Ludi

I strongly agree with Matt about difficulty assessments in general and his thoughts about THUNDER. I had several negs in the tournament because I explicitly thought that a tossup answer was far too hard for "regular difficulty" and guessed something easier even though I knew the clue. I wa...

Magister Ludi

Please post your thoughts about the KLEE set in this thread. I'm especially interested to hear what people thought of the less mainstream portions of the distribution.

Magister Ludi

I hope everyone enjoyed the set. It ended up more difficult than I would have liked and some of our attempts at writing world art questions didn't work as well as I kight of hoped but it seemed like some of them were still answered nonetheless. Jonathan Magin and Charlie Dees won the first game of a...

Magister Ludi

Someone asked for the per packet distribution of the tournament. Enjoy. - 6 Painting - 6 Classical Music - 1 Sculpture - 1 Architecture - 1 Jazz - 1 Film - 1.5 Opera / .5 Dance - .5 Non-Western / Ancient Art - .5 Art Theory/Criticism - .5 Photography - .5 Performance/Misc Art I'll post the exact dis...

Magister Ludi

Field Update: Ike Jose/ Mike Sorice Rob Carson / Hannah Kirsch Billy Beyer / Andrew Hart Brendan Byrne / Mike Cheyne Jonathan Magin / Charlie Dees Andy Kravis / Scot Putzig Free Agents: Matt Weiner Trevor Davis Gautam (maybe) Post in this thread if you are looking for teammates to play this event wi...

Magister Ludi

We are bringing three staffers.

Magister Ludi

To respond to Matt I think that geography tossups do not need to consist solely of clues that are "academic." I don't think geography tossups are invalidated by including some almanac clues as I would argue that a tossup that includes some important context (say around 2-3 lines worth) and...

Magister Ludi

This is going to be a doubles tournament, so post here when you form teams or if you are looking for teammates.

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