The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mike Bentley

I think it's worth bringing this discussion of "weirdness" and quizbowl's move towards the contemporary to a more general discussion thread (i.e. not for this tournament). I personally like most of this direction (except for other arts and maybe visual arts where I think it's gone way too ...

Mike Bentley

Congrats to Matt and Chris!

Mike Bentley

Responding to Eric's post, I've heard of daisy chain drives, which is not true of most science hard parts. I think it's gettable. Male also seemed quite gettable to me. I also found Male extremely confusing and could not figure out what the hell to say despite having (years ago) read some npr artic...

Mike Bentley

Responding to Eric's post, I've heard of daisy chain drives, which is not true of most science hard parts. I think it's gettable. Male also seemed quite gettable to me.

Governor-general of India didn't seem that hard of an answer line to me, although it could perhaps be one clue easier.

Mike Bentley

Conversely, I think 14 packets is a big waste of time and effort. Maybe 5% of your teams are going to be playing packet 13 and 14. For regular season events, quizbowl should just adapt to fewer rounds and possibly slightly unfair finals formats. I'd rather play more tournaments than waste a bunch of...

Mike Bentley

I suspect the problem here is that there's a bunch of busywork involved in setting up and maintaining forums. Ideally, we could create a solution that's more self-serve since it's the set editors who care most about this for their sets. Whether such a solution is feasible in PhpBB or not, I don't kn...

Mike Bentley

Congrats to Stanford A for clearing the field and winning DI. Berkeley C won both games of an advantaged final to claim the DII title. Thanks to all players and staff!

Stats are here: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/7325/

Mike Bentley

I use words!

Mike Bentley

One idea is to have notes appear as footnotes at the bottom of the page so they don't clutter the answer line.

Mike Bentley

Alan makes an excellent post, which also highlights an even more important point (that even chemists do not have any fucking interest in learning shit about functional groups, but whether or not ochem can be written in fact "well" or even "better" than stupid name reaction stuff...

Mike Bentley

I'll post more later, but wanted to quickly note that lower difficulty open tournaments have existed for quite some time in the form of the online playtest mirror. In practice, most of the events end up having very stacked fields that wouldn't be fun to play against for casual quizzers. But it would...

Mike Bentley

The point in the third part of my post is that bonuses take up a disproportionate amount of time compared to their competitive utility. If that doesn't seem like a problem to you or others, that's fine. As I write in that section, there are many good things about bonuses. One of my proposed experim...

Mike Bentley

Can some oldsters comment on Matt Keller's candidacy? He seems like he was one of the most respected writers/editors for a few years before (at least to my knowledge) disappearing from the game around 2010. If I'm missing stuff he's doing, I'd like to know. As far as I know, he moved out to Seattle...

Mike Bentley

I think there is probably some psychological benefit to giving a correct answer even if everyone in the tournament is giving it. Hard to say how much this is worth in the grand scheme of things though. I like Andrew's point of bonuses at national tournaments being something you need to be good at in...

Mike Bentley

I think there's a spectrum to the cross-category nature of bonus parts. Quizbowl has traditionally had a more narrow definition of subjects than you encounter in a class / casual learning. If you're reading about Gordimer there's no way you're not discussing that she's a South African author and the...

Mike Bentley

I'm an advocate for trying out different things with bonuses. I haven't thought a ton about different ways to do this but I encourage other people to do so. I am a little skeptical that 1 or 2 part bonuses are the answer because they produce more variance and/or end up being a slog for the bottom te...

Mike Bentley

Hi, I'm looking for playtesters for the 2022 PACE NSC. There will likely be two waves of playtesting. The first will be on a random set of questions (i.e. not packetized, but not organized by subject). It will start in January. Most playtesting sessions will start around 7 or 8 PM Eastern on weekday...

Mike Bentley

Thanks Rob!

Mike Bentley

Any chance the admins could move some of the older private discussion forums to the archives? It's at the point where I need to scroll down 2 screens now to see new posts in this section. I suppose I could leave the user groups, but it's at least theoretically possible I'd want to access these forum...

Mike Bentley

I'd play it as a side event.

Mike Bentley

For tournaments below maybe 30 teams, I like to send out seeds ahead of time and let teams know I'm open to arguments for why they should be changed. (But it's important to also make it clear that you're not bound to make any changes to the seeding.) Teams often have the most information and most pa...

Mike Bentley

One common problem in writing visual tournaments such as Eyes That Do Not See is that you can only find a low resolution image. Your first step should be checking something like artstor or a Google Image / Books search to find a higher resolution image. But failing that, there are some new AI tools ...

Mike Bentley

As a sort of weird side point as an editor I don't really want players to know specific which books that I'm more likely to write out of if they look at my previous work because it would feel weird to me to get meta-studied (Not to say that I've writing exclusively from a single textbook but the po...

Mike Bentley

That being said, I can see an argument that by forcing citations at the writer level you'll probably push writers away from using Wikipedia and previous questions since there's going to be stigma attached to this. I know that some sets / mentor programs already do something like this informally.

Mike Bentley

I remain skeptical that there are people out there that are motivated enough to want to understand where a clue came from but can't figure this out from Googling. I'm not opposed to a set including citations if it doesn't affect any other aspect of polishing the set, making it easy to parse answer l...

Mike Bentley

The crossword constructing community has long had a similar problem with lack of diversity. The constructors of crosswords in mainstream venues are overwhelmingly white and male, and while there's still a long way to go, the community has made great strides in the last few years. And there are a lo...

Mike Bentley

We're still looking for more applications. I encourage anyone on the fence to apply!

Mike Bentley

The other solution is not to "bother" with pronouns as much as to expand the canon such that you have no transparency issues due to the lack of, say, female painters askable at a certain level, but that's manifestly a more long-term solution than agreeing to a certain rule about pronoun u...

Mike Bentley

Which of the following questions sets and packets which I am (soon!) writing would you be interested in playing, collaborating on, playtesting, proofreading, or reading, etc.? [Science History Monstrosity] [Video Games of Academic Interest] Interested in playing many of these, but very interested i...

Mike Bentley

I just published another one that's 90% on early electronic quiz games, but does touch on a little bit of quizbowl history: https://tedium.co/2021/09/15/trivia-tec ... dium=email

Mike Bentley

Any sense of what the minimum bar for editing should be? For instance, I technically edited 2 ICT questions last year. And as you may recall edited CS for the ACF Nationals that included the self-balancing binary trees question. Those were relatively minor contributions. Whereas I have edited some h...

Mike Bentley

For what it's worth, none of the stuff in that bonus was from class, but I think it could stand to be a bit more explicit without giving away the farm. It saddens me that people with serious knowledge couldn't get it. Hopefully people enjoyed some of the other business relevant content - it's hard ...

Mike Bentley

I thought the "minimum viable product" bonus was really hard to figure out from how little context there is - being given an (imo) not-so-straightforward definition was really disorienting and we ended up missing this part despite knowing about mvps (maybe grounding it more in software de...

Mike Bentley

The oil tossup relied too much on players being able to figure out what the source of a lot of corrupt wealth is in Lagos, as apparently oil is not much-discussed in the book. This clue relied too much on players inferring - I had encountered Graceland in articles on petrofiction while researching ...

Mike Bentley

The oil tossup relied too much on players being able to figure out what the source of a lot of corrupt wealth is in Lagos, as apparently oil is not much-discussed in the book. This clue relied too much on players inferring - I had encountered Graceland in articles on petrofiction while researching ...

Mike Bentley

Thanks to everyone who applied. I'll try to have responses by this weekend or early next week. Editor applications are likely closed but writers may continue to apply throughout the fall.

Mike Bentley

Due to my schedule, more of my questions ended up in the earlier packets than late packets. Curious if anyone perceived this difference when playing or it all more or less felt like traditional Scattergories.

Mike Bentley

For those who missed the note in the question on literary critics, I had suggested to Will that he add a clue that James Wood had been in a band called "Only Connect." Turns out I had messed up my anecdotes--Only Connect is in fact a tech support company in one of Wood's novels. Anyway, in...

Mike Bentley

By the way, I will eventually fix the issue in the stats with all games claiming to go into overtime but may take a while.

Mike Bentley

Thanks for writing and hosting this! It was enjoyable even for someone as bad at jazz content as me. Am I missing instructions on where to pay for the tournament, or was it a free tournament?

Mike Bentley

Jordan's team cleared the field. Stats are here: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/7 ... s/prelims/

Thanks everyone for playing and staffing! I may read the last packet after JORDU if anyone is still around.

Mike Bentley

If you are a free agent without a team who I realize I don't have contact for, please come to L211 and I'll try to put you on one.

Mike Bentley

Here is the schedule: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FrU ... p=drivesdk

Mike Bentley

The two of my buzzers that are there are available.

Mike Bentley

This event will start at 8:30 AM on Sunday. Be in your Round 1 rooms by then.

Mike Bentley

Reminder to get editor applications in this week. Would be great to get a few more applications!

Mike Bentley

Also, I'm not saying there should be no contemporary poetry in the distribution (especially at a tournament like ACF Nationals). But I think it's the right choice to weight it considerably less than contemporary long fiction.

Mike Bentley

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is...

Mike Bentley

- in general, it seemed like there was a lack of contemporary poetry/drama compared to contemporary long fiction, but Grant was buzzing so early on a lot of it that I didn't have time to figure out if it was contemporary or not Haven't read through the set yet so can't say whether this criticism is...

Mike Bentley

There were too many questions I loved to single any out for their greatness without having to look back at the packets; there wasn't a packet that went by without at least four or five home runs. Again, going back to the packets would let me detail this better, but I remember a few questions that s...

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