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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 spe...

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,"...

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 &q...

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 so...

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 writte...

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

Lately I've been listening to Broadcast's Tender Buttons (dream pop + psychedelia), Weyes Blood's Front Row Seat to Earth (kind of a mystical folk rock), and of course Beach House's Depression Cherry (more dream pop). Other recommendations: Frankie Cosmos Alvvays Best Friends Girl Ray Radiator Hospi...

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% o...

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 ...

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 &quo...

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 aff...

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 cha...

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. Th...

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 clu...

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 ...

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...

gyre and gimble

On the contrary, I've met several (non-theater) people for whom watching plays or acting them out for fun with friends is their primary mode of literary engagement. You're correct in that the number of plays people read is far fewer than the number of novels, but it's too early to halt the process ...

gyre and gimble

I liked this distributional breakdown. It makes more sense to have quotas by genre than according to arbitrary geographic boundaries. As a poetry specialist, I find few things more annoying than when there's no poetry tossup in a round. Here's how I would implement the breakdown, though: 1.5/1.5 Pro...

gyre and gimble

I think Daoud and Oliver are bringing up a subtly different, but related point, which I also agree with (it was the main thrust of my history post): categories should be written so that they're "accessible" to people who study the material academically. It's inevitable that academic study...

gyre and gimble

My point, which I should have made clearer, is that people should be pushed towards an academic understanding of mythology at collegiate level quizbowl. I don't know whether it's possible for that to actually happen, but I believe (and not merely because it would help my PPG :razz: ) that it would ...

gyre and gimble

I won't be able to respond to everything that's been addressed here, but I do want to point out some stuff: 1. The prevailing justification for myth's traditional 1/1 in the distribution is that mythology is pervasive throughout culture, that people encounter it in a wide variety of forms, and that ...

gyre and gimble

In the background of this painting, two trees at center frame a scene of a harbor flanked by several unrealistic gray mountains. The right arm of the woman on this painting’s right, who is in three-quarter profile, was painted excessively long in order to show that woman’s fingers leafing through a...

gyre and gimble

Stephen you've written a good visual arts set before, I don't understand how you can't see what I'm getting at, even if you think I'm not being 100% articulate about it. Sorry about the double post, but I wanted to respond to this separately. (Well, "respond" is the wrong word. I'm just u...

gyre and gimble

*Look, I think a complaint about difficulty is perfectly reasonable. If lots of these questions went dead, then maybe Mike should make the next set easier. But you're trying to find structural issues that don't exist, in order to back up your claim that the questions were too difficult. My complain...

gyre and gimble

Auks Ran Ova wrote:*especially when some of the myth questions contain like 50 impossible-to-phonetically-anglicize Irish or Welsh names, Stephen

Clearly, the optimal solution here is for everyone to go and take a semester of Welsh.

gyre and gimble

Again, none of my post isn't about how Giotto doesn't have a distinct style. Indeed, I recognized it was Giotto very, very quickly. The problem is the tossup does very little to suggest "Giotto's style" as uniquely applied to the Lamentation. The angels--and many other--clues do nothing t...

gyre and gimble

Mike, I'm curious: What sorts of conversion numbers do you expect when you write these sets? For individual questions, I'm sure the answer will necessarily vary depending on the difficulty of the chosen answerline, but I'm wondering what you would expect for the set as a whole.

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