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Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Apologies to those who hoped to be playing this tournament this weekend, but it's not going to be finished to the standard I would like by then. I had hoped to use this week to finish it up and apply necessary polish, but events have got in the way.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Update: this is ~75% written, of which 50% I'm mostly happy with, and the other 25% needs bashing around into decent shape still. I'm also currently in Greece, and have therefore picked up various new ideas/clues. Thus I think this tournament will probably be ready to play by August. In the meantime...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Short-beaked echidna wrote:I wonder which three post-Blair PMs will be tossed up.

Does depend on how many general elections we can fit in the next month to be fair.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I will be there early on Saturday morning I guess.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Am very ready to reveal embarrassing levels of knowledge about Lincoln Chafee and other obscure candidates.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Will be taking the light of Quizbowl to the far north as I go to St Andrews for a 1 year Masters.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

People who I think should get a bump from last year: George Corfield - Holy Christ this dude is good at biology and music - apparently Oxford had 26 PPB on the former and 22 PPB on the latter at Nationals. Despite being a specialist (he can get a lot of science in general) he was also his team's to...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Aladdin's Problem wrote: Adding to the chorus: Paradox games get you buzzes

Activities outside QB that don't get you buzzes: sitting in boats

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Sit Room Guy wrote:
jasongg17 wrote:Also, stuff like the Civilization games and Crusader Kings 2 are a major part of why I'm better at history than any other subject.
This. Also nothing makes you better at geography quite like games that make you stare at maps for hours on end.

Adding to the chorus: Paradox games get you buzzes

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Would be interested at some point.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

This may have long become myth and legend, but I'm about halfway through a 20/20 Wheel of Time packet on the few things I remember (and some things I don't) from the series. Let me know if anyone's interested in a reading when the packet is finished (probably in the next week). I could probably als...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

This is a preliminary announcement for OCTAVIAN (Oli's Classical Tournament About Various Interesting Ancient Nuggets) This will be a tossup-only tournament written by me. I plan currently on 12 packets of 24 tossups, power-marked, of about 8-9 lines. I aim for the answerlines to be about 1/2 that c...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

• Jurassic Coast as a tossup ?! And what's more, including "this coast" and fossil stuff in power ??. For the original British audience, I think it is reasonable as a tossup (I agree that the fossil stuff should not have been in power, and would have said so to the editors if I'd had the ...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

This was the best time I ever had playing a quizbowl tournament. It was far from perfect, but brought a lot of cool material into the quizbowl fold - particularly the sort of material that used to keep me endlessly fascinated at night in middle and high school, and which inspired me to start playin...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

-The tossup on the Covenanters, along with the tossup on Waterford, Ireland, were two examples of the systematic British bias in the set. It seems that though the editors Americanized the set, they either failed to un-Briticize it, or had little idea of what American players know. I wrote the tossu...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

If it dealt with the ancient world, chances are I wrote it. Various other history was also mine.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Yeah, the Oates bonus--those are pretty memorable last words but it's very, very hard to pull the exact verbiage. I might have asked for a portion of the words ("Oates said he was just going outside and he may be what?") or given the words and asked for the situation. Amusingly, at the UK...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Yeah, the Oates bonus--those are pretty memorable last words but it's very, very hard to pull the exact verbiage. I might have asked for a portion of the words ("Oates said he was just going outside and he may be what?") or given the words and asked for the situation. Amusingly, at the UK...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I'd say more in detail in a private discussion but: 1) for a 1 man tournament, this was exceptionally well thought out, with a few exceptions. 2) Perhaps my major criticism (which may well have been dealt with by further editing!) was that some answerlines, especially descriptive ones, quite often c...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Any chance we could get a discussion forum for this?

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Having just played the UK mirror of this tournament, I would highly recommend playing this set.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I'll talk about the ~drakaina~ because it's so rare I get to talk about female dragons and because it illustrates a central point. I will admit, the clue about Herodotus should be worded better, but I would not say it's incorrect, that...thing, is definitely a drakaina even if Herodotus doesn't use...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Myth is a weird category - it crosses over with pretty much every other category (apart from the Sciences). I do not think it should be treated as a pure literary category, but if it is, then it should be written with same view of testing the knowledge of people who have read the texts as literature...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

First of all, thank you for bothering to read my self-indulgent post, and for engaging with it. I might respond to this when I'm finished with TTIAC writing, but one thing to keep in mind is that, you can't get into a question writer's head. I certainly didn't thumb through Graves's index to bring t...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Or: Another Discourse on a much maligned Category The place of the mythology category within quizbowl has been often discussed – in every discussion of the distribution I’ve ever read on these forums, and elsewhere, its relative importance and merits have often been attacked, and often not unfairly...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

For philosophy in particular, it is worth keeping in mind that philosophy is one of the categories people are least likely to be significantly exposed to in their general education, particularly modern philosophy. Going too off the beaten path in that category will put far too many people out of th...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

(I read, rather than played the set) I'm going to read through the set again later, and will add comments, but I think the most notably "off" question I read all day was the Masaccio tossup which clued the quote above the skeleton in his Holy Trinity, i.e. his most famous single work, on t...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Last weekend was my first time bringing a team to a Certamen tournament (which seems somewhat odd, given that I'm a quiz bowler who's been teaching high school Latin for six years). It was, much as I expected, run on non-pyramidal questions with a bizarre tournament format. Obviously I understand t...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

As someone whose first venture (along with a lot of other British quiz bowlers [britbowlers?]) onto the IRC was this year's Festivus,one thing I would note is that for a lot of people, especially newer players, IRC is something before their time which requires somewhat archaic programmes to use and ...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

This set was pretty great, and I've got very few criticisms or quibbles, at least in the areas on which I have a vague qualification to talk about.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Auks Ran Ova wrote:You could, theoretically, just read it at Festivus tomorrow.

Festivus is today though, is it not?

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

my favorite question was the one that made me feel really good about myself because i got it super early off a clue i was enthusiastic about alright, good thread everyone, see you next year Just to be a contrarian, the best question I heard all year was the one from Listory on Argos that I negged f...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Will Alston has reminded me that archaeology belongs in my list of "things we need more of in the history distribution." This is very true. Also not all archaeology covers pre-historic subjects - mix in archaeological clues with historical. I also believe, from Regular difficulty upwards,...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

(I'm going to neg so much of my degree in this tournament)

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

One of this man’s works begins with the landing of Aeneas in Italy and ends with the death of Drusus. For 10 points each: [10] Name this Roman historian who names a set of vertú-exhorting “Discourses” by Machiavelli. ANSWER: _Livy_ [or Titus _Livius_] [10] Livy’s only surviving work is titled for t...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I'm comically rusty at this point, but I used to be a pretty good history player. One thing I've seen younger players make mistakes with when studying history questions is to get too narrowly focused. I've seen lots of players commit to things like "knowing everything about the Civil War"...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I'm also not sure that Sciron clue is great - it's the turtle that does the eating, while Sciron throws them off the cliff, which misled at least the team I read to (for amusement, here is a tiny turtle eating Sciron himself) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Drinking_bowl%2C...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I was reading rather than playing, but I very much enjoyed the Cimabue bonus set, especially the clue on "Maesta", based on the room in the Uffizi. It was nice to hear a question based on how the paintings are displayed.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Short-beaked echidna wrote:Lol

Wiggle Wiggle and Must Be Santa are lyrical masterworks.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I'd just like to note that your example of Pluto/Hades is a really bad one to pick, given Attic and wider Greek usage of the 5th century onwards: " τὸ δὲ Πλούτωνος, τοῦτο μὲν κατὰ τὴν τοῦ πλούτου δόσιν, ὅτι ἐκ τῆς γῆς κάτωθεν ἀνίεται ὁ πλοῦτος, ἐπωνομάσθη: ὁ δὲ ‘Ἅιδης,’ οἱ πολλοὶ μέν μοι δοκοῦσ...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

b. And what was the furthest? (As above.) Whoever put me second. https://i.somethingawful.com/u/garbageday/2015/Avatars/taylorboom.gif Someone who doesn't have finals should do a quick explanation of this list - I imagine some non-UK players might want to know more about these players beyond their ...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

I can confirm that Oxford Open will be going ahead in late January at some point! :dance: It will be the same difficulty as last year which was probably Regular-minus, although these things are always subjective. We will also be producing an American version of the set, and as we will have at least...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Kouign Amann wrote:I'm joining the American exodus to Oxford in the fall, and I'll be staying for the rest of the year too. #shoethetabs?

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Though someone more official will post at some point, I believe Oxford hopes to mirror its eponymous Open, with the more egregious British parts Americanized.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

This tournament was fun and good, and there was some fun history in there. One day there will be an ancient Greece toss-up where the city is not Thebes, but it is not this day :razz: the Mali tossup led in with the Catalan Atlas (which - checking Quinterest - has been a lead-in at least three times...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

This tournament was fun and good, and there was some fun history in there. One day there will be an ancient Greece toss-up where the city is not Thebes, but it is not this day :razz: the Mali tossup led in with the Catalan Atlas (which - checking Quinterest - has been a lead-in at least three times ...

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

cruzeiro wrote:In Pack 5, bonus 8 (Carthage/Rome), the bonus seems to suggest (or did when I played this set) that the Battle of Cannae came after the Battle of the Metaurus River, which is incorrect.

Though it went to the other team, this question also suggested Carthage was a kingdom, which is...bold.

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Well, all the UK circuit (small as it is) for one!

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Just want to state my appreciation for being able to follow regularly updated stats from the other side of the Atlantic!

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

Short-beaked echidna wrote:This bracket is missing this wonderful piece of commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58stoJJ5No

Nah, all about Neville's reaction here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpX_FyUdVo0

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