2015 STIMPY: Religion/World History/Film

[Gonzagapuma1]

I'm interested to hear feedback on any of these categories. This was my first time editing religion, so I'd especially be happy to hear feedback on that. The Kumbh Mela clue is certainly not specific enough, so I'll fix that before future mirrors. Beyond that, I tried to balance it about 70/30-ish between Judaism/Islam/Christianity and other religions.

I wrote all of the film except for the Brazil bonus (barely edited a great submission from Dartmouth) and the Annie Hall tossup (edited by Grace). The Nanook of the North tossup clearly should've been nuked from orbit, and I think it's just really hard to write a good tossup on that topic. So, I'd love to hear feedback on the rest of it or on how shitty a job I did on the NOTN question. Did people think there was too much film? How did people feel about this fairly different FA distribution?

[women, fire and dangerous things]

I really enjoyed the non-Nanook of the North film questions, and it was good to see clues about major things like Jean Epstein and Journey to Italy that don't get asked about much.

[vinteuil]

Did people think there was too much film? How did people feel about this fairly different FA distribution?

Just some stats (remember that "other fine arts" here is "audiovisual and 'useable' arts," and thus does not include any jazz, sculpture, etc.):
Film: 5/3
Opera: 4/2
Ballet and Musicals: 2/2
Architecture: 2/3.5
Other (photography, ceramics, etc.): 1/3.5

I personally like the bonus subdistribution better (4/4 opera would have definitely been too much, and I think 5/5 film too), but I think this ended up balancing well. "Other other" (e.g. that bonus on the decorations of Reims cathedral, although I'm counting that as .5 architecture here) is definitely better-suited to bonuses, so I think the asymmetry is more or less unavoidable.

Not to make this thread stray too far from Dan's questions, but I'd also be curious what people thought of the difficulty of the other arts.

[Ike]

Yeah that Nanook tossup seemed to be the only bad film question. I don't think you wrote a bad Nanook tossup, just that there are only so many clues that you can use before it becomes pretty obvious what you are doing.

I actually think editors should have some leeway in sub-distributions - if every tournament had this much film - yes, that's a problem, but given it's a packet submission and you wanted to write on what you like, it is totally okay to have a differently flavored tournament every now and then.

Ike

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I thought the world history was very well-executed and did a good job of using notable, knowable clues - there was something of a slant toward the 20th century, but that's nothing I didn't expect and it didn't feel as strong as at SUBMIT last year. I also thought the bonuses in world history used much more gettable hard parts than the other categories, so that was good. The only gripe I had was the one round where there was 1/1 20th century Asian history (non-ideal already) where both questions had references to Buddhism (Buddhist monks was the tossup, and the dalit bonus referred to B.R. Ambedkar).

I liked the particular way this tournament focused strongly on Abrahamic faiths, though I don't think every tournament necessarily needs to do that. Aesthetically, I appreciated how it was pulled off without phoned-in-sounding tossups on Jewish holidays or the Pillars of Islam (though admittedly those are perfectly fine things to ask about).

I'm happy you liked my City of God bonus! That movie was awesome.