The Quizbowl Resource Center

Well, I wish we came up with this idea in November so we could play it during the 2015 Festivus, but whatever. This is the announcement for the Seinfeld Trash Tournament: Serenity Now, Witty Title Later. Written by me, Young Fenimore Lee, a junior from Stevenson High School in the Chicagoland area, along with Olivia Lamberti, a freshman from the same school as me, and Meredith Pounds, a senior at Bloomington High School in mid-state Illinois. I'm head editor. We're also looking into someone with experience editing trash packets, Seinfeld knowledge, and some time on their hands to run our stuff by (look for my contact info at the bottom if you're interested).

We're hoping to write around 4 or 5 packets with 20 tossups each, with the following distribution:

4 Characters
4 Objects
4 Locations
4 Events (basically, we wanted to write tossups on episodes, but asking for episode names would be really inaccessible so instead we go by events that can be described)
4 Misc. Terms (anything that doesn't fall under the above categories, including groups of people, phrases, and assorted terms from the show)
1 Tiebreaker taken randomly from extra tossups we end up writing; they will always be medium difficulty answerlines.

Tossups will be 7-8 lines Times New Roman 10 pt. font while writing . There are superpower and power marks for all tossups.

In our efforts to make sure the tournament is as accessible as possible to the average fan, within each category there is a 1/2/1 distribution of easy/medium/hard answerlines. Basically, easy answerlines are things the average, casual Seinfeld viewer would know; medium answerlines are things the average somewhat-avid Seinfeld fan would know; and hard answerlines are things someone who has watched nearly every episode would most likely remember. Sometimes the categorizations based on difficulties aren't exact, but the point is that the packets should be fairly accessible to anyone who likes Seinfeld.

We should have all the packets complete by mid-March, along with an extra packet of all the extra tossups we wrote just for fun. We're currently thinking about hosting this at maybe ATROPHY in April (if Alec Krueger can arrange for it) or either HSNCT or PACE, depending on if people want to play it at any of those; leave a post here with some contact info if you're interested in playing. We'd be psyched if basically any Illinois tournament wanted to host it at all, too. If anyone is interested in this for any purpose whatsoever, contact me at [email protected] or leave a post here.

Also, a Fusilli Jerry will be awarded to the winner of wherever we get this to be a side tournament at. If we confirm enough people who want to play, we can add in other awards, too.

Due to general lack of interest and stagnation in progress of writing, this tournament is cancelled. If anyone wants, I can read the two packets we ended up writing in the IRC sometime.

I'm interested in an IRC reading.

If this were to get read on IRC, I would totally participate.

The tournament is pretty incomplete at the moment, so I'm going to try to get progress on the set up to 60 tossups written and edited by sometime in the next two weeks, which is when I'll have a reading on the IRC of all the tossups. Date TBA.

EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that it would be best to hold the IRC reading after ACF Nationals, so I'll probably hold it the week after ACF Nats.

Any updates? You have no idea how excited I am for this.

I have finally completely edited one 20 tossup packet. It'll be read on the qb IRC tonight at 9:30 PM CDT. All interested parties should come and play!

Packet reading was a lot of fun. Results and notes on the reading here. Packet 1 here. Packet 2 and 3 probably coming in the next couple of months.

I loved the first packet, are you writing more?