TRASH Regionals Discussion

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TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

I assume the set is now open for discussion now that all the mirrors are finished?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by creed_of_hubris »

Go ahead.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by bmcke »

All the questions about recent things were easy for most teams, and all the questions about old things were difficult for most teams.

(Maybe this is just how trash works.)
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by marnold »

I don't know if this was an issue at other sites, but the completely unrandomized round made me laugh, especially given that it shows what ridiculously high percentage of TRASH's distribution is dedicated to companies, restaurants and non-video games. Those questions are written like Madlibs ("founded in POOP CITY by YOUR MOM under the name DUMMY HEAD INC."), they are usually about irrelevant and stupid crap, and they go dead at a disproportionate rate. Who likes those?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Coelacanth »

I may have more to say about specific questions as this thread unfolds. I didn't find any egregious issues with how the questions were distributed, either thematically or temporally.

I do think TRASH needs to work on tossup accessibility. As I look at the stats across the various sites, it seems to be averaging right around 16 tossups answered per game. For your "regular difficulty" event, shouldn't the goal be somewhat higher than 80% conversion?

Dead tossups are the bane of every tournament, and my experience in TRASH tells me they fall into three groups:
(1) Legit answers that nobody happened to know (sometimes the auto racing or country music or boxing person just isn't in the room)
(2) Poor answer selection on legit topics (minor characters on TV shows, unimportant album titles or song titles not released as singles, plot elements from movies few people have seen)
(3) Stuff that should just never have been asked in the first place

I'll commend TRASH on getting rid of most of category (3), but they continue to struggle with the second group. You should not have to be a regular viewer of a show, or have seen a movie, or own multiple albums by an artist to get a tossup on them.

I'm not advocating dumbing down the distribution, but I think a few tweaks to the answer selection would make for a more accessible and more successful event.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Overall I thought this tournament was terrible. There were problems with pretty much all aspects of it. Unlike most tournaments where you'll get an odd clunker every so often in a round, this tournament had the sensation of every so often getting a good question out of the sea of clunkers. It also felt like a worse tournament than last year, but looking back on last year's tournament maybe it's just always been this bad and I've forgotten since then.

Many tossups suffered from the "Eiffel" problem, in that they were overloaded with very hard clues on a subject before finally getting to the things that I'd expect people to be buzzing on at the very end. Let’s take a look at the Jane Krakowski tossup to illustrate this point:
“On Broadway, she originated the role of Dinah the Dining Car in Starlight Express, was nominated for a Tony as the secretary Flaemmchen in Grand Hotel, and won a Tony as Carla in the revival of Nine. She is best known for two TV characters, one the inventor of the face-bra, the other the originator of Pam, the Overly-Confident Morbidly Obese Woman. For ten points, name this portrayer of Cage-Fish employee Elaine Vassal and TGS star Jenna Maroney.”
I would wager that 95% of the people playing only know two things about Jane Krakowski—that she was on Ally McBeal and that she plays Jenna on 30 Rock. Rather than wasting half of this question talking about her minor roles, why not reduce that stuff down to one line or so and expand on her more famous characters so that you can get some more pyramidality out of this? This question gives only one clue about Jenna besides giving her name at the very end, meaning that if you’re a reasonably big 30 Rock fan who didn’t see that particular episode or something, you’ll be engaged in a buzzer race with someone who doesn’t watch the show but happens to know Krakowski played Jenna. Another example that readily comes to mind is Kyle Chandler—this is a guy best known for playing Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights, but the question doesn’t even mention that character until the last words in the tossup.

The videogame questions at this tournament were downright terrible and seemed like a marked decline from last year. They seemed written by people who don't actually play videogames, as many of the topics were drawn from what seemed to be the most obvious genre in the category (e.g. Starcraft, Counter Strike, Final Fantasy 1). This isn't the world's worst problem in itself, but when you have a question beginning "There's a class in UC Berkeley and it's popular in South Korea", it's terrible. Furthermore, many of the videogame bonuses were really fucking hard (Romance of the Three Kingdoms shouldn't be an easy part, Breakout on plot clues shouldn't be an easy part, etc.)

Some particularly awful questions in other areas: Galaxy Quest (beginning with a very memorable scene from the movie), Mark Trail ("this comic strip about the outdoors.."), G4 (“This cable network broadcast Pong for a while”), Donna Pinciotti (this is an example of an “Eiffel” type of question—there are a lot of good clues to use about Donna, but this question mainly refrained from doing so) and several others that I can list if there’s demand to do so. Furthermore, there were a bunch of crazily hard tossups at this tournament that really had no place being here and could be easily fixed by changing them into questions on easier subjects within the same universe (for instance, write on Naruto and not a character from Naruto).

Another issue was the formatting. Why were the packets in HTML format? Why were some answers not underlined? Why was one packet not randomized? The poor formatting was exacerbated by the terrible writing and grammar in these packets. As far as I know, there isn’t a limit on length for TRASH questions. Thus, I don’t see any reason why multiple tossups per packet spent several clues before actually identifying what was being asked for. For instance, take this tossup on “The Sign”:
“"How can a person like me care for you? How can a person like you bring me joy? Why do I bother when you're not the one for me?" These three questions are posed to an ex-lover, who is also told that you can see a lot of stars under the pale moon, that "you would hardly recognize me" and that the narrator is "happy living without you." We're also warned that "no one's gonna drag you up, to get into the light where you belong" and that "life is demanding, without understanding," in for ten points, what 1994 hit by Ace of Base, in which the title entity "opens up [someone's] eyes?"”
This question doesn’t identify that a song is being asked about until after the for 10 points! There is no reason to ever do this! Pronouns are your friend!

Anyway, to reiterate, this tournament was awful and to me signifies that TRASH is headed in the wrong direction.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

TRASH needs to address several things:

1. Stop mixing in 3-line speedcheck tossups with actual pyramidal tossups. The aforementioned Donna one is terrible. Donna is a reasonably well known TV character--this tossup did the usual lazy TV dreck way of writing where it spits two or three random factoids obtained from random episodes and then a quick giveaway.

2. Stop playing the "Who just died game?" or "Who was in the paper last month?" game. The tossup on Myles Brand, for instance, that basically began "This NCAA official..."

3. Actually use common sense in picking answers. Who's going to answer "Dann-O" before the giveaway?

4. Actually reward knowledge of songs. There were a couple tossups on some of my favorite songs at this tournament, including "Ring of Fire" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart." For the former, it didn't help that I knew a lot of the lyrics, I just had to go off of unbuzzable clues about the song's creation, vague clues about Johnny Cash, and then play figure it out with the clue about mariachis. For the latter, I got incredibly unhelpful, vague clues about the authors of the song and a clue that "the Youtube video is weird." Stop writing music tossups off of Wikipedia and actually listen to it.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by creed_of_hubris »

We changed editors for video games. Last year the editor, who was a hardcore gamer and collector, also ended up writing many of the questions. This year, with a new editor (me), the tossup answers intentionally tended towards well-known games because I wanted to avoid being too obscure and I'm not as into the scene. I'll keep your criticisms in mind for the next batch.

We should have caught the unrandomized tossups earlier in the process, obviously.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by 1943 FC Magnitogorsk »

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:write on Naruto
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by ... and the chaos of Mexican modernity »

Is this year's TRASH set gonna be posted?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

All of Mike's systematic criticisms are right on. I'd like to pile on a couple of question-specific incredulities before I get to my other comments:

What the hell is "Space Hulk?" Noted author of a video game tournament/person who gets every video game question Jeremy Eaton expressed a similar sentiment when that tossup went dead in our game. Can you not write tossups on completely random things with no regard to their importance or difficulty. please?

The tossup on the eighth most important character from a show that was popular when current undergraduates were in 2nd grade, NYPD Blue. Why? Is it that hard to write a tossup on NYPD Blue or one of the central characters? It's not like this is a popular show among quizbowl players; you can use pretty easy-to-find clues without making the question too easy. This is just crazy difficulty for its own sake.

I shouldn't be able to predict multiple answers per TRASH tournament based on knowing lazy 1990s-vintage writing patterns. I got the Gourmet tossup immediately because it said it was a magazine and the closing of Gourmet is in the news. I have never read, handled, or even seen an issue of Gourmet. I have no idea what it is besides "a magazine about food that got a lot of coverage when it went under for some reason." But I know trash writers are lazy and like to pluck arbitrary topics out of the newspaper, so I was prepared to get that question on the first clue. Similarly, I got Russell Brand based off of realizing "this guy is being promoted by a basic cable channel as the next cool thing and is from England, so I know trash people will think he's awesome" and the fact that you once again wrote a question that immediately told me what the person is best known for ("this British person who was on MTV and engages in wacky antics..."). Mixing those questions with the multiple actor/actress questions that refused to give any information people might know until the end is pretty jarring. Stop writing on random things in the newspaper and on the latest things that Comedy Central tells you are fads even though you don't know anyone in the real world who likes them. It only rewards people like me who understand the psychology of question writing over people who actually know trash topics.

The constant use of Billboard chart clues: who thinks this is interesting or helpful? Oh, Double Fantasy was "Debuting at #11 on the Billboard charts upon its release" and Accelerate "debuted on the Billboard 200 at number two"? I'll just go ahead and buzz on those totally useless clues.

Lastly, I'd like to call for the elimination of the lame. At the VCU site, we smartly remembered to tell people to not take 30 seconds on each bonus discussing whether to lame it, which was one reason we finished on time (moderators prompted for an answer or a lame after 5 seconds on the first part). In addition to the fact that most TRASH players will take any opportunity to have a lengthy discussion in the middle of the question, the lame is just unfair and encourages bad writing practices. You need to have all your difficulty-ordering options on the table when writing good bonuses, and you need to avoid the temptation to just write whole bonuses on super-niche subjects and justify it by saying people can lame. Getting rid of the lame and writing bonuses that are not "lame" to begin with is something TRASH really has to consider if they are going to stop their slide into irrelevance.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Theory Of The Leisure Flask »

Matt Weiner wrote:What the hell is "Space Hulk?" Noted author of a video game tournament/person who gets every video game question Jeremy Eaton expressed a similar sentiment when that tossup went dead in our game. Can you not write tossups on completely random things with no regard to their importance or difficulty. please?
Space Hulk isn't a video game at all, it's a board game. While it's likely much too hard to be a tossup answer outside of a nationals-level tournament, I would dispute that it's "competely random".
Last edited by Theory Of The Leisure Flask on Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Important Bird Area »

marnold wrote:Those questions written like Madlibs
Second this criticism. There were lots of questions about products and items that started off with stuff like "Founded in YEAR in RANDOM MIDWESTERN CITY as OTHER CORPORATE IDENTITY." I don't think those clues do a good job of testing deep knowledge of Radio Flyer wagons or whatever (I don't have a copy of the set right now, so I'm just going on memory of what I moderated.) For at least some of these things, it's likely that no one playing the tournament actually has deep knowledge of the topic (which means that they should be bonus parts, or else removed entirely if even the giveaway isn't important).
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Jamnman23 »

I do have some criticisms of this tournament, but I would not say it was out of the realm of enjoyment for me. However, I would say that it was not as good as last year's edition. Specifically, although I enjoyed many of the music tossups, I do agree that a lot of the music questions, especially those about songs or albums, contained a wealth of unbuzzable clues. 2/3 of a tossup on a song should not be taken up by the history of the song's production and other facts which for most people, would not distinguish it from anything else. In terms of sports, I thought the bonuses were pretty easy for most of the tournament. I don't remember many specific questions, but there was one particular tossup which comes to mind that falls in the category of "should not be tossed up". I am referring to the tossup on Joe "Ducky" Medwick. I have watched ESPN consistently for the last decade and frequently read ESPN.com, (I assume these are the primary resources from which people gather their knowledge and cannon of sports) and I have heard of Joe Medwick, but could probably count the amount of times I have heard him mentioned on one hand. He definitely has a significant place in baseball history, but the truth is that most people don't know who he is. If you are going to tossup a Cardinals player from the first half to middle of the 20th century, tossup Stan Musial or Rogers Hornsby. This particular tossup I believe highlights one of the areas in which TRASH fails to measure up to academic standards of writing. It is generally held that a tossup by its conclusion should be roughly equal in difficulty to the easy part of a bonus. In a regular difficulty tournament, I cannot see Joe Medwick as being anything other than a hard part of a bonus, and even at TRASHionals, I think you would have to make it a medium part. Thus, my point is that Joe Medwick should not have been tossed up.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Coelacanth »

Maybe my knowledge is skewed, but I think Ducky Medwick is a reasonable answer in the same way that Affirmed is. I think most people's "primary source" for sports knowledge is actually watching sports, and if you watch enough baseball Medwick is the answer to the Aflac trivia question a couple of times a year.

I do agree with (what I perceive to be) Benjamin's wider point about writing standards. When you read an ACF or NAQT set you can really see how the editors try to enforce things like consistent tossup length and accessibility, pyramidality and clue selection, easy-medium-hard bonus structure, etc. All the things that the modern academic player has come to expect from questions as a matter of course seem to be missing from TRASH. Of course, TRASH is not comprised of modern academic players.

It would be great if a respected academic editor or two could consult with TRASH on such standards, but I suspect that is probably a pipe dream.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Ethnic history of the Vilnius region »

I agree with most things expressed in this thread. I especially want to jump on the anti-product bandwagon. If I remember correctly, Battleship, Hawaiian punch, Swingline, and Cheetos all began with a clue about their obscure inventors and then moved on to their original name or city of origin, or something. Basically uninteresting stuff from the beginning up until towards the end, or sometimes the bitter end.

Bob Evans struck me as a particularly bad answer choice as far as brands go. It doesn’t advertise on television (at least not where I live), and, according to Wikipedia, it is only located in 23 states. So basically, if you live in a place where Bob Evans is ubiquitous, you have a good shot at getting it (I guess?), but if you live in the majority of states that don’t have them, you’re probably not getting it.

Another thing that annoyed me was answer acceptability. The biggest problem I had was with sports team nicknames. Several questions (the Detroit women’s basketball team comes to mind) required the team nickname, while some others (the Seattle soccer team, for one) only required the city. I don’t see why you would generally need the nickname anyway except for two teams in the same sport cities, but it seems really unfair to reward someone for answering with “Seattle” in one round while penalizing someone for answering “Detroit” in another. There were a few other examples of weird answer acceptability. One example that stands out in my mind is The Linus’ Security Blanket question. It specifically required Security Blanket; Linus’ Blanket per se was unacceptable. Really?

Every actor/actress question seemed to be a listing of characters they’ve played that was taken straight from imdb. Seriously, if there are examples that don't basically follow this pattern, please post them. Also, Tina Yothers as a tossup answer.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Would it kill TRASH to also write on TV shows that people actually care about and watch? Who was clamoring for tossups on Gimme a Break and Dream On?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by cvdwightw »

I didn't play the packet set (I was the driver for the car filled with "people who didn't want to play TRASH"), but I'd like to ask that we not turn this into the standard academic-tournament-discussion thread of "Topic X Was Too Hard"/"No It Wasn't"/"Let's Derail the Discussion Talking About ONE ANSWER." It's irrelevant whether Ducky Medwick was too hard for this tournament. Really, it is. If it's one tossup on Joe Medwick that's too hard for the tournament, well hey, that happens at every tournament - editors will always mistakenly assume that many more people will convert a tossup answer that they think is "hard, but reasonable" than actually will convert it. But based on the comments in this thread, it appears that the phenomenon of "person who is reasonably competent at TRASH topic X has never heard of Answer Y or can't buzz on Answer Z despite having good knowledge because of useless clues" is even more widespread than last year.

I don't think that we need to go so far as to second Matt's call for the elimination of the lame, but he does bring up a very important point about it: the lame is not being used the way it is intended to be used, and that is systematically due to terrible bonus construction.

Given that a well-written easy part should be gettable by 85-90% of teams, that leaves 10-15% of teams that aren't going to get it, and a significant portion of those teams aren't going to get either of the other two parts either. Furthermore, because of the variability in trash knowledge, it's likely that even the best team in the tournament is going to come up on several things that they are going to surely zero, no matter how well-written the question is. A well-used lame occurs when a team encounters one of those topics that they know and care so little about that even the easy part (85% of teams can get this!) is going to be a chore to pick up, whereas they'll probably know the easy part and hopefully something else on the next bonus. Therefore, a lame is simply supposed to be a gimmick that a team uses to transform a sure zero into a good chance at 10 or more points. In other words, a lame should be used as soon as a team thinks it will get no points on a bonus, because any competent team is getting 10 points on most bonuses. I highly suspect that this is the justification of the lame and that justification continues to have supporters at all levels of playing competence.

The problem comes when writers use the lame as a justification for lazy question writing on ridiculously difficult answers. Now, any team with halfway decent knowledge and strategy is going to use their lame like a Pendant of Life. That team is going to hold on to their lame (even in the face of bonuses they know very little about) until they hit the Niche Topic They Know Nothing About Bonus, and then hope and pray that Temple Guard #2 isn't hiding in any of the other bonuses.

Let's face it, there are certain niche subjects that are lamed with alarming frequency: country music, romance novels, board games. That doesn't mean that they're illegitimate topics. What it does mean is that the easy and medium parts of these bonuses need to be dumbed down to the point where 85-90% and 50% of teams, respectively, should be answering those parts. If that means that you have to take your favorite bonus in the whole word, "FTPE, name these Danielle Steel works," and make it such that one part is on Danielle Steel and one part is on whatever her best-known work is, so be it. But regardless of how easy you make these bonuses, people are still going to lame them.

What this means is that more mainstream bonuses must be crafted even more carefully. If teams are saving their lames for Niche Topic Bonus, then they're not laming the other bonuses. Teams shouldn't look back after a mainstream bonus is over and go "Oops, should've lamed that one," and they definitely shouldn't feel like they've been ravaged by Temple Guard #2 after laming a bonus on the Carter family and then hitting "For 10 points each, name these not-quite-notable movies given only the name of the character played by Sandra Bullock."
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by lasercats »

Please Please Please check to see if the movie you are using as a clue is a remake. The "Goodbye Mr. Chips" clue in the Petula Clark tossup really threw me off because the writer neglected to specify between the 1939 original and the remake.

I was happy to hear that more Broadway tossups are being used. Now I hope you will move on to good broadway shows, ie not Aida.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Perhaps the reader just messed up, but the question clearly says "remake."
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Captain Sinico »

I was underwhelmed by these questions as well. I didn't think they were as bad as, say, TRASH before three years ago, but I thought they were a considerable step back from last year's Regionals. I felt like a huge fraction of them rewarded obvious guesses, along the lines Matt is discussing (e.g. "This tennis player who's writing a book or something...", "This video game that's popular in Korea or whatever...") and another huge chunk were on things I was totally okay with not having had not heard even of. A huge fraction of the latter were in the usual suspect categories, like non-video games, books, etc.
My biggest beef was the existence of such a huge fraction of the questions is on real people involved in making TV/movies. I felt like there was in general something on the order of 6/6+ per round on actors and actresses (and sometimes directors, producers, writers, composers, etc.) I would have very strongly preferred more questions on TV shows/movies, characters therefrom, plot elements therefrom, etc. I do think these in general are harder to write and less robust to bad answer selection, but I actually count those as mixed curses, in the sense that they reveal who can actually write what and why and focus capable writers.

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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Mike Bentley »

Coelacanth wrote:Maybe my knowledge is skewed, but I think Ducky Medwick is a reasonable answer in the same way that Affirmed is. I think most people's "primary source" for sports knowledge is actually watching sports, and if you watch enough baseball Medwick is the answer to the Aflac trivia question a couple of times a year.

I do agree with (what I perceive to be) Benjamin's wider point about writing standards. When you read an ACF or NAQT set you can really see how the editors try to enforce things like consistent tossup length and accessibility, pyramidality and clue selection, easy-medium-hard bonus structure, etc. All the things that the modern academic player has come to expect from questions as a matter of course seem to be missing from TRASH. Of course, TRASH is not comprised of modern academic players.

It would be great if a respected academic editor or two could consult with TRASH on such standards, but I suspect that is probably a pipe dream.
So is TRASH doing anything to rectify this problem? Or is this as good as we can expect it to ever get with TRASH?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by bmcke »

Ducky Medwick is certainly no Gary Unger.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by answerguy »

The constant use of Billboard chart clues: who thinks this is interesting or helpful? Oh, Double Fantasy was "Debuting at #11 on the Billboard charts upon its release" and Accelerate "debuted on the Billboard 200 at number two"? I'll just go ahead and buzz on those totally useless clues.
The idea behind the Billboard clue in the _Double Fantasy_ TU specifically was designed to make someone wonder what could have caused an album that debuted to strong but unremarkable sales to suddenly shoot up the charts at that specific time, namely, December 1980. Spelling out the artist's death at that point in the question throws off the difficulty chain in the clues.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Terrible Shorts Depot »

bmcke wrote:Ducky Medwick is certainly no Gary Unger.
This tossup was an atrociously bad idea! Noted Red Wings fan Mike Cheyne didn't get it! My god, what on Earth were you people thinking?!

This tournament was awful. Please, never write such a piece of crap again.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I liked the Unger tossup because Carleton negged it for no reason. It was the last question and it allowed us to force overtime, which we won.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by OntarioQuizzer »

Cheynem wrote:I liked the Unger tossup because Carleton negged it for no reason. It was the last question and it allowed us to force overtime, which we won.
TRASH allows overtime now?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by creed_of_hubris »

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:
Coelacanth wrote: It would be great if a respected academic editor or two could consult with TRASH on such standards, but I suspect that is probably a pipe dream.
So is TRASH doing anything to rectify this problem? Or is this as good as we can expect it to ever get with TRASH?
Any respected academic editors who wish to assist in the development of future TRASH sets are welcome to volunteer their efforts.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

While I may eventually take TRASH up on its offer, I'm not sure if I like this implicit "put up or shut up" vibe here. TRASH has been producing sets for a long time now, the feedback from "established academic folks" is always the same, and the latter folks point to existing sets like Bentley's trash tournaments and CO Trash stuff as the kind of trash they would like TRASH to produce. I mean, I suppose I could write questions for TRASH, but it's not like TRASH really needs a "respected academic editor" to like show them the way to produce sets the community would enjoy. The same damn criticisms pop up every year!
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Coelacanth »

OntarioQuizzer wrote:
Cheynem wrote:I liked the Unger tossup because Carleton negged it for no reason. It was the last question and it allowed us to force overtime, which we won.
TRASH allows overtime now?
This was in a playoff game. For regular round-robin games, the policy is still that a tie remains a tie. Fortunately that didn't come up in our event.
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Dresden_The_BIG_JERK »

The Mountie wrote:Is this year's TRASH set gonna be posted?
?
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Re: TRASH Regionals Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

TRASH rarely posts its sets (there are a few on Stanford).
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