Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

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entropy
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Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

Post by entropy »

Mods, please move this post if you feel it would be more appropriate for another subforum.

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I'm not a very talented writer so I'm just going to cut to the chase. Everybody familiar with this community knows that giving housewrites and tournaments cutesy names has been an out-of-control trend for the past four or so years. This needs to stop, not just because it is unprofessional and makes quizbowlers seem like people who care more about in-jokes than presentability, but because it can actually lead to real-world problems.

I TDed an online mirror of IKEA in January 2020, which resulted in me getting paid in several different ways. A certain university, which I'll call UX because their emails with me had a scary privacy notice on the bottom, elected to send me an official check and put me into their vendor database as "Karan Gurazada/IKEA HS Open Mirror." They obviously have not owed me any money for IKEA since 2020 and never will again. However, I received an email from them this morning asking to check in on an online order they claimed to have placed. It looks like on July 27th they send me an email requesting to purchase a $800 desk for an new faculty member. I do not sell desks—a certain well-known international furniture company whose name was being parodied by the IKEA question set does. Because of quizbowlers trying to be funny, some poor assistant professor is going to be without a desk for a month.

There probably aren't going to be any real issues that come out of this besides some people [myself included] having a bit of a chuckle and one assistant professor being annoyed by their lack of a high-quality IKEA desk. I'm guess I'm just glad that I didn't TD an MRNA VACCINE mirror and unintentionally increase COVID's death count. But I'm ashamed of how the choice to name a set IKEA hurt people who had probably never heard of quizbowl before this incident and I'm ashamed that the people who handle money at UX, money that could be used to fund their quizbowl program, could quite possibly frown on quizbowl because of it. I hope my funny story helps people realize that their choice to make quizbowl a less professional and presentable activity can have a lot of effects that they can't possibly anticipate.
karan
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meebles127
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Re: Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

Post by meebles127 »

I just want to point out that having worked in a biomedical research lab that hospitals and labs oftentimes are required to purchase from a certain pre-approved list of vendors smaller than what's allowed for the entire university and it's even more common (in my experience) to only be allowed to purchase something from 1 or maybe 2 vendors, period. Given that the COVID-19 vaccine is a drug, I highly doubt that anyone involved with the MRNA set has received emails from purchasers in the thoughts that they were Pfizer or Moderna. It just doesn't work like that.
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ThisIsMyUsername
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Re: Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

When something like this happens, the tournament's original namers are not to blame. If the possibility of this sort of confusion exists, it is the responsibility of the person sending the check or filing the reimbursement form to be sensible and avoid such a confusion. (By Karan's logic, we should also stop using the term "mirror," because some school might think their quizbowl club is frivolously obsessed with their own reflections, wasting money on a pricey looking-glass.) In the case of an acronym (e.g. IKEA), one can write out the full name on a form (e.g. In-Depth Knowledge, Excellent Answerlines); or, one can simply provide a generic description of the tournament without using the tournament's title.
John Lawrence
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Stained Diviner
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Re: Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

Post by Stained Diviner »

When I was the treasurer of PACE, I got a check for several thousand dollars from a high school that had entered the NSC the year before and was working with an energy contractor named PACE. We worked it out easily, and I did not suggest that PACE change its name.
David Reinstein
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Cheynem
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Re: Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

Post by Cheynem »

Stained Diviner wrote: Wed Aug 17, 2022 11:11 am When I was the treasurer of PACE, I got a check for several thousand dollars from a high school that had entered the NSC the year before and was working with an energy contractor named PACE. We worked it out easily, and I did not suggest that PACE change its name.
Let's just say it moved David...to a bigger house!
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Re: Stop giving your sets cutesy names—they have real-world consequences.

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

I think a more likely real-world consequence of giving your tournament a cutesy name is that it would reinforce the stereotype that quizbowl is an unserious or weird event that is not worthy of student participation, university recognition, or social approval. On this front I feel that quizbowl has gotten much better: back in my day tournament names often included profane words or weird quizbowl chat room in-jokes.
Bruce
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