2023 ACF Winter General Thanks

[Ehtna]

I’d like to take the time to thank everybody who worked on this year’s set to some degree. With 14(!) individual subject editors, this is the largest corps of writers we’ve ever had working on an iteration of Winter, and I think it shows. The editors consistently brought creative ideas to their categories and were extremely receptive to feedback from other writers and playtesters. I’d like to highlight and thank each subject editor individually:

Rachel for bringing their fresh perspectives to the American literature and World literature categories, as well as the set as a whole, as a young but very capable member of our editing team.

Raymond for his diligence and willingness to take a stereotypical “dead straight white guys” category and turn it into something that was enjoyable to read and play.

Chandler for bringing their literary expertise to European literature, as well as driving collaboration between the editors and making the writing server a great place to be.

Amogh for taking on the herculean task of editing all of American history, world history, and social science, all while keeping questions fresh and tight across the board.

Allan for his strong grasp and creative takes on traditionally clue-mined parts of European and other history, as well as quick work in adjusting his questions to account for feedback.

Sharath for turning the set’s biology into some of the most approachable and enjoyable questions in the category that I’ve ever seen.

Maxwell for his ability to take a category as technical as physics and add his own unique spin to it, as well as working faster than almost any other editor I’ve worked with in the past.

Michal for taking on the challenge of dealing with so many disparate science categories and turning the other science into something very approachable and as embodying as “other science” as one can be with ~30 questions.

Guy for very clearly turning his passions into questions, adding great spins and ideas in visual and other fine arts that made his topics a pleasure to learn about.

Jacob for using his expertise as a musician and question editor to combine all aspects of playing music into questions that felt rewarding to both musicians and non-musicians alike.

Evan for perhaps having one of the strongest commitments to careful editing that I’ve ever seen, taking his time to get feedback and finely tune his questions to the best they can be.

Eric for being Eric by working extremely quickly and providing large amounts of feedback and help with more questions whenever other editors needed them.

And finally, Joel for condensing philosophy, one of the most unapproachable categories in quizbowl, into perspectives and interesting topics that they were clearly excited about sharing with the players.

During the production process, Alexandra Hardwick and Adam Silverman served as advisors helping to narrow the difficulty of questions down to something resembling the nebulous “two dot difficulty.” Their guidance was crucial in the beginning and middle stages of production, and the set would look much different without their help. Additionally, I want to personally thank Matt Bollinger for his assistance as well, providing important input and working with me to hone the vision of this set.

We also had a small staff of freelancers on the team who contributed questions to the set, so I’d like to formally recognize Ganon Evans, William Golden, Theresa Nyowheoma, Adam Silverman, and Henry Goff for their help! I’d also like to highlight Maxwell Ye, Michal Gerasimiuk, Eric Mukherjee, and Chandler West, who oftentimes all went above and beyond their editing duties and wrote a nontrivial number of questions in other categories to assist other editors.

We had a large group of playtesters who gave up their weekday evenings to help finetune the difficulty on all of our questions. While there are too many to list out in this post, many of their contributions and suggestions made it into the final set, in terms of clue suggestions, wording changes, topics to write about, and more.

Additionally, thank you to our proofreaders and their careful work with making sure as much of the set as possible was clean to read and easy to play. I’d especially like to shout out Ophir Lif, Coby Tran, Bryanna Shao, Ganon Evans, and Jacob Egol for their dedication to making the questions as easy to read as they could be. The set would have looked a lot messier without their help.

Lastly, thank you to everybody who played the set. I hope that teams were able to find something enjoyable and interesting in the questions! I invite any editors, players, or others associated with the set in any way to share their experiences or thanks. I’m sure at least some of my editors would like to shout out submission questions they really liked. Fire away!

[EvanKnox]

I failed to fulfill my commitment to this set. To the field, plus ACF and the general college quizbowl community: I apologize. You deserved better work on my part. To my fellow editors: I apologize. You deserved me relinquishing this editing spot for someone who would do their job.

With that said, I’d like to celebrate the work that many people put in to create Religion and Other distributions that are not only (importantly) complete, but had many fun clues and ideas in them:

First and foremost is Eric Mukherjee, who wrote far and away the majority of the religion questions (and also the Armored Core question). If you liked something in the religion category (clue or overall question), there’s a good chance Eric wrote it, and often on quite short notice. Any concerns around the margins of his questions (or anyone else’s below), meanwhile, stem from the condensed time period in which they were often written or the similarly condensed time I edited them in, both of which are strictly my fault.

Additional contributors in Religion were Ethan, Michał, Will Golden, Ganon Evans, Jacob, and Ophir Lifshitz. In brief, they deserve thanks for:
-Ethan, for some Islam content and making sure the distribution was actually finished
-Michał, for some Indian religion content and surprisingly deep Doordarshan knowledge
-Will, for trying to prevent Winter from having boring African religion content (hopefully successfully!)
-Ganon, for some good Native American religion content that (due to my own fault) was ultimately not part of the final tournament packets
-I feared these entries may sound a bit duplicative so I’ve combined them (which shouldn't detract from either Jacob's or Ophir's excellent work), but while proofreading the set both Jacob and Ophir greatly improved the quality of the Judaism questions. Jacob worked primarily on the tossups I believe, while Ophir worked on a combination of tossups and bonuses.

Additional contributors in Geo/Ce/Other Academic/Pop Culture were Ganon, Ethan, and Sharath, who deserve thanks for:
-Ganon’s general abilities in Current Events and Other Academic, where he collectively contributed several questions (he's also owed a belated shoutout for writing many of the better selections in 2023 ACF Fall’s pop culture)
-Ethan’s fun rollercoaster bonus
-Sharath’s unparalleled knowledge of musically-inclined senators

I sincerely hope I haven't left out any major contributions here (and will try to edit in anyone if I find out I have); even if I have clumsily excluded some folks I meant to include, it's worth mentioning that basically everyone on the writing/editing/proofreading/logistics team deserves some praise specifically for their work on these categories, even if I don't have individual questions to credit to each of them.

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The time crunch I created in my categories likely also resulted in my using fewer submitted questions than ideal (it’s harder to learn about new topics you might not otherwise think about than to work from existing knowledge, after all); alternatively, y’all’d be within your rights to call me needlessly and idiosyncratically picky. Nonetheless, I’d like to point out the submissions that I did elect to use in my categories, as well as to generally compliment the ideas behind some that weren’t used. I’ll note that this isn’t an exhaustive list and my interest or disinterest in any question isn’t really indicative of anything beyond my tastes, which I’ve already suggested could reasonably be called idiosyncratic. I’ll also apologize to submitters in my categories for 2022 or 2023 ACF Fall, since I’ve generally eschewed this sort of post in the past and have left some good questions unremarked upon as a result. Anyways:

Religion submissions:

Used: Prophets (in Islam) TU by Cal-Berkeley A, Passover TU by Johns Hopkins A, German TU by Vanderbilt A (converted from Nazi Germany), Krishna bonus by Arizona State A (converted from TU), Subhūti in Prajñāpāramitā sūtras bonus by Illinois A

Some additional ones I liked: Abu Bakr TU by Maryland A, Indonesian Islam bonus by Claremont A, Job bonus by Florida A, Haircutting TU by Nebraska A, Binding of Isaac TU by Yale A, Exodus TU by Waterloo A, Częstochowa icon bonus by Cambridge C, Laudato Si’ bonus by Duke A, Wicca bonus by Imperial A, Tibetan Buddhism bonus by Indiana A, Buddhism bonus by Ohio State A, Manichaeism bonus by Toronto A, Jeroboam bonus by Waterloo B

Other submissions:

Used: Moldova (Geography) by Cal-Berkeley A, Singapore food bonus (Geography) by Cornell C (converted from TU), Moon family (Current Events) by SIU Edwardsville A (converted from Unification Church)

Some additional ones I liked: Calais TU (Geography) by Columbia A, Volcanos bonus (Geography) by UNC A, Netherlands sex work bonus (Geography/Current Events) by Rutgers A, George Bailey TU (Pop Culture) by Sheffield B, British newspapers bonus (Current Events) by Sheffield B, Kazakhstan TU (Geography) by Yale A, Celia Cruz bonus (Other Academic) by Yale A, David Lynch TU (Pop Culture) by Vanderbilt A, Paramore TU (Pop Culture) by Durham A, South Africa TU (Geography) by McGill B, Ohio sports TU (Pop Culture) by Edinburgh A, Gorillas TU (Geography) by South Carolina A, Sarajevo TU (Geography) by UGA A, Brazilian hydroelectricity bonus (Geography/Current Events) by UNC B, Sufjan Stevens bonus (Pop Culture) by UW A, Black Broadway bonus (Other Academic) by Yale B, Postcards bonus (Other Academic) by UCF A