2023 ARCADIA General Discussion

[The Blind Prophet]

This thread is for general discussion of ARCADIIIA (i.e. anything not involving analysis of a single question).

[rhn26]

Thanks to all the writers and editors for producing what seemed to me to be a very intellectually exciting set!

I thought the set overall was whimsical, interesting, and contained many good ideas. I did feel that the biggest thing was that difficulty seemed kind of disjointed; in some categories there were questions that seemed to stick out as being significantly more difficult than I would expect from a set of this difficulty. However, they were very fun questions and I enjoyed hearing them, even if I think they would’ve been more appropriate at a 3-dot or even above difficulty.

I thought the literature tossups were by and large very good. I was playing with Raymond Wang, meaning that I didn’t have very many opportunities to notch a buzz on lit at all, but in general the tossups felt quite gettable while still having fresh and exciting clues in power. Tossups that stuck out as hard among the others to me included Middle English, cetology (though I’m horrendous at Moby-Dick), and Desai. The lit bonuses in general seemed harder than the tossups; for example, bonus parts on Lorrie Moore, the awarding of the 2019 Nobel to Peter Handke, and Brown Girl in the Ring seemed pretty difficult to know for this level. However, difficulty comments aside, I really liked the literature.

My perception of the science was probably colored by the fact that I’m used to/better on “classical” science questions on core classroom topics. I thought the science tossups overall were of a pretty good difficulty, particularly in chem and physics. There were a couple tossups (calibration, groups) in the chemistry that seemed slightly tougher, but I think they were good to include. The biology and other science stood out as tougher to me, but that could just be because of what felt like the higher inclusion of animal science, evo/eco, and other engineering topics. I did think the bonuses overall were hard; I did better on the Penn Bowl science by over 2 PPB when compared to this set.

I didn’t realize before playing this set that jazz and world music were included in auditory arts, so I did feel like I got to hear less classical music than usual. That being said, I thought the tossups generally had good choice of answerlines and were written well. Clues I liked especially were Yuja Wang’s marathon of Rachmaninoff piano concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra and (in other fine arts) the 2005 Glyndebourne production of Giulio Cesare with Danielle de Niese—Raymond and I both took a Bach and Handel music class this semester and watched that production in depth, so we buzzer raced each other half a line into that tossup. Some of the tossups that played a bit tougher were clarinet and Hungarian Rhapsodies, but I think that’s more due to blind spots for us than anything else. I liked the auditory bonuses a lot in general too.

[jirafman]

Making a quick post before more feedback comes in for some thanks and acknowledgement.

First off would like to thank everyone who played our set! Ultimately the set is for y'all and I hope you enjoyed the questions. Besides basic standards of good quality questions I didn't really try to enforce a cohesive set vision on all the editors/writers but mostly let the editors put their unique experiences and ideas into their categories. I think the hallmark of ARCADIIIA sets is a reasoned balance between clues based on experiential knowledge from working directly in the fields clued or engaging with the topic and more canonical quiz bowl clues and I hope that continued to show through! There was initially an effort to make this iteration of ARCADIIIA a touch more approachable than past iterations but those reins did get a tad looser as set production got to the mid-late stages (with my questions being one of the worst offenders, the Desai TU was perhaps a tad too ambitious but my thought process was mainly that among modern Indian Novels, works by Kiran Desai actually had fairly extensive readership and stood out as very important and representative works) but I think or at least hope that there were a tad bit more approachable answerlines for newer players than in past iterations.

Next of course thanks so much to all the writers and editors for ARCADIIIA! Being a defendant I don't sit on the jury, but to me y'all wrote a fantastic set of questions and did amazing work to get this set across the finish line. Plus the teamwork and engagement across the board was fantastic, I don't think there was a single question that didn't have at least two people give feedback. Everyone, even those who wrote very few questions, brought fantastic ideas to the table and had meaningful engagement in helping make this set the best iteration we could do in the time we had!

Here's a list of the editors so those giving feedback don't need to crosscheck the original forum post:
Head Editor: Jim Fan
Logistics: Jacob Egol

4/4 Literature
1/1 American [Editor: Caroline Mao]
1/1 European [Editor: Caroline Mao]
1/1 British/Commonwealth [Editor: Henry Goff]
1/1 World/Other [Editor: Jim Fan]

4/4 History
1/1 American [Editor: Jonathan Shauf]
1/1 European [Editor: Ganon Evans]
1/1 World [Editor: Ryan Rosenberg]
1/1 British/Commonwealth/Ancient/Other [Editors: Grant Peet (British/CW) and Kevin Thomas (Ancient/Other)]

4/4 Science
1/1 Biology [Editor: Kevin Thomas]
1/1 Chemistry [Editor: Justin Zhang]
1/1 Physics [Editor: Vincent Du]
1/1 Other [Editor: Evan Knox]

3/3 Arts
1/1 Visual [Editor: Henry Goff]
1/1 Auditory [Editor: Eric Gunter]
1/1 Other [Editors: Ivvone Zhou (Other Auditory) and Michael Bucknall (Other Visual)]

2/2 Beliefs
1/1 Religion [Editor: Ganon Evans]
1/1 Mythology [Editor: Michael Bucknall]

1/1 Philosophy [Editor: Jonathan Shauf]
1/1 Social Science [Editor: Kevin Jiang]
1/1 Geography/Current Events/Other Academic [Editors: Kevin Thomas (Geography), Kevin Jiang (CE and Other)]

[naan/steak-holding toll]

My overall perception of the set was similar to Richard's. I'm glad that this tournament continues to not shy away from using canonical mid-power clues and the lead-ins seemed quite knowable as well. A lot of the stylistic and content trends were carried over from previous editions of ARCADIA as well - the lit was generally quite canonical and very high quality, whereas the history, beliefs, and arts were way more experimental - which made the tournament feel quirky and familiar in a positive way.

My chief critique of this set, shared with others players at the Claremont site, was that the hard parts were frequently really hard. This might be a pitfall of having an editorial team that's relatively light on generalists; at least in the humanities, outside of literature, there were a lot of hard parts on answers that weren't particularly difficult and therefore might "seem gettable" to non-specialists who look them over, even if the clues themselves were quite daunting. I think this reflects in the playtest mirror stats, where you had a bunch of really strong teams that racked up tons of powers but didn't break 21 PPB.

[henrygoff]

don't have too much to say about my categories this time around, but with regards to my involvement on this set, I should offer thanks to two camps in particular:

1. Jim Fan. Jim first agreed to head edit this set when I approached him about co-head editing it with me; when a situation arose that left me unable to fulfill my end of the partnership, Jim was incredibly understanding and immediately agreed to take on head editing duties by himself. Despite being a first-time head editor, in a position that he never intended to fill, and with a full load of graduate studies to boot, Jim did a fantastic job guiding this set's production, and under his lead, we created an ARCADIA as excellent as the first two. I hope Jim continues head editing in the future, or at least gets to co-head edit with someone who won't flake on him .

2. Everyone who wrote a visual arts question, but particularly Ganon Evans, Rahul Keyal, and Annabelle Yang, who wrote 8/5 of the 14/14 in the category. As a first-time VFA editor with a somewhat shaky grasp of the canon coming in, having three of the finest arts writers in quizbowl produce half my distribution was nothing short of a luxury. Everything they wrote was stellar, but I especially enjoyed Ganon's Da Vinci tossup, Rahul's Starry Night tossup, and Annabelle's Old Masters/Mistresses bonus. Jim, Eric, Ivvone, Vincent, Kevin, and Caroline all also wrote great questions that I was excited to have in the set. Thanks so much, y'all!

[ivvone]

Thanks to the ARCAD3A team for making my first time editing such a great experience! I edited the small but mighty chunk of Auditory OFA (opera, dance, musical theatre), and as such, I will dedicate this space to highlighting the people who contributed to this subcategory:

• Eric Gunter, former editor of this category, contributed a banger bonus on sleepwalking in opera commonlinking two of my favorite composers. He also provided me with one of my greatest disappointments with this distro when he was too busy with saving lives, I guess, to contribute his incredible musical theatre knowledge to this set. If we bully him enough, maybe he'll write some for 4RC4DI4!

• Our dear headitor Jim Fan contributed a vivid bonus cluing Robert Carsen's production of Eugene Onegin (at the Met in 2007 with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renee Fleming) and a fun question on Parisian cabarets (the Folies Bergère bonus)! I loved these ideas and really appreciated these well-researched questions, particularly since they were very much in my wheelhouse.

• Vincent Du's questions speak for themselves. The Puerto Rico and Nijinsky/a TUs were fantastic ideas by a fantastic writer that led me to open a(n) (e)book for the first time in a while and agonize over the clues for days before realizing Vincent's original questions were nearly perfect as is. I especially appreciate his contributions to subjects I know little about so I don't have to write them.

I approach every question with the goal of making one theoretical nerd excited: that seemed to be Jacob Egol with the first iteration of the Carousel bonus and Annabelle Yang with the Hoffmann TU. I am immensely grateful that Jacob and Annabelle playtested the arts questions and contributed valuable expert feedback.

• No bias here, but I liked my own questions too. Specifically, I liked cluing Sutton Foster in the 1920s TU, the Glyndebourne production of Giulio Cesare in the Handel TU, Macmillan's L'histoire de Manon, and musicologist Wye Jamison Allanbrook in the Mozart opera bonus. I also liked highlighting (operatic) women in comedy(ia dell'arte) in the packet 11 opera TU.

Clues I liked especially were Yuja Wang’s marathon of Rachmaninoff piano concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra and (in other fine arts) the 2005 Glyndebourne production of Giulio Cesare with Danielle de Niese—Raymond and I both took a Bach and Handel music class this semester and watched that production in depth, so we buzzer raced each other half a line into that tossup.

I'm glad you liked those clues, Richard! You and Raymond recognizing the famous Glyndebourne production from class is exactly the kind of buzz I was hoping for. Great buzz, and a well deserved power! I also wrote that Rachmaninoff TU in February, so I'm glad that clue has stayed relevant!

If you liked any of the content, here's a YouTube playlist. If you didn't, feel free to roast me/the questions! I welcome all feedback.

[Esgunter64]

Oops they didn't learn from last time and let me edit again. I had the pleasure of editing the AFA for this iteration of ARCADIA, and as a swan song for my qb editing career as I'm getting busier with fourth year rotations, I'm rather pleased with the final product. The writers (who I'll thank specifically shortly) did a phenomenal job of writing the sort of fresh and interesting content that I look for when I play a set, and I couldn't give them enough praise (though I'm going to try).

My goal with the AFA was to put together a distro that encompassed as much of what could be considered "auditory fine arts" as I possibly could, including content from underrepresented voices in the music sphere. I also tried to include clues that reward knowledge of not only listening to and appreciating music, but also reward those who perform themselves and engage with music in that way.

Special Thanks:

The first person I want to thank is Jim Fan. To be able to put together a set like this despite his full load of grad studies is truly a testament to his talent as an editor and writer. Jim's direction, vision, and hefty writing contributions (especially towards the end when deadlines creeped ever closer with a significant chunk of writing left to be done) helped the team produce a set that we're all proud of and hope to see enjoyed by anyone who plays it. He's also responsible for the Titan Symphony tossup and bonus on the Galilei family's contributions to music, the latter of which I especially enjoyed learning more about through editing it (and I always appreciate an excuse to listen to Mahler 1 every now and then).

Secondly I'd like to extend a huge thanks to Jacob Egol and Annabelle Yang, who although didn't write any AFA content (truly a sad day for ARCADIIIA players), provided exceptional feedback and insight into the AFA during the internal playtesting and editing process. I always appreciate their wealth of knowledge in this area and the editing process would've been a lot rockier without their input.

You can attribute the rest of the AFA to three people, who deserve all the praise for their question output. Having these three contribute so heavily honestly probably saved the category, as I ended up going through a pretty severe bout of burnout (both quizbowl and non-quizbowl related) that lasted most of set production, leaving me dreading the thought of looking at my ARCADIIIA docs. Thankfully, through their prolific contributions, I didn't have to rush as badly to fill out the distro at the end and thus impact the quality of the AFA.

• First of the three to thank is Vincent Du. I always adore the music content that Vincent writes, as it ties together beautifully the perspectives of a musician and someone who truly loves listening to music. I find myself enjoying all his questions, even those on topics that don't align with my personal music tastes, which is a testament to his ability to take any area of AFA and make it fresh, fun, and interesting. It's honestly too much to list each of his contributions, but among those I especially enjoyed were the tossups on storms (a Beethoven piece I vibe with? Revolutionary!), Debussy, and the bonus on string quartets by Sibelius and Janáček both titled with the word "intimate"

• Secondly, to thank Ivvone Zhou, not only an opera aficionado, but extremely knowledgeable of non-opera classical music as well. I love her emphasis on specific performers and the "current events" approach she uses to writing questions by cluing things that are currently relevant in the classical music community (the Yuja Wang concert in her Rachmaninoff tossup, a bonus about the revival of HIP, the Youth Orchestras bonus, and her bonus on the background of Strauss' Four Last Songs).

• Last but not least to thank is Crow He. Crow and I have vastly different tastes in music, which is why I appreciate their contributions so much -- it's important to me to include content on as wide a range of music as possible, and I don't exactly write on music I don't enjoy listening to. Their questions on genre's I don't engage with that often (The tropicália content in the Brazil tossup, the Eastman/minimalism bonus, and the plunderphonics bonus) as well as banger questions on birds in jazz, Howard Shore, Emmet Cohen, and Maori pop music helped bring some fresh perspective to the music distro that I couldn't provide on my own.

I hope you enjoyed playing the AFA and ARCADIIIA as a whole, I'm immensely proud to have been a part of this team of absolutely incredible writers and editors. If you did enjoy the AFA and want to listen to the pieces/songs/styles clued, I have created a chonker of a Spotify playlist for your listening pleasure. If you didn't enjoy it, I appreciate all feedback!

[I like cookies]

TLDR: Stuff was good, Pleasure to work with everyone, Ganon owes me a Milky Way, Annabelle, Jacob, Hasna, Eric, Ashish, and Ivvone (and honorary bio players Vince, Justin, and Jim) are life savers.

When you’re filling in the shoes of titans, it is normal to be apprehensive I feel. This year, I took over the biology category from Hasna Karim and the geography from Ashish Subramanian, both superb editors who have done their best to leave a lasting legacy on their respective categories. On top of this, I humbly took on the Ancient History and Archaeology- (cackles greedily (Mine, all mine!) - a category I’d edited in the past two ARCADIAs and tried to give it my own spin which I’ll explain later in this forum ess- I mean, post. Forum post.

This is gonna be a long one - maybe, idk, I haven’t written that far yet - so buckle up your seatbelt, stay cozy in your driveway (or parking spot), and eat some ALDI chocolate as I regale you with my insights. Apologies for the grammar.

Obligatory (but well-deserved) massive thanks has to go to Jim for taking on Atlas’ burden with this set’s head-editing and Jacob for his unmatched logistics expertise.

With biology, I had two ways of looking at it. In one corner, the “med and research cabal” bio. In the other, the virtuous world of animals and ecology. With the former, I looked to my college education to pick and choose topics that I’d felt have been unrepresented in quizbowl. I was particularly fond of the parathyroid question which clued heavily from my Anatomy and Physiology class (as expected) and packet 11’s TU on N. Gonnorhaea which in hindsight might’ve been slightly too difficult. Additionally, my TU on fluorescence was inspired by one of the intro bio classes at UNC which heavily focused on the importance of techniques like colocalization and BIFC. The work of Annabelle, Vincent, Jim, Ivvone, Hasna, Justin, and Eric built upon this goal of targeting the biology curriculum with their excellent work on questions like RT, cell membranes, vancomycin, and mitochondria. I also greatly enjoyed TUs on rarer, but nonetheless important, topics on opsins, protein structure prediction, and leukemia. Sauroposeidon-level of thanks needs to go to Eric, Annabelle and Hasna for helping me sort clue difficulty in the more pharmacological and medically related questions that I lacked familiarity with. Ditto with Jacob and Jim for their feedback on the research side of things.

With the ecology and evolutionary bio, I took a decidedly different route aiming to appeal to generalists rather than specialists. It’s perhaps a flawed theory, but I’ve always had a hunch that most people’s first exposure to biology is through animal-related content and I sought to reward that type of knowledge with questions on feathers and turtle shells (both of which clue veterinary sci clues that you’d encounter if you owned a pet parrot or turtle). The question on seed dispersal was actually inspired by a SciShow video on the sandbox tree and many of the clues within that TU (such as elaiosomes and the winged samaras) were clues I’d learned through Youtube and Animal Planet back when it was good. The Sauropod question was inspired by Prehistoric Planet on Apple TV (not an advertisement, but I mean, its good). In doing so, I hoped to engage players who don’t typically consider themselves biology specialists. Ivvone, Rasheeq, and Ganon stepped in to provide some creative ideas when my brain produced none in these cats.

Now, onto Ancient History/Archaeology. Unlike previous ARCADIAs, I wanted to take this set’s content into a decidedly archaeological slant with the chosen topics. I managed to get my hands on an archaeology encyclopedia (ty Ashish), which inspired me to take a chance on more extracanonical topics like cropmarks which focused on the aerial methods archaeologists used to discover new sites and feces which, well, highlighted the importance of fecal matter in archaeological contexts. I also tried to incorporate archaeology in the ancient history as seen by the Teutoburg Forest TU included some of the archaeological discoveries. A shoutout has to be given to Ganon for his excellent mercury TU which made me cry over the pain of trying to understand Chinese alchemy. Further shoutouts to Jim with his falcon TU (I’m still jealous of this idea), Vince for his druid archaeology bonus, and Graham for the Alexander IV bonus.

Overall, it was an absolute joy to work on this set and its past iterations with some of the greatest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing (even Grant). It has only been a few years since many of us first started writing actual tournament questions at WORKSHOP 2021, and to think that we’ve come so far is honestly tear-jerking (in a good way). I’m so proud of all that we’ve accomplished. Here’s to the future! clinks imaginary orange juice glass.

[Oscario]

Nobody from the UK mirror has made a post here about the set yet, but feedback is important so I'll try to pass things along. As a disclaimer, this is all second-hand feedback, and I neither played nor staffed this mirror.

In short, it was poorly-received, more so than any other set we've mirrored recently. I think sometimes we are overly critical when talking about the questions in private, but the point stands; people generally did not enjoy it. It was supposed to be easier than previous editions of ARCADIA ("2-dot plus" instead of "3-dot minus") and it was supposed to be more "beginner-friendly", but as has been sort of acknowledged here, this ultimately wasn't the case. The set would probably have played better if the eventual difficulty had been made more public.

That said, some of the tossups played unexpectedly easy/transparent (off the top of my head, I remember people mentioning Our Town, Normans and Tenochtitlan as examples of this), which made the difficulty feel inconsistent.

Bonus difficulty, as has already been mentioned here, was a significant issue; only two teams outside of playtesting have exceeded 20 PPB, and then only barely. That's comparable to the stats for the Undergraduate Championship, which is well into the territory of 3 dots. Might talk about specific examples in the other thread.

Also, the visual fine arts apparently skewed quite old and there was a relative lack of instrumental or orchestral content in the auditory fine arts tossups. There were other less quantifiable opinions about other categories too, but perhaps that's better left for specific question discussion.

Oh, and a few more replacement bonuses would have been appreciated.

[jirafman]

Thanks for the feedback! Negative feedback is definitely welcomed as they're opportunities for us to improve the set and/or future iterations of sets we'd write. Addressing some of the issues you've brought up is a bit tricky being given from secondhand sources. If possibly I would love if you could encourage people who did play or staff to chime in here with general feedback or in the specific questions thread if you wanted to point out a single or a list of questions with specific issues! I'm sorry if the difficulty advertised created a disconnect. The set was always listed as 2.5 dot but in the aim to make it more "beginner=friendly" there was some effort to aim to incorporate more "2-dot" answerlines and have generally convertible easy parts though of course that doesn't preclude there being a reasonable amount of harder answerlines and hard parts to bonuses. I don't think we were anywhere near a "3-dot" difficulty set but I definitely would love to hear if people thought this wasn't true (and why).

[Gene Harrogate]

Fwiw I both enjoyed the set and also thought it was what you could reasonably call three dots. I don't think this set was on the whole easier than, say, Winter Closed for instance. The playtest ppbs bear this out -- for a set that's halfway between regionals and winter, you'd want to see some of those stacked teams getting somewhere in 23ppb range, at least. The fact that everyone seemed to compress around 19-21 suggests that hard parts were too challenging across the board.

The tossups (especially the literature) were somewhat more controlled, but there was certainly a large slice of questions whose commitment to conceits made them come off top heavy -- most noticeably in the rest of the humanities. For a set to feel controlled for the middle of the field, keeping the second, third, and fourth sentences reasonable is just as important as policing answerlines.

I think ARCADIA's mission to introduce novel or whimsical content to easier levels makes it more liable to hit trouble in hard parts and top-heavy conceits than other sets, but fwiw I don't think the set is unusual at all in this way. It seems to me a recurring trend across housewrites that answerlines and easy parts are well controlled but we tend to staple the top halves of harder sets onto bottom halves of our target difficulty.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'd call this set three dots, with a small asterisk. The asterisk comes in large part from (1) divergent writing styles (2) somewhat more generous early cluing than we've come to expect from some three-dot sets. In many ways I feel like it turned out similarly to 2020 IKEA - the lit was probably the most standard and powerable part of that set too, while the rest of the humanities were a bit more experimental (though not to this degree), and my biggest regret from that set in retrospect is too many tough hard parts.

On balance, the numbers portray a three-dot set similar to Winter Closed. The vibe was similar to Winter Closed too - easier than recent Penn Bowls, easier than some of the more tossup-overshooting Regs editions, overall still in the three-dot range.

[forrestw]

Thanks to everyone who worked on ARCADIA for making this set a very enjoyable experience! In general, I thought this set a good job of covering canonical topics in fresh ways while still keeping them accessible. I'll list my general impressions of the set here--I have basically zero specific evidence to back up these feelings, so these are just my gut reactions after playing.

Things I did not like:
- There were far fewer straightforward, knowledge-testing easy parts than I would prefer. By the end of the day, I was definitely getting tired of "figure it out"-style easy parts, as well as easy parts that had like two lines of obscure information followed by one famous title--the latter style of easy part takes a lot more mental energy to parse, and the former is just generally suboptimal.
- There was a little too much whimsy for my taste. I recognize that some of this is just personal preference, but I think it's generally true that more "out there" questions are more difficult to execute. In particular, I felt like the belief and social science were a little lacking in straightforward, canonical answers.
- Some of the lit, especially world lit, felt pretty hard. I was surprised that "call me ishmael tonight" was only worth 10 at this level (although a tossup on ghazals was awesome!) There were also some bonuses that seemed pretty hard--I remember there was one on African lit in packet 11 that surprised Moses with its difficulty.

Things I don't know how to feel about:
- I'm a huge proponent of there being more jazz and world music in the distribution compared to the amount of classical music. However, including it in afa is nonstandard (although of course I knew to expect this going in.) I think it makes more sense to include world classical traditions in afa than the world music tossups in this set, which focused on 20th century popular music (side note: I was hoping to see a question on MPB and was very happy that I did.) All this being said, I think it's important to consider what makes us categorize something as auditory fine arts--is the emphasis on the "auditory" or the "fine arts"? If the emphasis is on the "auditory", then this set's grouping makes sense. If not, then including something like MPB in the same category as the western classical tradition and jazz while not including opera doesn't make much sense. (These are just my disorganized ramblings and I don't really have a conclusion here, sorry.)

Things I liked:
- The physics and philosophy were really good and powerable by someone who knows about the subject. There were a handful of physics tossups that I felt any upperclassman studying physics should power, which I think is crucial to keeping the category accessible. The philosophy was really well done and I look forward to digging into these questions in the coming weeks.
- The jazz was wonderful, it did a great job of covering pretty much every time period with just a few questions. I was ecstatic to hear a bonus on Emmett's place--this is the kind of real knowledge-focused cluing that I think the afa tended to do really well, another example being Yuja Wang's Rach marathon.
- The other auditory was fantastic.
- I was able to 30 two econ bonuses, somehow? that was pretty cool

[amundhe]

Thanks to everyone for producing this set! Had a lot of fun and thought this set was clearly written by players with a lot of joy and real engagement with their various categories -- I'm anticipating this set providing a lot of reading recommendations for me.

What makes music questions most worthwhile to me personally isn't actually music itself but learning about cool ways in which people perform, learn, and collaborate in musical traditions; I think that ARCADIA absolutely did a great job cluing it. I was excited to be rewarded for buzzing on Yuja Wang's Rach 150 performances and the clue about Hamelin's cadenza for Hungarian Rhapsody 2. I liked the bonuses on HIP, sleepwalking in opera and (this might be straying towards other fine arts) never realized the connection between the Folies-Bergere and Ziegfield -- this was an awesome bonus in general.

I loved the visual fine arts in general, especially the tossups on "reclining", "Leonardo", and "Pennsylvania" and thought it had a number of creative conceits that were definitely accessible. "Hearts" might be my favorite vfa tossup I've played in a while -- loved how it combined the Commes des Garcons logo (something very popular, especially) with the Haring clue -- felt like this rewarded me more than anything I've ever played for looking up and being inquisitive about what I see in my everyday life (I've seen lots of people wear this), which to me feels like exactly the sort of thing that makes quizbowl awesome.

Other assorted notes: As someone who's been trying to learn philosophy over the course of this season, I've repeatedly turned to ARCADIA I and II in my studying because of how much well-clued/relevant/cool I've found the content, and ARCADIA III didn't disappoint in that regard. Really liked the Nyaya bonus in particular for asking about Indian thought. I really liked how much representation Egypt got in the beliefs of this set -- I think Egypt's been underrepresented for a while, and even though I'm not particularly good at it, it was nice to see.

Bonus parts felt a little long to me, and I thought there was a little too much "guess the most obvious answer" (which resulted in us whiffing the perfume part, among others). I think that the bonuses generally felt well-controlled with their medium parts (particularly in lit!), which I think is definitely good for accomplishing this set's stated goal of being beginner-friendly to some degree.

Wanted to echo a lot of what Forrest was saying, particularly about the world lit -- "Call me Ishmael tonight" was in power at 2019 CO, and "fragments of epic memory" was line 2 of ACF Regionals in 2021. I'm just picking a couple examples off of memory, but in general I felt that there was a good amount of clue drift reflected in this set -- both example I've picked has been from a set 3 dot or higher (this set was advertised as 2.5 dot). I think the world lit in particular wasn't as "beginner-friendly" as indicated by the set's initial forums post. Between the aforementioned two tossups having pretty hard clues as well as harder answerlines like The Time of the Hero and Desai, I'd categorize least 4/9 of the world lit as leaning hard, which perhaps strikes me as too much.

I think that this set also had some inconsistencies in difficulty -- as an example, the Debussy tossup gave the opening notes for "Clair de Lune" in power, but the Hungarian Rhapsodies tossup didn't have the analogous opening notes of Hungarian Rhapsody 2 in power (which to me feels inconsistent because I think Clair de Lune is by far more recognizable). To me, the Debussy tossup felt more 2-dot, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies tossup felt more 3-dot. I understand that difficulty variation within any set is normal, but I think that this combined with the set being powermarked felt weird -- I think every music player would agree that my buzz on the Hamelin cadenza (for 10 points) is more impressive than my buzz on F, A flat for Debussy (for 15 points). This sort of feels like a bug exacerbated by a lot of things in this set -- the difficulty being an intermediate value, the inconsistency between questions, and the fact that powermark length might have been pretty rigid.

Overall, I (probably due to being relatively experienced) had a fun time playing this set and really appreciated getting to learn through the content that the writers put into this set.

[EvanKnox]

Howdy everyone, I edited the other science for this year’s ARCADIA. I’m credited with a combined 3 questions in that distribution, which speaks to the degree it was a team effort. I think the distribution is better for it being a team effort, since we have a really deep pool of talented other science writers and I don’t have the requisite breadth to cover all the categories in other science to the degree they deserve. I’d like to recognize all the writers who contributed their deep, often quite “real” knowledge to make this category what it is (in alphabetical order):

Rasheeq Azad has a grasp of the mathematics behind things like physics and astronomy that I can only really dream of. Helpfully, he shared some of that through this set, with tossups on topics like virtual machines and sequences (blame me for concerns about these questions, I lack Rasheeq’s knowledge) and bonuses on B-mode polarizations, cryptography, and modular arithmetic. Rasheeq’s a real help in fact checking in these areas as well, and generally just a strong resource for deep knowledge in the most math-heavy parts of the science distribution.

Vincent Du is ARCADIA’s tenured other science editor, and a great help in filling in some math early with the vector spaces tossup and filling some earth science late with the waves tossup; in the middle, despite my subdistribution, he managed to sneak some tire engineering into a combined engineering and environmental science tossup. Vincent’s a stalwart in helping to fact check science and fill open distribution slots quickly (as you might expect, given his editing record), and is always impeccably helpful, whether as a category’s editor or a contributing writer.

In addition to his immense load as head editor, Jim Fan found time to add a saltwater tossup focused on desalination technologies (the impurity in the final question’s theme is unfortunately mine), along with a bonus on complex analysis. Most memorably, he wrote bonus on LASSO that I believe he brainstormed in about a minute sitting around after ICT, which speaks to his effectiveness leading us this year.

On short notice, Crow He wrote the text data tossup to fill out the data science slot. Crow was very willing to suggest possibilities to fill out the last bits of the Other Science distribution in this slot and CS when I was trying to get everything together, and their support was useful and greatly appreciated; I’m looking forward to seeing Crow’s future questions on the intersection of linguistics and math, CS, statistics, and any others areas of other science they run across.

Kevin Jiang contributed a lot of exciting questions in Math and CS, including applied topics after my own heart like the PageRank bonus and Cholesky decompositions as well as topics like the nop instruction and seismograph networks that I can’t say I know much of anything about. Kevin was busy with editing social science, editing ACF Fall, and taking on a good chunk of quizbowl logistics in addition to school, so the fact that he claimed as many questions as he did and churned them out so quickly is a testament to his top-flight effectiveness as a writer and editor.

Kevin Thomas put his impressive knowledge of the solar system to quickly whip up the Venus tossup at the end of writing, and also provided an earth science tossup with an appropriately astronomic and appropriately Kevin-content-y conceit in the bonus on supernova effects on the earth. Kevin’s been providing astronomy questions spanning the spectrum from Venus to Moonquakes over the course of ARCADIA, and is always a go-to resource in astronomy as a whole.

Ivvone Zhou lived up to her top-flight background in (bio)statistics with the tossup on sampling and sampling corrections, as well as a bonus touching on methods for handling missing data (a statistical topic very much after my own heart). Ivvone helped get the statistics completed far ahead of schedule, and I’m excited to learn more about biostatistics from any of her future writing.

A final note for those who played this year – I know I wrote some questions and made some amateurish edits to questions that left a bad taste in some of y’all’s mouths (I think Swapnil and Arya in the specific question discussion thread did a good job pointing out some bad alterations I made in math and CS in particular; apologies if I’m forgetting other commenters, I don’t mean to). The announcement for 2024's ARCADIA is up, but for clarity I won’t be involved editing the other science next year (or writing in categories like math or CS, I imagine), so if you didn’t like my work, please don’t worry about that carrying over to the next edition!

It’s an honor to be a part of ARCADIA. Hope to see folks come out to play next season’s edition!