2023 BHSU: General discussion

[Auks Ran Ova]

This thread is for general discussion of the BHSU set/philosophy/et cetera. There is a separate thread for specific question discussion.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

To kick things off with praise: I could tell the writing team had a great deal of fun putting this set together and put a lot of joy and love (of the game, of the subject matter, of each other's company) into it. And that radiated from every packet. The initial announcement promised "zany... in the service of being fun," and the set delivered zaniness and fun in heaping portions.

Some things I liked less:
At times, the zaniness felt to me like it was more for the amusement of the writing team than for the playing audience. Asides about specific BHSU editors are much less sensible and funny to people who don't know them personally (I chuckle because I've known many of you for 10-15 years now, but many (most?) people playing this don't know you!) This is definitely a matter of subjective judgment without super hard fast rules, but in general if you're sprinkling "meta" or deliberately zany content into a set, be mindful of when you're "inviting the audience in" to laugh with you, versus "shutting them out" by laughing amongst yourselves (or worse, "laughing at" them -- I felt acutely laughed-at by, e.g. the "philosophical dialogue" bonus part that turned out to be on Frog and Toad). And get feedback on when attempts to bring people in might not be doing that as well as intended.

On the order of 1-4 tossups per packet, the tournament's tossups had early clue drops that felt too easy to be within power in a Nats-minus set, and/or narrowed the possible answer space down to an "it's obviously x"/"what else could this possibly be?" contender or two very quickly. (I'll list some examples in the specific questions thread). Though others can speak for themselves, I don't think I was alone in feeling this more often than usual, or that it was just a result of me being good at quizbowl. Each game we had against a team of similar skill level included frustrating "game of chicken" type scenarios where willingness to go off vs. sit ended up deciding the game. Though maybe that's just how things always are, because we're all imperfect at difficulty control?

The trash in the set felt very predictable and self-indulgent -- because I've known Rob and Matt B. and Dylan and co. for years, I know they like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII (play another game) and the Star Wars Expanded Universe and sure enough, those things showed up! In fairness, there were also some questions that took a more "pop culture of significance" tack (the Lou Reed tossup, the a-bit-tough "desert blues" bonus, for example), and I felt like I learned more from those. But it's maybe not ideal that I could more or less pre-call that I'd get points for saying "Midgar" yesterday and did so.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Hi folks,

I subject-edited European Literature, European History, Philosophy, and Religion, and co-edited Music with Aaron Rosenberg. I also head-edited the set along with Rob Carson, which entailed helping the tone and philosophy for the tournament as a whole. I generally prefer to have the players drive the discussion and let the questions speak for themselves, but I'm happy to respond to any questions about those categories.

I did want to make a couple preliminary philosophical comments before discussion begins. First, as we said in the announcement, I think in-season open tournaments should have different goals from national championships. We aimed to be much more zany and experimental than ACF Nationals, where the overriding goal is to crown the strongest academic team. We focused much more on providing an entertaining and novel experience - hence the category fakeouts, goofy bonus themes, and expanded GK/Pop Culture distribution. We expect that there may have been some controversy around those, but controversy is part of providing a qualitatively different kind of set.

With the Pop Culture distribution, we tried to address some of the recent concerns people have brought up over the place of trash in quizbowl. Our take on that is probably rather different from that of many community members. Speaking for myself, I think that quizbowl should not be limited to testing engagement that takes place in an academic setting, and that extends to pop culture as well. I think contemporary culture (whether you like it or not) is a self-evidently important topic to understand, and an exclusively academic lens isn't really the greatest way to view it. Mainstream "critical acclaim" is often a rather dubious guide for topic selection, as well, since it indicates "what professional-class Americans are morally supposed to like" more than anything about artistic quality. As a result, you got a lot more pop culture than most mACF tournaments provide and it probably felt more like NAQT PC than usual, too.

However, I do want to assure you that we still took a lot of care about that distribution and hope it's influential on at least some future tournaments. Every question was intended to play well and test knowledge of something the field would actually have engaged with. Across the category as a whole, we tried to ask a representative selection of important topics in popular culture the field would be interested in. And within each subcategory, we aimed to test knowledge across a variety of time periods and subtopics, with a bias towards what's of contemporary relevance to the field we had. In other words, we sought to hold trash to the same standards we apply to every other category.

I don't expect that to be the last word on the subject, and we welcome feedback, positive or critical, on the pop culture and all other categories. So please - let us know what you thought!

[touchpack]

I edited the non-computer Science in the set, and, moreover, wrote roughly 80% of it myself. My goals weren't too different from what I try to do in every set I work on, but since I wrote so much of the set myself, they may have shined through more than they usually do on my projects:

-Ask about a wide variety of topics that are important either in the classroom or in real life, with a healthy mix between the two (for example, as Eric noted, the anatomy bonus in Finals 1 was straight out of important step 1 topics, while the sleep apnea tossup was more focused on medicine as practiced in the clinic)

-Explore areas that I think are underasked in quizbowl (ex: audio engineering with the equalizers bonus, civil engineering with the tossup on traffic modeling, ob/gyn with the bonus on gestational age estimation, etc)

-In the bonuses, have some bonus parts that make the players apply their real knowledge, rather than make a binary association as we usually do to answer tossups (ex: the mass spec bonus about peptide fragmentation nomenclature, the bonus on the QCD potential, the scattering bonus part on the optical theorem, etc.) It's always a challenge to balance these and make a part that can be answered in 5 seconds, not too simple or complex, and I hope I did a decent job balancing these. (I enjoyed watching Vivek take all 5 seconds and correctly answer the Laplace symbol hard part, at least!)

In addition, despite this being the 37th tournament I've edited, this is the first time I've ever been the primary person responsible for Other Science at this difficulty level. I have very little knowledge in Earth Science / Astronomy / Math, so I mostly just downloaded a bunch of textbooks and did my best. Feedback in this area especially welcome, as I'm less confident in the quality of these questions as I am in my primary subject areas (Bio/Chem/Phys).

Finally, I'd like to shout out Aaron Rosenberg, who did a very meticulous review of the Physics and Other Science and provided invaluable input I used to polish those categories. The set would have been noticeably worse without his work.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'll probably have some more thoughts later, but one positive aspect of this tournament I wanted to immediately highlight was its length control. Tossups were certainly shorter than events at similar levels and bonuses didn't amble on for particularly long. I don't think this created many buzzer races and helped keep rounds about the same length as similar events, despite the use of a 22/22 format.

[Jem Casey]

I was impressed with how well the set hit the difficulty/style benchmarks Matt B laid out:

The tournaments I have in mind as models are 2010-2011 Minnesota Open and 2010/2015 VCU Open. Although the Minnesota and VCU Opens were written in very different styles, they both give out early buzzes and 30s much more liberally than Nationals. They also both have lots of questions that Nationals editors are sometimes hesitant to write. Minnesota Open often pitches you straight-down-the-middle tossups on upper-canon topics that have come up recently. VCU Open has lots of unthemed, generously-powermarked tossups on ACF Fall level answerlines.

...yeah, that's pretty much exactly what we got! It's unusual for editors (to continue the baseball metaphors) to call their shot as well as the BHSU team did--certainly a testament to their vision and thoughtfulness.

Anyway, this set ruled. All the parts of the distro I can comment on had some the best questions in their categories that I've played and very few or no clunkers.

I will note that the recurring jokes (e.g. the FTSNOP thing) and the unannounced comedic/"arbitrary" bonus themes (e.g. the Dragon Ball Z or STL ones) would probably have been more confusing and less endearing if every room wasn't staffed by the set's authors. And while I remember most of the "trick" questions Matt J alluded to in the other thread being pretty amusing and playing out ok, there were a lot of them--probably a few too many, given that the set also had a decent number of less jokey questions with somewhat obfuscatory indicators/framings (Quine the computer scientist, scorpions as "beings" (iirc?), etc.). More so than causing playability issues, these aspects of BHSU's "zaniness" took away a bit from the "canonical great open" feel, though I hope it's still remembered as such.

[ryanrosenberg]

I edited social science and geography for this set. These are probably the two categories that have changed the most in quizbowl since the era that this set's vision harkened back to, which presented me with a unique challenge: how to marry the changes (which I like and think have improved quizbowl) with the set vision (which I support and wanted to reflect in my categories)? At the beginning of set production, I sat down and thought about what I liked in the sets that I played when I started quizbowl, and what I liked in the sets I've played in the past few years. In social science, older sets tend to take a more historical approach to the field, with many questions on specific influential thinkers. In geography, they cover a range of physical geography and dive deeply into specific places. Newer sets are rigorous in answer and clue selection, ensuring that the knowledge being tested is something that people care about outside our bubble. My intention was to produce a set with modern standards of cluing, pyramidality, and answerlines that also touched on topics and themes that used to come up more and deserve to be asked about.

If I had to pick a single question to sum up this approach, it would be the tossup on introspection. This combined clues about massively-influential modern work (Nisbett and Wilson's Telling More Than We Can Know) with clues about the pre-behaviorist approach to psychology. I don't think it was a perfect tossup. The link is a little tenuous -- the type of reporting on internal thought processes that Nisbett and Wilson are studying are not always called introspection, and it's not taking place in the same setting as what Titchener and Wundt were doing -- and the execution probably could have been a little tighter. But as a marriage of the old and the new, a modern question on an out-of-vogue topic, I'm happy with how it turned out.

[Mike Bentley]

Will post more specific feedback later, but wanted to quickly say that I really liked this tournament. The additional "other" and whimsy content played to my interests and strengths. I'm hoping more open tournaments use this as a potential model. Of course, there are other models for how you achieve write a tournament at this difficulty. Something like CMST 2 comes to mind as feeling different in a lot of ways that were less favorable to me but more favorable to others.

[grapesmoker]

I really enjoyed this tournament; one can always quibble with this or that clue in some individual questions (and I have) but overall this was a very polished, high quality set and I'm very glad to have been able to come out to NW and play it. It definitely bore the stamp of its authors; I didn't mind the "cute" twists too much, although I do somewhat resent twice being baited with the promise of answering an NBA-related bonus only to be tricked each time. To the extent that I have complaints it's mostly about the fact that I felt like, while the "other science" was admirably broadened to include more different domains, the overall distribution felt like it was very bio/chem heavy. I haven't run the numbers on this so it might just be a subjective evaluation on my part. But just about all the questions were great and fun to play. Thanks to the writers for producing such a good tournament.

[Tejas]

As I mentioned in the other thread, I edited the US History, World History and CE. I also wrote about half the history overall and most of the sports questions. This was my first time editing US History, so my focus was mostly to make it as varied as possible and hopefully keep it interesting. For the CE I tried to keep it more in the "Modern World" style of things related to the present day but not necessarily occurring in the last 5 years.

Along with my fellow editors, I also wanted to introduce more humor and a light tone into the set. I tried to focus on making the humor as broad as possible through using either funny anecdotes or wordplay as opposed to things like meta jokes or very online references. I would like to hear feedback on how this played, obviously you always run the risk of humor falling flat but I think people generally appreciated it (especially Matt's Jainism and Leviathan bonuses).

although I do somewhat resent twice being baited with the promise of answering an NBA-related bonus only to be tricked each time.

I wrote both these questions, so sorry about that. Of course the Barkley one was meant to be a bait and switch while the other was just meant as a joke leading into a normal CE bonus; you will get your 2011 Mavs tossup next time hopefully.

[grapesmoker]

I wrote both these questions, so sorry about that. Of course the Barkley one was meant to be a bait and switch while the other was just meant as a joke leading into a normal CE bonus; you will get your 2011 Mavs tossup next time hopefully.

Hey, I can neg on many different NBA tossups! For example, I negged that Mike D'Antoni question because I got Spurs-era Boris Diaw confused with Suns-era Boris Diaw.

[Auroni]

Auroni Gupta edited the Other Academic and the popular music, two of the essential categories that set this tournament apart from others. Auroni also freelanced across many categories, including writing many truly outstanding questions for the World Literature distribution. The Tagore, We Need New Names, and Fanon tossups - just to name a few - were brilliant ideas that I don't think anyone else on the editing team could have come up with.

I ended up editing only one popular music tossup (Alex's tossup on "men," which I focused to be about important disco hits of the 1970s and early 80s); Rob worked on the rest. I edited every other academic question, however. My priorities there were to ensure a balance of whimsical "mixed academic" questions contributed my co-writers and editors with questions that fall through the cracks of typical disciplinary typologies; to that end, you got stuff like astrology, ethnomycology, nutrition, and business. This is microcosmically reflected by the tossups that I wrote in this category, such as "body mass index" and "fast fashion," which investigate components of our modern world, as well as "the destruction of the Temple of Artemis" and "asparagus," which to me are fun. Many of these questions are adjacent to existing components of the distribution, but I did not do a detailed numerical breakdown of this by category as I was writing.

[Mike Bentley]

I very much enjoyed the stuff at the bottom of this tournament's distribution list, namely the Other Academic, Geography, Current Events and Pop Culture. These had a good mix of interesting clues, whimsy and diversity in what was asked about. Of course, not every question across all these categories was exactly to my tastes, and I agree with Matt Jackson that the execution on a few of these wasn't perfect (the UK one in Finals 2 is an example of one where it stayed quite generic for too long, but on the other hand stuff like Rio Grande and Wile E. Coyote in Finals 1 were fun topics to ask about).

I appreciated this tournament's humor and think it's fine to sometimes indulge like this. At the same time, I am one of the few people who played those Minnesota Opens still playing so I'm clearly in the target audience here.

[Sima Guang Hater]

This tournament was a joy to play and well written. I admit to having to take a few rounds to adjust to the set, but once I did I enjoyed it quite a bit. Some general thoughts in order:
- I am on the side of enjoying this tournament's humor. I thought it was funny without being obtrusive. I'm on the record as not really liking that whole "anyone, even Chris Ray" thing that MO did that one time, because readers would often stumble over it. But at this tournament, the jokes were not as wordy. I particularly liked the bonus part that started by noting that The Mushroom at the End of the World has already come up. Jordan is probably right that some of it should be pruned for a general audience, however.
- I also enjoyed the tournament's pop culture, not in the least because some of it was to my interests, but also because it was well written and cut across a lot of categories and time periods.
- I do agree with Matt Jackson that some of the tossups did narrow down rather quickly. I also think its very hard to quantify this feeling with any kind of stats, because a buzzpoint doesn't necessarily reflect the collective feelings of the players before the actual buzzing occurs.
- I think Billy's work on science was exemplary as usual. One thing I will point out is that the bonus parts that asked you to apply real knowledge often played very hard from the stats. I managed to answer the one about the optical theorem, had no chance on the QCD potential, and was somewhat confused on the MS/MS one - now I understand you were trying to test the fact that cleavage goes a/x, b/y, c/z, which you could probably test by simply asking e.g. a cleavage that produces C type ions at the N-terminus produce what other type of ions at the c-terminus. The GU/AG one wasn't our bonus but is also a thing that comes up with some frequency in my field.

[cwasims]

I enjoyed this tournament a lot - thanks very much to the editors and writers for putting together a polished and distinctive set. I'll echo what Mike said earlier and praise the Other Academic as being particularly well-done. The Social Science also had a lot of well-executed ideas.

One minor comment is that I felt this tournament had a few of what I might call "swerve" bonuses that suddenly change topic in the last part in a way that feels jarring. The two main examples of this that come to mind are the bonuses on Anglican Realignment and Benjamin Franklin's influence on classical political economy. In the first case, the final part was on masquerades, which really has absolutely nothing to do with Anglican Realignment; it's certainly perfectly serviceable and seems to have been difficulty-appropriate so it's not an issue of gameplay or fairness. As someone who was interested in learning more about Anglican Realignment based on the preceding parts, though, the change in theme was jarring (and a bit disappointing). The "German" medium part on the classical political economy bonus was pretty similar: an interesting theme was set up, but then the last part basically asked for an unrelated part of Franklin's thought that had nothing to do with political economy.

This is of course an extremely minor quibble: these were totally fine questions from a difficulty and playability perspective - I just found breaking the theme for seemingly little obvious reason to clash with what I would typically expect from a bonus, especially at this difficulty level. It may also speak to the quality of the tournament that these stood out for me - I'm sure all tournaments end up with bonuses of this type, but perhaps their relative paucity here explains why I noticed them.

[TaylorH]

I liked this set a lot. Pretty much every question I knew anything about was engaging and approached things from a unique and memorable angle, and all the stuff I hadn't heard of made me want to learn more. For me, the humor and silly stuff largely landed, even if I was kicking myself at a few points for not "figuring out" the fake outs on things I thought I knew well (like the Cloud Atlas bonus part).

I also wanted to specifically praise the science for being cool and rewarding. I'm someone who has learned a few areas of (mostly engineering-y) science fairly in depth through school and work, but I've never really studied science "for" quiz bowl. So many of the question I heard at BHSU clued directly from things I know first hand and didn't require packet-study canon knowledge to get, which I found gratifying. The neutron scattering and steel phase diagram bonus come to mind immediately as highlights, but I don't recall hearing an idea that I didn't like. The mix of classroom/fundamentals and applied stuff also felt like a better mix of what I am used to hearing at tournaments (which is usually a lot more of the former). Big thumbs up to Billy and all the other science contributors.

I'll echo what some others have said above on retaining some of the easier power clues: I really don't think its bad that seasoned players can "figure things out" and get a late power on difficult topics. I feel like the vast majority of players at other sites will not be able to do this with a worrying frequency.

The 1/1 trash was fun to me even if skewed towards the authors' known interests. I think pop culture should do that: no one wants to hear questions on things authors' might feel obligated to write on that they don't themselves enjoy (or at least find interesting for some reason).

Minor nitpick but I think it'd be nice to have category tags at bottom of the questions, especially with a somewhat odd distribution. It took me a bit to figure out Lou Reed was FA and Epicureanism was religion (?) for instance.

Great set, thanks to everyone who worked on it!

[jinah]

And while I remember most of the "trick" questions Matt J alluded to in the other thread being pretty amusing and playing out ok, there were a lot of them--probably a few too many, given that the set also had a decent number of less jokey questions with somewhat obfuscatory indicators/framings (Quine the computer scientist, scorpions as "beings" (iirc?), etc.).

I didn’t mind the questions that intentionally played as trick questions, but I disliked the framing of the questions that Jordan mentions in the second part of this quote. The “Trick” questions Matt mentioned (Tar, whatever the Final Fantasy city was, etc) were examples of fictional things being asked about as if they are real, which is a question device that many players are used to and are therefore able to shift frames of reference pretty easily. I think pronouns that are unorthodox vs being intentionally misleading can actually be more confusing for gameplay: “Ah, this question wants me to think a fictional city is a real city” is pretty easy to intuit once you recognize a clue. “This question is calling real animals ‘beings’ (because it’s asking about them in a mythological context??)” is, at least to me, more likely to throw someone off because it doesn’t seem to have any clear reason to not use the more obvious pronoun.

My biggest issue with the tournament was unironically the bathroom setup. Ideally, tournaments would never happen in buildings where the only bathroom is three flights of stairs away from the game rooms; apparently Locy is notorious for not being accessible. If the only possible rooms have accessibility concerns, I think organizers should make the issues clear ahead of time as they can seriously affect players’ ability to attend and enjoy the tournament.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

I had oodles of fun playing this tournament. Obviously it's hard to separate from both results and the fact that this was played in person, but this may be the most fun I've had playing quizbowl since covid. My basic thought is in line with what Jordan said, that his tourney called its shot and did it. I was excited for the promises this set made and it delivered. A shame of the no-longer-in-school life is that you don't really get to play anything that approximates any of the NAQT flavor. I was delighted when we heard a part on lupus or whatever, followed by "Voltaire said..." and realized were were getting a classic mixed impure academic bonus. The pop culture and GK content were both welcome additions to an open.

The one thing I'll say we occasionally found unideal was (what felt like) a decent chunk of kinda hard, figure-em-out easy parts. Feel free to call me a doofus for not having this click, but for example, we bageled the MR James bonus cause we're dumb, didn't know the subtitle of A Christmas Carol, and it didn't click that ghost was the most logical guess. This made it just the tiniest bit frustrating when (what felt like) the next bonus' easy part was Chaucer from Canterbury Tales. (to be clear, I don't think these bonuses were in the same game; we bageled a different bonus before the Chaucer bonus but I can't seem to find it) I'm curious to see if the non-elite sites (once they all happen) stats reflect the feeling I had, that there were probably a decent chunk of easy parts more in the 70% range. This isn't bad, though figure-em-outs can be more frustrating that an easy part like Gluck, which, while being (imo) on the hard end of an easy, is just a concrete "here's some works, who wrote them" as opposed to trying to feel it out. I also apologize for thusfar providing a single example (another I recall which the other team bageled was donor groups, which kinda stumped us all even if afterwards it made sense).

Conversely, despite bagelling more bonuses than I have since maybe my first tournament ever, I thought this set delivered on its promise of gettable 30s at open level, and so despite also putting up the lowest ppb I have in a few years at opens, this tournament never felt hard in a bad way nor did I feel (even when bagelling) that we were being beaten down. If there's tournaments that feel brutal but you look up and have ok stats, this was the opposite, where we put up what "felt" like a good showing on bonuses despite our actual ppb being under 14. I think this is because whenever something was actually about stuff we knew about, all 3 parts felt eminently gettable. I got the impression that this tournament wasn't afraid to have hard parts ask for things that have come up a bit (like Bogotazo) but that would play like a hard part anyway.

Another type of question I enjoyed that I'm sure happens in all sets but it felt noticeable here was the "here's a straightforward tossup on the multidisciplinary output of a guy or gal you may know mostly for one thing." CLR James and Frantz Fanon come to mind here, but I think I remember feeling this at other times too. I liked these alot. I'm going to list some of my favorite questions in the other thread, but broadly speaking, I thought the stuff I'm not a total rock on (the history, the vfa, and the various "other" stuff) was consistently fun. I knew this tournament would be a banger when tossup 10 was the re-election of Diaz (which slapped) and it delivered.

I hope this tournament is influential on at least some future opens, as it delivered alot of the kinds of things you don't get once you graduate. Namely, a not overly difficult, pop culture and whimsy-infused, in person tournament. Something I think future tournaments should be careful about is aping the tone of this tournament. I thought this tournament was filled with chuckles, and I liked it alot. But you know, future tournaments beware! If not effectively done this could easily be annoying. We didn't hear any meta at our site, which was probably for the best, and it made the little jokes or the silly leadins (like the Jason Kidd CE bonus) a perfect amount of light-heartedness.

EDIT: I also wanted to add that, as you can see by a perusal of the UMD site stats, I am happy the tournament did not feel the need to buff itself up prior to the non megadeath sites. Though the odd question (like internet) did have some "half the room kinda thinks its this for a while" feeling, it felt rare to me, and is also more fun than a tournament that overcompensates for this and is too challenging. I certainly think it was rare that my perfectly mid/low level team felt this during the actual in-power portion of these questions.

EDIT 2: I want to once again praise the mixed impure academic bonuses. When done well and sparingly (at this tournament they were), I think they provide a very fun "each part is for a different player on the team" element that was alot of fun to play.

[mico]

Couple of quick things from the perspective on the notably not main site:

I'll echo what Emmett said about the bonuses feeling reasonably easier than Nats, which is a good thing. Even though the whole field had relatively low ppb, there were few parts that felt impossibly hard and not enjoyable to play.

The length cap made this tournament much more of a pleasure to play at a non-elite field. Being able to finish 10 rounds by 6:30 was really nice, especially since the tiredness was beginning to hit everyone by the last couple (see ppbs decreasing 1-2 points across the field after lunch).

I think this set could have done a better job wording questions in a way that was unique and clear when played at gamespeed. I'm sure there was a concerted effort not to include non-specific clues, but I think a couple questions failed to emphasize key points easily missable at game speed. Also, some of the indicators I think could have been chosen better. That's probably attributed to not having lots of playtesting (I assume) since most would-be playtesters played the main site or will be playing the online site. And even then, my guess is the mainsite field was more in tune to feedback on the earlier clues than the later clues. I'll detail some examples further in the specific questions discussion.

I was on the side of not entirely enjoying the jumping around some of the questions were doing, especially when a basketball leadin would make it even more confusing to tell what the theme of the question was. My main disappointment however is that I never heard an academic leadin to a basketball bonus.

Overall fun set, and I'm glad it felt like it was easier than Nats, but more difficult than Regs.

[vydu]

This was a fun set - thanks to all the people who worked on it! I thought the science was very good, and the tossups picked innovative ways to ask about core stuff (in particular imo the analytical chemistry tossups did this well). I agree that the computation bonus parts might have been a bit too hard across the board, but generally felt well-chosen. Really cool clues in the LIouville theorem tossup and the cones tossup. A vibes-y observation is that the earth sciences questions felt heavily focused on "quantitative" clues and equations and models. Not necessarily a problem, I think it makes sense and does reflect a more textbook-focused approach. I appreciated the amount of atmospheric science this tournament had.

I think the difficulty range of the easy parts at this tournament was a bit suboptimal. It was partly a symptom of our team having spottier coverage of the distribution, but the difference between easies on e.g. Salafism or sanctions on South Africa versus fall-level easies like Chaucer or Adam Smith was definitely noticeable and felt larger than usual. However, I do agree that while this tournament served up bagels more often than I think other tournaments of its level do, the 30s did feel easier to come by as well, so that definitely balanced it out a bit.

[tpmorrison]

I really enjoyed this tournament; much thanks to all involved! I think my favorite aspects of the set were playability things already mentioned a few times — length control, buzzable but still challenging early clues, willingness to write interesting cross-category questions. Hard sets can sometimes feel like a slog, and these sorts of decisions definitely alleviate that feeling a great deal. I also appreciated the sprinkling of humor and whimsy throughout the set, though I do agree with some others that the “insider-y” stuff wasn’t my favorite (particularly since it sounds like some of the question content also veered “insider-y” at times, which I'm not really a fan of).

I agree wholeheartedly with Taylor and others that Billy did a great job making the science engaging even to non-scientists. I also appreciate his willingness to stretch the science distribution into areas not typically asked about. One minor quibble is that I don’t remember any statistics/machine learning content coming up; obviously there could be some in later packets, and it’s impossible to check every box in a 1/1 category, but in my (very biased!) opinion, this is a sufficiently important and popular area to merit a few questions in every set.

[touchpack]

Definitely true that there wasn't very much stats/ML type content in the set, and this was further compounded by the questions (1 bonus and 1 individual bonus part in a common link bonus) being packetized in Packet 11 and Finals 1, respectively. I moved the stats bonus into Packet 9 for future mirrors.

[The Story of a Head That Fell Off]

There's a few questions that really stood out to me that I greatly enjoyed (Guan Gong, landlords, klezmer, Bachianas Brasileiras, can openers, Lou Reed, Fatboy Slim) and a lot of good fun bonuses (never thought I would be rewarded for thinking Christgau's rebuttal to the "dancing about architecture" quote is plain ridiculous). Sussing out the Lydia Tar was definitely a highlight (very clever leadin, but I would be extremely impressed if anyone buzzed there).

It's rare for me to enjoy trash questions in academic sets, because the conventional 0.33/0.33 sharing space with Geo/CE always made the one random pop culture question stand out, and since it's so limited and typically only in easier sets, it always ends up either needing broad appeal and losing interesting flavor, or on pet topics the editors/authors enjoy and plainly indulgent. With so many subfields in trash, it always is kind of disappointing when you realize the only trash question you hear for the next three rounds is on something you don't care about. I'm sure you have heard about freshmen complain about the "waited 12 rounds to see the only basketball bonus bageled by the other team" feeling.

The extra room in this set, even though it seems like a small change, makes the pop culture feel more integrated and therefore less jarring to hear. Mixed with some of this set's "mixed impure academic" questions, it makes for a lively NAQT-like experience that you don't really get to experience elsewhere. Even though some questions might be a bit self-indulgent (the Midgar question comes to mind), the expanded room really makes the more niche questions less frustrating to hear. One key to making this work was that the trash questions had the high quality and difficulty that was shared with other questions in the set; even on topics I didn't know about, I could tell by my teammates' reactions that they were exciting and crafted with care. This set really showed that a hard set can incorporate more trash, and still maintain a high degree of competitiveness and fun.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

Will there be detailed stats for the Maryland site?

[VSCOelasticity]

It looks like some of the points raised here were edited by the time of the online mirror. I don't recall lots of "for the stated number of points" or any very in-jokey references to other editors, but its possible I missed some.

Overall, I had a great time playing the set. I think it did a good job of being humorous but not trying too hard to be funny.

I did think, like others here, that there was some variability in easy part expectations, and it felt like too many bonuses relied no guessing/saying the right thing.

The bonus transitions felt very jarring. I can't remember all of them, but the "STL" bonus might be better served, though maybe come across as less "witty," by just stating its theme outright in the bonus lead-in. It's a bit hard to process changing field/topic + listen to clues. Maybe I'm just old, though. This was not the only bonus to do this, but it is the one I remember at the moment.

I will re-up that the length control was admirable. The games ran at a very nice pace (also due to good moderation), and playing 22/22 never felt like a slog.

Again, thank you to all the writers, editors, logistics people, and whoever (or whomever?? I wasn't paying attention) else helped the set come together. I had a blast!

[etotheipi]

Feels a bit weird that my opinions on this set seem to have been the opposite of everyone else, and it's possible that some of this is just the Online Quizbowl Effect, but anyway:

I didn't have the greatest time playing this set. There are sets like Illinois Open that I have thoroughly enjoyed even while playing badly and repeatedly losing - which, to be clear, I believe to be the mark of a great set - and BHSU simply didn't give me the same feeling.

The In-Jokes: This, I think, was the single most negative experience for me as a player. Hopefully I don't sound too self-aggrandizing, but I think I'm in the somewhat unique spot of (1) being able to have expectations for myself on a set of this difficulty/basically being engaged on every tossup and (2) being young and entirely removed socially from the group of people who wrote this set. Therefore, I approached these asides from a place of near-total incomprehension, and my reaction to them ranged from annoyance to an active feeling of exclusion at one or two points. I'm not able to provide more specific evidence for exactly how I felt; and quite honestly, it's possible that I was not in the target audience of this set, and my input should be treated accordingly. But I do think that, if the goal is to make QB as socially inclusive as possible, some degree of professionalism in even open sets is the way to go.

The Other Jokes/Cuteness: This could also be a personal philosophy thing, but I think tossups like, say, Tar are best saved for explicitly vanity packets or side events; the Frobisher bonus goes here too (though I would have a very good time with it points-wise if I had played it). There's simply no reason to write a question with the conceit of asking about something that's fictional without revealing that, when you could write a straight-down-the-line tossup on the same answerline, revealing that it's fictional, and get a tossup that plays objectively better and/or doesn't confuse people nearly as much. All that changes is the perceived "cuteness" of the tossup, along with the potential for people to make embarrassing negs. The second, I think, is not something that should necessarily be pushed for in quizbowl questions. The first is a major source of the impression I mentioned above, that I found this set to be fine when I was doing well on it and not so fine when I wasn't. Cuteness is fun and all when you're playing well and winning, but when you're not playing well, you just don't have the time for that.

I will add that the non-inside jokes in bonuses didn't negatively affect my experience in the way that the inside jokes did - because they were, well, able to be appreciated by me - but I also don't see a reason for them to be there. With all the movement toward professionalizing quizbowl, I would rather see that attitude taken with every set, rather than there being one or two "whimsical" opens that still occupy the place of "intimidating nats-minus open" in the quizbowl calendar. There's nothing wrong with a set like this in isolation, but BHSU is the only non-nationals harder-than-regionals set of the semester, and I think that lends it a certain inherent cachet that should be acknowledged and worked with.

The Trash: There are two separate points I want to make here. This should be taken with the caveat that I'm generally anti-trash and do not do it well.

First of all, in a set like this with 1/1 trash, I would expect that a more, let's say, traditional angle to OFA would have room to be taken, and I didn't really get that feeling. Haven't looked through the packets in detail to verify this - frankly, I'm too tired to process more questions at this point - but I just think that if you are going to dedicate space to trash, you don't also have to make the effort to move other distributions towards "culture" in general (whether high or low).

Second, the trash felt quite vain (intended as the adjectival form of the quizbowl sense of "vanity"), in a way I have not seen in even other recent sets, including what NAQT I've played in the last couple of years. This was not really something that impacted my ability to buzz, rather, it further shaded in my perception of the set as something by a certain social group for people adjacent to that social group. I certainly got a feeling of "I like this media and therefore it should be asked about," which seems to have been intended? I'm not sure that such a subjective standard of what questions should be about is appropriate for quizbowl at all. It's possible that I've just taken this set far too "seriously," though, as I alluded to above.

The Other Academic: I was pretty excited to play the OAc in this set, and I do feel like a major chance was missed with it. To me, this is a category that exists to contain all the important connections between categories - history of science, weird unclassifiable "general thought," the flow of thought between various divisions of the humanities, etc. Especially in bonuses (though there were tossups like "can openers" as well that frankly descended into trivia), it feels like we got a bunch of trivial links of "things that are named the same": say, the ring fingers bonus and the especially egregious septets bonus. I just don't find this to be an interesting or exciting way of framing questions. Sure, these were fine quizbowl tossups from a gameplay standpoint, probably, but quizbowl isn't just a game in a vacuum - it exists to serve a particular intellectual purpose. I'm not going to pontificate on this, but I don't feel like that was served here.

This is probably an even less common take, but I don't particularly like swerves even if they're in category. The Elena Ferrante bonus is the one I remember best - I was excited to hear a bonus on a book I read a week ago, and quickly picked up the first two parts, only to be confronted with a hard whose link to the other two was tenuous enough for that tenuity to be alluded to in the question! (it asked for an author who had "once been called" the African Elena Ferrante or something). I'm sure that this novelist is very important, but why not e.g. make her the first part (so it wouldn't feel like a bait and switch), or link on African Prix Goncourt winners, or something like that? The impression this bonus and others gave me was of having a piece of candy dangled in front of me, and when I tried to eat it, it being moved away; that's not something I want to experience in quizbowl, of all places.

High-School-Ness in the Literature: This was an impression I had that seems to have been shared by a teammate? Tossups like "Lucy Poems," "Miss Havisham's House," "Faulkner" (this one is debatable), and "Pillow Book" (and even "Preface to The Scarlet Letter") felt like the kind of material a hypothetical open grounded in the high school canon would pull from, an impression which wasn't positive for me - especially since all of these tossups seemed rather dry (I thought the "Portrait of a Lady" tossup was a good example of a canonical-author tossup that was really interesting, though that's probably because I think Eliot is a whole lot more important of a writer than Dickens). Due to its shorter tossups and high difficulty, this set really had the chance to ask about literature in a way more focused on the experimental trend and innovation, on what's really been done by the great authors - I had a number of "why should I care?" moments while playing this set's literature, and considering I'm probably one of the quizbowlers whose current life is most centered around engagement with literature of all sorts from multiple angles, I just don't feel like that's an impression I should really get. I'll point out the A Visit From The Goon Squad as a counterexample to this trend: while that isn't experimental literature by any means, I think it did a good job of rewarding people who have knowledge about the current scene of literary fiction (I got that tossup on the clues about the sequel from LitHub articles I read a year or two back). The Denis Johnson clues in that one Johnson tossup were also welcome in this regard.

Easy Parts: This has already been pointed out (though it certainly hasn't been fixed), but it was rather annoying to play bonuses where we had to stretch pretty far for an easy and bonuses that gave the Canterbury Tales and asked for Chaucer. I think people would find it egregious if any of the hard parts on this set were hard parts in a high school regs set, and it seems pretty comparably bad to have an easy part in this set be what is very much a high school regs easy. 90 -> 100 is the same percentage as 10 -> 0, after all.

I apologize if this is unclear or overly negative - I am writing this immediately after the tournament and am thus mildly braindead. I'll reiterate that these are simply my impressions, which I hope will be a valuable contrasting perspective on the set to its editors and maybe influence decisions made by similar sets in the future, especially with regard to the more cosmetic points. To end on a positive note, I have basically zero criticisms to make w.r.t. the science - sets of this difficulty have a tendency to either overshoot the science or at least make it extremely intimidating, and I feel like BHSU balanced really well the four objectives of "asking about cool things," "asking about fundamental things," "thirties and powers being gettable but still rewarding," and "rewarding 'Real Knowledge'" (though I will admit I'm not the most qualified person to make this judgment).

EDIT: was scooped by Jon, who mentioned the "for the stated number of points" thing - I didn't get this, still don't, and was actively extremely confused by it being in that question. I think there's a reason for this - most moderators are moving fast enough (as they should!) that it's impossible to pay full attention to every word they say, and every quizbowl player has an in-built method of selecting out important words to translate into answers. Phrases like "for the stated number of points" force the listener to pay attention to them, distracting them from the parts of the question that will actually give them important information.

[Cheynem]

I think Arya and others make some good points, but I really disagree on the second "cuteness" factor they and others are critiquing. I do not think it is "too cute" that someone like Lydia Tar's fictionalness is concealed for a lot of the question. One of the things I like about quizbowl is the kind of the off-the-wall nature, in which you must pay attention all the time because questions can go in different directions or not be what they appear (to be honest, I thought this was fairly straightforward though). The question doesn't need to announce its nature to the players. Obviously one doesn't need this level of off-the-wall ness all the time, but I think every tournament is going to have a few curveballs like this--tossups that appear to be myth that are about apocryphal stories about famous people, the writings of people better known for something else, an actor/director tossup on fictional characters that have this job.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

So, this was always going to be a tournament that some people were going to really like and some people probably wouldn't like so much. We set out to write in a very particular kind of mode that appealed to our senses of humor and quizbowl aesthetics; if you have very different tastes in those areas, it's understandable that you'd find this tournament frustrating. I do think that our approach appealed to more than enough people to be worthy of its spot in the open schedule. There are enough tournaments written in contrasting styles, I think, to balance it out.

I do want to clarify two points. First, although we certainly included plenty of jokes, I wouldn't call most of them in-jokes. I don't think any of them required substantial meta knowledge to get; the closest I can think of is the bonus on Nicolas Jenson, where the joke is just that he shares his name with Nick. With other stuff (the DBZ bonus and the Jason Kidd lead-in, for example), we tried to give enough relevant context in the part to let people understand what was going on. Later in production, it was generally a point of emphasis to try to make sure those jokes were accessible to a wide audience and not just to us. We certainly could have made mistakes there, though, and I would be curious to hear which questions you thought were confusing enough to be exclusionary.

Second, I wanted to address the point about "high school" level literature. Some of this is inevitably going to come down to personal taste, so I don't fault anybody for wanting to hear fewer questions on Faulkner or whoever. In general, although I prefer asking more questions about those people because the field is more likely to have read them, I also realize that's not the case for every individual player. I do, though, want to strongly challenge the implication that the people we asked about are unimportant or juvenile. Even if Victorian literature isn't your thing, Dickens' influence on postmodern writers like Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, and Vladimir Nabokov is enormous. Faulkner and Hawthorne, for their part, are simply titans. If we decided to stop asking about these people at hard tournaments just because they're also read in high school, we would not be adequately testing people's knowledge of literature.

With that out of the way, I would just reiterate that I'm sorry to hear the set wasn't to your liking. Your reasons for not enjoying it are generally fair and understandable.

[Cheynem]

I thought that Hawthorne tossup was really good--it's a well excerpted thing from a well read novel, but it's also something that doesn't get asked or clued about in-depth as much as the novel.

The Faulkner one did seem to drop the clue about the teeth quickly, which is why I paused before buzzing, but it's certainly an interestingly themed question. I wouldn't say the problem is asking about Hawthorne or Faulkner, it's perhaps that the clues, especially in the Faulkner one, were slightly too easy.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

The Other Academic: I was pretty excited to play the OAc in this set, and I do feel like a major chance was missed with it. To me, this is a category that exists to contain all the important connections between categories - history of science, weird unclassifiable "general thought," the flow of thought between various divisions of the humanities, etc. Especially in bonuses (though there were tossups like "can openers" as well that frankly descended into trivia), it feels like we got a bunch of trivial links of "things that are named the same": say, the ring fingers bonus and the especially egregious septets bonus. I just don't find this to be an interesting or exciting way of framing questions. Sure, these were fine quizbowl tossups from a gameplay standpoint, probably, but quizbowl isn't just a game in a vacuum - it exists to serve a particular intellectual purpose. I'm not going to pontificate on this, but I don't feel like that was served here.

Hey Arya, I'm going to just take this with a post-tournament braindead piece of salt as someone who wrote a couple of the questions specifically called out here. I'm not going to challenge things like "can openers" perhaps being a bit goofy but it's a bit disappointing to me that the ring finger bonus struck you as just "things that are named the same" as opposed to perhaps a bonus themed on various human practices and superstitions related to the ring finger, including things like "thinking that the ratio of the index to the ring finger... has some sort of merit," "for some reason being the finger people put wedding rings on," and (while perhaps not very explicitly saying so due to needing to hide it for the merit of the bonus) "why the ring finger has a latin name of digitus medicinalis"

Maybe the OA was a bit heavy on common links but also not sure what's missing here, there were literal bonuses on science history (in fact, the first person to be called a scientist even!) and (albeit somewhat kookey) things like "astrological musings of Saturn ranging from the pseudoscientists, literatii, natural philosophers and art historians" (which may again, be in some of the wrong mental buckets for you due to you having some thoughts post tournament, tired, and presumably also due to getting many early buzzes that likely did not make it clear what some of these may have been)

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I see Other Academic as a healthy "wheel of fortune" category, in that it varies a lot from tournament to tournament and that's part of what makes it fun. Other Academic is a great outlet for the editor/writers to put their personal interests on paper and dredge up clues/topics that quizbowl never would have thought to ask before. It probably wouldn't go well if writers felt obliged to cover topics in Other Academic that they aren't interested in, since in the absence of any canon precedents to guide you, you're more likely to pick unimportant clues and produce a bad question. I'd personally find it boring if Other Academic primarily aimed to draw "serious" threads between our established categories, as opposed to venturing into the realms of totally extra-canonical content with appropriate dashes of whimsy; but all of the above belong, and having a healthy, variant mix is what makes it fun.

By contrast, I don't like when pop culture sticks super closely to writers' tastes - in part because that can make topics way, way more predictable if you know the writers well for various reasons, in part because it doesn't quite give the same excitement of unpacking an unexpected topic and going "oh cool, something I'd never have thought to ask before and want to learn about!" Like OK, I know Wang and I'm not surprised he wrote some OAc questions about weird superstitions and science history; that's still a massive green field! By contrast, you probably got a pretty decent playing advantage at this event from being aware of/sharing the BHSU writing team loving Final Fantasy or whatnot (thankfully, I had such such a player on my team).

[MorganV]

the Frobisher bonus
...
"Miss Havisham's House,"
...
A Visit From The Goon Squad

Hi! I wanted to post since you seem to have had strong opinions about three of my ~8 questions in the set :)

Historically I haven't written very much and so I wasn't a very high-volume writer for this tournament either, but I'd say that each of the questions I wrote was written with a particular purpose in mind.

Great Expectations is one of my favorite nostalgic books because I read it several times as a child, and I felt like there was a lot of room for memorable clues from this book that had never/rarely come up despite many Dickens questions. In service of this, I chose every clue from memory before looking at the book to confirm the details, because I wanted to ensure (by definition!) that every clue was memorable. I think I succeeded in this goal, because the detailed stats show that different players buzzed on every single clue in this tossup.
I feel strongly 1) that this is a book people in real life read, engage with, and enjoy; and 2) that deep questions on hypercanonical authors have just as much room in a difficult set as tossups on more challenging authors that may be more "exciting" from a quizbowler's perspective. I'll note that both Natan and Emmett singled out this tossup for praise in the other threads (thank you to them, if they're reading this! I appreciate it :) ) so while the tossup didn't spark joy for you (which is ok!), it did for other people.

Conversely, the Visit From The Goon Squad tossup was also designed to reward people for a book they're likely to have read (I very much enjoyed seeing Matt B buzz cold on the first clue in our playtest session), but also who are keeping up with the real world lit scene as opposed to just the quizbowl canon. I purposefully included the recent clue about The Candy House for the exact reason you buzzed on it, so I'm glad it played out that way!

Finally, when I was actively playing, these kinds of cute curveball questions were my favorite part of quizbowl, and I always love the opportunity to sneak them in when I write. Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine I'm not the only one, and that while some people will groan at these questions, others will be just as delighted as I was. I could have written a normal bonus on Cloud Atlas, sure, but I think the way I framed it makes the question more memorable and more entertaining, and that despite the gimmick it's a difficulty-appropriate but convertible hard part (Dylan answered the Frobisher part in playtesting). Plus, come on, as soon as I saw that Edward Elgar appeared in Cloud Atlas I wasn't going to miss the chance to write that clue.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the set more, though! I hope you don't feel like people are ganging up on you or that your feelings about the set are invalid just because other people felt differently. I do think a lot of your experience comes down to personal preference, and that, yes, we made some intentionally provocative choices, and inevitably some people were going to dislike them.

[Jem Casey]

This is probably an even less common take, but I don't particularly like swerves even if they're in category. The Elena Ferrante bonus is the one I remember best - I was excited to hear a bonus on a book I read a week ago, and quickly picked up the first two parts, only to be confronted with a hard whose link to the other two was tenuous enough for that tenuity to be alluded to in the question! (it asked for an author who had "once been called" the African Elena Ferrante or something). I'm sure that this novelist is very important, but why not e.g. make her the first part (so it wouldn't feel like a bait and switch), or link on African Prix Goncourt winners, or something like that? The impression this bonus and others gave me was of having a piece of candy dangled in front of me, and when I tried to eat it, it being moved away; that's not something I want to experience in quizbowl, of all places.

For what it's worth, I don’t think the principle hinted at here--that lit bonuses should either be explicitly themed or 30’able from deep knowledge of the first work or author clued--works as a rule for lit writing. In fact, the proposed restructuring, in which the bonus starts with NDiaye and transitions to Ferrante, would violate it too; the only difference is that the metaphorical candy would be taken away from NDiaye fans! Obviously, the feeling of building up momentum on a pet topic, only for the bonus to draw a connection in a different direction, can be disappointing, and it’s good for writers to remember that. But with dozens of avid readers playing every quizbowl set, every bonus will hold the promise of a dream hard part topic for someone, and they can’t all deliver--simply because everyone wants to hear different things (I, for one, would like to hear more questions about Marie Ndiaye). In a well-distributed set, some bonus parts will emphasize intertextuality or clue authors who’d be too hard to ask about otherwise, and not necessarily with forewarning earlier in the bonus. All of this seems to me an unavoidable and positive feature of our game.

If there’s a broader point to ramble about here, maybe it’s something like this: it can be tricky to reason from our own specific interests to how a question topic should be handled or category should be filled out. The literature 4/4 feels big, but dwindles down rather quickly as the editor throws pieces of varying sizes to classicists, medievalists, theater kids, genre fiction fans, book review followers, contemporary poetry scene acolytes, literature in translation snobs, English majors, scholars of British high modernism, readers of authors like Wordsworth, Faulkner, and Hawthorne, and so on. In this respect, “relevance to contemporary experimental fiction” is just one of the several dozen (worthy!) perspectives that each set should take at least a couple times; but sadly, not every set can emphasize all of them.

It’s great fun when questions make a case for their topic so vividly that they answer the “why should I care?” question for anyone paying attention. And sometimes questions will fail this test in ways that are obvious to an expert on the topic but not the question writer; discussion forums can be a great place to diagnose those issues for the benefit of future writers. But if I were using BHSU to show novice writers the do's and don'ts of lit writing, it's rather hard to see how the (excellent) A Visit from the Goon Squad or the Johnson questions silence "why should I care?" doubts better than the other questions, or what the rest of the set's lit is doing wrong enough to incur that sentiment. Ultimately, if you (in general, not just Arya) want to enjoy a category as vast as literature at the upper levels of the canon, you’ll sometimes have to meet a question halfway and imagine why you might care about it--most things that come up are worth it, I swear!

[ryanrosenberg]

Here are buzzpoint and bonus stats from all BHSU mirrors.

[Gene Harrogate]

I enjoyed this set quite a bit. Considering clue placement, topic variety, and execution of stated goals, it strikes me as the most technically sound open in several years. In addition to the many good, novel ideas, there was a heaping helping of meat-and-potatoes content (some of it unfashionable) clued in ways that were generally interesting. At what other modern housewrite would I get to see Gareth Thorlakson power Daniel Ellsberg off a G. Gordon Liddy clue and instantly 30 a Malvern Hill bous? Maybe I wouldn't want that at every tournament, but this one gave off a unique vibe that was arguably overdue for an open housewrite.

I've only had a chance to skim it, but it seems like the above discussion has mostly focused on jokiness and "transparency." I, for one, actually enjoyed much of the humor. There were some misses to be sure -- the "for the stated number of points" joke doesn't really come off without a moderator who's in on the bit -- but overall it's nice to play some well-written questions that don't take themselves too seriously.

Normally I'm in the camp that thinks transparency is, generally, a secondary issue. That's why I was surprised that BHSU's "transparency" left me feeling unsatisfied after many tossups. It's fair enough that there are other tossupable 19th century parties than the Colorados, or that the battle rage in question was unrelated to berserkers, or that the tossups on core and periphery, Dutch learning, and landlords could have had other answers. It may be unfair from a writer's perspective that these questions and others like them seemed to suggest an obvious answer within a couple clues. But many of these questions did seem to, however wrongly or unfairly, and by lunch the perception that this tournament rewarded yoloing to an unusual degree was a major topic of conversation. Is this a substantial gameplay issue? I'm unsure. It might mostly be aesthetic. Perhaps this comes across more for players who lack a truly elite knowledge base and aren't burdened by recalling old chestnuts like chipmunk battle rages. But at the very least, it undermined the enjoyment we drew from the obvious effort that went into clue selection, topic representation, and humor.

Hopefully my thoughts on transparency don't give the wrong impression -- I had a wonderful time playing this set. Thank you editors and writers for that.

[Gene Harrogate]

Another good thing I wanted to quickly mention about this set: someone (Justine French?) recently noted that representing a topic is an underrated virtue of quizbowl questions. I take this as picking accurate, evocative, and meaningfully important clues that an expert will quickly recognize and (hopefully) derive some joy from recognizing. To my mind, this is not an exclusive but occasionally conflictual approach versus taking an unexpected angle, new theme, or unexpected answerline for a well-trodden topic (there's some sort of content/form distinction to be made here but I won't explore that). In some ways, the first style is harder to pull off; but the "straight-down-the-middle" style of question-writing that this set took made many of its categories a model for this sort of representiveness. Kudos for that!