Here August is not a great month
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whats the best month
May
2nd best
i thought it would be january
…october is the best
Dunno what you expected
October’s too cold. August is too warm. September is good
evil
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july is the worst month
Agreed
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isnt it messed up how magnus gets snow and everybody else has to suffer through heat
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better yet, here’s 20 good tossup questions, and 20 good bonuses (although of course quality may vary slightly). this is about “regular” high school difficulty (or at least what it was in 2020, the conception of “regular” difficulty has unfortunately become nontrivially harder since then)
themes you may notice from good quizbowl questions:
- tossup clues are roughly in order of difficulty, from hardest to easier (so as to reward a greater depth of knowledge)
- bonuses have an easy part, a medium part, and a hard part (and while they’re not labeled, as this is from 2020 and that wasn’t in vogue yet, you can still kinda tell what the relative difficulties are supposed to be. but maybe that’s just me having read hundreds of packets and just having a good game sense.)
- questions “prompt” (the quizbowl way of saying “be more specific”) on most incomplete or underspecific answers instead of flat out rejecting you for not reading their mind. 99% of the time they will flat out accept it if you give an alternate name or a specific thing that’s being clued in a question about a more general version (for example, the tossup on functions has an instruction to accept recursive functions, even though presumably not all of the clues are actually about recursive functions. some sets would be evil and tell you to go fuck yourself if your answer doesn’t correspond to literally every past clue. i think this is kinda dumb and it’s definitely gone largely out of style.)
- they obfuscate details that they think would give the answer away (or if they think it would better to drop it later in the question instead for difficulty reasons) but they don’t obfuscate details purely for obfuscation’s sake (note: i did not read this too thoroughly so it’s possible they may have done this anyway. even good sets can fall victim to this on occasion). not putting the answerline in the middle of the question falls under this umbrella and is something ai has historically been really fucking bad at in a way that would be truly impossible for a human to fuck up
- this is more of a human mistake, but this set is good at writing sentences in a way that preserves the hard to easy idea even with the sentences while also avoiding writing sentences that don’t actually make much coherent sense. bad/old quizbowl sets have the clunkiest of sentences and phrases.
- the world “titular” does not show up once in this packet. this should not have to be a feature i explicitly label as good, but you would not believe how many sets use the word “titular” as a synonym for “title” (adjective) in a way that not only adds an extra syllable for the reader for no reason, but is also just kinda incorrect (titular’s main definition is to suggest “in title only,” such as to say “King Charles is the titular head of the Church of England.”)
- clues actually reward knowledge of people’s important works/contributions and pieces of media rather than biographical clues about when/where [x] was born or died or the exact date of a battle or boring shit like that (unless their date or place of birth does have some level of actual significance in their works or the works of others). this is a significant break from pre-internet quizbowl, in which every question was sourced from encyclopedias and the knowledge that Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice (which is mentioned exactly once in his wikipedia page) would somehow get you earlier and more consistent buzzes than actually being familiar with anything he did.
- i could go on but i can’t think of any other point to make here
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what does the part where half of each tossup is bolded and then followed by an asterisk mean? is that like you get more points if you get it before the asterisk? and would that feature need to be preserved in a hypothetical Good Tossup Question or has it fallen out of fashion?
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you get more points yeah (15 instead of 10, but one national tournament has it at 20 instead). some sets have “powers” (the name for this) and some sets don’t. fun but ultimately optional, more of a useful statkeeping tool than anything
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cookie
also truly great questions have a theme within their more specific answerline, and aren’t just wild commonlinks on a common answerline like ai would probably be prone to write (for an example of this, the prague tossup is themed around things that happened there during the 30 years war, and isn’t just a rambling mishmash about various things that happened during prague’s history. bad quizbowl sets love rambling mishmashes about various things that happened during a city/country’s history but those don’t make for interesting questions.)
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ok these aren’t great but they’re less hilariously awful than Clyde’s
Summary
- This artist depicted a woman in a white dress holding a parasol in “Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son.” He painted the same subject in different lighting conditions in his “Haystacks” series. This painter’s “Impression, Sunrise” gave name to the movement he helped found. His later works often feature water lilies in his garden at Giverny. For 10 points, name this French Impressionist painter known for his studies of light and color. ANSWER: Claude Monet [or Oscar-Claude Monet]
- This element is found in both the anode and cathode of nickel-metal hydride batteries. The lightest isotope of this element is used in fusion reactions. This element forms covalent bonds with carbon in organic compounds and is often used to determine their structures in NMR spectroscopy. This element, the most abundant in the universe, has only one proton in its nucleus. For 10 points, name this lightest element, whose diatomic form is commonly used to inflate balloons. ANSWER: hydrogen [or H]
- This country’s Khmer Rouge regime carried out the “Killing Fields” massacres. This country’s Angkor period saw the construction of temples like Angkor Wat. The Tonlé Sap lake in this country reverses its flow seasonally due to the Mekong River. This country’s current prime minister, Hun Sen, has held power since 1985. For 10 points, name this Southeast Asian country bordered by Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, with its capital at Phnom Penh. ANSWER: Cambodia [or Kampuchea]
- This novel’s protagonist loses his inheritance after his father is swindled by Merdle’s fraudulent bank. One character in this work is imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. The protagonist of this novel falls in love with Pet Meagles before realizing his feelings for Amy Dorrit, known as the title character. For 10 points, name this Charles Dickens novel about Arthur Clennam and the daughter of a long-term debtor, nicknamed “The Child of the Marshalsea.” ANSWER: Little Dorrit
- This organ contains Kupffer cells, which are specialized macrophages. This organ’s left and right lobes are separated by the falciform ligament. This organ produces bile, which is stored in the gallbladder. Alcohol abuse can lead to cirrhosis of this organ. This organ plays a crucial role in detoxification and produces many important proteins. For 10 points, name this large organ located in the upper right quadrant of the abdomen, essential for metabolism and removing toxins from the blood.
ANSWER: liver
I specifically told it not to do this and it did it anyway 
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bad start. rest of the tossup is fine? but the giveaway being an in theory important thing but in practice impossible to actually uniquely identify an artist with is. a uniquely ai thing clearly sourced from what the internet has to say about monet
…and there’s some good old misinformation spreading. somehow on my first read i missed hydride being in the firstline, which shows how much i respect chemistry. nmr spec is definitely harder than knowing what organic compounds are, this ai has to learn that difficulty should also smoothly decrease within sentences as well as between them.
idk when this ai was last allowed to get information but hun sen apparently stopped being pm in 2023. also this clue is harder than all the clues before it (and arguably tonle sap is also harder than the two clues before it too, although this is definitely harder than that).
according to qbreader this has only been tossed up twice ever, both at high difficulties and super long ago. definitely a dickens deep cut. apparently it was a prison bowl (hs regs+) hard part once. that says more about prison bowl than this answerline. even in bonuses it’s never been easier than a hard part.
this is…honestly fine? like. not good obviously. kinda boring. but you could tell me this was from a bad human written quizbowl set and i would probably believe you. “produces many important proteins” is obviously super vague and not particularly uniquely identifying but i have seen people write things like this before.
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