Hi all -

I want to thank everybody who participated in my first MiniLeague, and congratulate the top 3 finishers (separated by a margin of four points in the final!), BarkerC, KravisA, and O'ConnorT.

I had a grand vision for this ML that included the daily "behind the scenes" comments that other ML smiths have provided, but it turns out that between starting a new job this fall and writing a ML that 168 bits of trivia (as opposed to the usual 78) all my LL energy was pretty much gone. I was glad to see a thread early where people shared some of their favorite wrong answers, and I hope that if you have any more you've been hiding, this thread will inspire you to share them. My favorite, which I heard secondhand from another LLer, dates all the way back to MD1: "Lake Victoria Beckham's Husband's Team."

One thing I wanted to mention is my philosophy that a good Before & After question shouldn't simply be two unrelated trivia questions stapled together; for every question, I tried to envision one combined entity that the answer described, and clue the pieces in the context of that entity. (For example, Around The Horn of Africa isn't a TV show and a geographical feature; it's a TV show *about* a geographical feature.) That meant that part of the challenge was unraveling the pieces from each other and figuring out what parts of the question referred to what half; some players told me they really enjoyed this, and others found it very frustrating. I'm a puzzle guy before I'm a trivia guy, so to me this is more of a feature than a bug; but for anyone who was hoping to have more clearly defined halves, I'm sorry I didn't serve up what you were expecting.

The overall difficulty also skewed harder than I was intending. I think B&A is a format that works well for Jeopardy! because there's a race to answer the questions quickly, as opposed to at all. I think most LLers could sweep the average B&A Jeopardy! category given enough time to think about it. With this in mind, I feared that without upping the difficulty, I might wake up to find a massive wave of 6-6 ties. As a puzzle constructor, my goal is usually for solvers to (eventually) figure everything out, and that's not the desired structure for a ML. So I adjusted, probably too much, in the direction of subcultures. Interestingly, the finals were much more in line with my original fear, as about one-third of the championship players reasoned out at least ten of the twelve answers! Fortunately, the money system makes ties much less likely in the finals, and I was pleased to see so many people get right answers while still having a decisively ranked top 3.

So, if you're still reading this nonsense, I want to again express my appreciation to those who played, and encourage any feedback you have about the format, the questions, the content, or anything you think is worth talking about. It's highly unlikely I'll unleash B&A 2 any time soon (it's certainly not on the schedule for next year), but it'd be nice to know whether people want to see this sort of thing again, and what they'd like to see changed in another outing.

Finally, before I ride off into the sunset, the results from MD9Q4 imply that not enough of you (read: less than 100%) have heard my all-time favorite bit of stand-up comedy, Paul F. Tompkins' musings on the classic snakes-in-the-peanut-brittle-can gag. If you are a fan of hilarity, I strongly encourage you to click on this little gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpw1KYh5mY

Cheers,
KatzD

I thought this was an outstanding minileague, and just plain the most fun I've ever had in Learned League. I believe the Commish mentioned In another thread hoping you would plan for a B&A2 at some point in the future, and you may consider this my entusiastic agreement.

I had a great time in this ML and loved the "twist" of the Championship Day's Before & After & After... Honestly, the triple answers helped me get a few answers I probably wouldn't have otherwise...

For example, I've never seen Dark Crystal but I knew "Are You Afraid of the Dark" and Crystal Lake from the Friday the 13th films, so that answer was staring me in the face. Similarly, I knew the Buffy episode "Once More with Feeling" and reasoned the Times Square Studios show was "GMA" but I never knew the song "Feeling Good" (even though I own Origin of Symmetry, I didn't know the song title).

There were times I loved puzzling out how the question was split for each half, and there were times I silently cursed you... All in all it was a very fun ML!

+1

Really great job with this one!

Exactly what MoserK said here - part of this made me find the championship a little easier! I ended up taking my time on a lot of these questions, hoping to come up with a good guess. (Moreso than during the standard season.) I think that the scaled up difficulty was fair because of the long window for thinking about these.

Thanks for an entertaining few weeks, KatzD!

Another +1 from me. There was at least one question every day that made me grin when I figured out the answer, and half the fun was in parsing out the question language to try to decode what was being asked. It was the most fun ML I've played so far - outstanding work!

KatzD, thank you for putting together this ML! I'm in the sub-group that felt a bit frustrated by the difficulty level, but I did enjoy it. Actually most of the frustration was on Day 1, then I adjusted to the style.

For future consideration, maybe you could have used the ModKos scale to estimate the difficulty (I would say it's PG-13) and included a sample question (not just sample answers) in the ML description. I struggled with pulling apart the blended clues on Day 1 mostly because I wasn't prepared for that -- I was expecting Jeopardy! style B&A. I'm not saying there was anything wrong with your approach, it's actually more sophisticated and clever, but I think some frustrations could have been avoided by setting expectations.

One gripe, re: the Finals. "East of Eden" and "Eden's Crush" fail the "The overlapping portion of the two answers will always match in terms of both spelling and phonetics, and it will always consist of one or more entire words" portion of the rules (Italics mine). This caused me a fair bit of consternation.

In all, though, I really enjoyed this ML, even more so in that it was the first time I've made it to compete on the final day.

Like MeyerMM, I made it to the finals for the first time (and probably the last time, until somebody writes a Theater ML). If not for a silly mistake ("Black AND White") I could have been in the top 15, which is WAY above my actual trivia skill level. What I'm saying is, you have to do a sequel.

Oh yeah... I debated for several minutes whether or not I should money Wagons East of Eden Crush because I was pretty sure I knew all three answers and was pretty sure it was Eden's Crush... Luckily I did end up moneying it, but I wonder if it was a (relatively) high 46 points because others were confused by this...

Still, with 78 questions, I guess one error is forgiveable...

Another +1 here — in spite of the difficulty I had some days, I looked forward to tackling these, to that "AHA!" moment when the pieces would fit together, and to seeing the real answers. (And I was also psyched to hear my favorite Paul F. Tompkins bit, too.) It really was a great way to wake my brain up. Thanks so much for this.

Like so many people, I had a total blast doing this one. There was just a huge level of satisfaction whenever I could put together an answer like "Greendale Human Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"

Have there ever been LL questions with a lower yield than 4% (the results for "Pretty in Pink Triangle")? Also: was I the only one who got Weezer's "Pink Triangle" but then somehow couldn't come up with the Psychedelic Furs?

3% for identifying Mary Cassatt's The Toreador, from LL46, MD11.

I loved this MiniLeague - it was very creative. It played to my strengths - knowing one part and then digging in my memory for something that fit the other. Though I went 9-1-1 and had the third most questions correct in the ML, I failed to make the finals, being trapped behind the very formidable duo of LehmannS (most correct), and KravisA (fifth most and Championship runner-up). Kudos to KatzD (boo to the Commish for the group assignments). Looking forward to the sequel.

Nope... Even after seeing the answer, I went back and listened to the clip and couldn't pull out Pretty in Pink.... Started watching a bit of the YouTube video and realized I haven't really heard that song all that often before...

A thought along similar lines: I feel like I may have been in the minority of people who recognized "Star Trekkin'" but not "Video Killed the Radio Star." 'Twas a heck of a way to discover I'd somehow never (or, at best, rarely) heard the latter's intro.

i'm proud to be a 4%er, but i only knew the weezer. i've never even heard of the psychedelic furs or their song, but based on the wording of the clue ("just getting started" or something), i inferred that "pink" was the hinge word, so i made up something that sounded like it might be a song title ending in pink, and ... boom. (i think it's an '80s movie, right?)

also, the lowest correct answer % i've ever seen was geology MD7 Q3, which was correctly answered by exactly one out of the 108 ML competitors: PrysantM.

I'm with you. Of course when I got home and discussed the questions with my wife, she said "I got Video Killed the Radio Star immediately but I had no idea about the 2nd half..."

Here's a crazy idea for B&A 2 -- teams of 2 working together!

I'm sure you were in the minority, and that I was in the complementary majority; those who immediately got Pretty in Pink (a great song long before it put a twinkle in John Hughes' eye) but could make no headway with what turned out to be Weezer.

On the subject of KatzD's song mashups, I have to say that the particular confluence of sounds that made up Every Day Is Like Sunday Bloody Sunday in The Park With George, from the final, was perhaps the most unsettling, even suicide-inducing sound I've heard! Two of those songs I've actually listened to and enjoyed many times, but together, with a dash of Broadway? Yikes!

Interesting cognitive thing I've learned (mostly from other puzzle contests): When two songs are played simultaneously (rather than pasted together in sections), as with Pretty in Pink Triangle, my brain has a very hard time processing both. Once I've glommed onto one song, it jumps into the foreground and my chances of identifying the other song are very low.

I was in that boat too. I even thought of "Pretty In Pink" but for some reason dismissed it, and went with "Triangle Man" for the other half, though I was pretty sure that wasn't it.

So my childhood in front of the television wasn't wasted after all ...

I had this problem as well. I got "Pretty in Pink Triangle", but it was a total guess. As soon as I recognized Weezer, that's all I heard and the rest was background noise.

Also, another kudos to the smith, this was a fantastic ML!