It's 7:30 am on Wednesday the 3rd of January, the second day of the year back in the office, and I'm already dragging. Today is the winter solstice of office days. I spend more time in darkness today than any time all year. It's been my habit since Catie went to high school, to drop her off at the van pickup and drive over to my office on the other side of the hill, then reverse the process at 3 and take her home. It's her first day back at school since the airing and re-airing of the show, and I'm hoping that they'll be the little spark of recognition in her classmates. I don't worry about that with the staff and the administration, they got the publicity, as did the parents, but I'm hoping that they updated the monitors for the new semester and given them their due, but I won't know until next week. Because we didn't have Tuesday classes this week, there was no practice. This week is mine to mentally regroup and put together the plan for the rest of the year.
A lot of what I want to do for the team right now is stuff that I want to have available for everyone at a certain point, so I've been thinking of resurrecting the OTW idea, probably taking up part of this space and then spinning it off once it's more or less automated. Automation will enable me to do what I want to do with this and give me back some time that I would invest here and with building up study guides for the team for practice. In turn that time would be invested into finishing the book off. So there wouldn't be any losers here, you'd have something to read every week, the team would have an additional source to study, and I'd still have a space to contribute material should I find something to contribute.
The other usage thing this would accomplish is I'd have a use case for my working with Obsidian. I had been a reliable user of tiddlywiki pages for a very long time, but a combination of browser changes ruining tiddlywiki editing and my office cracking down on use of thumb drives made it a much harder system to use of late. I had used Obsidian to compile all my notes for the team in the run up to the taping, but all of my book notes are in a different format (trello and tiddlywiki, and google docs) so I don't want to convert the book to Obsidian. Using Obsidian's templating features would enable me to set up the skeleton of each OTW quickly and cleanly, and I could probably knock out the entire semester's work in a weekend. Then I could place all of them in Substack's scheduler and have them launch without me. And then I could devote Wednesday night and more of my free time to finishing the book with my new findings.
So what would this look like, this set it and forget it newsletter?
- It must be something that could run for a year without repeats. I want this to be something you can pick up this week's edition and if you find something you like, you can go back in the archive. I want to thwart the person who believes they can only be a specialist by stretching out any one specialty and surrounding it with lots of interesting things.
- It would be longer than someone could plausibly study everything in a week. I kind of want it to be more than the completionist could handle.
- It must cover more things than quiz bowl subjects. Ideally it should be a set of things useful for everyone from the middle school student to the college quiz bowl player to the international quizzer to the bar trivia team. But not everyone would need or even want to read the whole thing. This is another way of tempting those who try to specialize off that path. A big list would also encourage players to have their teammates read the list weekly and cover different things from themselves.
- It wouldn't be all my writing, I'd probably only be adding one or two things a newsletter. Instead I'd be relying on my abilities as a curator of material to fill each one.
- It would by nature be repetitive. That is, if I created a slot for Planet OTW, each week would cover a planet in sequence, and then we'd be done with that for a while. There’d be short term items serialized and a longstanding set of permanent fixtures.
- It would be multimedia. Getting to see how the Seton LaSalle team interacts with the material I have given them has shown me that you need to engage them in lots of ways to get all the information across. I like the idea of integrating visual learners and audio learners into this community, and giving them things that will benefit them is valuable. I also can see where having a section with images, video, or audio will help creators in every other form of quizzing than circuit quiz bowl.
- If I had the energy and time, I could take the sources from one newsletter and compile a packet. It wouldn't necessarily be the right distribution, or right difficulty for any particular event, but it would have enough material that someone could start from that and have enough ideas in their head to create a round of questions, or a night's entertainment at the bar. Hopefully doing something like that will coax out the writing impulses of those readers who want to help create next year’s questions. As we’ll see later this is something I’m very concerned with for 2024 and beyond. But if the supply is just a small number of items, I think writers would be concerned they items might be seen by who plays on those questions.
- The items chosen to be OTW would be ones that had some conscious choice that would interlink them to other pieces of information. For instance, I might not do River of the Week, but I might do Bridge of the Week and have that mention the river that it passes over.
So this would be a weekly list of 40-50 items of interest in a variety of subjects, in a variety of media, which would be useful in quizzing in any number of formats or difficulties. Okay. I’ll do a test run of the process this week. Saturday threatens to be a snowbound mess anyway. While that seems daunting, I think I have most of the components in place.
In looking over 2023, I'm struck by a sort of melancholy in that a lot of my worries about organizational strength being sapped by COVID in the long term kind of came true this year. There are times when I hate being correct in my predictions. The damage hasn't been on the visible level to most people reading this, it's been in the places that get ignored by the circuit.
- After a 30-year run, National Academic League closed up shop in July. At one point this was one of the largest programs for middle schools, and pioneered competition over telephony, with their annual championship decided through video call. NAL was also one of the few providers that worked with city and metropolitan school districts to make leagues across major cities.
- After a 15-year run without its writer, the last archives of Patrick's Press were retired from sale. While we mock it, it was the introduction to competition for thousands of players and schools, and will probably remain a practice staple in schools that don’t realize other free options exist.
In addition to these closures, we’ve seen other providers reduce their scope and drop state formats, and events that had long been supplied by other organizations having to turn to other places because their normal provider is having health issues. I spent two weekends in 2023 with the unpleasant task of figuring out who might still be looking to continue their school’s program. And if I hadn’t lucked in to three leagues that didn’t know what they were going to do now, and wanted to keep going, I’d have found the task crushing.