You can find the question set here, both in the order they were asked as well as in the order they’ll be covered here: Question Set
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1. New Yorker Tragic Covers
It feels weird for me to say this about a topic that I personally would've gotten 1/4 in, but this was an "easy" quad.
Fukushima appears to be a name most people can remember easily, and Uvalde was recent enough to score 40% answers even at L4. Nice difficulty gradient.
2. Star Lord's Awesome Mix
We can do audio questions now! Should we do audio questions though? That's a whole other question.
Since it was our very first time trying this, we tried to frame these as questions that are perfectly answerable even without the audio. This was in case any readers had issues with audio sharing, so they could skip the audio entirely if they needed to and the questions would still work. The downside is that this makes the audio clips seem gratuitous, which of course they were. They were more "musical breaks" in the quiz than actual questions, which is why we encouraged readers to play the whole thing even if someone knows the answer. I enjoyed them thoroughly. It's like you got 30 seconds to dance amidst an otherwise very involved 60 minutes of quizzing.
The difficulty gradient was perfect, and I applaud those of you who managed to remember who sang "Come and Get Your Love".
🎯 In particular, let's applaud Anup Kumar and Carlo John Aiello who got all 4 questions correct in this quad and scored their first muskets of the season.
Note for question setters of one-off friendlies and other quiz leagues: To embed an audio clip in your question, add the following to the question text column of your TSV file. Replace the URL with any direct link to a hosted audio file.
We used JukeHost, which seems to work well. Hope we see audio clips in other leagues soon!
Up until Week 3, we were still taking care to ensure that the last round had a lower percentage of L4 questions than other rounds, so to increase the possibility of close and exciting finishes. This has changed now, as is evident with the L4 of this quad appearing in Player 4’s last 3 questions.
This placement still made for some great quizzing moments, as more and more people were able to “guess” the name of a port in the Philippines. I loved the question, as convoluted as it was, so I’m sharing it here again.
Which Subterranean River National Park featuring underground waterfalls, located in the Saint Paul Mountain Range on the western coast of the island of Palawan features in the New 7 Wonders of Nature list? If we told you that the city it is named after can be construed as a female (as opposed to male) and Spanish (as opposed to French) version of another capital city's name, one ravaged by an earthquake in 2010 (and 2021), give us the name of this city/ park.
Answer: Peurto Princesa [The reference is to Port-Au-Prince, capital of Haiti]
3 consecutive quads with perfect difficulty gradient may seem suspicious to you, but don’t worry, we’re about to throw this streak out of the window with the next one.
4. Themed Episode Titles of TV Shows
A quad that looks like it was intended to be even, but was really just bad judgement on our part. That 70s Show turned out to be the easiest one, even easier than Mr Robot and WandaVision, which I thought was stunning.
You'd think that with the preponderance of Shakespeare fundae in quizzing circles, we'd really start to memorise some quotes from a few of his plays by now. But nope, some quotes are still too obscure and make for bad L3s. Total 160 means absolutely everyone in the league got to attempt that question: 61 people got it wrong, 98 passed, and Kushan Patel was that one person who got it right!
5. Tracey Emin's Whimsical Artworks
Another name that most people I know are aware of only because of how much the world of quizzing loves her and her “My Bed” art piece.
This played out as well as any Arts quad could. I got to hear about 4 different pronunciations of Edvard Munch, which is always fun. FWIW I’ve settled on “ed-vard moo-nkh”.
6. Cat Family
A pretty wide topic, and one I think we might revisit at some point, since 4 is a pretty small number of questions. Minor misjudgement in the L1 vs L2 difficulty level, with Jaguar playing harder, which I was quite surprised by.
My guess is that the L2 question had a lot of ‘in-routes’, meaning you could get the answer either by knowing that a chopped tail is called a "bobbed” tail, or that there used to be an NBA franchise from Charlotte, or that there’s a company by that name that builds farm equipment. Or hey, just knowing the answer.
Belonging to the medium-sized wild cat genus Lynx, which North American cat has distinctive black bars on its forelegs and a black-tipped, stubby (or "_____") tail, from which it derives its name? An American manufacturer of farm and construction equipment shares the name as did a Charlotte-based NBA franchise for a short period in the 2000s.
Answer: Bobcat
7. Cry Havoc! and Let Slip the Dogs of War
Of course, once we realized audio clips work we had to go ahead and try videos too. This quad had 2 quite useless video clips, neither of which added anything to the questions, but made for entertaining breaks all the same.
More people recognize and can quote a Shakespeare line than can recognize Marlon Brando, which is wonderful. Bonneville should really have been an L3, and Craig Shakespeare would’ve made for a nice, workable L4, but the difference is small enough that it didn’t change much.
I was quite excited while making this quad, just cos it was so free-flowing and far-reaching. Top Gear, Forsyth, even a completely random football connect! The one problem was that the quad was impossible to categorize. We ended up putting it under Literature, just cos that’s the overall connection, but the questions came from movies, sports and motorsport too.
8. Elementary Division
The back-to-school quad for the week didn’t really work well this time, if we’re being honest. Probably cos this wasn’t really stuff we all learnt in school, more like what people in other parts of the world learnt instead of what we learnt at school.
I was expecting people to trip up and get annoyed with Short Division, but that turned out to be doable. Chunking and Fourier Division on the other hand were nigh ungettable, even though I was witness to at least one wild “French name” guess that was correct.
9. Non-English Songs atop Billboard Hot 100
A nice quad idea IMO, and one we probably could’ve done with audio clips if we hadn’t already used a bunch of media this week.
The difficulty gradient was alright, although Macarena was probably a little too easy for an L2.
10. Pour Some Sugar On Me!
Yes that’s right, we really did a quad on sugar substitutes in the week immediately following the one where we did one on saccharides. It’s hard coming up with 2 F&B quads every week, so when we have an idea we use it twice 😅
A solid difficulty gradient again. I’m as surprised as you are, we’re usually so bad at this.
Here’s an extra sweetener for you.
What natural sweetener, obtained from a namesake plant native to Brazil and Paraguay, has been used by the Guarani people for over 1500 years? Over 50 to 300 times as sweet as refined sugar, its legality is on the edge in many nations but countries like Japan use it extensively.
Answer: Stevia
11. Sports played professionally by women only
Another good idea for a quad, and one that spanned the entire spectrum of difficulty.
Softball was a softie for most, getting answered in every single quiz and passed only 4 times in 40 quizzes.
Artistic Swimming acted as a worthy L4, with many people aware of the sport we were talking about but unaware of the new name. The question explicitly mentioned that synchronized swimming would not earn a prompt (just to make it an L4), which probably explains the higher than expected number of passes.
12. Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian
Okay, so this is the juicy one.
🎯 Before anything else, kudos to Vinod Hariharan for 4/4 and his first musket of the season in this quad!
Question: Is it FAIR to ask an entire quad’s worth of questions about a book written by someone who's actually participating in the league?
The case FOR it: A consistent theme across all Mimir leagues for me has been that the quads...shouldn't actually matter to the quizzers. Quads are a fun way to talk about what your quiz was about, and they allow QMs to measure and diversify their content well, but the quizzers themselves don't really need to care do they? If we ever do a quad that goes deep into a topic, well, you aren't expected to have read that book any more than you're expected to be aware of the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame. The questions themselves need to be good and gettable, the quads can be pretty much anything, who cares?
With this in mind, a quad on Indian fish dishes seemed to be a great idea, and we were chuffed to find that we could draw a nice connection to a book written by someone in the community. Of course, that guy himself could get all 4 answers right, but he'd get those even if we'd asked 4 questions on fish without mentioning his name, so no big deal right? Just good fun. Samanth ended up picking up only a single point in this quad, with the others in his group turning out to be big fish enthusiasts as well.
The case AGAINST it: While it may seem like everything worked out here, it definitely was because we got lucky. Samanth might've been in a group with 3 others who absolutely hate fish, and might've scored a musket, and this whole post would've been a bit awkward to write then. Sure, the questions are gettable, but the whole thing CAN still play badly in some situations. I'm reminded of a couple of quizzes I went to in Bangalore where it always seemed like the QMs and the top quizzers were sharing a bunch of inside jokes that I justdidn't get, and that's the sort of thing that can be really annoying to a new quizzer, especially when you're otherwise doing badly in the quiz.
Our conclusion is that while doing something like this wasn't strictly WRONG, we did get very lucky, and we probably won't be doing it again any time soon. Unless one of you reading this decides to write a book now and wants free promotion within the league. Then we're happy to do 4 questions and a Goodreads review in exchange for a free signed copy. Cheers.
13. Fighter Aircraft
A quad I’ve been itching to make ever since the first Top Gun: Maverick trailers came out. Fighter aircraft make for a niche fanbase, and it’s nice to see those people come out of the woodwork and grab points for extremely specific answers that sound like absolute gibberish to the others in the group: “Is this the SR-71?” “Yes, it is!” “Wut?”
The difficulty was all over the place though, hilariously so for a quad that was intended to be non-ascending. Something about the L3 just made it harder, probably the lack of sideways hints.
Got some interesting feedback for one of the questions in this quad: The Tomcat answer “clashed” with the other Cat Family quad in the quiz. This also happened with the Hamlet answer clashing with the Cry Havoc by Shakespeare quad. In fact, something like this has happened in previous weeks too. What’s happening here and why is it a problem?
Recently several quizzers have started seeing benefits in keeping track of the quads covered during the quiz. This helps them eliminate guesses, or just helps them focus on the right subject when a particular question comes up. They can sometimes even guess the approximate difficulty based on the difficulty levels of the questions that have gone by. “Quad counting” like this is a clever strategy, and definitely not against the rules or spirit of the quiz in any way. The problem is that quad counting relies on being able to correctly identify which question belongs to what quad. If it’s not obvious what quad a particular question belongs to (remember quad convergence?), there can be problems and there might even be mistakes.
As interesting as this is, we’re probably not going to do anything about it. While quad counting is fair game, quad obfuscation is too. In fact, we’re probably going to see if we can make this harder for quad counters somehow. No reason, I just think it might be a fun meta-game to play with those who are up for it :) Good luck!
14. Nandini Ramnath Movie Reviews
Another intended non-ascending quad, and misjudgement.
Aakashavaani played much, much harder than expected. An All-India Radio clue would probably have helped.
15. WWE Tag Teams
To wrap things up, here’s a non-ascending quad that played out perfectly!
🎯 Our nostalgia-themed quad also brought out an avalanche of musketeers, with Aswath Venkataraman, Jeffrey Seguritan, Pranjal Agrawal, Sreshth Shah, Aditya Morarka and Anup Kumarall scoring 4/4 in this quad.
Special Mentions
🎉 Anup Kumar got not one, but 2 distinct muskets in a single week. Amazing stuff!
2 separate games (130 and 142) saw 3 players getting miss-kets, or answering 3 out of 4 questions in a quad. I’m waiting for the day I can say all players got a miss-ket, meaning everyone excelled at something the others didn’t. A truly balanced quiz (or is it truly imbalanced?)
Seat Averages
X’s, or direct questions missed by all 4 seats. Seat 1: 4.55 Seat 2: 5.35 Seat 3: 4.28 Seat 4: 3.95
Owns, or direct questions answered by each seat. Seat 1: 6.05 Seat 2: 4.23 Seat 3: 5.93 Seat 4: 5.92
End of the curse of Seat 4??
You can share your feedback on this set by leaving a comment, or using the Feedback Form.
If you made it this far, has anyone told you how great you look today? Like damn, what an outfit, great stuff. Good luck with Week 5!
