These review posts are coming later and later in the week, that's usually how you know we're in the second half of the season.
Week 4 was a themed set! We're all suckers for themed weeks at B612, even though they're usually a bit divisive amongst players. There is a challenge to picking 15 topics that connect to a single theme without ruining the spread of the question set, and it's a very enjoyable one for our team of setters.
This time the theme started off as "The Nightime", but we veered towards it becoming simply "Dark Mode". In recognition of this, we even asked Readers to run their game in Dark Mode using this plugin on their browsers! The exact directive was "Switch to dark mode after all the 4 players have joined, so they get to see it happen, but don't explain anything". It was a joy to watch players slowly figure out what was happening and allow it to affect their guessing in positive ways.
A very pretty quad to start off, 4 (and now 5) photographs taken from aboard the ISS. Shame on us for not including NASA-sanctioned pictures of India during Diwali, but the quad works without it too.
Some guessed Pompeii for the L2. It's unfortunate cos that means they did crack the question, but the round circular patch in the photo had to be the volcano Mt Vesuvius and not the town nearby.
Bosphorus is now a fairly common funda in quizzes, being a reference to the Greek myth of Io who was transformed into a cow either by Zeus to hide her from Hera, or by Hera herself as punishment. She roamed the earth, constantly bothered by a gadfly, until she crossed the strait in question and met Prometheus.
I-95 played pretty tough but I've since learnt a couple of useful tips about American interstate highways, shown below.
Here's an extra for you.
Which stretch is this, as seen from the ISS at night? The lights clearly demonstrate the geographical entity that dictates the population concentration.
Answer: The Nile
🎯 MMD’s got his first musket! He answered all four of these questions, in a quad that go zero other miss-keteers. A rare achievement.
2. Historic Nightclubs
Here's an extra for you.
One of the most expensive and exclusive nightclubs in this capital city is the ‘MN Roy’, named for Bengali revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy, who is famously associated with his work in that particular part of the world, thousands of miles away from his homeland. In which capital city in the Americas would you find the MN Roy nightclub?
Answer: Mexico City
3. The NIGHTIE
Our irreverent quad for the week had an intro question that we were genuinely concerned about because it seemed 'nightie' might be hard to guess given how interchangeable the term is with nightgown and nightdress (both of which earned a prompt).
Muumuu was a new word for me, but the correct percentage here belies how many people seemed to have heard of it, without knowing it was from Hawaii.
4. Lunar Deities
Allah being possibly derived from Hubal was probably my favourite question of the week, even though it did play much harder than expected.
Archeologist Hugo Winkler was the first to associate which term for God with an ancient Arabian deity called Hubal, whom he called a lunar deity? The association came about simply because a statue of Hubal was present at a highly significant location now considered the house of god by the followers of this religion. This theory has been refuted by several scholars and is even considered an insult to the followers.
Answer: Allah
Lunar Eclipse made for an excellent origin story, but using the phrases 'natural phenomena' and 'set to happen in May and October' might have given away a little too much.
Given the popularity of Moonknight when it first came out, it's a little surprising that Khonshu was answered this infrequently.
5. Novels set over one night
Snuff had a very low answer rate, but it did prompt some of my favourite guesses this week. "What's the title of this book about serial fornication, that shares its name with a Terry Pratchett work?" "Uhh, Dickworld?"
Malazan had an issue with question framing, as we asked for the name of the 'universe' rather than the name of the series, and that prompted some die-hards to guess "Wu", which is the name that Steven Erikson has jokingly given the planet that Malazan is set on.
I’ve been asked why the Murakami question was framed the way it was, i.e. a lovely writeup about the plot of a lesser-known work of his, followed by a massive name drop with 1Q84 that ensures the question is answered.
After Dark is a novel about a college student who is out all night in Tokyo and runs into some interesting people including a Chinese-speaking prostitute, the owner of a love motel, a shady businessman, and more. Who penned this work in 2007, who also wrote 1Q84, a book set over a single year?
The short answer is that the question was intended to be an easy one, and the first line establishes the theme. The long answer is that quizzes aren’t exams, and many who play this sport do it to learn more than they do it to be evaluated. Yes, the question didn’t need the first line at all to be answered, but its inclusion elevates the question from a simple trivia test to a more readable puzzle. Now you know about a Murakami book that you hadn’t heard of before. This cannot be a bad thing.
Here’s an extra for you
Barring the last couple of pages, which shows the titular character turn over a new leaf, the entire novel is set over one night - one special night, in fact, featuring The Past, The Present and Yet To Come. Name this 1843 work.
Answer: A Christmas Carol
6. Nocturnal Animals
Some really great TILs in this quad, which I'm going to summarize here.
Owl wings have bristles along them to help break up air flow and act as silencers while approaching their prey.
The 'glowing eyes' you see on nocturnal animals is due to a layer of tissue called the tapetum lucidum, which bends light back.
Animals that have evolved to be active at the end of the day are called crepuscular animals, from the Latin word for twilight.
Fireflies have the scientific name lampyridae and they glow by burning something called luciferin in their bellies.
7. Nocturne Paintings
Kandinsky was a new name for me, but it played fairly easy. I watched a lot of people guess it simply because "that's the only Russian abstract artist I know", which sounds like a useful thing to memorise.
**Which painter’s work**, called ‘The Empire of Light’, is notable for its depiction of a blue, cloudy sky on top, but a dark, streetlit neighbourhood at the bottom. In this regard, it is both a night painting, and yet not - typical of the artist’s provocative approach.
Answer: Magritte
🎯 A musket-magnet is what this quad was, with Arun TP, Debanjan Bose, Saurav Mahale and Jing Feng all scoring a perfect 4/4 score.
8. Floodlights for Night Games
200 special tiles are laid below the surface of the pitch in this slum in Rio Di Janeiro that grabbed headlines in 2014 for its unique floodlights, which operate thanks to a technology called Pavegen. These floodlights get their power almost instantaneously. What generates the power for these floodlights?
Answer: The movements of the players! Hence, pave-gen.
🎯 Nayan and Naveen scored perfect muskets in this quad, their first of the season.
9. Artificial Nights
In hindsight, Day for Night is too harsh a question to end a set with. Most people aren't going to know the François Truffaut movie, and the cinematic technique is a crapshoot which isn't likely to land on "day for night". The "for" could probably have been given as part of the question.
10. Dark Matter
I've started to really enjoy science quads that do a good job with exposition of a technical topic (even when they stretch the week's theme since there's probably nothing dark about dark matter). Rajat has a bit of a knack for this, using every word in our 80-word limit to squeeze in extra information that doesn't help you answer the question, but does teach you new stuff.
Just look at this L1 question:
The Lambda-CDM model, also known as the standard model of Big-Bang cosmology, is one which accounts for the four most important facts about the universe - cosmic microwave background, the abundance of Hydrogen, Helium & Lithium, the large scale structure of the distribution of the galaxies, and the accelerating expansion of the universe. If Lambda is the cosmological constant, and the C stands for "Cold", what does DM stand for?
Answer: Dark Matter
This question could've been asked in under 20 words and probably still had the same L1 answer rate, but Rajat prefers to use the space he has to tell you about the 4 properties of the universe that any cosmological model needs to explain to be taken seriously. It makes for a more fulfilling quiz.
11. Adult Swim x Cartoon Network
What goes on on Cartoon Network after dark?
The first ever original production on Adult Swim was a comedy late-night talk show created by Mike Lazzo, featuring a 1960s Hannah-Barbera character reimagined as the titular talk show host. Subtitled rhymingly as "Coast to Coast", what was this show, where the host made a talking mantis and a lava-headed man do unpaid labour as punishment for crimes on the original series?
Answer: Space Ghost
12. Sleep Disorders in Movies
Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking played _extremely_ hard, and not because too few people know about the scene. The question used the quote "Out, damned spot!" and that led people to guess that she was washing her hands instead of focusing on the other clue in the question, the "eerie, blank stare."
The L2 question is a bit of a masterclass in question writing and packing hints into a few words, so take another look at it with all the hints highlighted.
Quite possibly the only time that you'd come across 'sleep-swimming' is in the trailer for a 2016 sequel to a 2003 film. The titular character indulges in it, as well as talking in her sleep, and the trailer seems to suggest that this is the reason for this forgetful character having flashes that guide her towards discovering her origins. The scene was edited out in the final cut. What's the title of the 2016 film?
Answer: Finding Dory
13. Black Food Trends
🎯 AP has been on top of this trend, scoring a perfect score and grabbing his first musket.
14. Twelfth Night Traditions
A tough quad, thanks to the 2 practical L4s, but take a look at the Reddit post that led to Kshitij Bedekar being one of the 3 people in the league that got this question right.
It is considered bad luck to leave Christmas decorations beyond the Twelfth Night, so one tradition on that day is to remove the decorations. Those who don’t observe this tradition typically keep the decorations till February 1st, the eve of which other festival?
Answer: Christmastide
15. The Night Of
A very literal interpretation of the theme gave us 4 titles with “Night Of” in them. I’ll be honest, only one question here really seemed worth it and that’s why the entire quad was included.
Here’s your extra:
In which Nissim Ezekiel poem does the protagonist remember the time his mother was victim to a creature “Parting with his poison - flash of diabolic tail in the dark room”?
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