Game Week 8 Analysis: The Little Prince, Poetry from Zen Pencils, and To Pimp a Butterfly
A season-end review and info about Season 4
8 weeks of quizzing are finally up, and we've reached the end of the season. A big thank you to all of you for putting up with this. We're working on report cards for each one of you now, so stay tuned for that.
First up, our congratulations to our Season 3 winners. 2 rounds of knockouts is no small feat, especially for a league that was otherwise being very deliberately non-competitive. Take a bow, winners of the B612 Quiz League!
Santosh Swaminathan
Pat Gibson
Jeffrey Seguritan
Murty MVR
Piyush Kedia
Sourjo Sengupta
Dhruv Mookerji
Subrat M
Ananth Kachroo
Apratim "Belur" Mukhopadhyay
Ritwik Ghosh
Subramaniam Balakrishna
Kumar Shobhit
Gautham Mahadevan
Aditya Morarka
Naveen Giles
Santosh V
Aditya Dhulipala
Vignesh Ramani
Bharat Kumar Ramesh
We had far fewer quizzes this time than in previous weeks, and honestly, I'm kind of puzzled about why. We'd been clear about not wanting to eliminate anyone at any stage of the league before we even began, so we did end up drawing all ~160 people into games, friendly or otherwise. But only 3 of the planned 21 friendly games ended up getting scheduled. People seem to lose interest if you call a game a friendly, or maybe they just want to do it on their own time and not share results. Oh well.
A Note on Season 4
Before we start with the quad review, I have some requests:
Season 4 of the B612 will start sometime in October. You can sign up right away here: Season 4 Sign-Up
Somewhere around the start of Season 2 of the league, we had done a series of interviews of people who had been participating in these quizzes. We didn't have a set of questions or anything, we just wanted to know what people are generally looking for when they sign up for a quiz league and whether they felt like they'd found it in B612 or any of the other quiz leagues. I heard some really nice stories about how people first got into quizzing, what they like about it, and how they've tried to keep it a part of their lives while working on other stuff. In a nutshell, it's just fun talking about quizzing and I think these conversations helped a lot in deciding the direction and tone of the B612 league. We'd like to do it again, simply because it's been a while and there are probably a lot more people to talk to. If you're interested in having a quick chat about what quizzing means to you, please let me know on the same form.
If you’d rather not have an actual conversation, but still have something to tell us, please use the Feedback form.
And now, to the questions.
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
You can share your feedback on this set by leaving a comment, or using the Feedback Form.
Raw Data: Game Week 8
1. Children's Literary Characters
We started the quiz with a bit of self-indulgence.
Fun fact: Although the artwork we're using all over our communications doesn't leave much doubt, we've never actually explained the name B612 anywhere. During Season 1 it was just left as a fun "figure it out" exercise for people who might be signing up, and while we intended to change it, we never did. I was surprised myself by how not-straightforward it was to google it. If someone asks you what B612 means, do us a favour, and don't tell them. IYKYK, and the others can figure it out.
The very slight L1/L2 mess-up here was mine. Vikas, who set the quad, had used a different image for the question, but I changed it because it had an ugly watermark on it. Here's the original image. Do you think it would've made the question harder for you?
I fully expected Beverley Cleary to go unanswered, but 7 answers is quite a lot.
2. Made-up Bands
If you see a quad on made-up bands, it generally means there's a question on Spinal Tap coming. I've never watched the movie myself, but like Stanley Kubrick and the Greek alphabet, it's just one of those things that quizzes assume everyone is interested in.
In one of the quizzes I read, Shankha got the L2 right simply by looking very closely at the image and reading aloud "Berry" written on the bass drum in the background. Surname is enough, and he got a well-deserved point.
Village Rockstars played well for an L4, and it's also your season-ending recommendation from this league. If a quad shows up in the first week of Season 4, do not say we did not warn you.
3. Ogden Nash food poems
I love a quad that doesn't take itself too seriously. Like rap, poetry makes for surprisingly good questions too, because the rhyme scheme can sometimes act as an extra hint. I say sometimes because in this case it was the only hint, and we didn't even give that for the L4.
This also made for my favourite bit of reading last week. I'd recommend poeticous.com if you want to check out more Ogden Nash poems since the UX of showing card previews at the bottom of the page works great for short poems: you're essentially reading about 15 poems together.
My favourite one so far:
The Jellyfish
Who wants my jellyfish?
I’m not sellyfish!
4. Japanese Refinement Arts
The quizziest of this week's quads is also a deep, deep Wikipedia rabbit hole to fall into.
Another misjudgement, again one of mine. Vikas had put Ikebana at L2 and Mulberry at L4, but I moved them around a bit and was subsequently surprised by how many people knew what ikebana was. Sorry folks. If Pat Gibson is the only one getting an L3 right in a quiz league, you know you’ve messed up.
5. Classroom Trigono
It's been a while since our last back-to-school quad, and I enjoyed reading this, in spite of how easy it ended up being.
🎯 Bharat Kumar Ramesh managed to score the very last musket of the season by picking up all 4 of the points in this quad. Kudos to Bharat, but who are these other group members who passed on every one of these questions??
We had another one of these in the tiebreakers, a particularly silly one if you ask me, which I'm sharing here in case your quiz didn't go that far.
What is
tan(0)? In other words, what is the ratio of the 'opposite' side of a right triangle to the 'adjacent' side, when the angle is 0°? The image at the top of this section might help you.Answer: 0. As the value of θ decreases, so does the length of the opposite side. At 0°, the opposite side disappears completely, meaning any ratio with the length of the opposite side in the numerator would also be zero.
6. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly
I have a growing interest in hip-hop (I'd like to make a full 16-quad Mimir set based on song lyrics someday) and one of these obvious choices for exploring that interest in a quiz is Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. This quad went through a lot of changes, with the original being written entirely in verse (I got nowhere with that) and the v2 attempting to recreate the poem from the album, i.e. revealing a question a few lines at a time. Eventually, the deadline drew nearer and we just went with a vanilla quad.
While the album is a pretty big deal, the quad intro question just didn't have enough clues in it and ended up playing too hard to be an L3, while Alex Haley is more well-known than we anticipated.
I'm happy we managed to squeeze in a "hidden in plain sight" hint for the L1 though, here's the question again.
Many tracks on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly contain a spoken-word performance of a poem. Revealed only a few lines at a time, these segments come together at the end of the last track 'Mortal Man'. The poem then transforms into a "conversation" edited to seem as if Lamar is conducting a live interview with which influential 90s figure? Lamar has mentioned that the entire album was intended to be an allusion to this figure, which is why it was originally intended to be titled Tu Pimp a Caterpillar.
Answer: Tupac Shakur. The original title of the album would've abbreviated to "Tu.P.a.C"
7. India @ Formula 1
Interest in Formula One has gone up dramatically in the last couple of years, largely due to Netflix's Drive to Survive (I'm a convert myself). It follows that F1 pops up in quizzes far more frequently now than it used to. The India connect is still fairly limited though, meaning if I ever tell you that we're doing an 'India @ F1' quad, you'll immediately guess half the answers: Karthikeyan, Chandok, Force India, etc.
How do we avoid that? Well, the goal was to hide the quad itself for as long as possible. Buddh Circuit appeared first, meaning the quad could've been sports venues or F1 tracks. The second answer (not the question) made the quad obvious, and the remaining questions were trivia.
The 2005 United States GP is notorious in Formula 1 history for seeing 14 cars from 7 teams pull out of the race after the formation lap, leaving only 6 cars to actually compete in the race. Of these 6 drivers, Ferrari's Michael Schumacher came first. Who came fourth, more than a lap behind Schumacher? It was by far his best ever result, and was in fact the only points finish of his entire F1 career.
Answer: Narain Karthikeyan
I enjoyed watching some people figure out this question purely on the basis of "why on earth would you be asked me about an obscure F1 driver who only scored points once in his career...unless he's Indian." Well done, chaps.
It's also kind of funny how many people can tell you that Perez used to drive for a team that had a pink card ("the pink Mercedes") but can't remember the name of the team. Got you there.
8. Words with Xenophobic Origins
A refreshingly perfect difficulty gradient, and a nice collection of fundae that you feel like you should've seen a dozen times before in quizzes, but somehow haven't.
I was surprised to find out that people had actually heard of the 'Dutch oven' prank (calling it a prank seems like giving it too much credit) before this quiz. Here's a link for some extra reading. For a laugh, check what the phrase "dutch oven surprise" links to.
9. Zen Pencils Poetry Quotes
Two good difficulty gradients in a row, is this even a B612 quiz? And with a lit quad, no less.
Nelson Mandela was our repeat funda of the week, appearing in a Zen Pencils comic for his favourite poem Invictus, and also in the Kendrick quad for Robben Island.
Google must've picked up on this too, cos I got this interview in my Youtube feed a few days later, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I have been a Craig Ferguson fanboi for many years, and here he's interviewing a Nobel Laureate and a personal friend of Nelson Mandela. They talk about him too. It's a great interview, pliss watch.
10. Foods associated with Sporting Events
See this is why you need an F&B category in your list, so you can find gems like this. A sports quad in an F&B trenchcoat.
11. Anand Gandhi
The 'gimme' quad of the week, with both L1 and L2 being answered over 80% of the time.
Like Indian Reality Shows last week, people seem almost embarrassed to take point for knowing Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi.
Ship Of Theseus becomes the first 100% question in B612 history, with not a single person getting it wrong or even passing on it.
The number of people who had Tumbbad on their fingertips makes me think I should watch it too, but Village Rockstars is already our recommendation of the week and I don't want this to be that post that says it'll give you a recommendation and instead gives you 10.
13. Countries Named By Explorers
In a rare first, I got 3/4 in a geography quad! Of course, it was the 3 easy ones, but that's enough for me, my geography standards are far lower than yours.
I loved how each of these questions had a similarly half-hidden clue in there for you to pick up on the answer:
Beard -> Barbuda
Lion -> Leone
Biblical King -> Solomon
Wet European City State -> Venice
A lot of quads have one or two questions like this, but the others devolve into trivia (see Indian @ F1). But the questions in this quad could all work fine as standalone questions in a pub quiz since each of them has enough info in it.
14. Quiz
As ridiculous as it sounds, this was a "science" quad. Our current category list doesn't handle internet trends very well, so we just threw it around. If your year-end report cards have a downtick in science, feel free to blame this topic.
Like Countries Named by Explorers this was 3 easy questions and 1 tougher one, which we used to balance our seat difficulty. The tough one was probably my favourite question from the week:
NASA's several Twitter handles came up with different one-word tweets (such as NASA Aeronautics tweeting "flight"). The best, however, was NASA Internships, which tweeted which word that represents what an internship is, and alludes to one of its vehicles launched in 2003?
Answer: Opportunity
15. Football Clubs X Greek Myth
Finally, we've got a quad that makes you think "there can't be 4 of these" but of course there are.
Quad Difficulty
A Personal Note
If you’ve made it this far, both in the league and in this post, thank you. No seriously, I didn't expect anyone to make it this far. I didn’t have an ending in mind at all, I figured people would catch the bits they were interested in and then move on to some other doom scroll-friendly part of the internet. The fact that you’re still here is extremely endearing and I am very grateful.
As I’ve mentioned before, running this quiz league is a bit of a dream come true. “Hmm, that’s a rather pathetic dream Harman, aim higher,” I hear you say. But you do not understand. For the longest time, quizzes have made me happy in a way that little else does. I’m talking r/HumanTippyTaps happy. I often step away from a laptop having just finished reading a quiz and just spend the next hour or so beaming about nothing in particular. I don’t need to have done well in the quiz for this to happen, the quiz itself just needs to be fun. Not the scores, not the questions, not the content at all if I’m being honest. Sometimes a group of 4 just clicks and everyone involved in the quiz, winners and losers alike, just ends up having a great time. The questions you get right make you smile, but you keep smiling through the questions you miss too. This is what I’d like to do with most of my time, and a league like this allows me to do it at scale. That’s why it’s a dream. Because it’s all the good stuff as a regular quiz, except it’s happening 50 times a week.
I don’t know for sure what we’re doing next. It’s obvious that we’re going to need to differentiate somehow, because there are way too many leagues doing the same thing and we don’t want to get drowned out. Mimir is the current fad, and we’ll ride for as long as it’s relevant, but someday there will be a new format to try and I want to make sure that the real thing we’re building is the community of friendly quizzers. People who are good at sharing this unlikely pastime with other, newer people. For this reason, I hope you do sign up for the B612 Extras. Right now it’s just a single friendly set that Vikas and I are working on, which we’ll pass around. But there will be more.
Finally, I hope that if you’ve enjoyed your experience in this league, you can convince a couple of your friends to give quizzing a shot too. I’m not asking you to get them to sign up with us (although that would certainly help Season 4 happen). I’ve spent enough time begging people to try out quizzing to know that nobody jumps straight to an 8-week commitment. But during this off-season, please try and get your friends to join you for a friendly game or two. Ping me or Vikas, we’d be happy to read.
Okay, that’s all. Here’s a feedback form for your lowe, and here’s a signup form for Season 4. See you in October.
