This weekend, I traveled to Maine, specifically Maranacook Community School, a little west of Augusta. At Cat Nats last year, John B from Maine told me they’d talked about computerizing their tournaments this year for the first time on tabroom.com, and being the sucker nice guy that I am, I volunteered to come up and [...]
This year’s Yale Invitational was an exercise to answer the question, “Can Palmer run a major invitational tournament while mostly walking around in a relative fog and running at a rather low level of motivation?” The answer, it appears, is yes. The tournament ran fine, and the crack tab staff did their usual crack thing. [...]
I’ve come to realize that most of my job in running college-hosted forensics tournaments is the judicious granting or withdrawal of permission for the hosts to engage in mindless panic attacks.
PF is caught between two opposing forces. The first is community-based lay judging. This feature helps avoid the false-logic style of debating that infects policy and LD to some degree; you end up with long chains of evidence that are fine for a flowpad, but the end result is simply untrue — increasing health care [...]
I was born and raised in New England, and I like the winters here. My family originally comes from even further north, the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence. So there was little chance I was going to enjoy a trip to Birmingham, AL, for four days, in the middle of June. 95 degree [...]