Pagination is a real thing. It is what people do so that
books look good. Literally it is the act of turning pages into text, but when
books are laid out automatically (we use InDesign), they don’t necessarily look
as good as they can. Loose lines, widows and orphans, that sort of thing. So
someone goes through and paginates, so that the final text is pleasing to the
eye. It can also be in aid of shortening or lengthening text, i.e., the number
of lines, if you have some sort of parameter to meet. Around the DJ, it’s the
act of making nice visually. It is one of those wonderful activities that only
occasionally draws on your skills of literally doing it; mostly you’re
listening to music and thumbing through pages and finding nothing, until you do
find something and have to address it. Then again, the reason I refer to Marty
P as the Paginator has nothing to do with the above, or anything else more
interesting than his actual last name and my tendency to give people nicknames,
some of which are way better than others. I’m especially proud of pure coinages
like the Panivore, I’m happy with Peanuts, Burgers, Speedy and Stealth, I can
live with initials just to save time, although they’re entirely for use here,
as I never turn to Palmer and say, “Hey, CP, what’s up?” Come to think of it, I
can’t remember ever turning to anyone and saying “What’s up?” but that’s
another issue entirely.
I mention all of this because now Monagle is wondering what
he needs to do to get a nickname. Beats me. Take up some weird habit, or better
yet, disclose some weird habit: if he were an eeler on the side, or a
semi-professional kick boxer, or a master prestidigitator, then we might have
something. Become an Irish citizen and change his name to O’Mangle? French and
La Gnome? Become a place so you can be a Monagwesian? I don’t know. This is all
a matter of inspiration, not perspiration, and you can see the sweat in this paragraph. Pfui.
Meanwhile, the Re-Gem worked out. I can’t recall any
invitationals that have gotten canceled and then reborn on another weekend and
ended up respectably. I can’t remember any, period. We certainly weren’t as big
as Gem 1.0, but we were big enough. I mean, we didn’t have enough rooms, so we
were big enough for that. The thing is, the university holds rooms for the
normal weekend; other activities already had their claims in for this one. But
still, about 100 PFers ain’t hay, and they were extremely competitive. So was
the half-that LD division. A few people came from far and wide (including
Vancouver), but mostly it was the northeast. Understandable.
Of course, you want to hear about all the bad stuff. Tabroom
worked pretty well. It did a couple of quirky things that we might not have
done, but once we saw it we could see the inherent albeit mechanical reasoning,
and we left things as they were. I mean, once you start farting around with a
pairing, you’d better have a damned good reason for it, because the odds are
you’re going to make things worse, not better. On the opposite side, with a
small field/pool, prefs were pretty damned good. We didn’t have to tinker much
with panels at all; improvement wasn’t going to happen. There was much
discussion of e-ballots versus p-ballots: I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
We did have one bollix. Gemmers were entering the ballots,
and for round 6 they gave the job to a different team without telling them about switching
sides in PF, which means that a goodly portion of a round was entered
incorrectly. We paired not knowing this, but we found out in about two seconds,
as the judges started throwing tomatoes at us in judge call. Unfortunately, it
meant that some teams who thought they had broken in fact hadn’t because the
brackets were redistributed, and we could only break the top 32. Total points
ended up being the deciding factor, and if you can’t drop highs and lows, you
really don’t want a 26 on there. Need a reason to work toward the best possible
speaker points, which usually requires reading your judges and responding to
that read? Speaker points matter, and speaking per se matters in PF, where so
many of the judges are not terribly experienced. Sounding good doesn’t replace
being good, but it sure helps it along.
Other than that, nothing sticks out. It was a pretty smooth
weekend, with the Paginator and Monagle on speech and congress, and Kaz and I
and Catholic Charlie handling the debate chores. Aside from the incident above,
there wasn’t any storming of the barricades. We did have one self-proclaimed
protest of a PF round, but since we were operating under NSDA rules, you really
have to make the protest in the round and make the protest the voting point,
and then come to the directors and claim that the judge was wrong, and even
then good luck, because the presumption is always for the judge in the round.
Complaining that the judge should have done what the judge didn’t do won’t hack
it, even if the opponents did something wrong. We concluded that they didn’t,
much less that the protest couldn’t stand because it wasn’t appropriately
called in the round. Of course the bottom line is that PFers and evidence are a
mug’s game, and the rules don’t help much at the point where there’s
paraphrasing. Another word to the wise: don’t ever paraphrase. Forget that the
rules allow it. If you do it, it is not as good a strategy as not doing it. A
real card saying “25%” versus a distilled blip saying “not a lot” are not the
same thing.
___
/
No comments:
Post a Comment