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rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.
A trivia contest you say?! 38 HOURS STRAIGHT YOU SAY?

RAID ON TRIVIA 51



Let's get prepared again for TRIVIA, goons! We're back in action April 16, 17, and 18!

IMPORTANT DATES AND TIMES
APRIL 12 (TBD???) - 3-6pm EDT - PICTURE SCAVENGER HUNT BEGINS! (scroll down to read more about this part - we need more people to join earlier for this!)
APRIL 16 - 7pm EDT - CONTEST BEGINS.
APRIL 17 - 1am EDT - CONTEST PAUSED.

APRIL 17 - 9am EDT - CONTEST RESUMES.
APRIL 17 - 7pm EDT - APPROX. 30 MINUTE CONTEST BREAK (TBD???)
APRIL 18 - 1am EDT - CONTEST PAUSED.

APRIL 18 - 9am EDT - CONTEST RESUMES.
APRIL 18 - 7pm EDT - APPROX. 30 MINUTE CONTEST BREAK (TBD???)
APRIL 19 - 1am EDT - CONTEST ENDS. (Late Monday Morning)

APRIL 19 - POST-1am EDT - We find out results (this is somewhat variable)

Our Logo (2021) (Colors subject to change)

More colorways: https://imgur.com/a/qsev2Lp

What the crap do you want us to do?

We've broken top ten 8 straight years, (and Top 3 for 4 years in a row now) which should be described as an inhuman feat for a team that didn't exist before 2011.

Some teams play for generations and haven't cracked Top 50.

Tell Me More! :allears:

For the last 52 years Stevens Point, WI college radio station 90FM has run the world's largest trivia contest.
There are over 350 teams from around the world who compete. The entire town is taken over by trivia contestants.

These are the canonical rules, but here's a brief overview.

  • Game runs for 38 hours (with 2 breaks of 8 hours due to COVID)
  • Approximately 8 questions every hour. They read a question, play a song, re-read it, play another song.
  • You have until the end of the second song to get your answer in. You're competing to get a correct answer and to get the answer in on time.
  • Occasionally there is a speed round which is 10 questions. (Generally twice per contest)
  • There will be 2 shorter rounds (4 questions generally) with a 30 minute break near the halfway points of each day (7pm Saturday and Sunday EST)

:siren: PICTURE SCAVENGER HUNT :siren:
We will get 30 grainy, sometimes blurry, sometimes photoshopped, black and white pictures that we need to identify as much as possible.
These can range from random hot sauce labels, inner sleeves of record albums, random board games, random people/celebrities, old sports stars, etc.
This part is EXTREMELY difficult. This begins on APRIL 12 (TBD ???). We have until the question about that picture is asked to answer it (so nearly a full week).
Sometimes these questions are worth hundreds of points - THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Getting 1 or 2 more of these pictures than other teams can be the difference between 3rd and 7th place in recent years!

Imagine a couple thousand trivia nerds hitting redial :f5: for 38 hours straight. Yeah.

Things you should know:
  • The questions are designed to be Google-proof, but that's not always possible. They want to make you at least work to get the answers.
  • Scoring: The fewer people that answer correctly, the more valuable the question is and so those people get awarded more points.
  • You can do anything to get the answer.


What TEAM GOONS needs from you! :eng101:
Here's a list of things we need:
  • Data Entry Goons: Someone to transcribe the questions to text for people on IRC ---> THIS IS SUPER VALUABLE! If your WPM is over 120 PLEASE come help us out!
  • IRC We have a channel on synirc.net
  • Mumble We re-stream the audio for everyone over Mumble.
  • Recording the stream for review is essential. There are music questions where they play a 20 second clip of like 8 different songs. You have to try to get them all right. You are given a long time to answer, but if you only hear it once and don't have a recording you're missing out on big points. Being able to edit the clip and analyze it is invaluable.
  • Non-Americans are VERY welcome: Goons from around the world. They've had questions that Americans won't get. Pop culture or things in other countries could be on the list.
  • Media whores: You have every season of Hogan's Heroes, M*A*S*H* and other random TV shows? Yeah, we might need you to help us figure out what color socks someone is wearing or some other bullshit question.
  • On the ground Goons: We have a group of goons in that run the On the Ground stuff for us in Stevens Point. (Yes this contest also has LITERAL scavenger hunts in real life DURING the competition)
  • Music nerds: Example question given by a coworker (accuracy not guaranteed) "In the Huey Lewis and the News vinyl's included artwork there is a neon sign on the wall. What does it say?"
  • Also we will get 3 snippets of 8 songs each to identify. These are sometimes easy, sometimes hard as gently caress. The snippets of each song are at most 1-2 seconds. if you have an ear for this sort of thing, we can use your help!

Official website (Don't be shocked at how bad this is)

:siren: Our Results: :siren:
2011: Trivial Fursuit - 33rd place
2012: Trivial Fursuit: 2 Fat 2 Furriest - 14th place
2013: Trivial Fursuit: Tokyo Yiff'd - 8th place
2014: Trivial Fursuit: Watch Walker Wreck - 7th place
2015: Trivial Fursuit: Awful Mix Vol. 5 - 4th place
2016: Trivial Fursuit: 6 Sick Stick Shifts - 6th place
2017: Trivial Fursuit: Furple Reign - 3rd place
2018: Trivial Fursuit: Miner Threat - 3rd place
2019: Trivial Fursuit 9: Howlin' Haoeles - 3rd place
2020: Trivial Fursuit X: Gon Yiff It To Ya - 3rd place

For those with archives...
Trivia 42 (2011) thread
Trivia 43 (2012) thread
Trivia 44 (2013) thread
Trivia 45 (2014) thread
Trivia 46 (2015) thread
Trivia 47 (2016) thread
Trivia 48 (2017) thread
Trivia 49 (2018) thread
Trivia 50 (2019) thread
Experiment in Trivia (2021) thread

As you can see we have (almost always) improved steadily with each year, with our best years being the last 4, when we placed in THIRD out of over 350 teams, giving us our FOURTH straight top 3 finish.

FAQ: :psyduck:

How the gently caress do I participate?
Follow the guide in the next post

What is our team name this year?
Undetermined currently. Please suggest options. (Maximum 36 characters, including spaces and punctuation)
Here are a few options in no particular order:
  • Trivial Fursuit XI YiffPing HongDong
  • Trivial Fursuit: CoaXIal CoeXIstence
  • Trivial Fursuit: MaXImum AnXIety
  • Trivial Fursuit: The ToXIc Furvenger
  • Trivial Fursuit: Earth Dogs Are Easy
  • Trivial Fursuit: We Love Eating Cats
  • Trivial Fursuit: Came In Outer Space
  • Trivial Fursuit: XI Bangs, XI Bangs
  • Trivial Fursuit: Melmac Or Bust
  • Trivial Fursuit: XIntergalactic
  • Trivial Fursuit: Groon Lake
  • TriXIal FursXIt

Please suggest more!

We more than welcome other suggestions for team names!

It's February (or March), what should I do right now?
Come drop into IRC (details on the next post) and say hi, we can tell you a little more or answer just about any question you have.
Due to the rules of the contest we cannot share most information in a public setting but in IRC we can tell you a lot more so you can get a feel for it!

Where the gently caress do I order my shirt?

my cat is norris posted:

:siren: The hideous Trivial Fursuit 2021 t-shirt is available to be ordered through March 7th! :siren:

As always, our shirts are being printed by Commonwealth Press, a small business locally-owned in Pittsburgh, PA. This year's shirt will include a small addition of their union bug printed beneath our team logo. Folks I spoke to in Discord were in strong favor of us supporting CWP's labor union membership by printing the union bug.

https://forms.gle/BgUrQUrswvDBELZdA

Gallery of sample background colors forthcoming.

Can I see some sample questions?

Athanatos posted:

This sounds weird but is actually kinda cool. Give it a shot when the day comes.

Some sample questions:

During a TV campaign for the frozen dinners of Marie Callendar, the claim was made that every recipe started the same way. According to that campaign, how did the recipe start?

This product has the registered autograph and logo of a legendary athlete as well as many pictures of this athlete in action on containers. What is the complete name of this product?

Early in the years of television videos, there was a motivational one called "No fool like a fool playin' hooky." What is the last name of the teacher featured in that video?

What kind of music is played in between questions?

Here are some Spotify playlists you can check out!

quote:

Trivia 44 Playlist (thanks, Athanatos!)

Trivia 45 Playlist (thanks, Athanatos!)

Trivia 46 Playlist (thanks, CatNamedNorris!)

Trivia 47 Playlist (thanks, TotalNewbie!)

Trivia 48 Playlist (thanks, CatNamedNorris!)

Trivia 49 Playlist (thanks, CatNamedNorris!)

Trivia 50 Playlist (thanks, CatNamedNorris!)

TELL ME MORE ABOUT THIS CONTEST
There was a decent write up done in 2017 and our team was featured in it.
https://theoutline.com/post/1469/stevens-point-worlds-biggest-trivia-contest

Including a "documentary" video in which we are also featured
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-IyBRXaUls
Start at 9:45 if you can't be bothered to watch the whole thing

There was also a movie made over 10 years ago about the contest called Triviatown
We usually do a yearly (online) screening of this film the Friday night 7 days before the contest starts. April 16. It's a tradition. This year is weird. Again.

This sounds stupid and complicated I don't want to do it
Give it 15 minutes of your time and then decide. There are tons of people involved in this contest and so many different areas of it, we have players of all sorts, from 18 through 65+ participating.
The contest is hectic, and fun, even if you're just sitting around watching the organized chaos unfold. Sometimes there might be a question about a cereal box we're stumped on but it happens to be in your pantry. Who knows!
We have goons from New Zealand, Sweden, all across the Americas, Britain, Finland, Denmark, Japan. We are all over the place!
Give us a fair shake and see how you like it.

Sooo... are you ready to play Trivia, Fast Eddie?

rawillkill fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Mar 1, 2021

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rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.
:siren: How To Join Us In IRC (TL;DR at bottom) :siren:

What the hell is IRC and what do I do?

So the channel is #tplobby on the server irc.synirc.net. To connect to these you will need an irc client. Popular ones are mibbit, hexchat, mIRC and irssi.

Mibbit is web based and as such the easiest one to get started with. The other ones require an installation. This guide will focus mostly on mibbit but the instructions are somewhat universal.

If you're okay with using mibbit, all you need to do is click here and pick a nickname.



For other clients, open it up, type in /connect irc.synirc.net, type in /nick YOUR_NICKNAME_HERE (you can pick your name here) and then type in /join #tplobby and you should be in.

I've joined but there's no contest going on. What the hell?

Once you're here (#tplobby) it might take a little while for people to respond, especially if you want to join during the middle of the contest is going on. This is because we're busy trying to win.
However, within a minute (last year this was generally within 15-30 seconds, not minutes) someone with OP (operator) status will talk to you. In the meantime, you can register your nick on the server.



Registering is pretty simple. Type in /msg NickServ register YOUR_PASSWORD YOUR_EMAIL
You will then get an email with a command to put type into IRC. Do that and you're registered!






note that the email ended up in my spam folder, so check there

Note: the next time you open up IRC and pick this nickname you will have to log in or the server will change your name. To do this you simply type in /msg nickserv identify YOUR_PASSWORD

On both of these commands it's important you don't have an empty space or whatever at the start or it or you'll post your entire message openly for everyone to see.
Make sure NOTHING but what I've put in italics above is in the message as you press enter or people might steal your password or whatever

Okay, so I'm registered and stuff. How do I join in the fun?

At this point you'll hopefully have been contacted by an OP in #tplobby (you can tell who's an op by what symbol they have before or after their name, these differ between clients, though. Mibbit has custom icons and others usually have an @ or a & before their name to show it.)

They will ask you to identify yourself with your SA user name and potentially by putting something in your profile.
They will then add you to a list of trusted users if all of the above has been done correctly and send you to another channel, where the actual contest is happening.
If after this point you get disconnected you will be able to join the real channel immediately and just log in with /msg nickserv identify YOUR_PASSWORD and skip all the other steps above.

If there are any questions or confusion, feel free to ask one of the ops in #tplobby for help. We'll try to have someone semi active in there as often as possible until the contest ends. If you have time to spare it's really helpful for everyone involved to register ahead of time.

TL;DR if you know sort of how to irc
Join #tplobby on the server irc.synirc.net.
Register your nick with nickserv.
Talk to an operator in #tplobby.
Or just click here.

rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.

Spaghett posted:

I've never done this before. Is it chill if I just pop on for a bit over the weekend?

We totally welcome people who just want to hang out, we have multiple IRC channels and there is one that is mostly just for chilling and hanging out, join whenever you wish

rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.

Fat Albert in a can posted:

Quick suggestion - If you're kicking someone because they're not logged in, might wanna put that for the reason and save everyone some time and wasted lines asking wtf happened and wtf do I need to do to make it not happen again.

Please join #tplobby as advised in the first post if you dont authenticate upon joining immediately. That's what the channel is there for. Sorry for this

rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.

Fat Albert in a can posted:

I joined the lobby, joined the channel, then left #tplobby because I was told earlier in the week, "Keep this clear to make it easier."

GLHF, I'm going to take a nap.

Sorry this happened to you. We ask people to leave #tplobby that are already authenticated in the other channel, not people still authenticating. I will make sure this is clear next time. I hope you join us when you're up to it. Sorry again

rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.
2nd place.

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rawillkill
Aug 15, 2009

Emma Watson is what runs trivia teams.

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