Well, now there are three people I know with birthdays today.
My cousin and his wife finally had a kid. They've had a lot of false starts and heartbreak along this path, and it's taken them a long time. I'm really happy for them.

I'm still trying to figure out my position on this year's ACF Fall, because I'm agreeing with everyone. On one hand, it was a step forward. It was a set where I only saw one tossup where I hadn't heard of the answer. That's very good. The difficulty on the bonuses was mostly reasonable. (It appears that my assessment of "one and two and a kick in the balls" has propagated, and there were more than a few of those, but not the majority. I understand that that is compensating for the other two parts being considered trivially easy, but when you can basically mark the question as a zero before you ask it, all it becomes is unnecessary, undistinguishing time filler) If the design was to make a set accessible to those on the circuit who don't usually go to ACF, then that was mostly achieved. This was a set at about the same difficulty as every other submission tournament I've seen in the past year and a half.

On the other hand, typos do matter, especially if they cause bad moderation. Factual errors do matter. Having pronunciation guides so that new moderators can get their heads around how to say things, that matters. It's damning to the image of something as academically rigorous as to have it ignore elementary school spelling and grammar. Fortunately, that is fixable. Less fixable is the proposition that only 12 of the 25+ were deemed usable, even partially. I've argued the idea that feedback is needed to make sets better, and cutting off another channel of feedback isn't going to fix the problem long term.

Anyway, it was a solid effort by ACF. I didn't see it as jaw droppingly excellent, but as good as other submission tournaments. More importantly, it was something for them to build on. It will take a series of events to shake the notion of ACF as nothing but hardcore. They've had two fall tournaments that have done that, and interceding tournaments that haven't. Whether the fall tournament is enough, we'll see.