the opening question of the general knowledge round was the winner of the 2025 Arthur C Clarke award. at this point i'm at the bar getting a drink and i'm like ah, ok. i don't know that but i suppose it's a normal thing for SFF book fans to be following.

but then the second question is 'which author has been nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award the most times without winning?' and i'm like ok. who the FUCK just knows that. what? what kind of question is that? huh??

the other highlight of the opening round was the final question, in which we had to name all 9 houses from game of thrones, for a point each. which i have to say i think is a lot of points to put on a question where you are simply completely scuppered if no-one on your team is a ASOIAF fan?

i more or less soloed this one bcos i was the only person who knew any other than like. Stark and Lannister and i am actually very pleased with my 6/9. at the end i was scrambling for more like 'what is that guy's name. you know. Pedro Pascal. he gets his eyes gouged out??'

this was followed by a round themed around the book festival organising the event. the more i think about this one the more annoyed i get. i don't know what their intention was but essentially it was just them telling us about paid events they had on over the weekend. we actually did score a respectably 3 tho.

the best designed round was a 'name that year' round where they would list of 3 SFF events (book publication or movie releases or whatever) and ask us to guess what year they all happened. this was i think the only round that was well-designed and fun to do. i suspect there may have been multiple people designing rounds independentl.

ok that brings me to the last actual round. we were given a set of answer sheets at the beginning that had the names of the rounds printed on them and this one was called 'Westeros or Wester Ross'. early on i expressed a concern that this might be an entirely Game of Thrones themed round but the group felt that this would be a bit silly. it was proposed that it might perhaps be guessing if place names were from fantasy books or real places in Scotland?

as it turned out: yes, it was an entirely Game of Thrones themed round. the idea was you had a guess if a place name was in Westeros or in real-life Wester Ross which for those unfamiliar is uhh. here:

and ok. if you know much about Scotland it might not surprise you to hear that this is not a region of the country that has a lot of well-known place names. absolutely baffling.