#non-tournament poll

[yen-sids-tournament]

SuperbOwl Day!!!!

~We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you coverage of an important competition~

please comment or tag whichever SuperbOwl we forgot

~Thank you, your regular program will resume shortly~

[died-but-not-dead-tournament]

Important Question before I launch the main tournament later today: I have been cajoled by my assistant to add Nemona to the tournament as a last minute addition- does anyone have preferences on who to banish in her place?

technically this poll is available for a day but I'm going to look at the results in at most three hours, likely earlier

[rpgbossthemebracket]

A question regarding the Pokemon prelims: both Volo and Cynthia's boss themes were submitted to the poll. It's not unprecedented to have them share a slot in brackets like this, so I'd like to know if I should do the same here.

[jane-john-doe-tournament]

Update

Right now, 16 different characters have been submitted. Should I close the form and start preparing a 16 character bracket or wait for more submissions?

[battleoftheicyfreaks]

Do you want me to hold a Pokemon preliminary for all the Pokemon that are submitted (that aren't Glaceon)?

[non-human-character-bracket]

Non-Human character bracket

This is a bracket to decide the best/most pookiest/blorboest/whatever non-human character

RULES:

By ‘Non-human character’ I mean any character that isn't entirely Human (for example animals, ghosts, vampires, monsters, aliens, robots, dolls, etc.)

No irl animals/robots/whatever, only characters. You get what I mean.

No Ocs

SUBMISSIONS OPEN UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2ND 2024

tags for visibility

@tournament-announcer @ship-colour-scheme-showdown @bestest-dead-best-friend-bracket @its-to-the-death @who-do-i-know-this-man-s3 @ultimate-character-design @who-do-i-know-this-man 

[crosspunzel]

[best-overplayed-song]

fun facts

4 Non Blondes bassist Christa Hillhouse said she was having sex when she heard Linda Perry working on "What's Up?" down the hall. she abruptly stopped and ran into her room to ask her what she was playing because she liked it so much

the band chose to name the song "What's Up?" to avoid confusion with Marvin Gaye's song "What's Going On"

Delores O'Riordan said she wrote "Dreams" about her first time falling in love

[outfitpolls]

Pokemon Cafe Remix FINALE

[best-non-english-word-torunament]

Welcome to the best non-english word tournament!

What is this?

This is another bracket tournament, in which we will decide the best word. However, this tournament is also dedicated to linguistic diversity and promoting languages that aren't English, since they are less visible on the internet at large. This means that words in English are banned from competing to make room for the other 6500-7500 known languages (depending on how you count). To avoid other large languages taking over the poll (both counting native speakers and languages the average tumblr user is likelier to know) there will be a limit of four words from every language. Join me and learn new cool words in many different languages as well as vote for your favourite!

Who are you?

I'm a linguistics student and language nerd from Sweden who took lots of inspiration from @ultimate-word-tournament but wanted to focus on language diversity in words. I'll also sneak in some posts about the language situation in the world because it's a fascinating topic. My native language isn't English, so please be kind if my posts are worded weirdly sometimes

What makes a word good?

There are many ways that a word can be good, but here are some examples: it sounds good/feels good to say, the script looks nice, it denotes an interesting concept, it denotes a concept you like, it does something interesting grammarwise or soundwise, it's funny, it's an interesting/fun compound, it has an interesting/fun etymology, it just has good vibes... The possibilities are endless and a judgement probably consists of some combinations of these or others

Rules:

There will be 64 words and a maximum of four words per language

No words in English, but loanwords from English are allowed with good motivation

No conlangs (I love them but the focus is on natural language)

Words from signed languages are allowed and encouraged as long as you can provide an explanatory picture or film for the sign

Words from pidgins are allowed

Words from extinct languages are allowed

No made up words (if it isn't/wasn't used in the language it doesn't belong, neither does words only your family/friend group uses, but slang words are allowed)

Every submitter is allowed to submit a maximum of two words from the same language based on the honor system

Submissions:

Submissions were open until the bracket was filled and are now closed

I will need to do some selection if I recieve more than four submissions from a language and this selection will mostly be based on who submitted first, with exceptions for good motivations or difficulty finding information on a word (like IPA transcription). I will try my best to research all words and languages, but since I'm hoping for small languages it might be difficult to find. There might also be some selection based on including more languages and areal diversity if I get some really good ones between the 64th submission and closing the form, but we'll see.

Some guidelines:

If you're able, please provide an IPA transcription for your word (the International Phonetic Alphabet has a sign for each sound used in any language, which makes transcription of exact pronounciation possible)

Please provide a short motivation on what makes your word good

You will need to provide a translation/explanation of the word in English since that is the language this tournament is conducted in for ease of communication and reach. If the exact translation of a word is part of what makes the word good, please provide that too

Have fun! I can't wait to see your words. If you just want to vote, go ahead and follow me in the meantime

I will tag some other tournaments to hopefully make this reach people who know interesting languages and good words in them. Please consider doing the same if you want this tournament to be as good as possible.

@ultimate-word-tournament @ultimate-sentence-tournament @words-for-cat-bracket @ultimate-poll-tournament @titlesbracket @tournamentdirectory @eurovision-song-bracket @the-shape-showdown @fuckingstupidbracket

[taxonomytournament]

Taxonomy Tournament: Amphibians* Finale

Urodela. This order is made up of amphibians that have a tail, such as newts and salamanders, including the axolotl.

Non-Tetrapod Lobe-finned Fish. This class is made up of fishes whose front fins are fleshy and joined to the body by bones, these being lungfish and coelecanths.

*Non-Tetrapod Lobe-finned Fish are not Amphibians

[punk-pangolins]

its been months and i cant think of anything else D: pls help

part 2 later???

[died-but-not-dead-tournament]

To clumsily attempt to clarify the "groups" poll since I was limited by how long the answers could be:

I was thinking it would be fun to do a no stakes mini-tournament to enjoy while I finish setting up the main one to find out which fandom has the most (based on quantity or severity, I don't really care) characters that died and came back!

Should be pretty easy to set up and roll out quickly if I do it like that (It won't delay the main tournament) or we could add stakes to it: Either the winning team moves on together to occupy a spot in the main bracket, or for increased randomness and stakes we eliminate all characters from the losing teams from the main bracket!

If we really need to thin the herd for the main bracket we can move all large groups of characters to here and not include their individual nominees in the main bracket, though that would probably evict a lot of major competitors from the tournament

Or we can do the opposite and just toss out the group nominations and only do the main tournament

Actually for ease of access let's just start with the big question:

[rpgbossthemebracket]

As I prepare to kick off the prelims, I need to resolve an issue with the main bracket itself. For the 64-slot bracket, I have 63 confirmed entrant franchises (half of which I've had to set up preliminary brackets/polls for, sweet jesus) and one edge case I'm not sure about. That edge case is Destiny, and while I said that MMORPGs count for the purpose of this poll, I meant that with the likes of FFXIV and WoW in mind. Destiny is more of a looter shooter with RPG elements, as I understand it, and while I don't have the firsthand experience to say whether I'd count it, the friends I've asked (and also Wikipedia) all say it doesn't.

That said, I still have one last slot to fill. Since I'm on the fence about what to do with it, why not democratize the process a bit?

I am willing to share the Destiny theme that was submitted, if that would affect anyone's choice here. Other things to note:

I'm already counting certain other edge cases like Disco Elysium and Binding of Isaac.

SMT only got one submission (somehow), which would affect its weighting if it stands on its own.

After seeing One-Winged Angel get into both the battle theme bracket and the final boss theme bracket, I'm not even sure Dancing Mad could beat it in the FF prelims.

Don't lie, you know it would be really funny if a YIIK song made it in.

I'll be posting the first prelims in a moment.

[its-to-the-death]

Fictional Weapon War Round 2

Orb (Pondering My Orb meme)

First posted to Twitter in October 2021 and the rest is history

The image is from a gamebook called Middle-Earth Quest: A Spy In Isengard and the artist is Angus McBride

The Spear of the Non-Believer (SCP Wiki)

"It contains unrelenting power that can turn mere mortals to ash when speared by it and which can kill gods and other immortals as if they weren't immortal at all. It's a legendary weapon in modern times and was in ancient times as well. The Spear of the Non-Believer has a small container that can hold it despite being smaller than the spear itself, and the container folds out into a harpoon gun to fire it, which is often necessary because of how large it is (though characters do use it as a normal spear at times as well)" -from the original submission

Mod comment:

*checks my watch as I wait for the wizards to arrive*

[sengoku-shinobu-daily]

Shinobu Sengoku 5* Bloomed Tournament

Hello! Mod cosmic here again! I thought it would be fun to end the year with a bracket tournament of his bloomed 5*! Re posts are always valued for a larger sample size! I also did the same poll but on my twitter account if you would like to look there too!