some friends in another discord were talking about a trivia league they were all in, and when i expressed interest they hooked me up with a referral! i expected it to be a home grown small thing put together by friends, but no, its... its a whole thing. its got its own website, its own rules, its own wikipedia article. ken jennings was a participant. a former white house chief of staff was a participant!!
so, turns out it takes itself pretty seriously! the two big things are there's a strict NO FORFEITING rule and there's a strict NO CHEATING rule -- as in, the only thing you can use to sort out info outside of your own brain is a pen and paper. but the only way they can enforce this is through honour system (unless your results are REALLY fishy i guess). still, ive had a few moments of accidentally getting distracted and cracking open a new tab without realizing i might be on the verge of somehow cheating... or wandering over to my bookshelf and realizing im almost about to see the spine of a relevant book...!! (our friend group generally agrees that slumdog millionaire-ing yourself is okay -- checking the questions and then living your normal day, and if someone else happens to bring up the relevant obscure facts, if a cop happens to curse the chinese for inventing gunpowder, well hey... as long as it isnt deliberate on your part!)
its called "Learned League"... i'm doing a "rookie season" rn and if i enjoy it (and i am, despite my current losing record) i'll have to pony up a small dues fee if i want to continue participating. i'm making it sound very intense but its honestly a lot of fun to answer the questions, agonize about what i do or don't know, embarrass myself, and then vent about em to my friends (AHH i coulda SWORN it was this!! waa!!!). fun to see when a question is genuinely impossible for everybody and also fun to see when my knowledge is just a blind spot. it scratches an itch i imagine crosswords must for others
another fun thing abt the format: you're matched up against a random other contestant and you can see their past trivia's results, and there's an element where you have to actually assign score values based on how well you think your opponent will do! i'm generally really bad at this, its cost me some matchups. but also it feels Devlishly good when you win because your opponent thought you wouldn't know something
its not flawless (theres a bit of an american bias in the questions, and some of the questions can be a bit hard to parse -- sometimes its fun to puzzle out what exactly the question is asking of you, but sometimes its like. what did you mean by this) but i'm definitely enjoying it a lot and i wrote a lot more about it than i intended to when i started this post! so... its fun!
(addendum: in the time it took me to write this post, discord came back!)