Greetings and salutations to you all! Welcome to the Acadacathalonomania blog!! (and not the monomaniacal blog, which is what spell check wants me to say)
You're probably asking yourself, what is this Acadacathalonomania thing? (Feel free to write "Acada" for short.) Well, the inspiration for this event was Tricadecathlonomania (or simply "Trica"). The link goes to their website, so feel free to explore, but here are the basics:
-Trica is a 24-hour long scavenger hunt, going from midnight to midnight.
-Trica tasks teams of 4 with a list of 288 items (1 item for every 5 minutes), where the teams must find things, videotape themselves doing things, create things, and figure out questions.
-In Trica, bonus points are awarded for combinations of items as well as going above all other teams on a particular item.
-In Trica, "[b]ribe your judges, cheat your opponents, and find loopholes in the system. All these things are encouraged."
-During Trica, teams attend check-ins throughout the day to turn in items and complete bonus challenges.
The event is pretty ridiculous, and the items definitely follow suit, such as "jog a mile backwards in 70s style running shorts", "tip a goat", and "What is the chemical symbol for jazz?" (There are definitely more crude items, but I'm not putting up examples of those.)
So, after hearing about this event for years, I decided to take the basic model of this event and adapt it to you all!
-Acada takes place in halves, each lasting 3 hours and 14 minutes over the course of one morning/afternoon.
-Acada tasks teams of 4 with a list of 42 items each half (1 item for about every 4.6 minutes), where the teams must find things, do things (on video), make things, and figure things out.
-In Acada, bonus points are awarded for combinations of items as well as going above all other teams on a particular item.
-In Acada, bribing is not allowed, but exploiting loopholes is fair game because the opportunity is open to all teams. At least one item will involve co-op-etition (cooperation/competition) with multiple teams.
-During Acada, teams attend a check-in throughout the second half of the competition to turn in items and complete bonus challenges. Teams do have a lunch break between the two halves so teams don't feel rushed to eat.
So, a lot of the same elements are there, but I did change some pieces to make it fit into the Academy environment (especially the time element). There have been two official Acada events so far: Acadacathalonomania 2010: Difficult to Say, Delicious to Eat! (October 2010) and Acadacathalonomania 2011: Revenge of the Day of the Dawn of the Night of the Zombified Living Dead (April 2011). Both have gone well, and both competitions have helped shape what Acada will be like in the future. In the near future, I will be posting the results of these two competitions, but for now, I wanted to briefly introduce Acadacathalonomania!
