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austin_dern

June 2025

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We went to lunch and I'm not positive which of two lunch experiences we had first. One of these was the Thursday lunch and one the Friday and I'll just trust [livejournal.com profile] bunny_hugger remembers better which is which or else it doesn't matter after all.

For one of the lunches we gathered in the Westin lobby to meet with the rest of the Michigan pinball folks. There we'd move in a huge, confused, lumbering mass toward some nearby restaurant, the way any large group that hasn't perfectly coordinated where we're going for lunch will. We missed out on MWS and CST, both of whom agreed they'd meet us at lunch, again without the perfect agreement about where lunch was going to be, and as it happened they went somewhere else entirely.

What the mass ended up going to was a Qdoba. And that's all right, possibly the best way to get a bunch of twenty or so people food that they want without being impossibly taxing on the wait staff or forcing a huge party to wait forever for everyone's meal to be ready and then eat fast so we could get back to the day. But it's also boring; I mean, we could go to Qdoba here. At least we could have gone to a chain that was present in Pittsburgh and rare in Lansing. And at that Michigan Pinball managed to slashdot the Qdoba. Our flood was enough that some of the first people through the line finished eating by the time the last of us (including me and [livejournal.com profile] bunny_hugger) could sit down. We could commiserate some with the folks we were sitting near, but mostly, it was a fast and confusing lunch. Still, I got to talk about my perfect 0-12 round (which is why I feel like this was probably Thursday's lunch).

The other lunch we went in a smaller mob back to Sienna Mercato and their meatballs, or as they put it, balls. They put it less insistently this time. The place was packed full and that seemed bizarre considering it was like 4 pm. And then we realized: oh yeah, the whole of Pinburgh got out at about the same time and surely every restaurant in a few blocks of the convention center was filled with pinball players.

And what pinball players! Someone pointed out to us a guy at one of the wall booths: Lyman F Sheats. I grant you may not know this name. If you see many pinball games after they've had their high score tables wiped, though, they'll often have his LFS initials as the default score. He's a pinball designer and programmer. It's his software behind games like Attack From Mars, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash --- there's an Easter egg there called ``Lyman's Lament'' which even includes his taunting of the player --- and modern games through at least to Iron Man. So, you know, an honest-to-goodness pinball celebrity. We let him alone, since that seemed the decent thing to do, although [livejournal.com profile] bunny_hugger did toss a few silly flirty moves when she was confident he wasn't looking. And if he (or anyone he was sitting with) noticed they didn't bring it up. Just silliness.

As I say, I forget which of those was Thursday's and which was Friday's lunch. I think it was that order but if it wasn't, it's only a slight difference.

Trivia: Many of the healers in France's Auvergne region, through the 19th century, were also blacksmiths, a profession traditionally associated with magic. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.

Currently Reading: DC Showcase Presents: Metal Men, Volume 1 Editor um ... will Peter Hamboussi do? That's close enough, I think. Probably. Boy does Dr Jerkface spend a lot of time ordering Platinum to stop getting her girl responsometry all over his semi-ept superhero team-leading.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-20 12:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] resonant.livejournal.com
How do you pronounce qdoba?

From Google, I can tell it's Mexican food.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-20 02:44 pm (UTC)
ext_392293: Portrait of BunnyHugger. (grayscale)
From: [identity profile] bunny-hugger.livejournal.com
"Cue-doba." I have no idea why.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-22 05:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] austin-dern.livejournal.com
Wikipedia offers by way of explanation that the chain had been named Z-Teca up until 1998, when trademark infringement lawsuits by Z'Tejas Southwestern Grill and Azteca prompted them to pick some safer name. Z-Teca, meanwhile, was the name they picked after their original name of Zuma was also hit with a trademark infringement suit. How Qdoba made the cut I don't know but I'm guessing they picked anything that nobody had registered first.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-22 05:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] austin-dern.livejournal.com
It's decent enough Mexican food, by the way. Something in the ten-dollar price range.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-20 02:48 pm (UTC)
ext_392293: Portrait of BunnyHugger. (grayscale)
From: [identity profile] bunny-hugger.livejournal.com
Thursday's lunch was Qdoba. I was terribly frustrated because we were supposed to have lunch with MWS and some other people, who were supposedly going to meet in the lobby. We went to the lobby and found a different group of people getting ready to go to Qdoba, which annoyed me, because I don't want to go to downtown Pittsburgh and then eat at a freakin' chain restaurant. I kept anxiously pointing out that MWS wasn't here but everyone went to leave. You kept reassuring me that he was surely already at the restaurant or would follow. We got there and he wasn't there. Then he texted me to ask where I was. I said I was with the group. He said HE was with the group and I wasn't there. So that's when it was revealed that my worries were correct and a different group had split off and we went with the "wrong" one. The other group had refused to go to Qdoba on the grounds that they didn't want to eat at a chain restaurant, and they went somewhere more interesting. I was so frustrated by all this that I went pretty hard on the "I told you so's" at you. So it sticks in my mind and I know it was Thursday.
Edited Date: 2016-10-20 02:49 pm (UTC)

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-22 05:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] austin-dern.livejournal.com
Thank you. Thursday felt more sensible to me but then I had the nagging feeling we'd been to the meatballs place Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Which I just couldn't reconcile.

I still don't get how all the Michigan Pinball people worked out to assemble in a group in the lobby and then we managed to assemble into two separate disjoint groups in the same lobby at the same time.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-22 06:08 am (UTC)
ext_392293: Portrait of BunnyHugger. (grayscale)
From: [identity profile] bunny-hugger.livejournal.com
Because they (our intended group) arrived after we already left.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-29 09:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] austin-dern.livejournal.com
It's still astounding that we were collectively able to get organizing a group wrong like that.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-20 02:50 pm (UTC)
ext_392293: Portrait of BunnyHugger. (grayscale)
From: [identity profile] bunny-hugger.livejournal.com
Oh, and I did not do anything flirty at Lyman Sheats! I stared at him when Mike pointed him out, and then he turned and caught me staring and I was embarrassed, but that was the most of it.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-22 05:47 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] austin-dern.livejournal.com
I accept correction. But I thought you had besides staring and smiling done that thing you see in cartoons where a woman puts the back of her wrist up to her chin and wriggles her fingers.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-22 06:07 am (UTC)
ext_392293: Portrait of BunnyHugger. (grayscale)
From: [identity profile] bunny-hugger.livejournal.com
What? I don't think so! All I remember doing is staring at him too hard.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-10-29 09:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] austin-dern.livejournal.com
Perhaps I am just remembering it wrong.

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