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austin_dern) wrote2024-01-07 12:10 am
Rumor spreadin' round in that Texas town about that shack outside La Grange
What's next? What else? Pinball. MWS runs a lot of pinball events and each year he holds one late in the year at our local barcade. We could hardly skip that, much though we wonder why so many more people turn up for his events and why there's enough more that the bar is willing to do favors like open up a couple hours early on the day. The people we can understand: while bunnyhugger organizes charity tournaments he does a cash payout, with the entry fees flowing up to the top finishers. And, probably, MWS has an advantage in pressing people to come, as he still goes to enormously many other tournaments, including ones on the eastside where we don't go either because they're too far or because we've had dead-to-me grade fights with people. MWS may have fewer of these, or he may be more willing to smile and attend the tournaments of, like, Trump supporters than I could imagine being.
Anyway. The format was match play, putting people in groups of four (or if population demanded, three) and letting them gather points by their finish. The top twelve finishers go on to three rounds of finals, each round being three games each. (The top four get a first-round bye.) The main event was only five rounds, so you'll notice this implies that the final four play more games in finals than in qualifying for finals. This stuff happens.
Now me, I had a bizarrely good main tournament. The five tables I was called on included three I consider myself a specialist on --- Metallica, Cactus Canyon, and the Beatles --- with the fourth being Medieval Madness. Everyone in competitive pinball is a specialist on that; my edge was I had played it recently so knew how the ball was behaving. The fifth game was Venom, which is only a couple weeks old. I happened to have a killer game on it, though, taking a first place, so that's great. Overall I never finished below second place the whole day, and cruised into eighth place among a bunch of the names you'll be seeing at state finals.
bunnyhugger had a much worse time, primarily as her first game was on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which nobody is good at, and which she bottomed out on. Replace that fourth place with a first, though, and she'd have been in finals with me.
The catch is in the first round of finals I was in a group with MWS and two of the young superstar players, one of whom won state last year and the other of whom is going into this year's finals as top seed. I bottomed out on Indiana Jones, the result of two house balls that everyone agreed were unfair. Still, given the way the scoring divides in these three-game rounds, and that it wouldn't be absurd if the other three traded first place finishes (as it turned out they did) I wasn't doomed until I took a last on Ghostbusters. There, too, I was starting to put something together my last ball, but fell short, and that's it. After two last-place finishes I was knocked out.
Ah, but at least I could be a spoiler, or decider, for the last game. This was on Getaway, a game that might as well be a coinflip for as hard as the one at our barcade plays. I was starting to put together an okay game and got the option to trigger the ``Secret Mania''. This is a twenty-second mode where every shot is worth half a million points, and it's called ``Secret Drainia'' for what seems inevitably to happen really fast when you pick it. Also, in multiplayer games, Secret Drainia screws up other people's multiball progress. The pinball manufacturer made like five versions of the ROMs for this game and Secret Drainia screws things up in a different way every version. So I was messing up everybody else but also figured, what have I got to lose? I may as well make things hard.
Well, I drained, but not too much before the natural end of Secret Drainia. And I got a pretty solid score for this stuff, one I could plausibly win on. Well, the younger of the kids came and beat me out, by a whisker. But the other one --- the one who'd won state last year --- did not, and so he was knocked out with me. This gave him, incidentally, his lowest finish for the year in the handful of competitions he played. (He still qualified for state championship, though.) If I had taken first place, the two younger players would have had to have a play-off between them.
In the end, MWS would make it to finals but take fourth place. The kid who squeaked me out on Getaway would take third place, and one of the other wunderkinds in Michigan Pinball took first place. (Second place would go to DOM, a player from Bay City, who I haven't mentioned because I didn't interact with him at all, really. Sorry.)
So that was fun close at hand. More fun while I was winning, of course, and less fun when I wasn't. Still, nice spending time at a tournament that felt like something State Championship-level, and not having any of the stress of helping bunnyhugger run it or having to go anywhere. Probably I'll be up for that next year too.
Now back from pinball to my serious business, pictures from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk:
Let me be arty for you and take a picture of the Looff Carousel's sign from the wrong side. You're welcome.
Plaque outside the Giant Dipper, tucked into the ground outside the ride. Oh, we're going to have to go back now it's a century old, right?
For Friday they introduced this new thing of a really long line to get in! Can't say I'm a fan but all right. There's the launch platform through the open windows there.
Tucked into the corner of the booth window --- where this time they were scanning our wristbands --- were these tickets for August 6, 2014. I don't know if that's from, like, the last season before switching to wristbands and swipe cards or what, but it seems plausible.
View from the top of the queue; the launch station's on the left here and the right has pictures of the ride once they run out of trivia to share.
Looking out of the coaster building and onto town, away from the boardwalk.
Trivia: In June 1926 the US Congress authorized the building of two giant rigid airships. It wasn't until March 1927 that money was authorized to build them, then, and only $200,000, not enough to build one. And mandated a design competition, despite the existence of only one serious competitor. Source: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.
Currently Reading: Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball, John Chad.