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austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
austin_dern

July 2025

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Despite my trouble with the law, [personal profile] bunnyhugger got into the Wizard's World on time and paid her $20 entry fee. There were a couple surprises in the morning announcements. Some of them were the ones we'd expect, a couple games being swapped out because they were behaving flakily the night before. One that was very welcome: a donor was putting a couple hundred dollars into the prize pool and now instead of the top four getting payouts, the top 24 would. They would figure out an equitable deal later on. (I was curious about the 24-person cutoff since given that they weren't playing out ties --- so everyone eliminated in the Round of 32 would be tied 17th through 32nd --- but supposed they would figure it out. I did not learn what they did.)

The unwelcome news: someone or several ones had not shown up, so they were redrawing the brackets, and a lot of people might be affected. In a tournament like this, where almost everyone plays in completely different communities, it's hard to get a scouting edge on your competition. But [personal profile] bunnyhugger, facing the New Jersey champion, had done her best to figure something out. She had the vibe that the New Jersey representative was a relatively weaker player, giving [personal profile] bunnyhugger confidence. (Basically, most of the stronger players she'd expect to be pulled into the New York City pinball scene and indeed, turns out something the New Jersey rep did this year was hold finals in Morristown, relatively near the City, while the New York finals were upstate, in Saratoga or somewhere. Made it more appealing to play across the Hudson like that.) But also, from as best [personal profile] bunnyhugger could figure from venues where New Jersey's representative had played, she probably didn't have a lot of experience on electromechanical or solid state tables. These are already one of [personal profile] bunnyhugger's relative strengths and she liked her chances on those tables against someone who maybe didn't play them much.

That advantage would always be limited, yes. Tournament rules this year had every competitor pick three games --- an old, a middle-age, and a modern table --- before they ever started playing. (In case of a 3-3 tie, the deciding game goes to the top seed to pick anything.) Wizard's World has relatively few electromechanical games, particularly in the tournament venue, and you know, there's middle-aged games and there's middle-aged games. There's an incredible difference between (say) Stern's 2014 Kiss and Bally's 1986 Pin-Bot, and one of those would likely be better for [personal profile] bunnyhugger than the other. (And the Beatles, while a 'new' game, plays mostly like an old-to-middle one.) So she wanted to play New Jersey's representative and was annoyed she was losing the chance.

Except she did not. When all was done, and the groups called --- her group, somehow, the last one to be called --- she was playing New Jersey, just exactly as she had hoped and loosely prepared. Now all she had to do was win four games in the next seven.


And now back to the Jackson County Fair and the rides ... but after dark!

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Getting a bunch of rides in at once with this picture, although the centerpiece is a Scrambler. Note that the carousel gets to serve as the logo on the fence for rides.


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And here's a Tilt-A-Whirl where the cars feature that 90s disposable paper cup design all the kids are so excited by.


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And a portable Miami/Moby Dick-style ride, near the top of its arc. Can't make out the name through all this light, though, sorry.


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We're too large to go through funhouse attractions like the Traffic Jam here, but we do like the art on them. Also we like pondering where one might be that different lanes might go to Selma, Albany, and Winsor. Selma suggests Alabama, of course, and that's compatible with Albany Georgia, but if there's a Windsor in the deep south that's big enough to have traffic signs pointing to it I can't figure what it is.


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Oh hey, they do have a roller coaster after all! How about that?


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Kidding aside this half-pipe or whatever it's named is one of those fine things to challenge your concept of what a roller coaster is, since there's no element in it that isn't satisfied by one or more kinds of things that are definitely roller coasters, yet the whole thing sure doesn't feel like a roller coaster to me. And yet we counted the Half Pipe that's very like this ride when we visited Elitch Gardens in Denver.


Trivia: In 1476 Girolamo Strozzi bankrolled Venice printer Nicolas Jenson's printing of 1,025 copies of an Italian translation of Pliny. A thousand copies were printed on paper, largely for sale in Venice; 25 were printed on vellum, aimed at export to London. Source: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age, Andrew Whitby.

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