After the eclipse we didn't have much to do besides regular stuff, at least for the couple weeks until Pinball At The Zoo. This would be, as usual, at the Kalamazoo Expo Center and not the literal zoo (which wouldn't open for a couple more weeks anyway), with the tournament there growing ever-bigger and ever more a part of the show. As in the past, there'd be Herb-style qualifying, buying tickets and putting up your best scores on a slate of machines, your eight best machines qualifying. They'd be open all afternoon Thursday and Friday, with a couple hours of qualifying on Saturday, plus some side tournaments including a women's tournament that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had her sights on.
I would not be going up for Thursday. I could have asked for the time off, but felt that between Motor City Furry Con, the eclipse, a dentist's appointment (that turned into two), and coming soon a doctor's appointment and Anthrohio that I didn't want to ask for the extra time off. I knew this meant I would not even remotely qualify for the tournament, but that's all right. When 2020 began, before the pandemic, I had resolved to make competing in pinball tournaments less of a Thing, and taking a relaxed attitude toward the majors like this is good for me.
bunnyhugger, though, now she had class yes, but she could arrange her days to take the whole afternoon off and go down there and play. She'd done that last year and, without making it into the Main or Classics tournament, had put herself in a good spot for the Women's tournament.
She didn't make the hour-plus drive herself, though. FAE --- formerly IAS --- from the local pinball league had wanted to get to Pinball At The Zoo for some time and she agreed to drive them. She was anxious about this, not knowing the level of small talk to maintain with a person who is almost as small-untalkative as me. But they're a pleasant person and, like we'd always known, they landed a really good seed in Main with the time to play.
bunnyhugger finished her Thursday something like second-seeded in the Women's tournament, not bad in any circumstance, even though there'd be a full day and more people coming to qualify on Friday. This including out-of-state women come for the big sanctioned-ranking points bounty this offered.
Friday during the day she stayed at home, doing some work and worrying how her seed was declining. But once work was done, I was ready to drive down to Kalamazoo and put in my $20 worth of entries into Main. We picked up FAE and went to see what we could do with a couple of hours.
Me, I put in my twenty entries, this year --- unlike last --- focusing just on the first eight that happened to be free. The lines for other games ended up longer than I wanted to deal with. I hoped this year to achieve a more modest goal than ranking: I wanted just to do better each time I replayed a game. I would not achieve this, having one game of Hardbody (a delightfully 80s workout-themed game I never heard of before), one game of Demolition Man, and two games of Stars worse than I'd already had.
Ah, but my very last game that short Friday night? I was playing on Stars and I finally, finally had the outstanding game on this table --- the one that goes to big Michigan tournaments has been an unbeatable challenge to me for years --- that I had enjoyed in Fort Wayne a few weeks earlier. Not just a satisfying game, but one that was really good. It would be something like the 13th best game anyone put up in qualifying on Stars; it was good enough, that, with a slate of those, I'd be in the A Division, higher seed in the first round. The rest of my games were nowhere near that good; I would end up --- after a couple more hours of qualifying on Saturday --- in 61st place. The top 32 would go into either A or B finals.
bunnyhugger meanwhile put in a couple games here and there in Main but got more worried about her position in the Women's tournament. With the arrival of out-of-state ringers and more women playing overall, her seed had dropped to eighth. Eight women would go to finals. She had some reasons for hope, among them that she'd somehow acquired The Knack for playing Game of Thrones, one of the women's-tournament games. She was routinely putting up scores in the hundreds of millions of points, scores she would kill to get in league or head-to-head play. In this, where people were putting their best scores of the weekend against everyone else's best scores? She kept putting up good scores but not quite advancing her stance. (Other games included Metallica, on which she was doing pretty well, and Jurassic Park, which has always been a mess for her; for me too. The electromechanical game in the set was Abra Ca Dabra which was uncharacteristically mean to her; we couldn't explain that.) We would need to get back first thing Saturday morning, to defend and if possible shore up her standing. I was confident in her.
And now for the other half of my blog, how about some Gilmore Car Museum stuff?
Cadillac emblem salvaged in rather good shape from the wall of a Detroit car factory that was closed long ago and torn down in 1995. The emblem's gone through various changes and this is the one current to about 1930. This is also where I learned that the ducks --- pardon, the merlettes --- were removed in 1999. Hrmph. They'll be back.
More signs from the Cadillac/LaSalle dealership area. LaSalle: it's not just an inappropriate line in the All In The Family theme! (LaSalles were upscale cars, like one level below Cadillac, so unlikely for working class people like the Bunkers.)
Hey look, it's a gigantic shiny banana! Now and then I feel bad about how big my Prius is and then you see something like this, which is about six Priuses long.
Shiny wingy woman on the hood of an early 30s Cadillac.
And here we move into the Lincoln Experience. Note the Lincoln-Zephyr in the middle because Zephyr is a great car name that they'd never have courage to use anymore.
And here's a shiny dog on the hood of a Lincoln something or other.
Trivia: Human blood is about three parts per billion silver. Bones are between 10 and 40 parts per billion silver. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.
Currently Reading: Your Pinball Machine: How to Purchase, Adjust, Maintain, and Repair Your Own Machine, B B Kamoroff.
