You know what we haven't done since like 2018? That's go to a pinball tournament New Year's Day. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger suggested we go to the one being held at that bar down in Jackson we went to once before, back in March, and I overcame the feeling that it's nice not doing things to be reminded that it's also nice to do things, too.
So this was at Tilted, the bar in Jackson mentioned above, and it started about noon --- the bar opened early for the event, justifying its entry fee. It also featured the (women's) launch party for the Metallica Remastered table. Stern Pinball for whatever reason pulled one of their dot-matrix-display games out of the backlog, hooked it up with a modern-era LED screen and some new animations and possibly some new rules and made something they can sell to collectors all over again. (I say possibly some new rules because ... I really don't know if they have changed the rules any. The game feels different, though that might be that with the extra space of the LED screen it's better able to communicate all the things a player might be going for at this moment. For the first time, for example, I now understand how to get super jackpot in Sparky Multiball.)
The women's tournament was done in the same way the side tournaments at Lansing pinball league are: everyone gets up to two chances to play and their highest score gets submitted. The four players with the highest scores do a one-game playoff for the trophy. In an agony that surely isn't foreshadowing Women's State Championship in a couple weeks, bunnyhugger just missed the cut for finals, falling about a million points --- small but not negligible change in this game --- short of making it. She was not in a good mood for this.
Nor was she in a good mood for the main tournament, which was a series of three- and four-player matchups. The player in each four-person group finishing on top collected seven points towards the final standings, the second person got five, third person got three, and last place got one. (In a three-player group, the leader gets seven points, the middle player four, and the last place finisher one.) She had a fine first-place finish on Venom, and then a last-place on Metallica. But after that disheartening start she had a pretty good day, finishing first or second on all but one of the remaining six rounds. This including a three-person group with me on Pulp Fiction, which somehow I played like I knew anything about it.
Me, meanwhile, I had a really good qualifying. Started out alternating second and first place, including some really solid third-ball rallies on games like Star Wars (twice!). And putting up that killer Pulp Fiction game, which I followed up on at the end of the day with a killer Toy Story 4 game. But I also had two third-place finishes. At the end of qualifying, though, bunnyhugger and I were seeded fourth and third, eager and ready for finals.
How that turned out, and why I want to know if something big changed on the Jersey Jack pinball game Guns N Roses, I mean to tell you on the morrow.
Today we continue our tour of the grounds of Camden Park, without riding anything.
Another look at the turnaround of Big Dipper.
The park goes on a while with seemingly unused space past the Big Dipper and the museum-that-isn't. It looks a lot like space that had been used but was abandoned, although given that it's near the river it seems plausible that the ground was just never quite good enough for anything more than picnic blankets.
Still, we did find these rusting structures in the woods, very close to the ravine dropoff.
And there's the water, maybe 25-30 feet down. That's Twelvepole Creek.
The edge of the ravine and the river is lushly grown; you get just a hint of river here.
And then here's a big slab of dying asphalt, off past the end of a picnic pavilion and the end of Big Dipper. Probably it used to be another picnic pavilion that's been abandoned.
Trivia: The 1939 report Toll Roads and Free Roads judged that it would be physically feasible for the United States to build six transcontinental toll-road superhighways, for a total of about $2.9 billion, with annual expenses of about $184 million per year through 1960. But even the most optimistic estimates were that it would earn annual tolls of about $72.14 million, under two-fifths the cost. Source: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift. The conclusion that the roads could not possibly pay their own way made it on page two of the report.
Currently Reading: Archaeology, January/February 2025, Editor Jarrett A Lobell.
PS: What's Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Are we supposed to know this Miss Galexia person? October 2024 - January 2025 and the answer is ``kind of''? Like, yeah, you could, but it doesn't hurt you if you don't.
