First round! After the delays of getting started and the false start of having to tell people that they were entitled to practice time on the games, eight pairs of women went off to play games and, after two groups came back to ask how the game-picking routine worked again (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had just explained it) they were off. I settled in at bunnyhugger's computer to wait for results of the best-of-seven head-to-head matches.
Minor mistake on my part: I was just sitting there waiting for people to come back and give me results, like, game-by-game, which the computer could track. Nobody had any idea they should do that, and it took me a long while to realize I could go around and check scoresheets and enter what people had. (Though more than once people protested they weren't done yet.) This wasn't all that significant a delay except for how it frustrated Ypsi Pinball, who were livestreaming and trying to commentate on the tournament, and had no results to talk about except what they could see on the one livestreaming rig they had. (Pinball tournaments have taken to having a streaming rig, a sort of inverted U-shaped clip with cameras pointing at the score screen, the playfield, and the player. Everyone uses the same design that one guy, somewhere, figured out, because it fits most any venue and can be set up and disassembled for travel in a few minutes.) Things got better during the day, both in my peeping on tournament results and my passing notes to the streamers so they could provide reports.
The most important games were those bunnyhugger played, against HLC. HLC got the first pick of the games, the Metallica Remastered that took a table bunnyhugger was familiar with from a decade of it being around our local barcade, and whomped it with modern Stern Pinball video screens and all that to make it seem new. There are a couple changes in the scoring, and the playfield, particularly in the addition of a spinner on the right orbit that I believe juices multiball, and bunnyhugger hasn't got the hang of the new rules yet. HLC, however, has, and she took a huge lead on ball two that bunnyhugger couldn't expect to catch. Even if she hadn't been interrupted by ... I'm not sure. I think this might have been where one of the mid-era games, Whirlwind, suffered its first malfunction and she had to go make rulings on that.
Still. That's just one game, even if it starts with a loss. It was bunnyhugger's turn to get one of her games and she picked Sky Jump. This is one of the two electromechanical games in the venue, a single-player game on which she put up 28,500, suffering two or maybe three house balls in the process. Still, anyone can get house balls a lot on this era of game; it's why they're normally set to five-ball play in tournament settings. And her 28,500 would be a solid score, compared to what other players did during the day; there were, I think, only three or four other people all day who beat that on their game. The tragic thing is HLC was one of those people, putting up 38,360 which I believe was the highest score anyone put on the table. It's not good to take any losses, but to take a loss on your own pick is brutal.
HLC's pick. Embryon, the 1980-era prog-rock-themed game we mostly know from playing at tournaments in Fremont. I didn't see the game at all, because of its position and because I was now prowling and creeping on other scorecards. Also because I started to worry I was jinxing bunnyhugger by watching her progress. Maybe so: bunnyhugger won this game and was back in the running.
Next game, another of bunnyhugger's picks: The Beatles. I had seen a couple groups playing this already and nobody had put up a score more than about 1.1 or 1.4 million. bunnyhugger never falls short of two million on our home table and this was playing close enough to our home table that the win was all but sure. Except this time bunnyhugger has the ball take some bad bounces, first and second balls. And she's able to get one jackpot, I think, in All My Lovin' multiball, but that's not much. She finished at something like 1.2 million. HLC didn't do much the first two balls, but she got a couple of jackpots and took the win, not just on one of bunnyhugger's games, but on the bunnyhugger game.
Now came Creature from the Black Lagoon, another HLC pick. And a heck of a lot of distraction as one of the news crews came in, wanting attention and talk and footage. And if that weren't enough, Whirlwind malfunctioned again, and bunnyhugger had to decide to take the game out and to put Earthshaker in to take its place as a middle-era game. And to inform all the groups that they were allowed to re-pick their middle-era games that round if they wanted, even if they hadn't picked Whirlwind. And yet, despite all this pulling her in every direction, she played a god solid game, shooting up the middle until the points-generated Move Your Car mode started, and ended up winning in a walkoff. She was down three games to two, but that's something you can win from. And this past year bunnyhugger has been --- and has been getting known for being --- a rally player, someone who steps up when it's hard and pulls out a win. She could do this.
Afterwards, bunnyhugger would tell me, she should have changed her own middle-game pick to Earthshaker. While she hadn't touched it all weekend just on general principle she felt stronger on it than she felt on her pick, No Fear. It's a game I like --- it gave me a powerful lucky win at Pinburgh one year, and it plays well in The Pinball Arcade simulation --- but my enthusiasm and vague idea of what the heck I do exactly isn't very transmittable. HLC took a pretty big lead by the end of the second ball, but bunnyhugger --- switching from my advice to play modes to instead play multiball --- did the perfect thing on the third ball, bringing a mode into multiball, with the promise of scoring all the points.
She did not. She finished the ball something like sixty million points ahead of HLC. But sixty million points is not that many in No Fear. HLC could lose if she had a short enough ball and didn't get any modes started. But she did get a mode started, and she played it pretty well, and blew past bunnyhugger's score. Reigning champion bunnyhugger was knocked out in the first round, four games to two.
It was not going to be a merry ride home.
But what is merry, any time? A good day at an amusement park. Such as seen here, pictures from our first, partial, day at Dollywood. See for yourself:
The first thing you see inside the park! One of the multiple theaters --- we didn't get into this one --- and the photo spot for the park's entry. You can see one of the park photographers there. The Summer Celebration was the seasonal special event going on then.
To the left of that is the last thing you see inside the park, the Emporium gift shop that's also the exit. I assume you can exit without going through the gift shop too. I'm not sure what the building on the right there is. Oh, but say, you were wondering how summer is celebrated at Dollywood?
Well, here! They set up a bunch of ``Roadside Attractions'', such as this Kite Sky, with dozens of kites above the midway, just glowing in the brilliant light. It was gorgeous. There's no capturing the subtleties of color and shade this presented.
Another view of the kites, again trying and failing to get at the brilliance of the colors in the afternoon sky. There would be a bunch of ``Roadside Attractions'' along the park and you're going to see every single one of them. (Not really.) (Probably.)
Here's a more nearly attraction-free part of the midway. Note the Smokey Mountains in the background, smoking. (That's actually from the locomotive, the ride that Dollywood was built around.)
Oh, but, just before that next attraction we noticed this charming birdhouse with an outbuilding.
Trivia: Something like 930,000 Korean refugees were repatriated from Japan to Korea over the course of 1946, joining 630,000 who had been returned the year before. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 14: 1952, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
