After beating KXL on Deadpool ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger would go into four straight games on Dungeons and Dragons. By then there were three players left, so she would have three of those games against MKS, one against KXL. After losing one game to MKS and then beating KXL --- knocking KXL out of the tournament --- it was down to two games against MKS, bunnyhugger needing to beat her once to win. In the second of bunnyhugger's matches against MKS a freak event happened. On the second ball bunnyhugger shot the ball up to the gelatinous cube in a move that should have started Dragon Multiball. But she also tilted, the game being prone to weird random instant-tilts where it gives the first and second warnings at once and then shuts the game down on you. Lousy but that happens.
Next ball, though, ball three, she approached the table to find the game telling her, before she plunged her ball, that she was in Dragon Multiball. This confused us all but bunnyhugger plunged, supposing that the game would start multiball when she plunged. Instead, the game only shot a single ball out, as far as we could tell in the multiball rules, but without the ball saver or at least not enough ball saver. Her ball ended, pretty far behind but not more than it was likely she could have made up in Dragon Multiball.
So I jumped out of the booth to look over the IFPA rulesheet, figuring that bunnyhugger was on her way upstairs to ask me for a ruling. PCL and MAG switched the stream away from showing the game to talk over what they saw and also to tell me roughly eight hundred times that I could call RLM and ask his advice what to rule.
But then ... eventually ... we realized it had been way longer than it took to get upstairs and ask me whether bunnyhugger should get a compensation ball. I went downstairs to check what was going on --- I imagined she and MKS trying to reconstruct just what the heck happened --- and it turned out they were playing the next game, having started the follow-up round which would be between the two players who had both lost three games each at that point. I was spared having to make a ruling.
Well, this final match MKS did win again, bunnyhugger never really having got things back in control after her unexpected multiball loss. bunnyhugger took a heartbreaking second place in the tournament, losing a good number of the ratings points she needs to compete in the women's state tournament next year and, she feared, making herself look like an amateur. And on camera, in front of anyone looking at the stream. I can't dispute the loss of points --- had she gotten first place she'd currently be above the cut line for an invitation to women's finals (granting, with over nine months of tournaments yet to be held) --- but an amateur? Hardly. Even if you lose the final match, it means you're good enough to be in finals, and so good enough to win them.
Still, hard not to think about had that unfair tilt not happened, or if she had appealed and it seemed consistent to rule that a compensation-ball matter. I have heard through the grapevine that Dungeons and Dragons is known, at least in that code revision, to have a bug with tilts at the start of multiball starting the next ball in an unplayable condition. We didn't know of it or have any reason to suspect the bug existed, though, and I don't know that it could have mattered at all if we had known it could happen. Or how to treat the problem of that Dragon Multiball starting as a single-ball thing. Hoping it doesn't happen again.
Really would be nice if pinball manufacturers could wait until the code doesn't have easy-to-create bugs before shipping.
And now some more wandering around Kings Island on a nice June day.
American Coaster Enthusiasts landmark plaque for The Racer, noting the ride's importance and how it was in an episode of The Brady Bunch that I never saw, and along the way implies the Coney Island park of C--------i closed in 1972, which it didn't really exactly.
Racer ridden (both sides) we went to Woodstock Express, which also opened in 1972 and is a quite good wooden roller coaster, though I repeat myself.
Loading station getting ready; you can see they were running two trains despite (or causing) the lack of any wait.
The queue goes on this bridge over the track so you get nice views of the coaster coming to you or being right underneath you, if you wait.
Fiberglass(?) Snoopy statue of him sharing a cookie with you, the way Snoopy did all the time in the comic strip. Also Woodstock with a much smaller cookie.
This isn't a particularly important part of the park, but I do quite like how the Woodstock Whirlybirds track makes this soothing wave across the picture.
Trivia: During the Harlan County (Kentucky) coal strike of 1931, the county's Red Cross chapter --- controlled by the coal companies --- refused to provide aid to striking workers. Exceptions were made only for miners who had some plot of land to grow vegetables, who could then be aided as farmers rather than mere victims of industrial downturns. Source: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 57: Pails of Pearls, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
