I've mentioned how Pinball At The Zoo draws just, like, everyone. Not just from Michigan but from all of North America. Among the people we expected to see there was ACE, who'd swept into the league for a couple seasons when his job had him stationed for a long while in Lansing, and who left, sadly abruptly, in January 2023. He'd arranged to get time off to come out here, and even make a week of it, before realizing that it was Easter weekend. So, uh, won't be doing that again, at least not when Pinball At The Zoo is Easter weekend.
He would have a pretty good weekend, making it to 4th place in the B Division. He had a tiebreaker against RED, of Lansing Pinball League, as if he hadn't had enough play that weekend. ACE would have sad news for us that he wouldn't be able to drop in on the last night of Lansing Pinball League's season on Tuesday, though; work had found reason for him to visit a client or something down in Indiana on Tuesday and Wednesday. So we saw him several times over the weekend and at the afterparty, but figured that was going to be it.
Except! Hours before league night was to begin we got word that he was going to make it after all. And so he got to join us --- the league, that is; he didn't play in my and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's group --- as a guest player. Also to play in the side tournament, by a wild coincidence on Deadpool (his favorite game), which he managed somehow to win.
A completely unexpected friend to see, who was there Friday? WVL, founder of the Lansing Pinball League, and rare visiter back to his old stomping grounds. He's living I want to say in St Joseph, Michigan, these days, so fair enough he feels up to the hourlong hike to Kalamazoo once a year but not the two-hour drive to Lansing twice a month. He seems to be doing well, and was just there to see the show and see people. Annoyingly, I had to cut off talking with him because I was next on some table (I forget which) and then ended up stuck behind someone who took forever on their game, only for me to take no time at all. Anyway even a little bit of contact beats none. Also he was there with his (current? former?) roommate, someone else who plays on the MUD he does and we were able to talk a bit about the experience of text roleplay adventures like that.
A couple of big names of competitive pinball were there, like Steve Bowden, who's become a regular at Pinball At The Zoo, or Zach Sharpe (son of Roger Sharpe, The Man Who Saved Pinball[tm]). Even a guy from New Zealand. But the biggest name of all there?
That would be Gary Stern, another The Man Who Saved Pinball, who took the remnants of Sega pinball when it folded in the late 90s to make the new Stern Pinball, that's seen pinball make it another quarter-century. (Sega Pinball was the rebranded Data East pinball, which itself got started with company parts bought from the closing of the original Stern pinball company of the 70s and 80s and a much younger Gary Stern. Which, incidentally, got a lot of its start from what was left of the Chicago Coin company.)
He's retired from a direct hands-on role in Stern Pinball, but obviously you want to keep a guy who looks just like his caricature out and being a public face of things. (The new King Kong game even opens --- or at least it opened when I played the game Thursday --- with the presentation of King Kong on Broadway and the game's announcer saying to stand by with your decoder pins for a secret message from Uncle Gary.) So he walked around the expo, wearing the same satin jacket with 'Pinball' embroidered across the back that bunnyhugger got from the Stern Merchandise Store, patiently smiling and taking pictures with everybody.
Well, not everybody. A couple of times bunnyhugger saw him but also saw that he was talking on the phone, or sitting in the lounge area checking something on his phone. Times when it seemed like, you know, he's stuck being on the whole weekend, so she wasn't going to interrupt his having a moment of peace. If peace can be had on a phone.
And then I even bumped into him once. I was stepping back from a game for some reason or other, and didn't notice that he was walking behind me. We didn't collide hard --- while I apologized, he continued on, maybe not having even noticed --- and that was that. Still, it was enough of a story for me to tell the rest of the weekend, to bunnyhugger's ever-more-rolled eyes, and now that I've shared it here it can go away until next year.
Fun chance getting to see people, though, not just games.
Next big event on my photo roll? The Ionia Free Fair, which we got to for only a few but well-appreciated and water-surrounded hours in mid-July.
The Ionia Free Fair doesn't charge admission, but it does charge for parking, but the parking does also come with coupons that you can see.
Because of the crowds and the flooding that knocked out a lot of parking area we were way, way, way back, out where some abandoned tractors or other farm equipment promised farm power.
Coming up to the fairgrounds brought us, first, to horse barns like this and a nice symmetry of light and dark.
Goat rolling their eyes at me.
Another goat getting a bit of a trim.
And a bin full of newly-hatched chicks.
Trivia: After the October Revolution Lenin counted the days until he could claim in triumph that he had lasted longer than the Paris Commune of 1871. Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1871, Eric Hobsbawm.
Currently Reading: Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop, Henry Petroski.
PS: What's Going On In Alley Oop? Is there a story in the Sunday Little Oops again? February - April 2025 in a pocket universe.
