Happy Doctorversary, dear ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger. ... I am sorry that this Pinball At The Zoo report happened to fall on it. If I'd realized I would have postponed writing the house-curse post a day.
Pinball At The Zoo women's semifinals. If bunnyhugger can play another round like the one she just had she'll be in finals and basically assured of a top position in women's finals next January. Also after a killer performance on Venom, and a great demonstration of skill on Creature, she's ... maybe not going to have top-seed-in-the-group GCH pick those games against her. Hard to say. Depends whether she was paying attention and how much she thinks those were fluke events.
Also the Ypsi Pinball camera stays with bunnyhugger's group. I don't know why. The highest seed still in the tournament was in the other group. Maybe it was just a 50-50 chance.
Anyway, I see this starting and I get out of the way lest my watching, even on stream, jinx bunnyhugger. I must have seen too much: she has a lousy game of Uncanny X-Men, good for only third place. There's no way she's moving on unless she gets a first on one of the next to games, and maybe not even then. The next game is Centaur, which has treated her pretty well all weekend ... and not this time. She gets a last and at this point ... actually, given the point distribution it's possible for her to move into the next round, but she'll have to win the final game --- Deadpool --- and then if the other players finish in the right order, she'll have eto win a playoff after that. It doesn't matter. She loses Deadpool, coming in last and worrying that everyone on-stream thinks she looks like a fool. My recollection is at least Chat thought, aw, she got some bad luck there.
It's a disappointing finish, especially coming immediately after a killer round. And especially because just making the final four would have all but guaranteed her placement in women's finals. But it's not as bad as might be. Five of the seven people finishing above her are from out of state, and while it's possible that, say, KEG might come out from Chicago or GCH from Greater Toronto Megalopolis for finals, more likely they'd play closer to home. With her finish bunnyhugger launched herself into 7th place on the women's side of tournaments, or fifth place among those likely to attend, and she can focus on maintaining rather than securing her position now.
FAE, who'd ridden with us Saturday as well, didn't make finals in anything; they were 25th-ranked in the race for 16 spots for Main Tournament B Division. If I could've swapped my Legends of Valhalla score with them they'd have been in, but you're not allowed to trade like that for some reason. Too bad.
We hung around a while, of course, me watching the end of women's main where KEG and two other women managed to tie for second place, and so had to have a three-way playoff to see who got which trophy. And to see the end of B Division finals, where ACE and RED ... got into a tie for third place, and had to have a two-way playoff to see who got which trophy.
And there was other stuff going on at the expo, even in these last hours for it. One of the vendors had a very musty manilla envelope full of spare parts for Tri-Zone, and I got that; it's nothing that we need right now --- plastics for the playfield and such --- but if we ever do need them, they're nice to have on hand.
Also the biggest disappointment of the weekend? The people with the exotic sodas did not have any Moxie, for two years in a row now.
Most interesting side item was a pinball museum in (somewhere) presenting a couple of Python Anghelo games. Not just games he'd designed, including the quite rare soccer-themed Flipper Football, but --- they claimed --- actual specific games from his personal collection. Including, like, the original playfield of Taxi when they used 'Marilyn' as one of the taxi passengers, before someone from Marilyn Monroe's estate made it clear that they had to play money for that and Williams Pinball changed it to Lola.
And the thing that was still holding a line when the rest of the show was packing up? A guy with his homebrewed pinball game, Sonic Spinball. A table based more or less on various Sonic the Hedgehog games that I don't understand, selectable at the start, along with a basic but respectable Pat Lawlor-esque table design. The guy had created it, originally, as his calling card to get into professional pinball design and it worked, getting him a job at the boutique maker American Pinball ... until they laid him and many other people off recently. But hey, he got to talk with Gary Stern and a bunch of Stern Pinball people, not to mention just about everyone who didn't spend every waking moment at the tournament. In a neat trick the game can be operated like normal from flippers and the plunger, or --- and he showed this off --- by a Sega handheld game controller. He said he'd thought about putting a shaker motor in the pinball machine so you could hit a button and 'nudge', or at least rattle, the physical game while playing on the controller. He also showed how silly this all could be by standing at the back of the table and playing by controller.
Anyway, after the long line I got the chance to play, poorly. FAE had a fairly respectable game, while bunnyhugger had one of those balls going on so long it got to be a little embarrassing, and she worried other people wouldn't get the chance to play at all. But all games, even runaway killer ones, end, and she got to have a really good bit of play on a homebrew table.
Back now to the Ionia Free Fair and some of the exhibitions.
Bunches of lawn and farm equipment on display in another part of the Floral Building. Also some vintage signs.
And you see they also had your dad's garage here.
As well as the owners guide for every car your dad owned.
Some vintage Ionia Free Fair stuff, plus miscellaneous Christmas things like Ray Coniff albums.
And then out the back, looking towards the Grand River ... say, what's that there?
Yes, looking out the doorway gave me this picture, now an Art!
Trivia: Algae use molybdenum as part of the digesting of sulphur, converting sulphur it to dimethyl sulfoxide and then by a molybdenum-based enzyme, to the volatile dimethyl sulfide. From there it rises into the atmosphere, oxidizing it into methanesulfonic acid, which triggers cloud formation. Source: Molecules at an Exhibition: The Science of Everyday Life, John Emsley.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 59: Popeye's Carnival, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Popeye accidentally buys a circus? Huh, I wonder if it's in financial --- oh, they don't have a tent.
