I did not the other day say anything about how ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger did. Let me rectify that. She started off bothered because the shrinking of A Division to eight people left her stranded in B. And, worse, near the top of B, where she would have to play perfectly just to preserve the position she had going in. And with the people going into finals seeded ninth through twelfth --- the serious players who were denied A --- attending this meant we had large B Division, eleven people, ten of whom would need to lose two best-of-three head-to-head matches before getting the big B Division trophy.
With an eleven-person head-to-head finals there were actually five people with first-round byes, bunnyhugger among them, a good leg up in getting through the five rounds to a final winner. Her first competition was against LE, one of the almost-healthy number of women we have in league this season. And bunnyhugger won in two matches straight, on games of Tron and Kiss that I didn't see because i was busy failing out.
Her next competition would be DJN, and not for the last time. Here bunnyhugger used The Beatles as her game pick --- every player could pick a game only once per night, part of the strategy of the tournament as a whole --- and had something terrible happen on ball three. Ordinarily, this ball starts with the game offering you the two-ball All My Loving multiball, which you can change away from if you make some weird, terrible mistake. But this time the game did not give her All My Loving; it started the third ball --- before she even plunged --- in one of the other, less lucrative modes. She called on me, as Assistant Tournament Director, for a ruling. Does she get compensation for the game malfunction here?
It pained me to, but I could not see how this was a major malfunction, the kind that earns someone an extra ball as compensation. Sometimes games will get tripped by something --- an errant switch, a spinner not done spinning, a drop target resetting on the wrong side of the new-player event --- and that's just too bad; it used to be really common on the Lord of the Rings table for player one (and only player one) to be cheated out of the chance to pick their mode, and Star Trek does it intermittently. So I had to say, despite it all, play on.
She was not happy at losing her multiball --- this despite her having a two-million-point lead already, on a game that two million points regularly wins on --- but acknowledged later that it was the correct ruling. She just wanted it on record in case it happened again, for example in the side tournament which was a one-game playoff on The Beatles.
And it happens that it did happen again. And it was in the side tournament. And guess who it happened to?
Yes, in one of those weird things that keeps happening, while bunnyhugger was away from the side tournament game taking care of some Finals business, what should have been her turn started with The Beatles ... apparently not being in any mode. The game has five songs, five modes, and there's always a flashing light to indicate which you're in or are going to start next. This time, there was nothing lit. And, I saw, one bank of drop targets had dropped. The drop targets should start each new ball raised up again. Whatever the exact problem was, it was surely related to this drop target dropping.
I warned bunnyhugger about it before she could start her ball, and yes, annoyingly, the ``play on'' ruling was the sensible one. And it turned out that the game started up All My Loving multiball anyway, just as if nothing were wrong. Still, the incident happening twice --- and getting a report of someone else it happened to, although not affecting the multiball selection --- was of interest to RED, who plays in league and repairs the games. Just hope the drop target information was a useful clue.
Anyway, after The Beatles troubles in the main tournament, B Division, bunnyhugger would go on to lose a game of John Wick to DJN. But then she picked Tales of the Arabian Nights for the tiebreaker game, and won that pretty nicely. She had got through two of the four rounds she would need to win the B Division.
So last time in pictures of Kennywood's Noah's Ark we were asked what happens if we Go That Way. Got your bets in for what's there? Here it is ...
Ah, it's the part of a zebra that kicks you. Okay.
Here's the part where you're slurped up into a beehive or maybe a bare holodeck, that's fun.
And here c_eagle has a warning for us about a room that's even more disorienting than the rest of the place.
Here we are! If this doesn't look terribly disorienting it's because you don't realize it has that 'mystery spot' illusion, where the room is appreciably off-level compared to the visual cues of the room so you feel like you're being pulled to the corner by some weirdly strong force.
Couple of bright birds look on at your confusion.
And now a quick jaunt through the time vortex.
Trivia: A 1427 Florentine law required every landholder or merchant to keep double-entry books for the state tax audit, the catasto. Records of these still survive. (Every good merchant also kept a libro segreto, the secret book for their eyes, with plausible-looking catastos for the state to audit.) Source: The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, Jacob Soll.
Currently Reading: Miscellaneous comic books.
