State championships. As mentioned, we were never in the running. GRV, who had qualified, kind-of surprised everyone by declaring at the last minute he wouldn't compete, scrambling some of the brackets and letting one of the alternates play. He's done this before. One year ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger got to play in state finals thanks to GRV's ``accidental'' tardiness. But folks figured now that there's money on the line the defending state runner-up would not miss again. We were wrong, failing to anticipate that his desire to do something dramatic --- and, it must be said, to do something nice for a hopeful runner-up --- would overcome his desire to get potentially a couple hundred bucks. Indeed --- well, watch this space.
As the tournament went on, well, of course, narratives emerged. One is that JRA --- number-four-ranked in the world --- kept taking people to the Led Zeppelin pinball. (Tournament rules allowed any competitor to play a particular game only once per round.) Stern's Led Zeppelin pinball came out last year and sank like a lead balloon; even our local venue which never misses a Stern table skipped it. Mostly, people don't think it's fun; there's not a lot obvious to do and nobody knows how to get any fun out of the modes. Except that JRA --- one of the underage players that SPM's father could not get worked up about our hipster bar's 9pm curfew for under-21-year-olds --- does know it. (I heard someone say his father had bought one and they kept it for a couple months, enough for him to really learn the rules.) So with a game that he alone really knows how to play? Of course he'd take every challenger to it.
It got to where people referred to it as his holding seminars or giving lessons on how to play, since everyone gathered around to watch just what to do with the thing. Like, how to prioritize your targets, what to try doing, what to skip. His ability to hit everything he really shoots at on purpose makes it easier for him, of course; I could try copying his moves but I would not put up a billion points on the game. (Almost nobody breaks a hundred million points when they're dragged into playing it.) But it probably has changed Led Zeppelin for the Michigan pinball community: once people know how they're supposed to play a game, usually, they like it more, in that Benjamin Franklin Effect way. And now the top players in Michigan have a model for how to have a decent game.
So JRA was blazing through the competition, not just on Led Zeppelin. SPM was too, on a greater diversity of games, with his ... 11? 13? 6? ... year-old reflexes and a good understanding of rules serving him well. AJH, who runs the venue, lost to CST, the former state representative and one of those people you'd always think would win the state championship but never did. CST in turn lost to ACE, our friend who'd just announced his leaving Michigan. And what a story that would be, your last weekend in the state being winning the state championship. Also how good the omens would be: for some reason everyone who'd won the state championship from Michigan since the modern tournament era began about a decade ago has had a name starting with A. With AJH knocked out, he'd be a really good bet to take the position.
Especially as more of the competitors fell out. Past champion ADM lost to TY (another of the folks staying in our big AirBnB rental). AJR, another of the underage players, lost to MSS. (His father, AND, didn't compete, taking his chances in Ohio, where he finished second.) ACE would be the only A-named player to make it into the final eight positions. He had to win.
And I was taken aback when he lost to JRA in the semifinals.
And then ACE came up against SPM, who everyone had been watching with mixed feelings. On the one hand, boy, a kid that young representing the state? Great narrative. And he's certainly good enough, if not this year then next. On the other hand, his father. People admitted that SPM could win state and if he does, he deserves it, but nobody wants to face what his father would be like the day after. It's a recognition of skill and dread that I haven't seen since AJG was a regular competitor. Well, TY beat him, so that ACE and SPM would play off for third and fourth place.
ACE took an early lead in the best-of-three match and then lost a game. SPM's father nagged the tournament director about whether --- I want to say the 90s Guns N Roses game --- was behaving quite properly. It was a little wonky but the same for everyone, so, play on. I'll spare you the suspense. ACE won. Everyone else was relieved to have SPM's father defeated and the relief was spoiled a bit by SPM's crying. Which, to emphasize, is absolutely appropriate for anyone and even more so for someone as young as however young he is. But, yeah, that hurts some.
And then finals. JRA versus TY. With neither player having a name starting A it was impossible to guess who might win. But JRA was a compelling bet, what with Led Zeppelin in his pocket. TY made a good run, though, finally making an inexplicable mental error: with the pick of game he took JRA to Deadpool, another modern Stern game and another game that JRA was routinely putting up billion-point scores on.
(Roughly speaking, your modern game --- anything with a video screen, certainly, but most games from 2010 on --- has a score that grows exponentially as game time goes on. Later shots have a value that depends on your play earlier on. An older game, particularly an electromechanical, has a score that grows more linearly with game time. You can light shots for Wow! points, but they don't keep growing after that. So if you're playing someone you know is much better than you, well, you can win any game; that's part of the fun of sport. But you'll have a less hard time of it on an electromechanical.)
TY put up a fantastic game, six hundred million or so. But JRA had a billion points in the first two balls, and didn't even need to play the last ball.
Our new state champion, first one decided since 2020, is JRA.
We had enormous congratulations of course for TY and ACE, and MWS who finished seventh, and BMK also staying with us (another Lansing Pinball League regular) who finished tenth. But also had to ask TY why in the world he took JRA to Deadpool? Why not an electromechanical, where he'd have had some realistic chance? TY didn't know, just one of those things.
And for the end of Michigan's curious streak of having state champions whose names begin A --- well, notice the last of JRA's initials. Maybe we are just moving into a new phase of the A domination.
You may notice in all this talk I haven't mentioned why on earth bunnyhugger or I were there. We hadn't done anything that we needed to be there for, or that we contributed to in any way. Why we put our rabbit, and bunnyhugger's parents, to the ordeal of boarding her I intend to reveal shortly.
What was happening in early January around here? Our washing machine finally died. Here's a few last pictures of it as we hauled it out of position, making room for its replacement.
Here's the washer and dryer. The old dryer, the same harvest gold as the washer, died sometime in the early 2000s and bunnyhugger replaced it with that unit that someone was getting rid of as they'd moved into a new house that came with appliances.
Here's the old washer looming over the floor as though it were Disco-era Borg.
The mess that was the back of the washing machine. We got a bit of rust. That circular thing on the left center side looked like it could be removed to fiddle with stuff inside but it was not going to budge.
The serial number for our washer, which turned out to be lurking at the top front of the machine, just underneath the door. bunnyhugger looked it up and found this implied the machine was manufactured in December 1977. (Either 1977 or 2003, but we can rule out 2003 because it's harvest gold and also bunnyhugger already owned it then.)
Electrical wiring diagram on the back of the machine, just in case you want to know everything about how it works.
And finally the machine moved out of the way, so we could fit the new washer beside the dryer. It spent a short while off to the side where it was a surprisingly useful table on the side of everything.
Trivia: In 1807 Napoleon's Minister of the Interior ordered the prefects of every départment to provide translations of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the local patois. The results came in ninety different patois. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.
Currently Reading: A History of The World's Airlines, R E G Davies. Ooh, into some nice mid-60s speculations about the future of the aviation industry, particularly about whether there's likely to continue being the sort of rapid turnover in planes and plane designs that had been seen from 1945-1965. Davies notes the orders being placed for supersonic transports, not yet a workable technology (and notes the great problems sonic booms present), but, uh, yeah, after about the Boeing 747 generation we stopped getting tremendous changes and more refinements of airplane capacity and speed. Davies notes that planes couldn't get much faster than they already were without licking the sound barrier and, yeah, basically so today. (My recollection is planes on average fly slower than they did in the 60s, mostly for fuel economy reasons.) Always neat seeing forecasts of the future, though, when you know how things turned out.
