This week we reached the median of a seven-week block of pinball events on Tuesdays. It started the last week of February with pinball league, and then the first week of March with the Dungeons and Dragons launch party. Then pinball league. Next week is pinball league again --- it's the second and fourth weeks of the month --- and after that, the 1st of April, the charity tournament in honor of ERR. And after that, pinball league once more and then finally we have a nice relaxing Tuesday with nothing to do but our taxes.
And this week was the charity tournament, March Hare Madness, one of the four quarterly tournaments raising money for animal care. This is the one dedicated to Stephen, the superstar Flemish giant, and supports the rescue from which we adopted him, Penelope the Californian, and Fezziwig the mouse.
The format: Four-group matchplay, yes, but with the Critical Hit deck. This is a bunch of cards for casting ``spells'' that add weird and wacky things to your pinball game. Like, one card lets you steal a different player's game after ball one or ball two. Another lets you make them stop playing that ball right that second. Another covers up the score display, which does more than you'd think to mess up your modern game with complicated rules and much information that needs to be tracked somehow. Given the general no-shenanigans nature of the International Flipper Pinball Association --- they won't sanction tournaments where, say, you play with hands on opposite flippers or other simple ways to make a familiar game weird --- it's amazing they allow this. It seems like the lingering remains of an old joke never pulled out again.
It also seems likely they figured the Critical Hit games would not be a lasting problem. The cards were issued in like two small runs, years ago, and as cards went missing the remaining decks would be used less and less. After years of success we lost four cards last year and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger was ready to give up on the format. But the Critical Hit deck got a re-issue, and she got a fresh deck, and now there were enough cards to feel comfortable using them.
In past years the format has been to give out two cards to everyone at the start, and then to give people another card when they earn an extra ball, which most games make practical at least and some games make inevitable. I had a thought and bunnyhugger liked it: what if we also gave out an extra ball to whoever finished last in a group? With more cards in our nearly-two-deck set we could certainly spare them. And having more cards put into circulation might get people to use them more. The fun of this format is throwing down cards and launching chaos and people who have only a couple cards save them like JRPG players. It usually gets better in the latter rounds when people figure they're out of time to use them; could we inspire that chaos earlier?
bunnyhugger approved, and then dove in to making trophies, using some past bowling trophies donated by MWS, sawing off the plastic bowlers and replacing them with resin bunnies. All she had to do was actually run the tournament.
And in photographs: moving now into the last night of our big summer trip last year. What'd that look like at Kings Island?
Midway switching on its lights as the evening sets in. At this point I think we got a meal and so the next picture is ...
... Fully night! And I love this stuff, all sorts of difficult color and shade variations.
We went in for the end-of-the-night ride on The Beast and here we are underneath the fireworks-and-drone show again. I guess someday we could not get a ride on The Beast and see what it actually looks like but who wants to run that risk?
Anyway here's the drones coming together again for the Kings Island logo. Last picture I think was in-between formations so if you didn't recognize it that's normal.
The Beast's station getting ready to dispatch trains again. I like the Moon being juuuust off to the side of the structure.
First train loading up, I think it is, getting ready to resume riding.
Trivia: The first maneuvering of Gemini 3 --- and the first maneuvering of any spacecraft on orbit --- was an approximately 75-second burn of forward-firing thrusters 11 and 12, which brought the spacecraft to a nearly circular orbit within two miles of the planned parameters. Source: Gemini Flies! Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler.
Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.
