All the way ago last Tuesday ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger hosted this year's Fear and Trembling pinball tournament. This is her pin-golf event, where the goal is not to score points but to complete objectives in as few balls as possible. This is a fun and frustrating format, for everyone. Us, for the challenge of figuring out what tables to use and what objectives to set on them. Everyone else, for finding that they can't manage to do something on purpose that they always do incidentally while playing. Sometimes your best approach is to ignore the goal and just play a good game, but people only resort to that in desperation.
Speaking of desperation: one extra challenge we put on ourselves is that the tournament offers a player's choice of objectives, so we need to find tables that have two clear objectives that aren't just ``get a bunch of points''. Ideally they should be objectives you can make progress on that's saved, ball-to-ball, and should make it really clear when you've made the goal so you don't have to guess what happened. The point of this is to make choosing, and knowing you might have succeeded if you'd picked the other objective, part of the game.
Ironically, we passed on the challenge of picking which tables, turning the choice over to a random number generator. Well, we feel like we always pick the same games and after long enough you run out of different goals. The random number generator picked an interesting enough course, though, including a couple games I really like, at least one that I don't but am somehow good at, and didn't repeat too many from the last couple years' of games.
Picking objectives was annoying, in part because many modern pinball games have gotten complicated to the point there are jillions of things to do and the video screens, for all the space they have, don't always persistently show you what happened. Ultimately we only had to bump one game from the main bank to backup for want of being sure we had a clean objective. And there was testing, because with stuff going on we didn't have enough time at our local barcade to try them all out. I went two days in a row in the leadup to the tournament to try out objectives I wasn't sure about, but still left a couple games --- like Medieval Madness, which I've played so many times in person and in virtual form that I doubt there's anything I don't know --- with objectives that were technically untested.
Still, what's the worst that could happen?
That teased, let's wrap up photos of our trip to Crossroads Village from the last week of last year. I'm almost up to within the past ten months!
Another intersection with a nice lighted fence and some really good reflections here.
Here's the village's central tree and the reflections in the slush around it.
Not Santa! Just one of his many statues waving around the place. Note the over-decorated tree in the background, one of the village's centerpiece items.
The opera house and the coffee shop here, near the end of the night. The gift shop has already closed and is dark.
The tree wrapped up tight in lights. I think this is the time we overheard someone asking and told them that yeah, we'd been here in the summer and the tree was still wrapped, just unlit.
And a parting view of the train station and a lot of wet planks of wood.
Trivia: When developing the first periodic table of the elements Dimitri Mendeleyev supposed that the atomic weights of either tellurium (128) or iodine (127) must be wrong because tellurium clearly preceded iodine in order. Mendeleyev was correct about the ordering, but did not know of isotopes, or that there is enough abundant tellurium-130 that an unrefined sample's average weight will be closer to 128, while iodine-127 is the only common isotope of that element. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.
Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.
