Pin-golf got started before I got home from work. The format lets you start anytime and the plan was that people could start playing a course anytime between 4:30 and 7:00. By the time I got home and walked to the barcade to join ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger a few people were already playing, and she was waiting for the chance to start herself. Past experience said it was a bad idea for the two of us to play at the same time, since it leaves the main desk with nobody watching it, but it's also just ... not done ... to play on your own if you can help it. So when the next couple people came in, bunnyhugger started playing with them while I watched the desk and gave people instructions and all that.
Fear and Trembling is usually a small tournament --- people shy away from the pin-golf format, it seems --- and since you can start anytime there's never a particular reason to start at this time, so folks drift in slowly. I didn't get to start playing myself until just before 7pm, when, among other things, FAE and DMC decided to ditch the cards they had been playing and start new ones (one could restart a try for a small additional donation to the charity). DMC's choice to restart came after he had accidentally been playing toward one objective but had written down, on the scoresheet, that he was attempting the other. It was clear to everyone what he had meant to do, but we have to go by what's on the page and with that failure to meet the goal, a 4, he decided to restart. This is how he and FAE ended up in a group with me.
Since I had tested out most of the objectives in the preceding half-week and had suggested or concurred with all of them you'd expect I would be good at the course, if you had no idea how pin-golf works. Even expert players have trouble with some of them --- DMC, an expert on the game Rush, failed on his first go-round to make that objective in a single ball! --- and I'm not an expert player. I think my only hole-in-one was the Rush objective, one that we had agreed was an easy one, but also that you need some easy objectives because it is too demoralizing when everything is impossible. Despite that even expert players DMC and FAE had a couple of 4's, representing objectives never made. And even some of the more novice players, in other groups, got a couple of objectives in three or even two balls, giving them a heck of a feeling of triumph.
I did just well enough to make the four-person playoffs, which took me by such surprise that when bunnyhugger told me I said ``no I did not''. The playoffs were further pin-golf, playing a bank of three holes at the choice of top-seeded DMC, and the objectives chosen by second-seed FAE. (RED and I just got to pick our order of play.) I did not do well in the first two of the playoff objectives, even though they were the same ones as the main course. The only one I managed was on the final game, King Kong, playing the goal of climbing to 200 feet of the Empire State Building, which you do by making a specific set of game-chosen shots, one of them a right bastard, because there isn't a reliable angle to set up the shot. I ended up giving up on aiming for that and starting a multiball instead on the correct supposition that in the chaos of three balls running around something would go my way, and it did.
Still, that left me in fourth-place, still taking home a trophy. RED took home third place, the trophy he liked best too --- one he happened to mention earlier in the night as being awesome, assuaging bunnyhugger's fears that she had made disappointing trophies this time around --- and DMC took second. This meant FAE won the Fear and Trembling tournament for the fourth time in a row and it's kind of a shame we can't give them permanent possession of a trophy. They just have to take home this year's first-place trophy again.
Still can't believe I made the cut but there's the trophy to prove it.
Now I'm going to close out Christmas lights pictures; I promised you I was going to be more sparing in these, didn't I? Go ahead and guess what amusement park photographs come up next.
Pterodactyl light that's stationary and not animated, but the streaks in my windshield give it a little vibe of having just landed anyway.
And I'm always going to be fond of showing a sea serpent. As I recall the serpent actually has only one tail, with the end alternating, and my picture got both lit at once.
This Santa alligator looks like they've taken all the cold medicine.
From the Noah's Ark display here's two raccoons, two squirrels, and two frogs hanging out. The rest of the Ark is on the other side of the street.
Oh, bunch of people pointing at a lad in a basket, wonder what comes next.
The reindeer are so glad that I'm leaving. You can see a bit of the raceway stadium stairs behind, in the picture, that you couldn't possibly see in person.
Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Wednesday' was 'Budhuvasara', meaning 'Awakening'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.
Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.
