Once she lost her first round ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger was knocked out of contention for the championship, and also out of the interest of the streamers. If she appeared on camera again (I don't remember and I'm not rewatching the whole stream to check) it was incidental, that she was on a game people still in the running were in. She was put into the rounds of best-of-three ``tiebreakers''. The International Flipper Pinball Association considers everyone who lost the first round to be in an eight-way tie for ninth-through-sixteenth, but bunnyhugger chose to break the ties with more rounds of play. In this way, if nothing else, nobody who came out to play would have to leave before getting at most ... uh ... ten losses. (It also meant some poor soul did get ten losses, although she had some wins in there.)
Nothing about the tournament format compels anyone to stick around after they don't want to play anymore, of course. Last year several players left after the first round and we had the very counter-intuitive result that two players who lost the first but won their second round before leaving finished ahead of someone who lost the first and second rounds but played through to the fourth. Having heard more than enough about that last year bunnyhugger was determined that it wouldn't happen again. Anyone who forfeited, such as because they wanted to get out of the middle of nowhere in the lower peninsula ahead of the most major snow event known to humanity, would be placed manually below anyone else who'd won the same number of rounds. As it turns out, only one person took this opportunity to leave early --- last year, in the less-remote Bay City, three people ditched; and come to think of it, back in January 2020 a great mass of people in the open tournament just disappeared, leaving the brackets a logical shambles --- so everything was easy to work out. (Ironically, she had got her stuff together to leave just as the other brackets had finished enough that she had a specific competitor to play against. I don't know whether she might have stuck around had she known that.)
The tiebreaker rounds, though, tried to make it up to bunnyhugger, who beat the first two rounds of opponents without a loss. And she took the final opponent, KEG --- once upon a time of Lansing League, now a Chicagoland player making a name for herself as the first out-of-stater in the Michigan women's championship --- to a third game. But she lost the third game, finishing the tournament at tenth, which was one more heartbreaking defeat after what the day had already brought.
KEC, meanwhile --- the person who beat bunnyhugger in the first round, I'm sorry my convention of using high score initials is confusing here --- emerged into the second round also playing strong. There's a funny thing here. Most of the time, when you learn a skill, any skill, you plateau; you have a long period of making slight improvement, then suddenly get a lot better, then have a long period of slight improvement again. KEC doesn't plateau; she just gets a bit, incrementally but noticeably, better every time. She's an even match for bunnyhugger, I'd say. But that day? She was also playing great. Above her normal level. After beating bunnyhugger 4-2 she went to beat MEW also in six games. She was in semifinals and only one thing could keep her out of finals, and that was our carpooler.
On that suspenseful beat let me divert you to Tuscora Park, which doesn't just have an antique carousel, something I think I've said already in photo captions or introductions. I forget. Someone check me on that.
Other thing we wanted to ride, besides the carousel: the Parker Superior Wheel, matching the one at Crossroads Village. Note that to the left of car number 9 is a wheelchair-accessible car; there's one just like it opposite the center axis.
View of the baseball game from on the ride. I'd thought there were only two Superior Wheels known to exist and we'd ridden them both but it turns out there's another in ... Kansas? One of those states down there anyway. You can't see that other Superior Wheel from here.
Looking down on the swings ride that bunnyhugger might have been able to fit in but that has hard fiberglass seats too narrow for me.
And an arty view out at the train ride, chugging along past the miniature golf course that we once again didn't have time to play.
Miniature golf course, train station, swimming pool, and antique carousel seen from atop the Superior Wheel.
And a view out on the miniature golf course, the train's course, and the roller coaster from the Superior Wheel.
Trivia: Powering up for the Apollo 1 capsule began at 7:41 am the 27th of January, 1967. The astronauts get secured in their seats until 1:19 pm. Source: In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965 - 1969, Francis French and Colin Burgess. The astronauts first entered the capsule at 1:00.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 81: Steam Rocket to Infinity, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
