March Hare Madness is a pinball tournament with two elements. The ordinary is group matchplay, with each round setting people in a group of three or four people on a randomly-drawn game and awarding ratings points based on the order of finish. The absurd is the Critical Hit deck, a deck of cards which give the player the option to cast ``spells''. These allow mischief or advantages like covering the display screen so no one knows their scores, or swapping someone from your group into another group, or requiring someone to stop play immediately. Given the International Flipper Pinball Association's strong attitude that sanctioned pinball contests should only test pinball skills and not nonsense like ``can you play with your arms crossed'', you may wonder how they sanction the Critical Hit deck. It seems to be a moment of youthful whimsy they can't bear to repent.
Every player was dealt three cards to start, and would get another card if, in a round, they collected an extra ball (most games make this attainable, and some make it easy), or if you finished in last place (consolation, and getting more cards in play). My initial set of cards was one good card --- after the first ball, swap my position, and score, with the player of my choice --- and two lousy ones --- give another player's game a shake to give them one or more tilt warnings. Over the night I would collect only a couple more cards, those also uninspiring ones. Cover the display screen. Something else I forget and that tells you how much I figured I could play it. So I ended up going the night without playing anything. Even the good card, swiping someone else's score, I was never far enough behind at the end of ball one (or behind at all) for that to be worth using. I guess I ended up in bunches of people with a similar dilemma; the only time a card got used against me all night was the stop-playing-now card that RED dropped just as I was getting multiball going on Medieval Madness. I got a compensation ball, as the card specifies, but probably missed out on first place because of that mischief.
Other people, though, were having a good time with their cards, and causing a good bit of mayhem. There was a lot of playing the cards to eject someone from their group, since if you know you're playing, say, DMC on Rush, a game he can play approximately forever, you maybe will take your chances with literally anyone else. And if your group just had DMC land in it maybe you want to change the game away from whatever you're stuck with to something he maybe won't play for so long. And if maybe you're someone else in the group DMC just got put into and you liked the old game better maybe you'll drop the card that makes every group change their game. So at the end of every round was not only the wait for other groups to finish but also a pause while everyone figured what they wanted to do to force ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger to adjust the official tournament settings on her iPad Mini.
With experience everyone got better at this pre-round fidgeting. The first time around took a while, though, and bunnyhugger feared that the tournament --- even though it started at the early hour of 6 pm --- wouldn't finish at a reasonable hour. The particular dread is of a tournament that hits the bar's closing hour, but any time after midnight is still rough considering she and I have to be at work Wednesday morning. I said, with confidence, that the six qualifying rounds would be done around 10 pm and the whole tournament done by midnight. In this, I would be wrong, but I would not be so terribly wrong. The last round of qualifying finished a little after 10 pm, and the last playoff game would finish somewhere around 12:15; we were able to leave for home about 12:30. Could have been about an hour worse before it would have been really untenable.
And now we're closing off the ZooAmerica part of our Hershey Park visit.
And here's some more black vultures, hanging out and doing their vulturely business.
Meanwhile the rabbits work on leaf-clearing detail.
Goose with a rabbit who's suspicious of all these photos I'm taking of them.
Oh, and here's a porcupine that turns out wanted to sit up top on a tree trunk. Also turns out porcupine tails are longer than I think.
There's supposed to be a grey wolf somewhere in this enclosure but I don't know, the camouflage and everything, no telling where they might be.
And uh ... oh, uhm, so turns out the black vultures were volunteer exhibits that ZooAmerica does not want to have around and is hanging effigies to try chasing them off. If the effigy plan is working then the black vulture population must have been something else before they started.
Trivia: During the transearth coast Apollo 8 required only one small midcourse correction, a 15.0-second maneuver using the service module's reaction control system for a change of 4.8 feet per second. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.
Currently Reading: A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day, John Withington.
