I was busy with a trivia day and then baking ziti with farmer's cheese rather than mozzarella (it came out okay, a bit stringy is all) and you know, it's late and I don't feel up to writing more narrative stuff. Please enjoy pictures instead.
So the next interesting thing we did last summer was head to Downtown East Lansing for their 80s Night, one of a string of evenings where a couple blocks were closed off and used for fun. Here's some pictures.
The basic layout. The park you see past was carved out from what used to be an interurban turnaround point.
And here's Pinball Pete's, the Lansing-and-Ann-Arbor pinball and video game magnate. We didn't happen to go downstairs for this, though.
They set out tape for things like a running long jump track (bottom of picture) and hopscotch board.
Pinball Pete's set up a tent with a couple pinball and one video game. They lacked any true 80s pinball games so brought out Aerosmith and the 90s Guns N' Roses. The game I think was a Marvel vs Capcom fighting game.
Here's ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_hugger in her 80s gear urging me to play Guns N'Roses. (I would have a crazy good game.)
And performing on stage, Starfarm, a local band that specializes in 80s covers.
Here's the sound booth guy working the treble or something on a CVS.
They had a real-life Tetris game; you'd roll the big die (in the woman's hand) to see what your next piece was and have to add it to the tower without the whole thing falling over. Kids often ignored the die-rolling bit and just made their own stacks.
And there it falls!
Some kids thought outside the box for Tetris block placement.
There were also various activities, including here, painting vinyl records. I'm torn on that as an activity; on the one hand, it destroys a record as a record and on the other, they're not records that were being used as records.
I meant this to be an album cover but this might be my County Fair picture submission instead.
Trivia: Atari manufactured twelve million copies of its Pac-Man cartridge though the company's research showed under ten million people owned and used a 2600 system. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story of the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, Steven L Kent.
Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.
