austin_dern

In other bogus news after Motor City Fur[ry] Con: when we got in, during our local blackout, I was content to get all the luggage and boxes (holding fursuits and kigurumis) and all in the house. Monday afternoon I figured to unpack everything and move photographs onto my computer and everything. Unpacking went fine, but photographs ... I couldn't find my camera.

There were obvious reasons it might have been missing. We moved everything in hurriedly, because it was like midnight. We were exhausted. We'd been through an attempted derecho. We were moving stuff into a blacked-out house illuminated only by handheld flashlights. Surely it was just put somewhere wrong. Or maybe left behind in my car. I'd put my con badge and character badge in this little box with my coati tail and ears, and expected I'd put my camera --- the other thing wrapped around my neck --- there too. It's what I usually do. But it could easily have fallen onto the floor of my car, rolled under a seat, and gone invisible there.

So we're left with the question: did I leave my camera at the con? I know with certainty that I had it as late as our last walk around the hotel before leaving. My suspicion is that when I went to the bathroom right before our final departure. I'd taken off everything I was wearing around my neck so I could take my tail off the belt. It would be not-ridiculous if I missed one of the things to put back on.

So, I called the hotel to ask if anyone had turned the camera in to their lost-and-found. They took my name and e-mail and phone and haven't called me back. I also e-mailed the convention in case anyone turned it in to their lost-and-found, but haven't heard back yet.

Today, going into the office during a rain not as heavy as Sunday's but still pretty good, I remembered: I had hung my small umbrella on the camera bag, and so that's missing too. On the one hand, some good news as if I can find my umbrella I've surely found my camera. On the other hand, I haven't seen my umbrella either. And while I've had that umbrella for months, it was only this weekend it got its real first workout, as the umbrella kept in my car for when it turns out to be rainy when I was away from home.

Can't say I approve of this direction of things.

And now ... at last ... we close out Jungle Jim's, and photos from our Hot and Lineless amusement park trip last June. After this it was all driving home and finding an interesting weirdly good Taco Bell in some tiny town in the northwestern corner of Ohio. Can't photograph that. Instead, the last pictures:

This Campbell's Soup swing is whimsical or body horror, you tell me! It looks like the mouth is supposed to move but I have no idea what for. I can't tell if the Lego Block Indiana Jones is part of the same promotion or was another figure they put on for convenience.

Jungle Jim's is proud of their bathroom. They have a couple TVs showing endless loops of local news footage, including from WDIV in Detroit, and various stations that reported on their bathroom-competition success.

Back over to the (American) candies. A bunch of candies are put on shelves built out of bumper cars from the WKRP-area Coney Island.

Last time we were here, about a decade ago, the candies were loose in the seats. The shelves make it easier to find stuff but also obscure the bumper cars.

I don't know how long ago these bumper cars were removed --- Coney Island all but shut down in the early 70s and regrew in the mid-70s, but it didn't close for good until last year.

And a last picture of the Coney Island logo and the Duce maker's mark for the bumper car.

Trivia: The first woman-owned McDonald's franchise opened in 1960 in Pontiac, Michigan. Source: Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain. Chatelain doesn't mention her name (or at least, doesn't on the page I drew this from) as it was secondary to her point about the rare roles for women even in line operations.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

This past weekend we attended Motor City Fur[ry] Con, in Ypsilanti, full trip report to come. So, as you can tell from the lede here, we're fine, we're unharmed, and we got through the experience just fine. Also, there was an ordeal.

It came Sunday, after Closing Ceremonies, while bunnyhugger was trying to do some schoolwork she hadn't had time for earlier in the weekend and I was eating a very soft sugar cookie from the hotel concessions table. We knew a big storm front was rolling through. People had been telling us they were leaving early for it. We had looked at the forecasts and since it seemed likely to be over by the end of the Dead Dog Dance, or soon after (and it was), figured our best bet was to see it out in the hotel.

About 6:30 everybody's phone went off, at once, with the emergency alert siren and a message about the severe storm watch and warnings of wind gusts up to 75 miles per hour, and to stay indoors away from all windows. We looked around and, with the nearest windows like fifty feet off and partly obscured by a corner in the hallway figured we were fine.

Then con staff started bellowing, ``Everyone to Main Events, the tornado sirens are going off. Everyone to Main Events now'' and before we could process things we were gathering in the room that had just had its chairs stacked up by the walls for the Dead Dog Dance. Someone or other announced this was the safest room in the hotel, but also, don't stand underneath the chandelier because if it fell ... Eventually people built defensive circles of chairs underneath the chandeliers, and were mostly successful in keeping other people from swiping them to sit on. (The chairs were turned into the circle so they couldn't be sat un as arranged.)

From there came about an hour of increasingly hot and boring waiting, while the AV people made slightly more sophisticated graphics saying to get to ``the right'' as you looked at the stage and to not get under the chandeliers. For a short while they also projected the radar map; I don't know if they stopped because they figured the basic instructions were better or if they figured the weather radar would encourage worry. Eventually they grabbed some of the giant fans out of the Headless Lounge to stir the hot, muggy air around. And both bunnyhugger and I thought of how this is surely the most Covid-risky thing we could be doing. We had on our N-95's, of course, and even a fabric cover over those for style, but it's hard not to think of the people who weren't wearing anything, and who'd relied on space and fresh air for safety.

Though the doors facing the big glass-lined hallway were mostly shut, they kept being cracked open as stragglers found their way in or, eventually, as people were chaperoned to the bathroom. (For a rare change I didn't need the facilities.) Eventually con staff got chilled water bottles to pass around to fursuiters and cups of water for people who held their hands up for need.

Speaking of fursuiters: they did announce that all fursuiters were to remove their heads, so that they could hear any instructions clearly and so their vision would be unimpaired, especially if the lights went out and they had to direct people by voice and cell phone flashlights. Also to remove their feet, for greater mobility, although the guy making announcements admitted that maybe it'd be good to have something on your feet in case of debris on the floor. I imagine there's enough people fursuiting in socked feet that the suit paws might be the better option. I was left feeling that direction was ambiguous. Well, it's not like anyone gets to practice this much.

They also announced that people were not to take photographs, which seemed bizarre and also about ten minutes too late when they did. Eventually they got to declaring that because fursuiters were ordered to take their heads off, this room was now considered a Headless Lounge, no photography permitted. While the taboo against fursuiters taking heads off in public is long since gone, I think people are understanding of respecting that a fursuiter doesn't want to be photographed headless unless they choose to take it off. Nothing would keep people from taking photos at all, but starting with that rationale would probably have reduced the number of shots taken.

A couple times the lights flickered, at one point knocking the audio system out and reducing everything to the staff shouting and asking people to speak quieter, direction the crowd took for seconds. At one point someone started doing a wolf howl but mercifully that didn't catch on. At another point I was part of a chain passing a bottle of chilled water to a fursuiter, but I didn't hear that it was to a specific suiter and I just looked around for anyone in partial costume who would take water, so they had to go and re-do it, bypassing me this time. But the power never went off there, and after about an hour we were allowed out. After a bit longer, the convention's remaining things --- hospitality, game rooms, the dance --- opened.

The biggest sacrifice to all this was the Dead Dog Dance, which can't run much past 9 pm or they won't have time to tear down and pack up all the equipment. So it was cut to maybe half its planned runtime, and we could only get to about the last half-hour of that. But, perhaps as a consequence of people being stuck inside for an hour or more after they might otherwise have left, the convention was far more lively and active and engaging even an hour past the end of the Dead Dog Dance, and it wasn't really drifting to a stop even when we did leave. Still, with (false) bomb scares the last two years and now a derecho blasting through it's not hard to wonder if Sundays at Motor City Furry Con are lightly cursed.

We got home to find our power was out, and it would stay out until somewhere around 3 am. Fortunately I'd just bought some new flashlights to put in spots that seemed obvious to me recently so we were able to get our nightly chores done, if slower than we'd wanted.

So that all explained let's zip back to June and Jungle Jim's.

Little theater with a movie about Jungle Jim's playing. As with last time we were here, we figured we didn't have time to see it but maybe we'll catch it next time.

I feel like there's meme template potential in this.

Many of the support beams are also giraffes.

They put some local styling on the Mexican foods part of the International Foods section.

Here's the Indian Foods section and an endcap for Mastodon, the distributed social media network.

And now ... o-ho! What's this woods all about?

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Wednesday' was 'Saumayavara', honoring Mercury and meaning 'Auspicious, gentle'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

Our coffee table broke. This isn't too surprising as it was never much of a table, one of those things held together with hex keys that now and then I tightened back up to not wobble. But something happened a couple weeks ago and one of the legs broke clean through, so that it couldn't be used as a table anymore.

After a short while as living room clutter and then a short while as clutter in the garage I realized a role for it. With the legs taken off it fits very neatly underneath the sofa, filling up about two-thirds of the frontage that Athena had used to squeeze underneath and start biting the lining. With the help of a couple empty cardboard boxes I could slide material underneath that keeps her from squeezing under and that she hasn't got the dexterity or strength to move out of the way.

What we'd really like is to have the space underneath used as storage, if anything, but until we can find under-sofa boxes the right dimensions this will do something. It makes our bunny cross.

We were done with Kings Island, but there was a C[ something ]ti institution we had to visit, especially because our last trip (in 2019) was constrained so that we couldn't have gone there. That would be ...

That's right, Jungle Jim's, home of the Kings Island monorail. There's also stretches of track long enough that a train could plausibly run, but this isn't it.

It's a great, overgrown attraction, but it's also an actual supermarket too.

Haven't even got in yet and we've seen a monorail and a Rhinestone Rhino. You know it's going to be something else.

And a point of historic interest: the stones in the building were granite paving stones from C-town's public landing, the Ohio River dock people knew as the entrance to the city. Normally I'd have focused on the plaque to make it easier reading but given the stones are the attration, there we go, giving them attention. Jungle Jim's bought the stones and used them for the building.

And now here we are, seeing the cheeses of various nations: Germany, Ireland-and-Australia, England, and Gouda.

Did I mention Jungle Jim's had pinball? We had heard it had pinball when we last visited, like a decade before, but we hadn't been able to find it. This time ... we found it. Two games, and we can't swear there aren't more we failed to see.

The wall art behind Jurassic Park is curious because it's not taken from any specific pinball, but it is informed by what pinball machines looked like in the 70s.

Photograph from the inside looking out, so you see what the plastic doors look like affixed to a normal structure. Though it's obvious how the trick works it's still very effective and there's a feeling like you're stepping through a magic portal as the port-a-potty structures train you to expect a small enclosed volume and going into a corridor feels like a violation of the rules.

One minor point of weird publicity is Jungle Jim's bathrooms. Besides the one for photographing that I bet small kids make terrible mistakes on there's the ``portable restrooms'' that are, in fact, the doors to real, spacious, and clean bathrooms that have actually won awards.

Anyway here's bunnyhugger getting Detroit Rock City to rock.

Moving on. Here's some of the candy shelves and say, do you see what's caught my eye there?

Yes, it's Elvis, an animatronic salvaged from the old days of Chuck E Cheese, and doing his show every five minutes, without any hints of The King catching fire. Also there's one of the penny press machines to the side.

Trivia: The word ``reverie'' first appears in English in the mid-14th century meaning ``wildness, frolicking, revelry'', the word derived from the Old French reverie (``revelry, wantonness, wildness''), from rever, meaning ``to revel, to rave''. Meanwhile ``rever'' first appears in the early 15th century meaning ``merrymaking, boisterous partying'', derived from the verb revel, ``to make merry'', from the Old French reveler (``to make merry''), from the Latin rebellâre, ``to rebel, to make war''. Despite the similarity in their initial meanings, and their sounds, they are not related. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz. Steinmetz doesn't speculate but I wouldn't be surprised if reveler didn't get some currency from being mistaken for reverie.

Currently Reading: One Heartbeat Away: Presidential Disability and Succession, Birch Bayh.

We're getting deeper into the March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thingy so my humor blog is full of all sorts of nonsense. Hope you enjoy:

• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 32
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Quicksand versus Believing Rumors
• Statistics Saturday: Some Classic _Looney Tunes_ Characters and What Kind of Genie They Would Make
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Spelling Out Your Acronyms versus Gemini 3
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Lists versus Roleplaying
• What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Who's writing The Phantom now? December 2024 - March 2025
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Regrets versus Seeds
• MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 33

Last time I shared Kings Island pictures we were getting to ride The Bat. And how's that turned out?

Here's The Bat, returning froma ride. It, uh, doesn't look like the front-seat passengers enjoyed the ride this time. Maybe they're disappointed it was this short. Let's go with that.

Got another look at the Ultra Boom after we rode and, hey, they just bought one off of Art's Rental? Did they swipe this one and figure Art couldn't say anything?

Another look at the train returned and just past the brake run.

Returning along the hilariously long queue. You can see in the cement where they once had even more overflow queue capacity.

Returning the main body of the park at last. The Sol Spin area is in the background here. We're getting near a swinging ship ride that we didn't go on.

The swinging ship brings us to the Festhaus. I believe at one point the park had a substantial Oktoberfest area that's been parted out to other sections now and this might be the last holdout, or it might be considered part of the International Midway or something.

Here's the floral calendar, so you know where we were just over nine months ago.

Sculpture detail on the Grand Carousel building.

And a look at some of the rare non-shield horses on the Grand Carousel.

I think there are actually only three horses on the outer row with PTC Shields like this --- it's not Idlewild's carousel, after all --- but this is a nice example of an understated shield.

Here's a more prominent PTC shield and that also features the horse's head, lost a bit under the painting.

The horse I rode. Not sure what CEB means; possibly it's honoring a donor or sponsor for the horse.

Trivia: The first league-wide baseball schedule was adopted by the National League the 22nd of March, 1877. Before then clubs arranged the dates and locations of matches on their own, which among other things allowed flexibility when injury or illness made it impossible to field nine players. Source: A Game of Inches: The Story Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

So here's just the sort of thing we needed. After having got back to eating pellets reliably and with good appetite Athena went back off pellets today. She's still eating vegetables well, and hay well as far as we can determine. It's hard to be sure given how disorganized hay always is, at least not without doing an awful lot of cleaning first. But she's eating it. She's also chewing up cardboard like that was candy so ...

We are stumped and annoyed. Being off her food after a gastrointestinal episode makes sense, and even having a relapse sort of seems to make sense. But we've now had her examined a couple times and found she seems to be in fine health; the only physical thing that might have been wrong, her molars growing out, we've dealt with by having them ground down. It's like she just decides sometimes she's not going to eat pellets period.

This would be a mild annoyance except we're hoping to leave Athena with bunnyhugger's parents soon and they will not be happy with a rabbit who's not eating pellets. Or worse who's sometimes eating pellets and sometimes refusing them.

If I didn't know better I'd think she was being stubborn because I set up barricades that kept her out from underneath the sofa last night. But she couldn't be planning a revenge that complicated, right? ... Right?

Thursday we had to drive home. But, disappointed that we hadn't ridden Bat or Backlot Stunt Coaster, or Banshee but understanding it would probably still be closed for excellent reasons, and thinking we hadn't really got anything from the gift shop, we stopped in for what we swore would be just a few hours and, to our surprise, was. Pictures so you know it happened:

We got a good parking spot, fairly near the big sign! I don't know what the trouble somene was having that got the cops on them.

But you can see from where we were down to the Eiffel Tower and, to the left of it, Orion. Note you can see we're packed for home since my dirty laundry is in the trunk.

The stately Kings Island Theater, which we never did get around to seeing anything in. I like the 70s typeface (Friz Quadrata) used for the lettering on the building.

Sol Spin, seen here spinning. It's the same kind of ride Kennywood has, although with different colors.

Here's Banshee, still closed for the investigation and possibly cleanup of the death the night before.

Station and lift hill for Banshee. It has that nice trick of doing a loop around the lift hill.

Trivia: In 1661 England's King Charles II ordered Massachusetts to hang no more Quakers merely for their religious dissent. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin. (Four had been hung since 1658, when the colony ordered the death penalty for Quakers who entered the colony a third time. More were given lesser punishments.)

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

PS: What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Who's writing The Phantom now? December 2024 - March 2025 is my comics recap for this week.

We had twelve people at the March Hare Madness tournament, which is in line with the last couple years. The turnout meant everyone could play in a four-player group, which the IFPA treats as the ideal of pinball and which means we wouldn't have to fuss with the way to score rounds with three players. It would be timed matchplay, putting people into groups in rounds that started from a little past 6 pm, when everyone was checked in and got rules, until 10 pm by bunnyhugger's clock. It turns out the very last round of the night finished a couple minutes past 10 pm, which bunnyhugger welcomed as a relief. We've often had a round finish a couple minutes before the cutoff, dragging the tournament out an extra half-hour or more.

We all got two Critial Hit cards to start and mine were identical: the ones that let you shake a game, giving a tilt warning or two on another player. Not one I really cared for so I didn't use it. Other people got more interesting cards, offering things like covering the scoring screen --- a card people kept getting, and kept playing, possibly every round; it's lucky I remembered to bring a newspaper so we had something to cover the displays with. And when I lost the first round by far, hey, at least I got another card out of it. That's how I had three ``give the game a shake so someone else gets a tilt warning or two'' cards. I know we shuffled the decks but ...

I would eventually start winning some games, or at least finishing second, but my start of two last-place finishes was too much for me to recover from. I eventually got some cards that weren't shake-the-table, too. One I tried using to cover the screen on The Addams Family, but someone else played the card to cancel that. For the last group of the night I played a card letting me swap DMC, the dominating player, to another group, but someone else played a card that happened to swap him back. (That wasn't their specific intent, but the other person wanted DMC out of their group so there was a three-eighths chance he'd end up back in mine.)

Still, more people were getting cards each round, and it felt like more people were using them, and earlier on. So the new card-earning rules seem like a hit. Someone before leaving even stopped to tell bunnyhugger how she liked the consolation prize of getting more cards to play when she wasn't able to move up in the standings any.

We haven't yet(!) counted the cards to make sure none went missing. But we were clearer earlier on about the heartbreak of losing cards, and managed to ask almost everyone before they left to check their pockets and make sure they didn't have any cards left over.

As you may have inferred from two people using cards to bounce DMC from their groups, DMC was having a killer night. In the six rounds we completed he finished first in ... oh ... all of them. I don't know if any of them were ever close but it's a heck of a streak anyway.

Also having a heck of a night: bunnyhugger. She never got the benefit of an extra card for finishing in last place. In fact, she only finished in third once, taking first or second place five times in six rounds. Heck, she beat FAE on games in two rounds. Also somehow we never ended up in a group together. But the important thing is she tied for second place and would be going into finals. And me? I'd be going into the streaming commentators' booth with PCL.

Continuing on our Wednesday at Kings Island, you saw the night was come and we were looking at the fireworks from The Beast's queue. So you know what to expect from that ...

We're up to The Beast's station. There's a good number of atmospheric signs, like the ones underneath the 'Caution! The Beast Attacks Likely' warning 'In the woods ... everything is fine'.

I think the ride operator is a little annoyed people are holding out for the final train instead of filling out the cars.

Train ahead of us dispatched. I forget whether we were on the last roller coaster of the night

And ... done. The Beast is ready to go to bed for the night. I don't know if there was one last train still out on the course.

One of The Beast's lift hills, alongside the final brake run.

And there's the queue, all emptied out.

Trivia: When Gemini 3's retrorockets fired, in the cross-fire sequence of rockets 1, 3, 2, and 4, Gus Grissom was momentarily concerned by what happened to retro number 2. Source: Gemini: Steps to the Moon, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

This weekend we visited bunnyhugger's parents. Unfortunately obligations on SpinDizzy Muck kept us from being able to go Saturday, and Sunday had the requirement that we leave around 10 pm to get us to bed soon enough. And we ended up late, in part because road construction has resumed and we can't turn onto US 127 south from the natural route. Can't come back, either; I discovered that in the night when the temporary barriers made the lanes even narrower than I'm comfortable with.

An hour or two after we arrived bunnyhugger went out to walk her parents' dog. Both usually enjoy this because bunnyhugger uses it for her daily half-hour walk and the dog doesn't often get to spend so much time in the nearby park and all that. This was a little less fun than usual because after quite a while of warm weather we were back to near-freezing and, turns out, raining, so by the end of the walk they'd both had enough.

I decided to go for a walk myself, separately. But after a couple blocks my bluetooth headphones died. Though I'd charged them up last Tuesday they went into the low-battery warning cycle, where every minute it interrupts the audio to tell me ``Cease Charging''. Cease doesn't make sense here but it's what I hear. Maybe they're trying to say ``Needs'' charging? Anyway, it gives these one-minute warnings when it's about five minutes from being out of battery rather than, say, giving one warning every five minutes starting from when there's an hour of charge left. With no podcast, and with a near-freezing drizzle setting in, this wasn't so much fun so I headed back.

I did along the way see an upright piano someone left on their extension. When I mentioned this to bunnyhugger's father he seemed stunned and disbelieving of the concept, and asked several times where it was, so there's something like a 35% chance he's dragged a lightly-rained-on upright piano from the next block over. (Maybe not that high. If he had bunnyhugger's mother would likely have said something to her and I'd have heard of the trouble I'd instigated.)

There were two substantial goals to the visit. One was eating all the reuben sandwiches. Did we succeed? No. Despite our best efforts bunnyhugger's mother made one more sandwich than we could eat, which we took home to be a lunch.

Ah, but the second and more important goal: playing our first round of Aftermath, the board roleplaying game that the guy who made Mice and Mystics did next. Did we succeed? No. This in part because of our late start and early end. But more that Aftermath comes with eight hundred thousand token things that need to be punched out of cardboard and put into the separate baggies for organization. (The game provides the baggies, which is a great touch.) Also many pieces that need to be assembled into dials with pointers and stuff like that. bunnyhugger needed an hour or so just to do that and there wasn't time for gameplaying given that. However, we did have the time to look at the game and marvel at how well-produced it looks. And to get some idea of what the goals of the thing are and who the player-characters are.

We're intimidated by one of the rules, that if we ever fail a specific adventure we're to restart the entire campaign. Given how often we had to replay Mice and Mystics chapters the idea of starting everything over and over seems un-fun. On the other hand, surely the game would be designed so failing out and restarting from scratch was rare but fun, right? Oh, did I mention bunnyhugger brought not just the book but also a set of annotated rulesheets that the board game fans pass around to clarify ambiguous or mysterious rules in the actual book? (You can also, of course, ignore the restart-from-scratch and the game even has official provisions for that.)

So maybe next time that'll be what we finish the night on.

And for my pictures tonight? Still more of Kings Island Wednesday, and pictures of the ongoing evening now.

Got back to that little park and I took a handful of more photos. Here I wanted the Racer-themed Miniature Miniature Eiffel Tower lined up with the antique carousel.

And a little father in is the Orion-themed Miniature Miniature Eiffel Tower.

Looking back the other way picks up The Bat and the ... uh .. I'm going to guess Diamondback Miniature Miniature Eiffel Towers.

And then we get to the setting sun and this wonderful triangle of glow above the midway.

View of the entrance gate, or the exit gate I suppose, in the evening sun. But what really interested me was this ...

Looking back at the Moon and the Miniature Eiffel Tower in the reflection of the windows of the main gate.

Trivia: Hours before WLW was to make its initial broadcast in 1922, owner Powel Crosley, frightened that the antenna location meant the station's new 50-watt license would not provide enough reach, had the antennas raised. Rounding up employees from the radio factory they added a twenty-foot section of downspout to each tower, elevating the antenna height to sixty feet, and added a counterpoise to balance the new structure. Source: Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation, Rusty McClure with David Stern and Michael A Banks.

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

First round of playoffs bunnyhugger, as high seed, got her pick of games. Playing against her: RLM, always a fearsome figure; DUB, another top player and someone who gave her one of her handful of losses (and who's a great guy), and TLH, who'd finished third in the state women's championship this year.

For her first game she picked Fast Draw, the electromechanical, one of those games she always has an advantage on. And she put up a commanding lead the first two balls, but it's a five-ball game. RLM ended up beating her, though my recollection is not by much. bunnyhugger took a second. Her second game, Getaway, RLM again ran away with things, but bunnyhugger trying out the ball-saver strategy paid off well and she got another second-place finish. On to Foo Fighters, the only modern game and one bunnyhugger always feels good on.

She wasn't feeling so good this time, unfortunately. After taking a lead first ball she couldn't do much of anything. Fortunately RLM was dominating everything, which was very good --- because of it, even when bunnyhugger took last place, she still had more ranking points than anyone except RLM and so would move on. It would have been possible, had she taken last and TLH taken second, that she'd have had to have a playoff, but when DUB had a killer third ball that was all but closed off. bunnyhugger hadn't done the calculations here --- she plays better when she's not watching the standings --- and so was genuinely surprised that two second-place and one last-place finish was enough to move on. That's what happens when someone soaks up all the first-place finishes, though.

Semifinals now. The four players who'd had a bye now get into play and bunnyhugger was put in a group with the formidable JJH, who picks Terminator 2 as the first game. She hates this pick. Terminator 2 is one of the first dot-matrix-display games, but it has a lot of the late-solid-state feel of needing to make far too many shots that are way too difficult to get any points worth the mention. But before she could be put onto a game she expected to flop on came some urgent news. RLM had misunderstood the finishes of the last game in the other group and had to rearrange the scores. With the rearranged scores, the seeding changes, and bunnyhugger get bounced into the other group. She's facing RLM, JW, and SM. SM is a woman who's been playing at RLM weekly tournaments since back in September and we don't know anything more about her. JW has pick of games and chooses Dungeons and Dragons.

On this, JW takes a big win, but bunnyhugger gets second place; RLM surprises everyone with a third-place finish. If bunnyhugger can do like she did last time, with JW's help, she's into the final four, even as the storm seems to be taking longer to get to Grand Rapids.

JW's next pick is Indianapolis 500, a game that in simulation is one of my favorites, a comfortable early-DMD game with a bunch of fun things. I try to brief bunnyhugger on what to do but there's nothing like experience with the actual or simulated game and time on the actual table. She gets a third-place finish. But JW takes second, and RLM first place. bunnyhugger could still get to the next round, with a first- or second-place finish on the last game --- Space Shuttle --- but she could also take last place in the four-player group, depending how things go.

On Space Shuttle RLM puts up another killer game and, in first place, secures his place in finals. The best bunnyhugger can hope for is getting second place in which case --- with JW coming in last --- she'd play him in a tiebreaker. But then SM finally has a good game, getting second place. RLM and JW move on, and bunnyhugger does not have to decide whether our resolve to leave at 1 am, so we get home before the rain, will hold.

As it happens she did well enough that she ranked highest of all the people knocked out that round, taking fifth place of the thirty players. She'd get a bounty of 5.00 ratings points in the (open) International Flipper Pinball Association standings. This doesn't quite get her into the top eight women's (open), but she's close to it. Another night or two like this and she'd be pretty secure.

We drove home without getting rained on, not even a drizzle, and while there were some winds it was nothing bad. We were safe and sound. JJH won the tournament with RLM getting another second-place.

So we pass, unphotographed, a terrible moment during our Kings Island visit. After my WindChaser misadventure we went over to Banshee to find it closed, and didn't get started going to The Bat (II) before a shaken employee told us the entire area was closed. This because a man had snuck into the Banshee infield to recover --- I think his car keys --- and been struck by a train and killed. All we knew for a couple hours --- JTK would text things to us later --- was that something affecting a bunch of rides happened and I was guessing some power problem, likely air conditioning overloading the local power supply. Anyway, since we didn't ride Banshee or anything else around there I didn't bother taking photos; we instead went to the other side of the park for Flight of Fear, which you'll see here ...

The ride is set up in this ``Bureau of Paranormal Activity'' facility with the queue bringing you inside a building to, huh, what mysterious thing might there be in a place ``established'' 1947? The atom logo I believe is new. The Orion ride logo on the right there certainly is new.

And here's a part of the decor, computers and technical equipment set up to the underside of a weird saucer-like ... ship ... of some kind. Note the high-tech electric typewriter on the tube there.

The colors keep shifting to make the wait exciting. Here's almost the same scene but portrait rather than landscape, and green rather than red, and see how different it is?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Peering up at the saucer to the scaffolding that for all I know is actually usable for maintenance or shows or anything. The top of the warehouse looks like it's genuine warehouse, and I don't know whether that's to fit the theme of this being a secret government warehouse or if it's just that's what's convenient to build. Anyway, so we're joining the people going up into the saucer and what do we find within it?

Yes. Inside the saucer is Star Trek: Discovery.

Trivia: When cotton prices collapsed in the 1920s, Atlanta's Rich's Department Store bought five thousand bales above market price to help farmers. Source: The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America's Great Department Storess, Robert Hendrickson. Rich's was bought out by Federated Department Stores in 1976, which later bought out Macy's and getting closed.

Currently Reading: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside-Down, Editor Tom Standage.

Another week, another Friday evening tournament at RLM Amusements. And for the first time in a couple weeks we went to it, since the only potential conflict was severe thunderstorms expected to blow in around 2:30 or 3:30 am. This could be a problem if we made it to finals, but what are the odds of that? Anyway I said I was comfortable with a hard decision to leave at 1 am so we would be home before anything heavy hit. I'm not competing for anything more than the fun of competition; I can kneel in a playoffs round, if lucky enough to reach that. Would bunnyhugger? She's had the lure of getting enough rating points to qualify, ideally with a high seed, in the women's ranking and a final-four appearance in one of these open tournaments would launch her ahead in the open rankings. (You can get invited for performance in open tournaments or in women's tournaments.) She said she would, if it came to that.

And it was questionable on my side whether this was anything to worry about. I lost the first game when I kept getting one or two flips before the ball found a drain. The second game too. Also the third, and also the fourth; I wasn't just losing, I was losing awfully. In a fourteen-round head-to-head game you can expect to make playoffs if you get eight or so wins and I would have to manage a heck of a turnaround to have a hope of that.

So my next game would be Baby Pac-Man, the video game/pinball hybrid that RLM keeps in mostly to hear the complaints of people that it's not a real pinball game. My opponent had little idea how to play either --- I can't swear she had touched it before --- but I've been loading up with basic strategy points because this game's not going to stop being picked until the people who pick it know it's not a sure win for them. (Not that anyone picked it this time; it's in playoffs when someone might choose it on purpose.)

So this time armed with a bit of knowledge I played the pinball part to collect energizers and a lot of them, and fortunately I had the captive ball and the spinners dialed in to make that possible. And then was able to go into the maze with power pellets and, better, to get bunches of ghosts. If you manage to eat all four ghosts in one power-up, you get 30,000 points, which is more than you get for eating all the regular dots on the board, never mind what you get for all your pinball play. (You get a 10,000-point bonus for completing the board, so that brings you to as many as 34,400 points, but you can get four energizers and if you really want, can keep going back into the pinball to re-light energizers.) I only managed all four ghosts once, but I got three several times, and got to the second board. My opponent --- who was doing a heck of a job clearing dots considering she didn't have any power pellets --- didn't have a chance.

With that win on a dubious pinball game breaking my losing streak, I went on to lose the next game. But that was the end of my losing streaks; I'd go on to lose again on Tales from the Crypt and on Labyrinth and Jaws, but I'd win everything else, including using a strategy on Getaway that relies on the game having a ball saver, and managing a last-ball rally on the electromechanical 300 that overcame my opponent's really good last-ball rally. And on Dracula, getting the Bats Bonus on ball two, which because of how it works (don't worry about the details) left me in an all-but-invincible position for the game.

So despite the catastrophic start I ended up with ... six wins, not getting to the playoffs and not seeing enough people leave early to bump me up. But I did manage to play three good games after all, and get myself up from ``horrible'' to ``mediocre'', so that's not bad at all, really.

Ah, and how about bunnyhugger, whom I mercifully never had to play? Wait a bit, I hope to tell you soon.

Our Kings Island visit continues; enjoy some more pictures, please.

Surf Dog, the Zamperla Disk'O that Kings Island wants us to believe is a roller coaster but isn't although I can't name an element that disqualifies it, and particularly, the fiberglass(?) statue of Snoopy in a bodysuit that advertises its entrance.

Linus's Beetle Bugs are a Junior Whip, one of the rides that goes back to the park's 1972 opening and that I suppose must be from the former Coney Island C-town. It's Linus's Beetle Bugs because of Linus's well-known affinity for bugs? Also I'm pretty sure the picture there is Rerun, not Linus, but I admit it's hard to be sure without accessories like Linus's blanket or lined shirt. (On the other hand, Rerun usually wears overalls and a striped shirt too.)

I took a picture of Snoopy by this flagpole just because it was a very soothing sight and I felt like sharing that.

Zoom photo of the Eiffel Tower. I didn't go up in it because it had been marked closed but that sure looks like there's people there and it seems like too many to plausibly be a maintenance or inspection crew so maybe things changed when I wasn't looking and bunnyhugger declined to tell me.

Ah well. I got that above photo while in line for Diamondback. Here's a picture of people on the lift hill about to have a pretty nice ride there.

The signature gimmick of Diamondback is that in the last hill you splash through the water and here's a train just done with that. You can see the mist settling.

Trivia: The United States's first census was authorized in legislation passed the 1st of March, 1790, the sixth act of the first Congress. Census Day was set for the 2nd of August. Source: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age, Andrew Whitby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 57: Pails of Pearls, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

When bunnyhugger ran the Dungeons and Dragons launch party she didn't do particularly well, but she didn't expect to either. This was the open launch, and many of the particularly competitive people from league, plus a couple who aren't in league or aren't any more, like CST, showed up. But she was expecting to do better with the women's launch party, which if like nearly all the women's events she holds at the local hipster barcade would probably see her win.

More people showed up than usual, most of the rare faces Grand Rapids folks who are generally shy about venturing into a barcade. This didn't change the principle of the thing --- people getting paired at random, with people knocked out on their fourth game loss, with one group always being on Dungeons and Dragons --- but it did step up the difficulty a little. Also, this gave PCL the chance to set up his streaming rig and sit down with both MAG and ME in the recording ``booth'' of the long table. As this was a Dungeons and Dragons launch party the rig would stay on that game for good, and it was ... exciting? ... commenting on a game whose rules I barely know, and that as a new release barely exist.

I sat in the booth trying to look like I knew what I was doing through to the sixth round, when bunnyhugger needed me as tournament official to make a ruling on a game involving her. It was on Indiana Jones; player two had started multiball, which on that game shoots the balls through a one-way gate to the right flipper. But this time the one-way gate, as it sometimes does, fails, getting stuck or something and kicking the balls back into the outlane. So the player's reward for getting multiball started --- one of the things players are expected to do --- was no multiball and, in fact, the ball (and game) ending. I had to rule that this is covered by the International Flipper Pinball Association's template rules (which we use for our events) that the mechanical nature of pinball is such that sometimes a part doesn't work as designed and it sucks.

This seems consistent, based on the IFPA Discord and people who love debating rulings, with what most people would do. The argument for ruling this a major malfunction --- giving Player Two a compensation ball for the turn at the game lost --- is that game malfunctions that the player could not possibly control that cause the premature end of the ball are (generally) cause for compensation. I think I could be convinced by that, in time, but I made the call and Player Two did not get the chance to make up the (pretty considerable) gap and so this gave bunnyhugger her first loss. She would not lose again except on Dungeons and Dragons.

How many of those losses there were I intend to share with you tomorrow.

Getting back in pictures to Kings Island and what's at the end of the Adventure Express queue. It's what you'd expect ...

Adventure Express's station. I can't remember what the old looked like, sorry, but you see the Old Timey Cargo Boxes decorating it. The box labelled '138AP23' likely references the ride's original opening date --- the 13th of April, 1991 --- and its 2023 renovation. I don't know the significance of the 8, though if I had to give an opinion I'd say it's that there were eight roller coasters opened at Kings Island before this. It would make more sense if the number were 9, then, I agree. (If it's 8 for the eighth non-family coaster I guess that makes sense but the family coaster --- Woodstock Express, née Scooby Doo --- is not a powered coaster or one only kids could ride or anything like that which would make sense to excluding it from a coaster count.)

So here's the official itinerary of the things we're to see on the Adventure Express, all normal things that either exist at the park or reference things that used to exist, past whatever the S.Y.Overlook means. But, look forward to those!

And here's the terrifying things you definitely will not see when the train suddenly diverts from the real track to go hurtling out of control past the gem mine, the tomb, the arches, the caverns, and the forbidden temple! ... Oh wait! Oh noooo! You surprised us all, ride theming!

Anyway that's all quite good fun. Here's the floral calendar clock so now you know just when our visit was, although there's events that happened that day which would make it easy for you to date that.

Here's The Racer, the racing coaster that was one of Kings Island's originals, and a guy reading a ride sign while using the stance of a guy at a urinal. I mean, there's only so many ways to stand in front of a thing, you know? I'm being unfair.

bunnyhugger delighted by the view of the roller coaster and behind her, the Coney Mall, and also wondering how I got this high in the air to take a picture of her. Was I jumping? Was I just very tall? No way to know.

Trivia: By the end of 1849 Chile's national shipping had been so depleted by sips being taken up to San Francisco harbor and then being immobilized by crew desertions that the Congress authorized foreign vessels to --- temporarily --- take up the intra-national transport (cabotage). Source: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, Eric Hobsbawm.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 57: Pails of Pearls, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Noelle is just on a tear putting these together lately.