austin_dern

Returning to Motor City Furry Con and, more or less, Saturday. I'd picked out a furry --- pinball, actually --- T-shirt to wear Saturday but then decided to set out in my red panda kigurumi, since I don't wear that enough. Figured I'd change back when I felt like. It turns out I never did feel like, and spent the whole day in suit. This got a bit hot at times; it's fleece, after all, and I was wearing cargo pants underneath as the best way to be sure I had my phone and car keys in a secure place. The kigurumi pockets aren't even deep enough to fit my hands, let alone a thing. It did have the advantage that the tail is easier to keep managed than my coati tail, though, which keeps wanting to fall down in a most out-of-character way.

As mentioned the day saw a lot of panels of interest to us. We joined, late, the panel ``Before Furry: Funny Animal Comics'', which advertised itself as talking about the ancient days of primordial furry art, you know, like the 80s and 90s. It turns out that this would have been our best chance to see Lightspill, a friend from SpinDizzy Muck, who was at the convention and that somehow we never did catch. They told me after they'd gone to the panel but had to leave partway through, suggesting we passed each other without noticing.

Anyway the panel did get back to the really old stuff, complete with pictures from the funny animal comic books that I've discovered are easy reading and pretty good learn-to-draw reference material. They even had a couple truly vintage comic books out there, such as one issue of Fawcett's Funny Animals, where Captain Marvel Bunny (Hoppy) appeared. I got to actually touch this ancient thing, in the minutes they had at the end to invite people up to see and look through some of their old comics.

But the bulk of what they had, and of what we saw in the presentation, was 90s stuff, including stuff I recognized from when it was new. One item, clips from Joe Ekaitis's T.H.E. Fox (a web comic that started in the 80s(!)) even came in handy since it was fresh in my mind when a friend asked about an old furry comic he sort-of remembered. And there were things like Gene Catlow's illustrated trip report to Confurence VIII, that I remembered from when it came out on SCFA/Yerf.

We hung around a while after, looking at the comics and talking with twitchers --- the second day of our meeting up with him some --- until bunnyhugger asked if we shouldn't get to the variety show. So we should have: I had misread the schedule and thought we had a half-hour, so we joined it already in progress.

And the progress! First of all, it was a variety show, mostly people singing or lip-synching to something already recorded. But it was also a variety show making use of the convention's theme, which you may have inferred from my subject lines here: Don't Panic. It was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy theme, something it's astounding we hadn't seen before. It's almost stunning enough people still remember the books to support a theme like that. It did give all the convention materials a great graphic design style, and gave the show a central pretext. That pretext: that this was the dinner show at Milkybone's, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Also stunning: the hosts for this show were puppets! They'd set up a small puppet booth at one end of the stage and had a pretty good white dog of some kind as the main host, and a moose as subsidiary character, with a couple others popping in and out for specific bits. Puppets! In furry! We had no idea there was going to be a variety show, but a variety show with puppets? If we'd had any hint we'd have volunteered.

After the show we stuck around to catch the puppeteers and tell them how much we appreciated seeing that. The dog's puppeteer explained he had build the rigging for the puppet stage at the last minute and was kind of surprised it worked at all and everyone agreed this was a great development. Yes, it was.

Back to Indiana Beach in pictures here, with some more pinball:

Continuing the games; after Scooby-Doo we get a bunch of modern Stern, with Batman '66, Elvira's House of Horrors, and the Mandalorian.

More pinball. After The Mandalorian we get the Led Zeppelin pinball which, um, well, there's people who enjoy that. We didn't get it at our local venues because the operator looked at the game and said ``nah'', as most people have.

And one more row! The left are the two Pinball 2000 games, Star Wars Episode I and Revenge From Mars. Next to that, a special edition of Jersey Jack's inaugural The Wizard of Oz game.

And it's a whole Jersey Jack row here with Wizard, Dialed In, and Willy Wonka.

The site has also got the Stern Insider Connect thing going so you can log in to games and have your data tracked by another company.

bunnyhugger and I played a tight game of Aladdin's Castle, and she won in a squeaker, the kind of win everyone loves most.

Trivia: The first public references to Yuri Gagarin's flight as Vostok 1 came in a Pravda publication the 25th of April, 1961. Before then the spaceship-satellite had been referenced as Korabl Sputnik VI. Gagarin's call sign was revealed the 25th of April to have been Swallow. Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201.

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

When JL beat bunnyhugger for the Michigan State Women's Championship this year she unknowingly did us a favor. This because it turns out that the Women's North American Championship series was this weekend, out in New Hampshire. Also this weekend: Motor City Fur[ry] Con, in Ypsilanti. While the finals were on Friday you see the issue in getting to both events at once. We're having a hard enough time accepting that Anthrohio's move to mid-April --- something we hope is temporary --- puts it the same weekend as Easter (admittedly, not something going to repeat soon) and Pinball At The Zoo. The latter threatens to happen all the time, if the convention doesn't move back to late May or any other time of year. Really hoping it does. It's bad enough to lose one of our two conventions to pinball and Easter, but to lose both of them to pinball competition would be unbearable.

Meanwhile, at the Women's North American Championship Series, JL did nicely in winning her first round, but was knocked out in the second. So bunnyhugger has got a claim yet to having the record for getting farthest in the North American Championship, with having got through two rounds to be knocked out in the third. And last year's champion, AMK, had a first-round bye and then lost in her first match, which shows again how fickle being a champion is. Or just that there's 54 people there and 53 of them will not take first place. You know.

And back in June, here's some more pictures from Jungle Jim's. The place is kind of overwhelming and it's hard to know everything work photographing.

I'm told that when he was at Chuck E Cheese's Elvis here had only implicit connections to the more famous Elvis. Jungle Jim's is not shy about saying exactly who this lion is.

And nearby is a jellybean portrait of ... uh ... uhm ... I'm going to say the Fourth Doctor as Paul Gaugin or maybe the Skipper?

Back to Elvis, with a bit of view of the mechanism on his feet.

I include this shot for your 70s-style pictures of the singer seen from two camera angles at once.

bunnyhugger looking over her stamped penny in front of Elvis.

There's a lot of custom signs too, or at least I don't recognize this as any particular established squirrel character.

Traffic signs directing people around the ice cream. Yes, that's Graeter's ice cream there. Told you we were in WKRP-town.

Some penguins above the frozen foods area. There's stuff like this all over the grocery.

So where do you imagine the honey's kept?

And this would be the aisle for flying bicycles and also ... I guess soup, on the endcap there?

A whole bunch of fake storefronts put above eye level. I assume they all reflect brands or product lines, but that's just going by the fact I know that Hodgson Mill is a thing.

Toys and clothes get here under the Blue Q kangaroo.

Trivia: Family sources say that Paul Terry offered Paul Robeson the chance to do vocals and singing for TerryToons. But as no voice credits were on the finished films --- and Robeson's hiring would have been kept secret after his investigation by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities --- it is unknown when, or what films he might have worked. Source: Terrytoons: The Story Of Paul Terry And His Classic Cartoon Factory, W Gerald Hamonic

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

Finals. bunnyhugger had drawn up three banks for the March Hare Madness finals, so that the top seed --- DMC --- could pick a slate of games, not just three that he could blow up that would go on forever. He picked the bank with Godzilla, which we should have expected, and other people picking what order to go in made the mistake of forcing him to go first, so that he couldn't have a walk-off last ball on that game. Meanwhile PCL and I set up in the ``booth'', the long table upstairs, with a couple laptops and camera setup to do commentary for the live stream. This time we had headphones with microphones poking out, so between that and my trying to enunciate better I could be heard nattering away, my voice sounding like a nonspecific Muppet. (Boy, remember when Nonspecific Muppet's first EP came out and it was all anyone played that summer?)

The streaming gear was inviting enough that a couple guys came over and asked if we were doing a podcast. I was content to allow it as yeah, might as well be a podcast, but PCL explained it in enthusiastic detail. They asked what our subject was and weren't satisfied that we were talking about the pinball game --- Getaway, a very short game to balance the long-playing Godzilla --- going on maybe fifteen feet away. They suggested talking about relationships or mushrooms or who would win, Godzilla or King Kong. They stuck around only a few minutes, bestowing the advice to ``stay positive'', and looked like they were having fun.

While they were visiting we were distracted trying to follow the actual game --- we were also suffering lagbursts not on the recorded stream --- and missed bunnyhugger trying to use the strategy she'd deployed well in Grand Rapids, of letting the ball save build progress on Getaway. The first deliberate drain worked perfectly, but the second one the game recorded just too late for the ball save, and she got cheated out of a second ball. Can't say for sure that if she'd gotten this ball to play she'd have done better than third place, but it can't have helped.

And as our guests were leaving a weird event happened. FAE played a card to shake the game, giving DMC a tilt warning. After FAE shook and the game warned, Getaway launched the ball, which quickly drained, and I had to leave to make a ruling on this. That DMC would receive a compensation ball was beyond question. The issue: International Flipper Pinball Association rules say that a player is disqualified if they cause another player to lose the ball. That is, literally, what happened, but the Critical Hit card specifically allowed FAE to take the action which caused the loss of ball.

Fortunately we had the stream so we could go back and check a key issue: did FAE tap the ball launch? Because that would collapse the question to a simple played-out-of-turn matter. It took a little fussing around but we could see on the captured stream that FAE's hands had never been near the ball launch.

So the closest model I could find to the published rules covering this is that accidentally causing the loss of a ball, or losing the ball because of a tournament director's instructions, doesn't disqualify a player. Following the instructions of the card seemed to waive the issue of playing out of turn objection, and as nobody had the faintest idea that Getaway would launch a ball on a tilt warning --- if it does do that consistently and this weren't just a freak event --- it fits as an accident.

DMC grumbled, as is his wont, but accepted this. But he did use his own version of the shake-the-game-to-give-a-tilt-warning against FAE, shaking hard enough that the game tilted. FAE would get a compensation ball too, and DMC had to pay a penalty (letting FAE pick one of DMC's remaining cards at random), but that settled that.

In the end, FAE lost, taking last place on a game I had confidently explained to the streamers had a special understanding where FAE would win every time. bunnyhugger as mentioned came in third, DMC second, and DG would get first place, the first time all night that DMC didn't win his group.

Two games to go.

Now let's close out that visit to Kings Island Wednesday night. We expected just to drive home the next day but, you know what? We had thought about what we might do in the area.

Here's the Eiffel Tower by night, with a small nova going off on the observation deck.

As we walked toward the front of the park the Grand Carousel stood out like a jewel.

Here's the ride set to bed for the night, though if you look you can see like six park people standing around discussing whatever it is they discuss when the carousel's been finished for 45 minutes.

And here's the Grand Carousel's sign holding the flashlight under its chin to tell a spooOOooOOooky story.

Just a nice view of the base of the Eiffel Tower with the International Midway and the exit gate in the background.

Here's the reflecting pool, with the park exit in the distance.

A last look back at the Eiffel Tower, with bunnyhugger in some weird distorted perspective as if I had a wide-angle lens or something.

And a last, postcard shot, from the front of the reflecting pool, with the spotlights on the Eiffel Tower not at all making it look like the eyes of a very tall killbot.

Trivia: The March of Time newsreel, from spring 1935 through fall 1951, published only one reel per month. Typical newsreels would be published twice weekly. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding.

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

This week we reached the median of a seven-week block of pinball events on Tuesdays. It started the last week of February with pinball league, and then the first week of March with the Dungeons and Dragons launch party. Then pinball league. Next week is pinball league again --- it's the second and fourth weeks of the month --- and after that, the 1st of April, the charity tournament in honor of ERR. And after that, pinball league once more and then finally we have a nice relaxing Tuesday with nothing to do but our taxes.

And this week was the charity tournament, March Hare Madness, one of the four quarterly tournaments raising money for animal care. This is the one dedicated to Stephen, the superstar Flemish giant, and supports the rescue from which we adopted him, Penelope the Californian, and Fezziwig the mouse.

The format: Four-group matchplay, yes, but with the Critical Hit deck. This is a bunch of cards for casting ``spells'' that add weird and wacky things to your pinball game. Like, one card lets you steal a different player's game after ball one or ball two. Another lets you make them stop playing that ball right that second. Another covers up the score display, which does more than you'd think to mess up your modern game with complicated rules and much information that needs to be tracked somehow. Given the general no-shenanigans nature of the International Flipper Pinball Association --- they won't sanction tournaments where, say, you play with hands on opposite flippers or other simple ways to make a familiar game weird --- it's amazing they allow this. It seems like the lingering remains of an old joke never pulled out again.

It also seems likely they figured the Critical Hit games would not be a lasting problem. The cards were issued in like two small runs, years ago, and as cards went missing the remaining decks would be used less and less. After years of success we lost four cards last year and bunnyhugger was ready to give up on the format. But the Critical Hit deck got a re-issue, and she got a fresh deck, and now there were enough cards to feel comfortable using them.

In past years the format has been to give out two cards to everyone at the start, and then to give people another card when they earn an extra ball, which most games make practical at least and some games make inevitable. I had a thought and bunnyhugger liked it: what if we also gave out an extra ball to whoever finished last in a group? With more cards in our nearly-two-deck set we could certainly spare them. And having more cards put into circulation might get people to use them more. The fun of this format is throwing down cards and launching chaos and people who have only a couple cards save them like JRPG players. It usually gets better in the latter rounds when people figure they're out of time to use them; could we inspire that chaos earlier?

bunnyhugger approved, and then dove in to making trophies, using some past bowling trophies donated by MWS, sawing off the plastic bowlers and replacing them with resin bunnies. All she had to do was actually run the tournament.

And in photographs: moving now into the last night of our big summer trip last year. What'd that look like at Kings Island?

Midway switching on its lights as the evening sets in. At this point I think we got a meal and so the next picture is ...

... Fully night! And I love this stuff, all sorts of difficult color and shade variations.

We went in for the end-of-the-night ride on The Beast and here we are underneath the fireworks-and-drone show again. I guess someday we could not get a ride on The Beast and see what it actually looks like but who wants to run that risk?

Anyway here's the drones coming together again for the Kings Island logo. Last picture I think was in-between formations so if you didn't recognize it that's normal.

The Beast's station getting ready to dispatch trains again. I like the Moon being juuuust off to the side of the structure.

First train loading up, I think it is, getting ready to resume riding.

Trivia: The first maneuvering of Gemini 3 --- and the first maneuvering of any spacecraft on orbit --- was an approximately 75-second burn of forward-firing thrusters 11 and 12, which brought the spacecraft to a nearly circular orbit within two miles of the planned parameters. Source: Gemini Flies! Unmanned Flights and the First Manned Mission, David J Shayler.

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

So how did bunnyhugger do at RLM Amusements? She won her first game, Robo-War, with a killer score, her best score ever on that table and good enough she felt embarrassed having won by that much. She won her second game, too, on the electromechanical Fast Draw. And then on Space Shuttle, beating one of the other women at the thirty-person tournament. And then on Total Nuclear Annihilation as well. She took a loss on Dungeons and Dragons, knocking her out of the tie for first place, but her winning ways resumed on Dracula and on Avengers: Infinity Quest.

At this point she got called up on Baby Pac-Man, against one of the strongest players, the one who'd finish qualifying in first place. Despite my attempts to give her advice she didn't win or even make a convincing showing. She also lost on Buck Rogers before taking a win on The Uncanny X-Men. Then two more losses, on Iron Maiden and on Tales From The Crypt, the last apparently cheating her out of a multiball, the second time in a week that's happened. But then she won on Getaway using that same ball-saver strategy we've just been learning about. And then on Labyrinth, with a quite good game versus a merely okay game by one of the other women.

She ended up with nine wins, a great finish by any count. She qualified for finals in sixth place. Had she gotten even one more win she'd have been in the tie for a first-round bye. She hadn't known; she hadn't been following the standings and before her last round expressed to me worries that she was not going to make it to playoffs. She usually plays with less stress if she isn't thinking how she has to win this game and here's a fine example of that.

So she was in! After a bunch of ties for the last playoff spot and for the last first-round bye were settled four-player groups were drawn up, for PAPA-scoring qualifying. This would be a set of three games, the winner of each game getting four points, second place two points, third place one, and last place zero. The two people who get the highest number of points from the three matches move on to the next round. And bunnyhugger, as one of the high seeds, got the choice of what games they would play. This is known as driving the bus, and bunnyhugger kind of hates this, since if she flops on a game she can only think how she drove the bus off a cliff. Still, her fate was now in her hands.

Continuing at Kings Island on our Wednesday visit, through to a shocking moment.

Diamondback splashing down at just the right spot for the spray to reveal the Eiffel Tower within. (The train's moving away from the camera here; there's baffles on the back to make a huge spray that doesn't affect the riders.) You can see the next train on the lift hill, to the left.

And another shot of a train just splashed down, here with the flume shooting in the direction of the lift hill.

And now ... mmmm. WindSeeker. I made good on my resolve to take a ride on it, since it's been ages since the ride was getting stuck at the top of the tower and it'd be great to see the park from that high up, right?

So after we were stuck at the top of the tower and let down very slowly they closed the ride, of course, and you can see people doing inspections and, I assume, diagnosing what the heck went wrong. Racer's in the background; I got a lot of views of the trains far beneath running like toys and I'm sorry I am a responsible enough rider that I didn't take out my camera to photograph or film that view.

After this we considered going to The Beast --- you see the tracks in the tiling leading up to it --- but the line was fairly substantial so we went over to Banshee and The Bat instead.

Evening silhouette photograph of Diamondback and the Backlot Stunt Coaster props.

Trivia: When he set off to France in February 1778 as one of the diplomats representing the United States, John Adams had no knowledge of European politics or diplomacy and could not speak French, the language of diplomacy; nor had he ever seen a King, Queen, or Foreign Minister of any great power; nor had he ever set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people. Source: John Adams, David McCullough.

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

PS: What's Going On In Mary Worth? Why is Popeye in repeats? December 2024 - March 2025 plus some stuff about Popeye.

After beating KXL on Deadpool bunnyhugger would go into four straight games on Dungeons and Dragons. By then there were three players left, so she would have three of those games against MKS, one against KXL. After losing one game to MKS and then beating KXL --- knocking KXL out of the tournament --- it was down to two games against MKS, bunnyhugger needing to beat her once to win. In the second of bunnyhugger's matches against MKS a freak event happened. On the second ball bunnyhugger shot the ball up to the gelatinous cube in a move that should have started Dragon Multiball. But she also tilted, the game being prone to weird random instant-tilts where it gives the first and second warnings at once and then shuts the game down on you. Lousy but that happens.

Next ball, though, ball three, she approached the table to find the game telling her, before she plunged her ball, that she was in Dragon Multiball. This confused us all but bunnyhugger plunged, supposing that the game would start multiball when she plunged. Instead, the game only shot a single ball out, as far as we could tell in the multiball rules, but without the ball saver or at least not enough ball saver. Her ball ended, pretty far behind but not more than it was likely she could have made up in Dragon Multiball.

So I jumped out of the booth to look over the IFPA rulesheet, figuring that bunnyhugger was on her way upstairs to ask me for a ruling. PCL and MAG switched the stream away from showing the game to talk over what they saw and also to tell me roughly eight hundred times that I could call RLM and ask his advice what to rule.

But then ... eventually ... we realized it had been way longer than it took to get upstairs and ask me whether bunnyhugger should get a compensation ball. I went downstairs to check what was going on --- I imagined she and MKS trying to reconstruct just what the heck happened --- and it turned out they were playing the next game, having started the follow-up round which would be between the two players who had both lost three games each at that point. I was spared having to make a ruling.

Well, this final match MKS did win again, bunnyhugger never really having got things back in control after her unexpected multiball loss. bunnyhugger took a heartbreaking second place in the tournament, losing a good number of the ratings points she needs to compete in the women's state tournament next year and, she feared, making herself look like an amateur. And on camera, in front of anyone looking at the stream. I can't dispute the loss of points --- had she gotten first place she'd currently be above the cut line for an invitation to women's finals (granting, with over nine months of tournaments yet to be held) --- but an amateur? Hardly. Even if you lose the final match, it means you're good enough to be in finals, and so good enough to win them.

Still, hard not to think about had that unfair tilt not happened, or if she had appealed and it seemed consistent to rule that a compensation-ball matter. I have heard through the grapevine that Dungeons and Dragons is known, at least in that code revision, to have a bug with tilts at the start of multiball starting the next ball in an unplayable condition. We didn't know of it or have any reason to suspect the bug existed, though, and I don't know that it could have mattered at all if we had known it could happen. Or how to treat the problem of that Dragon Multiball starting as a single-ball thing. Hoping it doesn't happen again.

Really would be nice if pinball manufacturers could wait until the code doesn't have easy-to-create bugs before shipping.

And now some more wandering around Kings Island on a nice June day.

American Coaster Enthusiasts landmark plaque for The Racer, noting the ride's importance and how it was in an episode of The Brady Bunch that I never saw, and along the way implies the Coney Island park of C--------i closed in 1972, which it didn't really exactly.

Racer ridden (both sides) we went to Woodstock Express, which also opened in 1972 and is a quite good wooden roller coaster, though I repeat myself.

Loading station getting ready; you can see they were running two trains despite (or causing) the lack of any wait.

The queue goes on this bridge over the track so you get nice views of the coaster coming to you or being right underneath you, if you wait.

Fiberglass(?) Snoopy statue of him sharing a cookie with you, the way Snoopy did all the time in the comic strip. Also Woodstock with a much smaller cookie.

This isn't a particularly important part of the park, but I do quite like how the Woodstock Whirlybirds track makes this soothing wave across the picture.

Trivia: During the Harlan County (Kentucky) coal strike of 1931, the county's Red Cross chapter --- controlled by the coal companies --- refused to provide aid to striking workers. Exceptions were made only for miners who had some plot of land to grow vegetables, who could then be aided as farmers rather than mere victims of industrial downturns. Source: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe.

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

Last Wednesday, I went back to the hipster bar, taking care of something we had meant to and forgotten to do during the Dungeons and Dragons launch party the night before. This was putting up a poster announcing the Women's Launch Party, which would be held a couple days later. Stern Pinball went through one or two launch parties sending only a PDF that people running tournaments were supposed to print out and hang themselves, which bunnyhugger did not do. But for this game they returned to sending out posters, and while we forgot to put up one for the open tournament that's fine, seventeen people showed up. That's a good crowd.

And you know who was there? RED, naturally, hanging out with long-ago league regular PHD. RED was showing some of what he knew about the game to PHD and we got to talk a little bit about, you know, nothing much.

One thing we'd discovered the night before. Dungeons and Dragons, like every Stern pinball these days, has the option to log in using the Stern Insider Connect program, an account and an app and all. It lets you rack up Achievements and, in some games, also get progress that transfers from one game to another. This campaign mode lets the game rules mutate out underneath you, in some cases letting you get far better scores for some modes than someone who wasn't logged in gets. Also it means another company gets to track the things you do, and while Stern Insider connect is a free account now, I imagine at some point they'll take a tithe of your logged-in games.

But Dungeons and Dragons offers a pretty strong reason to log in like that: you can create a character and have it progress, game to game. This is a compelling enough idea that bunnyhugger finally got an account, that she could form some character.

Still, for games where logging in every time can give you advantages, maybe breaking competitions, there's compensation: you can log in on ball two and get credit for all the things you accomplish, but not have it mess up the scoring of your current game. And, we learned shortly before the tournament Tuesday, Stern put in a new method for Dungeons and Dragons. Hit the Action Button right after logging in and you'd log in as a ``one-time character'', not bringing your campaign progress into the game. This went well for the tournament until someone noticed that you still keep the gold built up, game to game, and you can use that in the merchant's to buy stuff. And, in principle then, more stuff than your competitors who weren't bringing campaign progress in.

You might ask how did Stern put out a pinball game with rules so half-formed that what should be a straightforward operation --- ``if you use the non-campaign-mode game don't include campaign-mode stuff''. Even these days, when it's easy to update the software on a game and so you're able to, for example, ship a game with the most basic, unrefined code and trust that you can make it good later?

Well, in playing RED and PHD a couple games --- I had to be polite, after all --- I had a really good game of Dungeons and Dragons. Good enough to get the Grand Champion score. I wanted to take a picture of that, to commemorate surely the only time I'll ever have that title and so that bunnyhugger could be mad at me. In the Attract Mode, waiting for people to put coins in or to start playing, the game would not bring up the high scores, the way every game since 1985 has. So, yes, can be.

We've reached the end of the first, short, day at Kings Island so you know what that means: lots of pictures of nobody in the park! But wait, there's a surprise coming.

I liked how the ... I think this is the International Midway ... looks with the white light outline here.

And here's a place that looks like it's still open and probably isn't, underneath the park's Tower.

The midway pool and those colored water jets are great and just get better by night.

Here it's seen from slightly off to the side, so that both the Eiffel Tower, Orion (the blue diagonal streak), and the Kings Island logo are in view. Note the person taking a picture of the Kings Island sign there.

Eiffel Tower, gift shop with Camp Snoopy stuff in the window, and moon that I don't think was full but it's literally impossible to check now.

And here we go, this is that picture that guy was taking, only this one is mine! ... Except ...

There we go. There's the dead-center view that makes this look as much as possible like a postcard they sold in the gift shops in the 80s.

And finally, my inspiration, since by then it seemed like we might be the only people left in the park and had it all to ourselves: bunnyhugger welcoming you to Jurassic Kings Island. bunnyhugger took the same picture of me, if you'd like to see me hamming it up.

Trivia: From 1925 to 1929 morning radio (before 1927 just in San Francisco, after that from NBC in New York City) had the pseudonymous broadcaster ``Cheerio'', his true identity known only to the head of NBC, and --- rumor had it --- performing six morning a week (live) without compensation. After Herbert Hoover's inauguration ``Cheerio'' was revealed to be Charles Kellogg Field, a classmate and friend of Hoover, who had defrayed the program's costs and contributed content suggestions. Source: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong. Field had gone into business rather than the stage, at his parent's behest, and stayed on radio until shortly before World War II.

Friday night, wondering whether it might be less bother to just stay home and not, we went to RLM Amusements for our second tournament in a two weeks and our third in a month. This would also be the launch party for the new Dungeons and Dragons pinball machine. This would also, because people kept showing up, turn out to be the largest regularly-scheduled pinball event in Michigan history as far as anyone can tell: there were 64 competitors. Only some Pinballs At The Zoo and Babies Food Festival contests have had more competitors, and those are all multi-day events encouraging people attending some larger event to drop a couple scores in.

Also there: a preposterous amount of food, mostly desserts, including someone who'd decorated a large white cake into a pinball machine. This was an amazing piece of food art, reproducing very loosely the Dungeons and Dragons game layout with things like flippers made of cylinders of frosting, pop bumpers made of Oreos, and playfield lights made of candy corn. It was so beautiful people were terrified to cut it open and eat it, although someone overcame that fear before the night was out.

Not to spoil things but: I played lousy, winning only six games of the fourteen played in qualifying, and only two of them with actual good scores. Granting one of them was excellent, getting High Score #1 on the Alien pinball machine they somehow have. bunnyhugger played lousy too, winning only five games, although in a rare mercy we were never put up against each other. She did get the chance to play JTK, our pinball and amusement parks friend, although I only saw him in-between rounds.

There were consolations. Particularly they had so much stuff to give away in door prize drawings. bunnyhugger won a Dungeons and Dragons Essentials Kit, which her first impulse was to put into the door prize pool for her own upcoming D&D launch party. Her second impulse was, hey, what if we played this for fun ourselves? I won a velvet bag with dice inside. bunnyhugger's name was also called for a second prize, naturally when she was in the middle of playing a game, but that was because they failed to remove people's names once they won a prize, so that was just an innocent mistake.

Still, with all that, around 11 pm we were looking to head home because we'd fallen short of the threshold for moving on to the 32-person finals. And yet ... people kept dropping out because they did not want to stick around until the 3 am or whatever it would take for playoffs to resolve. (They would finish about 5:20 am.) It finally reached the point that people with a mere six wins were eligible, though the five of us still hanging around would compete for the one playoff spot remaining, and on Paragon. And yet, guess who got it, while bunnyhugger glared and asked, seriously?

And yeah, seriously. So, after a brief false start (one more person left and so two six-game-winners got to playoffs) we started the first three-game round of playoffs. Which were not required to include the Dungeons and Dragons game, fortunately, as it started suffering some mechanical problem that took it out of action for several hours. I quipped to RLM about how could anyone foresee it being impossible to get a group together to play Dungeons and Dragons, a crack bunnyhugger liked and that we think other people didn't understand. In RLM's case, possibly because of trying to manage a crazy huge tournament threatening to run forever.

I squeaked through the first round, despite the person picking games choosing Baby Pac-Man, the video game/pinball hybrid that RLM keeps in these tournaments because a couple people who like it really like it, wrongly. This one I got second place in, though, thanks in part to getting some tips and a basic strategy guide after complaining about the game last week on Mastodon. Also in getting lucky; two of the players were in striking distance of my score but blew it in the video game portion.

Still, between that and a win on Captain Fantastic --- an Elton John-themed electromechanical, and on which two of us broke the 100,000-point barrier, I made it into the second round, with only two rounds to come after that. The second round saw me thrown into the briar patch of Genesis, where I resumed my usual winning ways on it to put up more than two million points. Which took only second place because player one somehow managed to put up three million points, the rotter. But between second places on Genesis and Flash Gordon I was about where I want to be. If you land second place in every game you're all but guaranteed to move on in this format.

All the more exciting, the four of us had split the standings the first two games so that everyone could plausibly move on, making the last game as meaningful as possible. We played Alien, for my second time that night, and while I was as good at finding the shots as I had been earlier when I put up a high score table-worthy game, I couldn't play the modes worth anything. I got third place, just short of moving on. I would finish the night in a tie for 17th place of the 64 competitors and you know, I was good with that. Besides, it was already 1:30 am and we wanted to get some food and go home.

Once home we discovered that bunnyhugger had left her purse, with her wallet, her house and car keys, and her Switch, behind. I called RLM who was of course still there and established that the purse was there, and the other guy we knew from Lansing was not, and no, he wasn't figuring on happening to pass through Lansing in the next couple days. So, Saturday, I drove back, picked it up, congratulated RLM on having had such an insane event (he finished in second place), and caught up on a bunch of podcasts that had been clogging up my iPod. So all's well.

Next week's tournament probably won't be so massively overpopulated. But we all thought the 55 people at the tournament week-after-state-championship wasn't likely to be repeated either, so, who knows?

You know what is well, though, and known? More Dollywood, finishing the train ride.

Here we certainly are circling the Country Fair section; their elevated swings ride in the background. I don't know how serious the Yard Limit sign is, but there is a maintenance shed near there.

There it is! They have a second engine for the train, which wasn't running during our visit.

Here's that soap-bubbles Roadside Attraction, seen from behind. Also again seen without bubbles.

And we're done! We're off the train here. I forget what this building is, but it's pleasant-looking. Might be a small performance space.

Here's the Country Fair carousel, lit at the wrong exposure value for the circumstances.

Got that fixed. Here's the carousel again.

Trivia: Benjamin Livermore's mid-19th-century typewriter had only a half-dozen keys, each of which produced a straight line, with the superimposition of impressions used to build up each letter. Source: The Wonderful Writing Machine, Bruce Bliven Jr. Which, you know, that is an ingenious way to solve the problem of getting all the shapes you need without a too-complicated key mechanism and just imagine what computing would be like if that had been the system we settled on. There is something Apple Newton Handreader-like to its production though.

Currently Reading: Why War?, Richard Overy.

bunnyhugger in the first round of playoffs. She was put in a group of four for your classic PAPA-style playoff, three games and the top two point-getters moving on to the next round. (Winning a game got you four points, second place two points, third place one point, last place zero points.) One of the players, ALX, is new to tournament play --- the International Flipper Pinball Association doesn't list him having anything before four weeks ago --- and, must admit, he looked it. The other players in her group were MEW and AES, women she who intimidate her or worse, get in her head.

MEW has over the last year become a power player, making it into state finals in open and winning or coming in highly in a lot of high-value tournaments. AES, a more average player, meanwhile bunnyhugger feels beats her all the time. This is the power of selective memory: according to their IFPA records, they've been trading off the higher finish in both open and women's only tournaments with remarkable consistency. The last time either of them finished higher than the other two tournaments in a row was January-February 2024. Admittedly, AES finished higher both times.

So. MEW had the pick of all three games. First one was Jim Henson's Labyrinth and, as it was playoffs, RLM started up the live-stream to share with the public. MEW often commentates on these streams so perhaps for that, or perhaps to show off the new Labyrinth, RLM put the stream on that game. Nobody knows much about Labyrinth; it's from a boutique manufacturer and as often happens the grammar of the game is all weird. MEW either knows something or got lucky as she put up 35 million points, an easy win. But bunnyhugger put up six million points for a safe second.

MEW's next choice was Space Shuttle, the solid-state game that saved Williams Pinball in the 80s. Here MEW's usually deft touch failed her and she bottomoed out, coming in last and giving ALX his only point of the round. But AES had two great and one okay balls, taking the win. bunnyhugger took second place again. She would move on if she beat MEW, or if she finished at least one position ahead of AES.

The game: Getaway, luckily a game she knows and likes well enough and that she's played well several times that night, including in head-to-head competition. It also plays enough like the specific table at our local hipster bar that her reflexes are basically right for it. (Not perfectly. The other players all used this trick of letting the ball drain right away and let the ball save launch it back; this is a way to make progress to the next gear. Our home game has historically always had too short a ball save period for this --- it was pretty near useless --- so we would never try that.) She had a solid first ball that left her, MEW, and AES pretty near tied for the lead. (Poor ALX was outclassed.) MEW blew up the second ball, and the third, finishing well over 200 million points. But AES finished her last ball at only about 77 million, and bunnyhugger at 55 million could fairly reliably catch that, and have to do a playoff against AES to move on to the next round.

But, and to the shock of the commenters first and then us sitting around the table watching the stream a few seconds later, her last ball saw what should have been a shot up the left orbit to start multiball fail, and ping out of play, leaving her in third place. She was knocked out and AES took a second win in a row against bunnyhugger.

She cursed out her bad play, of course, but the fact is there really wasn't any bad play. The worst you can say is her second ball on Getaway was almost a house ball, but that happens to everyone sometimes. And she might have been better off, that third ball, shooting the Supercharger, which would have given her only something like eight million points but still, that's a good bit of the gap she needed to make up, and it's always easier to play when the gap you're trying to make up is smaller.

MEW would be knocked out the next round. AES just squeaked through the next, winning a tiebreaker to make it to the third and final round. She didn't win --- RLM did, with DOM taking second --- but, well, maybe next time. Just getting into playoffs is good, getting through a round would be great, getting into finals would have her well-set for the year to come. We'll see what happens.

The drive home was slow, partly because she accidentally left her travel mug behind and we had to return for it. But also because the snow had arrived, and it wasn't extremely heavy but the roads were slow --- I felt comfortable at about 45-50 miles per hour the whole ride home on normally 70 mph Interstates --- and now and then someone passed us, sending my windshield too near a whiteout for my liking. bunnyhugger's too. Had the forecast been clear that this would be the driving conditions, we likely wouldn't have set out.

Next Friday RLM's supposed to have the Dungeons and Dragons launch party, which is supposed to highlight the new game in the tournament in some way. It seems optimistic to suppose they'll be able to get everyone together to play Dungeons and Dragons the same night.

Now please enjoy some more pictures from the Wildwood Grove area of Dollywood, only this time by day.

Here's a view of the Big Bear Mountain tracks, seen from beneath a waterfall that runs (was built?) in front of them. Somewhere way past that is track for the train, too.

And now here ... well, in back you see the twists of the Big Bear Mountain coaster. But what about this little track in front? Are you thinking, as we were, Moose! Moose! Moose on the Loose?

Your thinking is correct! Much like at Darien Lake and at Festyland they have a steeplechase-style track with a single-rider car, in this case with a bear theme. It doesn't share as relentless a string of puns and recitations of ``Moose! Moose! Moose on the Loose!' as the ride at Darien Lake does, but the ride operator who sees you on the return has several good lines to toss at you.

Here's the station, with a bear ready for me to go out and you can see a bear coming around a curve returning someone. There's a lot of nice little scenes to look at along the way; it's a scenic ride, not a thrill one.

Then, here's a bunch of hoppy frogs. I bet this would have been one of my favorite rides as a kid.

From Wildwood Grove you get this view of both the Mystery Mine up front and the Wild Eagle coaster, behind.

Trivia: When Iowa applied for territorial status (granted in 1838) it sought a re-surveying of the border with Missouri, which had been intended (and was specified in the Missouri constitution) to run on the ``parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the river Des Moines'', but which as surveyed (in 1816) had curved northward on the east end (along the Des Moines river). Furthermore, there are no rapids in the Des Moines river. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled (in 1849) that there was no way to know what was meant by the Des Moines rapids but the curved line had been recognized as the border for so long that it should stay as that.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 53: Pturkey Island, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Last night we made our return to RLM Amusements for one of their weekly tournaments. We hadn't been able to get there a couple weeks running, because of other committments, but this looked like a perfect chance except for the winter storm advisory. A storm that would be starting in earnest around 11 pm would drop three to five inches on us and a similar amount on Grand Rapids, out where RLM Amusements is. However, as the week went on, the forecast snow kept starting later and later, and with a forecast of the snow not reaching a 50% chance of starting before 11 pm it seemed like maybe it'd be okay to go after all?

As with the previous time, qualifying was fourteen head-to-head matches between a randomly drawn pair who hadn't played each other before and on a randomly drawn machine. bunnyhugger and I both took losses our first round, an annoying start. But after that? I settled into a nice little winning streak, taking four wins in a row against players who, must be admitted, weren't playing very well. But that's all right, since a convincing win counts as much as a squeaker does, and I wasn't putting up very good games anyway, except for one Iron Maiden that I managed to pull out at the end. For a while, I was sitting on top of the rankings and though, wow, even if I just play 50/50 the rest of the night I'm a shoe-in for the playoffs.

Dear reader, I did not play 50/50 for the rest of the night. I lost the next five rounds in a row. I began to make a comeback, with wins on Jim Henson's Labyrinth (not his personal game, understand; the pinball machine just entered production last year) and on Genesis. That Genesis, though ... now, the weird mid-80s Gottlieb game Genesis is one of my pocket games, something I can almost always pull out a win on, and something I play extremely well. While I did win, it was not a good win; it was a bare minimum win, squeaking it out at something like 250,000 points, and if I can't put up 300,000 on Genesis you know I'm playing rotten.

Next round I was put on Baby Pac-Man, the weird hybrid pinball and video game and I got stuck against someone who kind of knew how to play; he managed to clear one whole board of the video game which is astounding. (Baby Pac-Man's maze does not have energizer pellets unless you do well enough on some deadly shots in the pinball game, and the monsters --- and Baby Pac --- all move faster so the maze is very challenging.) And, like, all the points of the game are in clearing mazes; the pinball is good for getting energizers and fruits, useless unless you gather them in the video game. I managed what was probably my best-ever Baby Pac-Man game, clearing like three-quarters of a board, and that might have beaten anyone except this guy who somehow knows how to play it.

And then my last round --- moot, as I had too few wins to make the playoffs --- was a loss, and on Torpedo Alley, a late-solid-state game I usually don't have three instant drains on.

What of bunnyhugger, after her first-round loss? I plan to tell you of that tomorrow.

Today, though, I plan to show you some more Dollywood pictures. Tomorrow too.

I assume that, this being February and me being in Michigan, texting DWPARK to 41274 won't get me any special offers anyway. But it's nice of them to invite me. Kids, this is what we used before there were QR codes on amusement park signs.

Looking up at the Firechaser Express launch station. I'm sorry not to have waited for the train launching. Still, this picture more than anything else loks like a screen grab from Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Your average walkway at Dollywood. Note how hard the misting spray is working to cool down anyone, because it was somewhere like 180 Fahrenheit out there.

Now here's that giant metal eagle statue previously seen by night.

Another angle on that eagle; it's quite broad and a natural thing for people to photograph themselves in front of.

I think I took about this same photograph by night before of Wild Eagle and of the Firechaser Express station from the other side.

Trivia: A 1523 decree issued at Nuremberg complained that over a hundred tons of ginger and two thousand tons of pepper had come into Germany from Lison alone, and that ``the king of Portugal, with spices under his control, has set ... prices as he will, because at no manner of dearness will they rest unsold among Germans''. Source: Food in History, Reay Tannahill. Tannahill doesn't say if the decree specified what time frame this was in, but it can't have been more than a quarter-century since the first Portuguese expedition reached India.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 53: Pturkey Island, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.