austin_dern

Now to close out pictures of the Women's International Pinball Tournament, as again, no time to write just now.

Pinburgh championship banners seen from the first floor, near where they keep all the Long Croquet Mallets on the wall.

A break in the action. This might have been lunch or just the time before the scheduled next round.

The waiting area, waiting around.

I went over to this little side balcony where I got an extreme shot of the previous WIPT champion banners.

And over there they had the original King Kong! Hi-Deal is one of Bally's last electromechanical games, but don't worry, it's another collect-the-playing-cards game.

From by Hi-Deal you get this view of the tournament organizers area, with all the people wearing STAFF shirts and plastic crates of stuff.

Here I got up real close to the top-four-finishers plaques and you know what I discovered about how they're held up?

Yeah, it's all done with cans of soda pop! Only the first place finisher gets a Diet Coke, everyone else has to accept Regular Sprite.

This is just side art from a bouncy-ball crane game that, I don't know, there's something appealing even though the kangaroo face was drawn kind of weird.

Disused PAPA call-a-tournament-official-over station; you push the button and they get word that someone should be over. They had a couple of these off hidden behind things. Anyway I don't know what the winged, horned pinball is supposed to mean.

Later in the day the bagels were replaced with lots of popcorn.

And at the venue we saw Labyrinth for the first time, playing it enough to understand there's cool stuff going on here, not enough to understand how to do any of it on purpose.

Trivia: Capcom Gus Grissom gave Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White the go-head for his spacewalk one hour 33 minutes into the flight. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler. They would try opening the hatch at just under four hours into the flight.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 62: WEE vs I.O.U., Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Noelle observes it's the last Tom Sims-penned story so of course it's another college football tale.

I mentioned in passing the Zen Tournament, the traditional end-of-the-pinball-season match where teams of players try to win a double-elimination contest. We had that Tuesday night and once again bunnyhugger and I were a team. The format was, apart from the teams-of-people-playing, the same as we used in league finals, best-of-three matches and a team eliminated only after losing a second round of that.

The surprising thing, especially given we hadn't practiced at all. On our very first game against the team of PCL and DG, Black Knight: Sword of Rage, we lost, but after rallying from an enormous gap, and losing by only a couple hundred thousand points. I felt great for that; bunnyhugger felt the opposite. On Dungeons and Dragons we learned that there was a brand-new code update just that day that made Dragon Multiball, the thing everyone goes for, more difficult to reach. We won anyway but it was luckier than it should have been. We lost on the last game, though, and went into the Second Chance Bracket.

But once there we were we started doing well again. This included some really dominating games of Tron, The Beatles --- I think we had a million points plus on the first ball, and that's where you'd hope to be after two balls --- and in the next round, had a game of Pulp Fiction where we made up a half-million-point gap on one ball. I count myself lucky when I get a half-million points a whole game of Pulp Fiction, never mind on one ball and splitting flipper responsibilities. If that weren't enough we managed to beat the team of DMC and RED --- my pick for the team of destiny here --- in three games, winning on Tales of the Arabian Nights thanks to a killer first ball, and squeaking out a win on Jaws on the bonus of the last ball.

So this put us into finals, against the team of PCL and DG again. They beat us on Godzilla, like we kind of expected, although we didn't do badly. On The Addams Family it took us a little while but we finally got the rhythm of the skill shot, and shooting the ramp, and shooting the chair to start modes and that gave us a very easy win. Then they picked Jurassic Park, which we never play, and rarely play well, and we just couldn't do anything. We even failed to get the T-Rex Multiball started, so the game was a loss. And with that, we lost the tournament, but we got far closer than we were expecting, We should have expected; bunnyhugger had been counting on using down time during the tournament to get some work done so naturally she would have no time.

For the side tournament --- there's always a side tournament --- bunnyhugger brought in her All-American Girl toy machine, The Flip Side, figuring there was no way this could be such a long-playing game as to make the tournament drag on. In this she was correct. She did not foresee the possibility of someone beating her long-held high score on her own table, and while RED did not beat her high score, he came closer than she was comfortable with. We also streamed this on PCL's rig, which was very funny because the rig is set up for a pinball game of normal dimensions, not something small enough for a squirrel to be able to play. I don't know that this is the first time anyone's streamed The Flip Side for an actual sanctioned pinball tournament but it's a rarity at least. So if anyone caught the stream, they got to enjoy that oddness too.

Coming up now on the photo roll: the Women's International Pinball Tournament, the thing we really went to Pittsburgh for. This used to be held the day after Pinburgh finals, but with ... well, there was a revival of Pinburgh. Without the backing of ReplayFX and the dispersed collection of games from PAPA headquarters it can't command the Anthrocon convention center, but after all, the important thing in a tournament is the playing, right? So here's how that looked ...

The new location of Pinburgh! Which we almost drove right past because we ... were expecting some kind of dedicated sports-event facility, not the upper level of a multiplex.

But here it is, the revived Women's Intergalactic Pinball Tournament. Also something held there for the first time, the pre-Pinburgh Bash At The Burgh tournament that we didn't get to.

They had the rights to the name as well as the banners from Previous Pinburgh, including the ones that reflected the 2019 champions that would have debuted at Pinburgh 2020.

And ... there's the venue, the mezzanine level of the multiplex here. You can totally date these photos to this year because there's Yet Another Alien Movie among the posters.

Players warming up. Also filling up, since they provided bagels! If we'd known I probably would still have eaten so many eggs from the hotel breakfast but still, that's nice seeing.

Spanish Eyes! And still featuring its Pinburgh 2019 bank sign, so there's a good chance I played this literal table for something that counts before. Also look at that art; it's a pity that artist didn't do more games.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Friday' was 'Sukravara', honoring Venus and meaning 'bright, resplendent'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 61: King Bee and Queen Bee, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.

While bunnyhugger had her better-but-not-enough second half of the Women's International Pinball Tournament, what was I doing? Milling around some, naturally. Having a little bit of popcorn and regretting I hadn't stashed more bagels or doughnuts while they were out earlier. Movie theater popcorn is nice but, c'mon, you can't make that a meal. Occasionally I even talked to another guy there, agreeing about things like Mystic having great sounds or Whitewater playing well or stuff like that. And then ---

They had a couple brand-new games in the free-play area, ones that had been for the Battle Of The Burgh side tournament or alternate games for New Pinburgh. Among them, Jersey Jack's Toy Story 4, which I got to play enough times to start feeling like I had any idea what the rules are. This served me well next time we went to Marvin's League, as the Marvelous Mechanical Museum has a Toy Story 4 in its lineup. But they also had a real boutique pinball company's lone (to date) game ... Labyrinth, based on the 1980s Studios movie.

Having been a kid and having had cable at least in the back half of the 80s yes, I saw Labyrinth a good number of times. Not so much since then. So all the props and playfield art and the considerable video shown, plus the modes going on, were all vaguely familiar and grew moreso the more I saw them. It did highlight how I need to rewatch Labyrinth sometime, though. I could not play it well, mind you. The game seems like it's designed well enough, I just never got a handle on what to shoot for, or why; cluing people into the rules is very hard on modern games where the different modes keep changing out from under you. (This is also why I wanted time to play Toy Story 4 on free play.) But it feels good, it feels like something I want to play more. Hope somewhere near me gets one.

bunnyhugger would play a couple games of this, after qualifying ended and she was not among the players-off. She too found the game appealing, and beating me a couple times can't have hurt. There was a mode with the Fireys that I got started somehow and that was looking like a lot of fun, that I drained out of too soon. Interested in something more.

I was able to coax her into playing a couple of the other games that I'd liked. Rolling Stones, with its late-70s chimey version of Satisfaction, was also fun and my discovery of how easy it is to get the 1-2-3-4-5 target sequence will surely matter if we ever encounter this in tournament play again. (The game, like many in that era, has a bit where if you build up the bonus enough it resets, not to zero, but to a higher tier of bonus, a touch of rich-get-richer play that you can't help loving when you're rich.) Mystic and its weird haunted music and also sounds lifted from Tri-Zone or Meteor. Some simple fun, while the many-way tie for 16th went on in the tournament area.

We would not stick around for the playoffs. bunnyhugger worried a little bit about looking like a sore loser. But not too much, as she also didn't want to stick around where she felt so disappointed. She offered that we could stay as long as I felt like playing more, but I also felt like I had probably had about enough. Had bunnyhugger made finals, or at least done something like finish on a perfect round so she could end the night feeling good about her performance, I'd probably have felt more like sticking around. But, if I really feel like doing all day at a pay-one-price arcade, hey, there's Brighton, there's Fremont. I could even go to the Sparks museum where the games may cost 50 cents but I can play them pretty long outside tournament play. Plus get bread sticks. We could go.

Briefly we considered getting Starlite admission into Kennywood. But the park expected to be open only to 9 pm, and there was little chance we could get there before 7:30. Never mind; then. We should find something to eat.

And now, it's time to get to the end of the Electric Light Parade. But don't worry, Silver Bells isn't quite finished yet!

There were fewer marching bands than usual --- I think only eight or ten, compared to a dozen in past years --- and they're all hard to photograph, but here's at least some flag-twirlers.

The local Roller Derby teams have merged and so we've lost the Lansing Derby Vixens and the East Lansing Mitten Mavens, which have joined to become just Lansing Roller Derby. Here's the float for the combined team and yes, they should have named themselves the Mitten Vixens or the Vixen Mavens or something good like that instead.

I think these might be some of our Maven Vixens, but I'm not sure.

Cows leading a stairwell of people not looking at cows.

And here's Big Lug, the dragon-ish mascot of the local minor-league baseball team!

Finally the stars of the show arrive, Santa Claus supported by Quaker Martha Washington.

Trivia: In 1950 Lansing State Journal columnist Ted Foster cashed in on the trivia that Detroit used to be in the National League; readers protesting who sent ten or 25 cents in were shown his proof, an 1887 advertising bill by Lansing clothing merchant Charles Broas, which on the back side showed pictures of Detroit players in street dress. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Ceasar. Ceasar doesn't explain how this worked or why it was either 10 cents or 25. But yes, Detroit had a team in the National League from 1881 to 1888, and in 1883 set a Major League Baseball record for surrendering the most runs in a single inning (18), to the Chicago team.

Currently Reading: Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, Kim Todd.

So what was I doing, while bunnyhugger got more angry at the idea of pinball? Mostly puttering around. The whole mezzanine had tables on free play, apart from the designated tournament areas, so I could wander around and look at them. Occasionally agree with some other guy who was there that this was a heck of a table. Some of them were ones I knew well from tournaments or pinball museums, such as Quicksilver, this lovely liquid-goopy-character-based early solid state game. Or the early-solid-state Rolling Stones, which plays these lovely tinny early-synthesizer versions of a couple pre-1980 Rolling Stones tunes. This is one that I had played a couple times in past tournaments without ever getting a handle on; here, I could, and discovered it's actually pretty fun. The real key is collecting five stars and repeating, which can give you an extra ball, which is victory in a game of that era.

They also had a Mystic, the magic/tic-tac-toe-themed early solid state that's always an agent of chaos at Fremont pinball events. This one played a tiny bit different from the one AJH had, but not very much. The important thing is it had its sound turned up high enough that I could hear how many things in the game produce nice spooky sound effects. It's not a completely different game but it is a fun addition. Whenever we get to Fremont next I'll be sure to ask AJH when he's getting the sound fixed on Mystic. He'll be very happy to have me drop in and make demands like that, I can tell you!

I also discovered Cleopatra, one of those games made at the electromechanical/solid-state transition (they had the solid-state version) and High-Hand, a King Kong-themed electromechanical that apparently I could play all day, given the chance. I was a little sad not to have played in New Pinburgh, if the games I was putting up on these were any guide. But everybody plays great games when they don't count for anything.

And there's another special game, but I'll save that for a little later.

When the lunch break came we had the choice of what to do for lunch. The bagels and doughnuts from breakfast had been cleared away, replaced with popcorn. I suppose we could have gotten something to eat at the movie theater concession stand, but we figured we could probably do better. The question was where. There was a taco place we considered --- more on that anon too --- but we figured that was too far away to get there, get food, eat, and get back.

So instead we drove to a Sheetz, filling up on gas that was cheaper than what we would get back home. And learning how they've changed their deli counter ordering system since Covid-19. I don't like having to deal with giant ordering screens for everything --- they seem too much like an attempt to even further divorce customers from the people who do the work for them --- but they are much better than those video menus that keep refreshing the screen away from what you were trying to read, and they do make it easy to find the not-boring vegetarian options. So we got good sandwiches or wraps or whatever (it's been weeks, does it matter what it really was?) and drove back to the Rezzanine.

We lost the excellent parking space we'd gotten by being there at 9:45 in the morning or whatever it was. We ended up taking a parking spot to the side of the movie theater, near where some driving school --- or schools --- had set up some traffic cones for people to practice parallel parking. While we got ourselves organized we watched more people park near us --- the lot was empty when I pulled in, I swear --- and traffic students doing their best to parallel park, the nervous ones clearly reassuring themselves only by the thought that nobody was watching them and making comments about when they blew their attempt.

And before reentering I tried without success to reassure bunnyhugger that nobody thought she was a bad player (they certainly did not) and that the tournament was not lost yet. I hadn't looked up the standings but I promised her that one good round would put her back into contention. As it turns out, had she managed to have a perfect round four --- three first-place finishes, nine wins --- and nothing else changed, she would have ... been bounced into a tie for 18th place, just below the cutoff of top 16 players going to finals. I think that counts as being in contention, but reasonable people might disagree.

Back now to the Silver Bells parade of lights. Ready for some very exciting lights?

OK, these are only moderately exciting lights, but still, the garbage truck people make some nice displays.

And here is everyone's favorite, the Petoskey Stell Drum Band! Two levels of lots of people playing steel drums on a rocking truck.

This thing started as just a high school band director up in Petoskey getting really into steel drums and turning it into a thing.

You may notice the aspect ratio on these pictures is weird and that's because these are stills from the movie I took. I'd share the movie but Livejournal doesn't make that easy, at least not yet, and I'm making Livejournal pay for my photo repository.

I wonder what they do in the non-Christmas season.

Person here looking at the Petoskey Steel Drum Band moving on, wondering if he'll know joy again before next Silver Bells. We may hope.

Trivia: In 1760 parts of Rhode Island's South County --- today's Washington County --- the southwestern part of the state with large sheep and dairy farms using a plantation system --- were one-sixth enslaved persons. Source: Rhode Island: A History, William G McLoughlin.

Currently Reading: The Oregon Trail: Yesterday and Today, William E Hill.

That's a fair description of Kennywood. Sunday we got up, in time to stuff plates full at the hotel breakfastery. The goal: the Women's International Pinball Tournament, at whatever the ``Rezzanine Esports Facility'' was. We had the choice to go there Saturday and at least scout it out, but Kennywood was more important, and it's not likely there would have been many --- any? --- tables for the WIPT tournament that wouldn't be used for New Pinburgh finals or the Bash At The Burgh side tournament. bunnyhugger was going in cold.

I don't know what you imagine the Rezzanine might be. I was guessing, oh, probably a warehouse or something like that, maybe (like AJH's place in Fremont) a former business turned into a pinball arcade. No. The key is in letters after that R: this was the mezzanine of a movie theater. So along the way I learned there's a Lion King prequel, a Beetlejuice sequel, a Harold and the Purple Crayon movie, and a Wicked movie coming out. Who knew?

Hanging over the edge of the balcony were things I'd imagined I wouldn't see again, the huge banners proclaiming Pinburgh champions from 2011 (Keith Elwin) through to 2019 (Keith Elwin). Also the banners with the winners of the first two WIPT tournaments (Nicole Bernier and Holly Koskinen). Also a banner in memory of Lyman F Sheats, who wrote the ruleset for whatever your favorite pinball game is, and died of suicide in early 2022. Pretty much every pinball organization has made some gesture of respect and call for mental health awareness in memorial.

We got there not quite the moment the doors open, but comfortably ahead of the designated hour bunnyhugger had to check in. The line wound its way up the stairs to the entrance of the mezzanine and I accidentally cheated by not paying the spectator entry fee. Didn't know there was one. I made good after the crowd died down a little. As part of her registration and check-in bunnyhugger got a swag bag, her second tote bag full of random pinball stuff this year. Among the things was a Pinburgh 2019 t-shirt, I assume leftover stock. Other people got other t-shirts, all ones that I guess clean out the storage locker.

Arranged along the mezzanine were several rows of pinball machines, banks of three games each reorganized from New Pinburgh's banks of four. This did mean the slightly awkward case that most banks stretched across two rows. There were also a good number of games in the free play area where onlookers like me could play. Some of them, I now know, had been part of the Bash at the Burgh side tournament. Some were left over even past that, I assume the games that could have been played had we been there the day before. Many of them were familiar from Pinburgh or ReplayFX. At least one --- Spanish Eyes --- even still had a Pinburgh 2019 sign on it, so I know I played that during the free play times.

Most shocking discovery: that there was never a FunHouse in the tournament. FunHouse is a maintenance nightmare --- Rudy's head is complicated and always breaking --- but it's also, in many ways, The pinball game. also startling is that there were ultimately only eight banks, plus two backup banks. With only 64 players registered --- and only 63 attending; people on the waiting list missed a chance --- they wouldn't need more. Even New Pinburgh had only had 12 banks (plus three backups), which gave me the sense that the whole thing was very small. But going from a convention that occupied the Anthrocon Convention Center down to the upper level of a movieplex could not help feeling small.

Also they had breakfast. Bagels and doughnuts, mostly, plus coffee. If there was tea I didn't figure it out. There might have been orange juice or milk too; wasn't looking. If we had known we might have made different choices in what to stuff our plates with at the hotel. Probably not, though; I'll take as many cold hard-boiled eggs as you'll let me get away with.

That's the setting, though. How the tournament went I intend to start telling you tomorrow.

For now, in my photo roll, we're up to mid-November last year and so ... Silver Bells in the City! A parade and everything! Did this one get destroyed by a hilarious fast-moving squall? Just wait and see or remember what I already reported about this.

Our path to the parade went through the Lansing City Center, where they had a couple reindeer on display to be baffled by screaming children! You can almost see the nearer one wondering how it's come to this.

Reindeer has definitely figured out the escape route here and is just waiting to implement it.

And now to our waiting spot to be cold and see things pass in front of us! Here, behind, is the City Hall and the booth where the TV people broadcast from.

And here's the reviewing stand where the Mayor and the Guests of Honor and other dignitaries would sit, where there's heat.

And here's the camera on the boom and the state capitol, everything set up to pass in front of us in a not-bad spot where things would be obstructed only in my photographs.

Camera operator here looks strikingly like a guy whom I know used to be a local-news camera operator, but that guy is older and in Seattle so it's just something in local-news camera operator life that makes people converge on a type, I guess.

Trivia: Promethium --- one of the artificial elements, number 61 --- was first (definitely) synthesized in 1945 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The synthesis was not announced for another two years, when the research team (Jacob Marinsky, Lawrence Glendenin, Charles Coryell) had finished their uranium work. Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements, Sam Kean.

Currently Reading: The Oregon Trail: Yesterday and Today, William E Hill.

Among the many things we lost to Covid-19 was Pinburgh, the center of the pinball calendar, greatest contest in the world. It ran as an adjunct to the ReplayFX convention, and alongside Pinburgh ran several side tournaments, the Intergalactic Pinball Tournament and the Women's International Pinball Tournament. The vast collection of the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association was broken up and sold off. It happens a friend who was tech for PAPA lost his job in that too.

But ... the Pittsburgh Pinball, this year, got permission from the dormant Replay Foundation to host a Pinburgh tournament. This would not be the tournament that would have been in 2020, with over a thousand players occupying Pittsburgh's Anthrocon Convention Center. It would be a smaller thing, held at something called ``Rezzanine Esports'' in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, with a mere 144 players buying tickets that were triple? Something like that? the price of Pinburgh 2020. They still sold out in nanoseconds.

But also revived were the Intergalactic --- now dubbed the Bash at the Burgh for reasons not known to me at this time --- and the Women's International Pinball Tournament. I, like many, was skeptical of this revived Pinburgh and wanted, well, to see it succeed but not so much to lay out that much cash. Similarly for the Bash at the Burgh which, following Intergalactic rules, would be playing only a couple of games and then finding out everybody else did much better than me. Not worth going all the way to Pittsburgh for.

But the Women's tournament ... now that would be, as it had been, Pinburgh-esque, six rounds of playing banks of three games each (an electromechanical, a solid-state, and a modern game each), plus finals. And the price was more reasonable. I wouldn't be playing, of course, but bunnyhugger? That could be fun. It might have some of the thrill of Pinburgh back. And it would be a good excuse to visit Kennywood again, something we never need much coaxing to do.

All I would need is to take a Monday off from work, as there's no driving back Sunday night and my going into the home office at 8 am the day after. This would make a short week, as I'd already planned at the end to take time off for my family gettogether, but that's all right. We can have short weeks too. (Happily everything at work was stable enough this wasn't an inconvenience.)

So, three weeks ago Friday, I closed up my work computer, tossed my laptop bag in the car, and tried to check whether there was anything else we might need for the weekend, and we started the big drive down to Pittsburgh. Along the way I learned that my rough idea --- ``take I-80, the Ohio Turnpike until it splits off to, uh, I-71 or whatever it is down to Pittsburgh'' --- did not understand that it's I-80 that splits off the Turnpike, which turns into I-76 to go into Pennsylvania. And my talk of I-71, which bunnyhugger associates with C-------ti, only confused matters. OK, but we do pass I-71, which wends its way up to Cleveland, and that's not far, for our purposes, from where the Turnpike becomes I-76, so there was an element of not-wrongness to my loose idea of how to get there.

We would not be staying in the old Red Roof Inn this time. Too far from wherever the heck Bridgeville is. We hope it's doing all right, but we went to a different hotel from a different chain that was right next to a Dunkin Donuts and a mass of overlapping roads our satellite navigator could never quite figure out, adding a moment of thrill to every moment interacting with I-79. I enjoyed the sleep of a person going to Kennywood in the morning. bunnyhugger had the broken sleep of a person whose partner responds to being woken up and told he's snoring with, ``Yes, I suppose I am'' and then going back to snoring.

(That interaction did not happen this trip, so far as I remember, but it's the sort of thing going on.)

Anyway the important thing is, finally, we're back to a trip report that's about both amusement parks and pinball.

Back now to Bronner's and the wonderland of Christmas there last November:

While Bronner's specializes in Christmas it'll sell ornaments for any holiday it can, and here's some Day of the Dead ornaments. The picture should have been rotated but I accidentally forgot to and I like the composition better this way.

And if we're at the Day of the Dead, Halloween can't be far off, can it? And intermingled some? There's a greenish skull down there that you could probably pass off as Jim Carrey in The Mask, in case you needed for some reason.

Here's your office themed ornaments for people who want a wireless printer that, much like a real one, doesn't print. Note the Wordle ornaments at the top, too.

bunnyhugger spotted a college ornament for the place where she took a couple math classes! Also, this year, a photography course.

You ever run out of beeswax and have none of it for yourself for your Christmas tree? Here's all the beeswax you'll need for that, then, and please enjoy!

There are not so many dragon ornaments as you might imagine given that everybody loves dragons and wants them around, but at least they do have some pudgy green glittery dragons, that's something.

Trivia: After the success of the 1906 Intercalated Olympic Games the Greek government formed organizing committees for both a 1910 and a 1914 games, but conflicts throughout the era kept Greece from being able to do more than make loose plans. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. I'm not clear whether there even was an organizing committee to develop a 1918 games.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, July/August 2024, Editor Sarah Hamilton. Cover article on Pop Tarts!