Happy actual doctorversary, love, since I got it wrong two days ago.
Another week without missing a day on my humor blog! It's there as a Dreamwidth feed, if you want to follow that, and also on RSS. Run in the past week have been:
- Because The Season Has Come Again, last week's big piece, about baseball.
- In Which I Am Failed By My Pop Culture Education as training for a social interaction.
- Statistics Saturday: My Acts Of Passive Aggression which is more precise than I figured going in.
- What's Going On In Alley Oop? January - April 2017 It's mind-controlling pantsless frog-plant aliens versus dinosaurs; Who! Will! Win?
- Sorry For The Late Notice and you missed it but Lansing wanted something.
- In Which I'm Briefly Written By Paul Rhymer as I read stuff out loud.
- Something Else I Discovered In The Local Alt-Weekly or there's not enough band names out there.
- From The April 2017 Scraps File, this week's big piece, stuff you can use to write your own stuff.
Back to Pinburgh, and Sunday, a chance for a lot of wandering around and not doing anything particular.
Backglass for Gottlieb's 1966 Mayfair, an electromechanical game that hoped to piggyback on how the kids could not get enough of My Fair Lady. The game was also released in a version that gave extra balls instead of replays, named Hyde Park.
Merch tables! Besides admiring the pinball and video game machines you could buy stuff for your pinball and video game machines. Or other nerd-culture stuff. I don't know that these folks were actually selling their Hi-C stock or if that was just so they had something to keep them going.
Backglass for Gottlieb's 1967 Super Score, the pinball-themed game that avoids being an infinite recursion. But you know they were thinking about it. Mostly I admire the cleverness of the score reels. The four-player version loses that, in favor of another level of recursion.
``How am I supposed to let people know we're making this game in 1978?'' Williams's Disco Fever is one of two released games made with these curved ``banana'' flippers, which hold and fling the ball kind of like jai alai paddles. The flipper feeling is weird, but I think a good weird, and I think it's a shame more games haven't tried them. You get a different kind of control to the shooting.
Attack From The Back! 
bunny_hugger delights in one of the modded pinball games, an Attack From Mars played with flippers hooked up to the top. She's still irked that she had a slightly better-than-average game on it. The strangest thing about playing the game this way: trying to nudge the machine even though when you'd want to the ball is hopelessly far away from you, closer to the fulcrum of your nudge, so your efforts are inherently futile.
Mortal Kombat ripoff named Tattoo Assassins that caught my eye with its wonderfully goofy character biographies. The game, based on a concept about magic living tattoo ink (from the screenwriter for Back To The Future), never went into production and it's not clear how many of the prototypes still exist. The Professional and Amateur Pinball Association is believed to have two of them, so this might be legit. Anyway. Read everything you can about it, because it's one of those fiascos that just keeps giving. Not sure? The game has a Nancy Kerrigan expy. Also Hanna, who was ``a world class strip club dancer until a deranged killer'' and I'm sorry but what is the precise skill which differentiates a world-class strip club dancer from the merely very good strip club dancer? Plus they seem to have invented animalities and actually done nudalities. And that's not even counting the 90s Cyber stuff and the stuff that would be racist if it weren't so goofy and probably really is racist in that ``what, were we supposed to think?'' 80s-movie style.
Trivia: The word ``stamina'' is first recorded in a letter Jonathan Swift wrote to Irish dramatist Richard B Sheridan: ``I indeed think her stamina could not last much longer, when I saw she could take no nourishment''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.
Currently Reading: The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radial Right in France, William D Irvine.
PS: Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 8: Introducing Stability, getting back into the swing of this series.