It's only natural

We got up at 7 am Sunday so you know it has to be something significant. Either a day trip to a distant amusement park or a pinball tournament. It wasn't the amusement park.

This would be our first trip to Fremont and what we call the Pinball Points Mine since the end of February, 2020. We met and carpooled the way up there with MWS, who insisted on paying for gas even though we'd planned to go anyway. I worried that I wouldn't remember quite the whole path to Fremont, since it's not anywhere near any highways and the last 45 minutes is all twisty paths on two-lane roads. It turns out after two and a half years of not driving this path I still know it perfectly, although it felt longer than it used to.

We got there about fifteen minutes after the venue opened for the day. We were slowed by avoiding local construction and by a stop at a rest area. We worried about getting to play enough games to qualify for the tournaments, particularly for the finals; the International Flipper Pinball Association wants at most half the people who play a tournament to have a chance for the top spot. (This is one of many measures taken to limit hacking of the rankings.) We didn't need to worry as much as we did. The place was not so busy as we feared --- only a dozen players, counting us, were there --- and somehow all twelve of us qualified. I believe I know what's going on here. AJH and PH, who run the venue as an arcade people can just come in and play at (and rent for events), also ran a ``casual tournament'' the Tuesday before, and I would not be surprised if they encourage people who attend that to also enter scores for the not-casual tournaments, even if they're not likely to attend finals. The locals playing for fun would then give the population count needed for the hardcore players going after points.

bunny_hugger and I --- receiving quite a few smiles and comments about people being glad to see us again --- had resolved to play for fun more than points, though. We don't figure to make state finals this year and are kind of okay with never making them again, really. And we started our play acting like that, too. I opened my first game in years with a last-place finish, and managed a third-place finish the second game when APP didn't get credit for a shot that should have doubled his score. The bug couldn't be replicated, so, it has to be written off as the charm of a physical, mechanical game that sometimes it doesn't give you credit for shots you made. Sometimes the reverse happens: bunny_hugger started to have a great game in Road Show when it started giving phantom hits on a high-value target. But that was a replicable bug and the game had to be pulled, to her regret.

bunny_hugger would not have a good day, by the standings. Mostly third-place finishes, although she was able to get a first-place finish on an electromechanical game against AJH, APP, and JAB, a tough group. And several times she managed to pull her game together on the last ball, going from a last-place finish to a respectable second. Twice she even had a Lazarus ball, one that pops back into play after starting to drain, and she was ready and able to recover from that. Usually when a ball Lazaruses the event is so surprising the player loses it again immediately.

I had a very strange event where I gradually improved over the long, tiring day. My finishes got better, yes, but I don't think it's just that everyone else grew fatigued faster than I did. Like, the final round, we were playing Whirlwind, a brutal late solid-state game, and nevertheless I had a good, solid game. I would end the last tournament in fifth place, of the twelve people playing for finals, and that in a points tie with MWS and AJH. (The tie was broken in their favor as AJH had more first-place finishes than either of us, and MWS had more second-place finishes than I did.)

The format for the tournament had changed from what Fremont used before. Instead of a group playing a round of five (or seven!) games of their choice, we had quartets of people playing two games --- meant to be a more-modern and an older game, although some of the banks didn't manage that --- drawn by the computer. AJH and PH picked the bank format as a way to make game selection and playing less hassle for them to deal with. There were a lot of game breakdowns during the day, though, and a lot of substitutions needed; I'm not sure there was a single round where nothing had any issues. But also, instead of the lowest-performing people being eliminated from a tournament, everyone played every round. This certainly makes the day feel more satisfying, as you don't get the long periods of nothing going on once you've had three bad games and can't move on.

So, I missed whenever it was they announced where tournament standings would be, and I didn't know (though I should have guessed) that bunny_hugger had turned on her phone to be a mobile Wi-Fi spot for us. The result is I went the whole day not actually knowing how well I was doing. I had suspicions, as the rounds went on, based on the caliber of people I was playing. To enter the last round of the day going against AJH, PH, and APP suggested things. I'm not sure if, next time we go, I'll try to stay oblivious to my actual ranking. I'm not sure it made any difference to how I played, but it felt nice just going and playing instead of looking to what might be coming next.

At the end of the day --- as my quartet played really excessively long games of Surf Champ, an electromechanical, and Whirlwind, a brutal solid-state table --- folks asked bunny_hugger if we'd like to go to a nearby bar with them. There are few things we'd like to do less than go to an indoor restaurant right now, really, although that I was still playing made it less weird to say no. Especially as they had to leave now before the bar closed. (The bar had already closed hours earlier, it turned out, and they ended up driving back to Grand Rapids, an hour away, to find a Buffalo Wild Wings that was still open.) So MWS ended up not carpooling back with us, a sad bit as we don't get to hang out with him enough and we'd have really liked to spend even more time going back over everything in the day.

We got home, tired, very tired, a weariness I haven't felt since Pinburgh. It was a good feeling of exhaustion.

I've got more pictures of the Rodents SIG from Anthrohio and you're going to see every one of them! ... Not literally; I'm skipping the blurry ones.

And here's Chitter petting a distant cousin.

Person next to me giving the rat a little attention, now.

And here's a good dramatic pose of the woodchuck.

Trivia: When seized by the British in June 1807 the USS Chesapeake had a crew of 329, plus 52 Marines, a handful of civilians, and several Italian musicians who, homesick, had resigned from the Marine band. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, A J Langguth.

Currently Reading: Archaeological Newshounds: Twelve Years of Pre-Internet Artifacts, Thomas K Dye.