Into the woods

Last Tuesday was another of bunny_hugger's charity pinball tournaments, the Rocket Robin contest. That's become a ``Swiss pairing'' format tournament, which is to say, it tries to be a round-robin tournament. (You're supposed to play the person you haven't played before who has the closest record to your own.) The turnout was low, as sometimes happens; with only thirteen people in we got through eleven rounds. I think the only person I didn't play was bunny_hugger, which is odd as she did play someone twice and we had almost identical standings at the end.

I had low expectations going in, since my head has not been in a good place for competitive pinball since, oh, January of 2020. And it started bad after all, with two losses in a row, and then a win just because the guy I was playing somehow had an even worse game. My fourth round I got drawn on Willy Wonka, that's somehow turned into being both a game I love and one I can play decently; after two lousy balls I put in three-quarters of a million, typically enough to win a match. Then RED went and beat that, all on one ball. I got the lucky draw for a bye the next round --- there were thirteen players --- and then, well, my fortunes changed.

My next playing game was against a guy who'd drifted out of league, and who was having a worse day than I was. On our game --- Scared Stiff --- I finally managed to have a game that went like the virtual pinball game versions do, particularly, hitting this routine where I keep hitting the Crate Multiball jackpot, and went to a win so compelling that my opponent withdrew from the tournament altogether. He'd had five losses in a row (plus one bye) and that was enough. I waited for bunny_hugger to finish her game to report this withdrawal, and finally eventually figured I had time to go to the bathroom, and she finished and started the next round before I could say what happened. So we lost time to figuring out how to tell the game management software what happened. (International Flipper Pinball Association rules say that a player who's in less than half the rounds of the match doesn't count at all in the standings. This guy played five games, but he had a bye one round, so I think he still counts, as we only had eleven rounds. I'm not sure if the bye counts, though.)

Anyway after this, though, I was hot. I kept on winning, including against MWS on Cactus Canyon (there, again, one where it's less that I played better and more that he played worse), and rising from the basement to within range of the top three. The last game of the night, for me, ended up being on Deadpool against MAG. I'd practiced Deadpool a bit before the match, since I was scheduled to play it next league night, and I was feeling good about knowing particularly this one ramp shot that, of course, I couldn't get for love or money in competition. MAG was also having a hard time getting decent play together, and we nudged the machine so far that we're amazed we didn't tilt. Well, finally, he got a decent multiball going, while I couldn't, and he won, and as a result he took one of the three trophies home while I had to be satisfied with just recovering from an awful start.

In the story comics you might wonder What's Going On In Alley Oop? What happened with Leonardo da Vinci? May - July 2022 gets its plot recap here.

So, the photos. The next big thing we went to was the Fairy Tale Festival at the Turner-Dodge House so here's that afternoon, which somehow has about as many pictures as an amusement park trip might? I don't understand it either.

Our draconis personae: bunny_hugger put her dragon costume on to go to the Fairy Tale Festival at the Turner-Dodge House.

And here's the Turner-Dodge house, the first time we've visited it when it wasn't snowy and icy and cold. This might be the first time I've shared a picture from this angle because it was too much work to trudge down the ice and snow on the sidewalk in January.

A bit of castle ruin set up with spooky haunted figures around it.

Many of the props and such were set up by this How-To Halloween event group and they decorate for the part.

Here's bunny_hugger from the back, so you can see how well her outfit fits together.

And here is a swamp dragon, as seen at a previous year's ArtFair.

Trivia: A 1939 book published by the WPA promulgated a history of the Jersey Devil, offhandedly referring to the creature as New Jersey's ``official state demon''. (It made no mention of the political drama behind the original 18th-century stories.) Source: The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster, Brian Regal, Frank J Esposito.

Currently Reading: Water Fun For Everyone, Bernard E Empleton, Prudence Fleming, Fern Yates.