I apologize to dear bunny_hugger but realized way too close to publication that I forgot to write anything today so that explains why I had some unexpected blocks of free time. Here's two days' worth of Dollywood pictures to fill things up, though.

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After nearly a week of licking her wounds from the Michigan Women's State Pinball Tournament, bunny_hugger was thinking ... what might she do? To get a secure position --- and a good seed --- for the women's tournament next year, certainly. But also to feel better about herself as a player?

The obvious answer? Since the end of pandemic closures RLM ( Read more... )

After MEW and the Traverse City players left the player roster at the Michigan Women's State Pinball Championship settled down. I don't believe anyone else left, simplifying the problem of keeping track of who was where in the tournament, and I was better able to keep up with the dwindling number of matches and tracking who was where. The Ypsi ( Read more... )

So, as said Monday, bunny_hugger lost in the first round of playoffs. Of course, half of all the competitors did. The most surprising loss was MEW, who'd gone into the tournament top-seeded --- and who was the first woman since bunny_hugger to make it to the open state championship series --- and whom bunny_hugger had spent much of the drive into Bay City telling me was the ( Read more... )

This week I report on What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Were you playing Star Trek: The Next Generation wrong for thirty years? November 2024 - January 2025 and the question posed there is because I didn't have any better questions about the strip. You know how it is.

I didn't have time to write up more about pinball so please enjoy ( Read more... )

First round! After the delays of getting started and the false start of having to tell people that they were entitled to practice time on the games, eight pairs of women went off to play games and, after two groups came back to ask how the game-picking routine worked again (bunny_hugger had just explained it) they were off. I settled in at bunny_hugger's computer to ( Read more... )

We set up the trophies, the plaque, the rule sheet, the page explaining how game selection works, and the scorecards on the only somewhat tolerably free table near the center of the tournament-play area. Also bunny_hugger's laptop, as that would do the real work of keeping the progress through the match straight.

Problems we didn't see at the start of the ( Read more... )

We set out early, but not horrifically early, Sunday the 19th, the last full day of Weimar America. The weather was never so bad that we had to drive up the night before and find a local hotel, the way we had for the 2019 and 2020 state finals. All that it was, was bitterly cold; I don't think the high for the day was 10 Fahrenheit and it was ( Read more... )

While I was, I think, reasonable in my optimism about bunny_hugger's chances in State Women's Finals, there was a weakness she had. She hadn't any experience on the machines they'd be playing. She hadn't even been to the venue, the Crazy Quarters Arcade in Bay City, before. She had the right to pick any venue she deemed acceptable for the women's ( Read more... )

On my humor blog this week, I got annoyed at WordPress, tried to give some people nostalgic stings of 1980s animated great stupidity, and got all huffy about a comic book even the people who made it wouldn't have remembered while they were making it. If that sounds appealing and you haven't already seen it on your RSS reader, please give one or ( Read more... )