i'm ba-aaaack...
Aug. 20th, 2006 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swingchickiefun, FUN long weekend away in pittsburgh. "pittsburgh???" you ask... "why the hell would anyone want to go to pittsburgh on vacation?" for the world pinball championships, biznatches!!!!!
yes, a bunch of us hopped on planes from various parts of the country, and joined people from around the world for a weekend of playing with shiny, blinky boxes that took lots of our money. it was a scream.
first off, since i'm sure you're wondering, YES i competed... you are reading the blog of the 101st-ranked novice pinball player in the world! w00t! not bad for a gal who hasn't played pinball in years!
so, here was the weekend.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shellefly and i hightailed it to pittsburgh on friday afternoon, and were met at the airport by jeremym, who whisked us away to the site of the pinball action. the rest of the team, including xtingu and boutell, had already been there for a day or so, and were already gettin' their pinball on. the place was HUGE -- it's basically a massive warehouse in an industrial area, filled with around 400 pinball machines, that opens once a year from this international tournament. this is just one small corner of the space:
one of the long walls has a row of machines along it, that go chronologically year by year from around 1958 up to today. it's incredibly cool to see how the machines changed year after year. by the time we arrived onsite,boutell had played his way along almost the entire wall, ending up at 2003 (lord of the rings, one of the most popular machines there).
jeremym along the wall
i had to take photos of some of the machines, because they were just so funny...
middle earth!
future spa! (not the boobs busting out of all the gals' outfits... a recurring theme in pinball art)
gay 90's!
this was the competition area for division C, the group i was in. there were 8 or 9 machines for each division, and you picked 5 ahead of time and played those for your score.
dinner was at this funky brewhouse that had once been a huge church:
yes, those are brew tanks up on the altar. hee. this was about as close as i've come to a church in a long, LONG time. several people came over to ask us about our team shirts (flame bowling shirts with "freak base pinball" on the back, and pinball names for each of us -- i was "Tilt"), including the restaurant manager, who was very intrigued:
the pinball celebrities settling in for dinner
saturday was a late bagel breakfast in the morning, and then off to play more pinball!!!!jeremym and i managed to get in one round of competition before joining up with the group to see: snakes on a plane, muthafucka!!!!! oh my god, so funny and campy and ridiculous. i loved it. and i was surprised, there were only a dozen or so people in the theater besides our group. after the movie, it was back to pinball for another couple of hours. the best part, and i swear this made my weekend, was what xtingu revealed to us about the "bride of pinbot" machine... "bride of pinbot" was actually the first pinball machine to have an easter egg! half of us thought she was crazy... you had to do one thing for 45 seconds, another thing for 45 seconds, etc. etc... we were just standing around watching her hold flippers in and do all this stuff, and we were like, "oh, come ON". then all of a sudden, as she started smacking the flippers in time to "old macdonald had a farm", the scoreboard changed and scrolled "EEEEEIIIIIIIEEEEIIIOOOOOOO"... you could have heard our shrieks of glee for miles.
she kept going, and when it got to "and on this farm he had a cow"... the darn thing started (in a very 1970's electronic voice) going "MOO MOO... MOO MOO..."
we were dying. so, that's pretty much it... we played lots of pinball, found the cool easter egg, ate a heck of a lot of not-healthy food (ooh! andxtingu got filmed for an australian pinball documentary), and became internationally-ranked pinball competitors. and i managed to get an earlier flight out, so i can decompress this afternoon before i get back to the grind of work. yay!
team "freak base pinball":
yes, a bunch of us hopped on planes from various parts of the country, and joined people from around the world for a weekend of playing with shiny, blinky boxes that took lots of our money. it was a scream.
first off, since i'm sure you're wondering, YES i competed... you are reading the blog of the 101st-ranked novice pinball player in the world! w00t! not bad for a gal who hasn't played pinball in years!
so, here was the weekend.
shellefly and i hightailed it to pittsburgh on friday afternoon, and were met at the airport by jeremym, who whisked us away to the site of the pinball action. the rest of the team, including xtingu and boutell, had already been there for a day or so, and were already gettin' their pinball on. the place was HUGE -- it's basically a massive warehouse in an industrial area, filled with around 400 pinball machines, that opens once a year from this international tournament. this is just one small corner of the space:one of the long walls has a row of machines along it, that go chronologically year by year from around 1958 up to today. it's incredibly cool to see how the machines changed year after year. by the time we arrived onsite,
boutell had played his way along almost the entire wall, ending up at 2003 (lord of the rings, one of the most popular machines there).jeremym along the walli had to take photos of some of the machines, because they were just so funny...
middle earth!
future spa! (not the boobs busting out of all the gals' outfits... a recurring theme in pinball art)
gay 90's!
this was the competition area for division C, the group i was in. there were 8 or 9 machines for each division, and you picked 5 ahead of time and played those for your score.
dinner was at this funky brewhouse that had once been a huge church:
yes, those are brew tanks up on the altar. hee. this was about as close as i've come to a church in a long, LONG time. several people came over to ask us about our team shirts (flame bowling shirts with "freak base pinball" on the back, and pinball names for each of us -- i was "Tilt"), including the restaurant manager, who was very intrigued:
the pinball celebrities settling in for dinner
saturday was a late bagel breakfast in the morning, and then off to play more pinball!!!!
jeremym and i managed to get in one round of competition before joining up with the group to see: snakes on a plane, muthafucka!!!!! oh my god, so funny and campy and ridiculous. i loved it. and i was surprised, there were only a dozen or so people in the theater besides our group. after the movie, it was back to pinball for another couple of hours. the best part, and i swear this made my weekend, was what xtingu revealed to us about the "bride of pinbot" machine... "bride of pinbot" was actually the first pinball machine to have an easter egg! half of us thought she was crazy... you had to do one thing for 45 seconds, another thing for 45 seconds, etc. etc... we were just standing around watching her hold flippers in and do all this stuff, and we were like, "oh, come ON". then all of a sudden, as she started smacking the flippers in time to "old macdonald had a farm", the scoreboard changed and scrolled "EEEEEIIIIIIIEEEEIIIOOOOOOO"... you could have heard our shrieks of glee for miles.she kept going, and when it got to "and on this farm he had a cow"... the darn thing started (in a very 1970's electronic voice) going "MOO MOO... MOO MOO..."
we were dying. so, that's pretty much it... we played lots of pinball, found the cool easter egg, ate a heck of a lot of not-healthy food (ooh! and
xtingu got filmed for an australian pinball documentary), and became internationally-ranked pinball competitors. and i managed to get an earlier flight out, so i can decompress this afternoon before i get back to the grind of work. yay!team "freak base pinball":
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 08:50 pm (UTC)EVER.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 10:23 pm (UTC)You are quite the glam pinball moll, too, heh.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 10:56 pm (UTC)That team photo is a really wonderful pic of you. Stick it on the dating sites and label it NOT A BOWLING TEAM DAMMIT!
You kicked my ass thoroughly in competition, too. [Shakes fist] Ah'll be bach!
Now if only I'd smiled for this picture... or the guy had managed to press the shutter button on my camera... (:
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:03 am (UTC)i was glad to be there, and i'm psyched you had fun... fly safe tomorrow!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-27 04:13 am (UTC)Some other LJ names for ya:
Dr John, my pinball partner in crime and also in Australian documentaries: =
Chris aka "Hamlet":
His most-excellent belle:
I'm not sure if Jamie has an LJ...
Thanks for posting this!