arborelia

I'm watching the VOD of the classic pinball tournament at Free Play Florida, and Escher Lefkoff (#1 pinball player in the world) is doing commentary.

His commentary at one point was "He hit flag 3 and -- well I could talk about the strategy but I assume everybody knows how to play Wizard."

Wizard is a pinball table from 1975 that might be the most complex electromechanical table. I played it a week and a half ago in VPX and I don't know the strategy for Wizard! I certainly don't remember what flag 3 does. Most people know nothing about Wizard at all.

This is a problem you get, I guess, when the #1 player is commentating. There's a view from the top where you just forget what it's like to not know things. But even if the strategy of Wizard were obvious to every viewer -- he should still talk about it. You can just talk about things that people already understand. That's commentary!

I made an MSU pack, but this time it's not one of my packs for ALttP Randomizer -- this one puts music from the Katamari Damacy series into Earthbound PK Scramble, which are tastes that should go great together.

I first made something like this happen by accident, when I loaded my Katamari MSU pack for ALttP in a Mystery Mystery seed that was actually Earthbound. The tracks landed in pretty arbitrary places, and half of them were missing and fell back to the vanilla game's music. It was still great.

Let's see how well it works when I actually try to choose appropriate music for each track. Going live soon with a rando run that tests the pack for the first time:

Every day I have to authorize with Google Cloud or else something I need to do for work will fail. Every day it makes me accept permissions for their cloud stuff to use my work account, as if I've never done this before. And it takes such a long time to authorize that I forget what I was doing.

I watched my browser's URL bar as it was happening. it's logging into so many things. one of them is blogger[.]com. you're telling me that if Blogger went down I wouldn't be able to do a kubernetes

It's 1976 and pinball is legalized!

There's a huge boom in pinball tables from 1976 (and we'll see even more in 1977). So I'll be splitting 1976 into two streams, one of them tonight (Monday) at 8pm Eastern, the second part on Thursday at 8pm.

Notes on particular tables coming up:

• Aztec is the table that my wife @FlannelKat had in her childhood home, she introduced me to it and it rules
• Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (does the full name of this table even appear on it?) is one of my favorite EM tables. It's the second table in the Tommy-verse and also a celebrity-licensed table, featuring Elton John the Pinball Wizard. It's unfortunate that the table artist was an edgy fascism-enjoyer, though.
• Sure Shot is a version of Bank Shot, the table that Roger Sharpe played in a courtroom and made the skill shot that saved pinball
• I'm aware that Canada Dry is just El Dorado with worse rules. Many things are just El Dorado with worse rules. I still need to play the ginger ale table though

VOD for part 1 (Monday):

We're about to see another table from the Tommy expanded universe! Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy is a table where Elton John is the Pinball Wizard. Like he is in the movie version of Tommy, where he sings the song "Pinball Wizard".

He doesn't play Tommy, he's Tommy's opponent singing about Tommy.

In the theme of this table, Elton John has not been dethroned by a magical, traumatized, disabled teen. Maybe it's a prequel. Maybe it's from an alternate world where Tommy had a normal childhood.

Oh, and there's still six other pinball tables too. Silver Ball Century goes live soon (might start a bit late because my boss just pinged me):