A freakish new way to blog!

I'm typing this using Google's Blogger widget for the Mac. It doesn't look like I can upload pictures or anything, and the typing area is even smaller than the regular Blogger window... so I don't think this will make me a believer. Oh well.

OK, I'm done now. Honestly, I have yet to find anything compelling about widgets. Apple made them out to be this incredible productivity booster, but I'm just not seeing it.

DIA movement will be coming soon. I put the Doctor Who targets up on eBay, and they've both already got bids with less than 24 hours to go.

Just to show that I'm not as completely pussy-whipped as I make myself out to be, I told my wife about the Centaur playfield today. Of course, it helped that when I brought up the subject, her first reaction was horror at the possibility that I'd bought another full game. And since it's the backglass she has a problem with -- she is disgusted by the fact that the titular character has his pubes showing --
my just getting the playfield is probably a relief to her. Strangely enough, she has a problem with Paragon, another Paul Faris game... as an artist, she's offended by the design of Mr. Barbarian Warrior. He has no neck and he has the proportions of a Lord of the Rings-type dwarf. Of course, the backglass never bothered me, since I rarely take my eyes off of Ms. Cowering Barbarian Princess' tits. For the record, from an artistic standpoint my wife likes Quicksilver (that's why she agreed to allow it in the living room), is OK with Mr. Cowboy in EBD and Doctor Who, and had no memory of the Black Knight.

So anyway, some new developments in the Centaur parts saga: As I suspected, repro plastics are available, and Illinois Pinball has the best price at $100 -- they're the guys I bought the DW mini-playfield cam from. PBR probably has the targets, most likely for $4 a piece, which would be a total of $48 -- it would be nice if PBR had this stuff on their web site, but their site sucks dead donkey dicks, so the only way to find out anything is to call them. If they don't have them, there are other guys around the internets that do.

Boy I wish Bally had a parts inventory in their manuals like Williams does. I did sit down with the Fathom and Skateball manuals and found some common parts... but darn it if they don't have a four target bank between them. Fathom does have two sets of three targets with memory, so if I can figure out how to jury-rig the memory coils onto a regular set of four targets, I could get off easily. I'm reasonably certain that SB's five target bank will fit the ORBS targets if I just edit out the center target. Sine SB is almost completely populated, it will probably donate the most surface parts.

Hey, in the last post I mentioned all the games I could think of with inline targets... well, damned if I forgot one that sitting in my basement right now: Eight Ball Deluxe. And Super Duh... I've got a spare partially populated playfield, which includes the inline targets. They're pretty messed up, but the main problem is that the targets have broken off from the base, and I would be replacing the targets anyway.

"This is what I love about pinball restoration," he said facetiously.

Enough about Centaur. Hey, here's two cool things: My correction to IMDB was accepted, and the title of the game is now Spider-man. Hooray! I am a contributor to the community. Second, my curiosity got the best of me and I posted to rgp about the odd state of my Dalek head connectors -- they more pins than the ones in the manual -- but there were apparently too many more interesting posts about people complaining about bad game sellers and telling Pingeek to go to hell, so nobody answered me... until I got a response from Pfutz! That's right, the Davros of the DW pinball game! He pointed me at a link I'd been to in the past but hadn't looked at wrt this problem. I responded with some details about the wiring and a fanboy gush, but there's been no follow ups. When I get some free time -- probably never -- I should activate the Dalek head using the secret setting, run the head test, and see if any of those mystery wires are active.

Not much else... Centaur is going to be kind of a money pit for a while, so I'm going to have to get aggressive about selling some of my spare parts. I'm trying to commit to not buying Centaur parts on credit if I can avoid it, so that means I have to pay back the $400 or so I owe the family before I make any major purchases (like the targets and plastics). We'll see how my boys can swim when the auctions finish tomorrow.