Whoa.

Week 8 of the pinball league went better than expected. I am still in first place and got a pretty good score, considering I wasn't even there. Jack*Bot was one of my group's games, so my triumphant 4 B point score was counted, and I stole a point for that as well. My group also had Mousin' Around which was a good score, I just barely eked out a win on Skateball, and even my old nemesis Star Trek gave me a second place finish. That plus 4 bonus points (apparently, the match points are considered a virtual fifth machine and a scored accordingly... yoink!) gave me 16 total points out of a maximum (?) of 20. I'm now at #9 out of 19. I guess I'll find out next week if I'm going to move up to Division A or stay in B for the whole season.

The big question is whether my performance of the last few weeks is because of the practicing I've been doing. Honestly, I don't know. I feel like I'm playing better now that I've learned some of the advanced techniques and put a name to some that I already used. And I tried keeping track of my scores when I played at home, but I didn't stick with it so it would be hard to judge from that.

Now I'm getting super antsy to find out how I do in the last two weeks... will I continue doing well? Choke? Become so smug that collapse in on myself and start to burn? Probably it will be some combination of those, but I'm really interested to find out.

On a side note, we also went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was pleasantly surprised by it, because it certainly wasn't what I expected. I guess the filmmakers took advantage of the fact that this was basically an all-talking exposition book to make Harry Potter and the Extended Surreal Tone Poem. The entire movie was like a dream... kind of a nonsensical dream if you haven't read the book, because they had to leave so much out to fit it in 2.5 hours. A pretty bold choice and extremely cool for a big movie franchise... especially since it looks like they intended to do that, as opposed to the second Transformers movie, which apparently is an attempt by Michael Bay to remake Dali & Buñuel's Andalusian Dog with giant robots.