Off to PAPA for the Weekend!

Well, Mrs. Entropy and I are heading off to Pittsburgh today for PAPA 14. I'm hoping to actually break into the top tercile of the bottom tier, but we'll see. I did have a bit of existential doubt about whether my nice finish at Pinburgh morally obligates me to compete in the B Division instead of my usual C. I put the question to the FSPA league mailing list, and the response that put be over the edge came from the guy who pasted my ass to the wall with Gorilla Glue on Monday (which caused me to go from 1st to 3rd place in our last night before the finals... nice). To paraphrase him, basically PAPA divisions are bosses, and to level up you need to beat the first boss, in this case C Division. So I've decided that to move on to B Div I should put up a decent showing in C, not this 61st/62st place bullshit I've done the last two years. I've got high hopes: C Division's games this year include Rolling Stones, which has served me well in league this season (with the possible exception of last Monday night); Terminator 2, which of course I own (and got a whopping THREE Super Jackpots on the same ball a few days ago, despite the lamps that indicate where to shoot being out and having to use the lamp column display problem to figure out which of the jackpot lights is lit); and Wheel of Fortune, which I have the high score on at Volleyball House (though to be fair, to this day I have no idea how I scored so high). So as I say every year: We shall see.

And since I've got a theme going here, these are this week's museum repairs: My two undisputed successes are I replaced a broken drop target on Big Bang Bar and I fixed the lamp board on Indiana Jones. Sadly, the drop target was just a blank one I found in the bottom of the cabinet, not one with a decal on it. The IJ lamp board I pulled and took home, fixed and tested in Wednesday night (there were some burned out bulbs, bad connections, and one or two sockets that had broken and needed resoldering), then Zoe Entropy installed it (!!! The issue is following in the footsteps of her sire) Thursday when she went in to work. I glanced at it when I went in for some pre-PAPA practice after work... there are still a few bulbs out, and I'm suspecting they're bad connections at the plug. But the resoldered lamps were working, so you can tell if you've spelled the ENT of ADVENTURE.

I also looked into a "weak kicker" on Safe Cracker. That turned out to be a perfectly good but poorly aimed kicker, which was kicking the ball into a wireform, which caused the ball to rattle back and forth in the lane, slowing it down to the point where it couldn't make it out of its lane, giving the impression of weakness. 50K rgp poster Lloyd T. Olson suggested I bend it slightly to the left to re-aim it, so I'll try that next time I go in (probably NOT next Tuesday, since we have a big project to finish at work and I'll probably be in a post-PAPA pinball funk). While I was in SC I checked a switch it said was bad, which turned out to be a drop target whose spring had come off. I reattached it, and in the process found out how difficult SC is to work on... it's tiny size makes it so everything is packed in so tightly that it's virtually impossible to do anything without taking a bunch of adjacent stuff apart.

And in the Good/Bad Omen Department: When I went in the the museum last night I did some pre-PAPA flipping. Largely sucked, but did get my first Super Jackpot on Creature, and it would have been doubled except that the museum's game only registers 1 letter for each ramp shot instead of the usual two (or three if you're Bowen) so it takes twice as many ramps to spell Creature. Anyway, hopefully that is the foretaste of victory and the crappy other games I played were not the anticipation of suck. Again, we'll see in about 8 hours.