I attended Free Play Florida in Orlando last month and the machine that everyone loved and wanted to play was the new Jersey Jack Harry Potter design. It has a fascinating and frighteningly intricate flow (I can’t imagine it being successfully maintained in an arcade and there were a few stuck balls). The lighting is much brighter and better than on some previous Jersey Jack designs where it is tough to follow the ball without strong ambient room light. The typical attendee was older, male, and white, but there were some kids and also some women (central Florida and, therefore, the nonbinary weren’t strongly represented):
Speaking of nonbinary, if you can overlook J.K. Rowling’s heresy against Science, i.e., her position that there is a distinction to be made between male and female humans, this would be an awesome home machine. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books and I can’t keep the movies straight, but I loved it!
On the flip side of the Jersey Jack world, they also had the Avatar machine. I thought the movie was dumb and the pinball machine is underwhelming. It ranks #32 in the Pinside Top 100 while Harry Potter is near the top (ratings for the CE version). There was never anyone waiting to play either of the two Avatar machines while there was always at least one person waiting to play one of the three Harry Potter machines. Speaking of waiting, there was no official policy but I never saw anyone play more than one game on a machine for which someone was waiting. It seems that in a society with shared values there is no need for an explicit rule. Everyone was super polite!
The Jersey Jack Godfather was also there. Although it is a great and relevant movie (Somalis in Minnesota seem to have been following “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”), its underwhelming #70 ranking on the Pinside Top 100 seems justified.
What else happens when old white guys organize a convention? A classic computer area! Here’s an emulator for the PDP 11/70 that I used in 1978 as a Fortran programmer at NASA:
Lots of classic home computers as well:
And a luggable:
I would love to thank the person who built this enormous skee ball machine with 5-gallon buckets for the slots:
The convention featured pinball tournaments as well as a charity drive for Florida-based Project Pinball, which places and maintains machines in children’s hospitals nationwide. There were a moderate number of classic machines, but various commercial arcades have more and better-maintained collections.
The most unusual video game was this Jubeat rhythm game from Japan. You play against others around the world, I think, and log in using a Tokyo Metro card. The gal playing in this photo is an Orlando local who apparently loves Japan so much that she just happened to have a Tokyo Metro card with her. I played it and learned that I have no rhythm.
After the Sunday 4 pm wind-down for the convention, I zipped over to Celebration, a Disney-designed New Urbanism community. It’s only a few years older than our beloved Abacoa, but it seems uglier except for the lake. Here’s on example of the architecture:
As in our neighborhoods, they decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving:
Some photos of the best that Celebration can look:
In a 15-minute walk, I encountered at least three women covered according to Islamic tradition, so that would make Celebration a better place for finding a Muslim community than Abacoa (I’ve never seen even a hijab, much less a burqa; teenage and adult females in Abacoa may wear short skirts, halter tops, bikinis, and other un-Islamic outfits):
Celebration has a distinctly non-Halal outpost of Tampa’s Columbia Restaurant, founded in 1903. Pork, bacon, and alcohol lurk everywhere on the menu, e.g.,
Finally, Happy Gazpacho Day to those who celebrate!
I’m old enough to remember when they changed the pinball launcher to add a point in arcade machines, so you had an incentive to not slam it forward with your hand to start the ball. (We also drank water out of the vinyl hose back then, youngsters.) Looks like the Jersey Jack Godfather has a horse head for a launcher. I guess that is a bigger incentive to not damage the $12,000 machine. In the ’70s, pinball was so popular that they a movie about it, rather than vice-versa. Remember “Tommy”, by the Who? The Gay Mafia had a presence in that one with Sir Elton and “Pinball Wizard”. A very disturbing rock opera. I liked “Quadrophenia Better”, about quad ’70s quadrophonic stereos, I think. Please don’t bring back 8 track, nostalgists.
We were still using PDP-11s in aerospace in the ’90s, magnetic core memory and all, for telemetry. We didn’t trust WinTel for that task. I didn’t work in a Dot Com company, due to having a real job, but I heard they liked pinball machines in the lobby or break room. CPU manufacturers still work very hard on presenting the ’70s model of the PDP-11 architecture to the C compiler. There have been various projects to emulate the old Lisp machines.
As for Florida, wow you have late fall color. Where is the immigrant blowing leaves, did you crop him out? Also, it looks like some alligator got to Rudolf. “Mommy, is Santa going to come to Florida this year? What if there is fog and they need his shiny nose? Does he have weather radar like daddy?”