Archive for June, 2022

Pintastic NE 2022 Day 4 Valley of the Dolls and Balls

Posted: June 30, 2022 by datechguy in fun, pinball, special events
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One of the givens of Pintastic NE 2022 was the popularity of the Toy Story 4 game by Jersey Jack. When I woke up very early on the final day of Pintastic this was confirmed in the free play room.

I stayed in the extra ball room for about 3 hours and joined in several 4 player games of Toy Story 4 during that time. I lost track of time until my stomach reminded me in the middle of a game of Theatre of Magic that I hadn’t eaten so I walked to McDonalds for a sausage biscuit.

When I came back the reason for the vendor room packing up fast the night before was setting up. The previous management of the hotel had doubled booked the weekend and a Doll and Teddy Bear Show was taking place that morning and afternoon in what had been the vendor room.

I went in while they were setting up and talked to one of the dealers

It was quite a contrast between the clientele of the Doll show and Pintastic which was still going on with the ladies tournament in the Southern NH Pinball club room, the free play room and of course the extra ball lounge.

There was a fair selection of dolls and after the show officially started I got permission to go in again and interviewed the promoter:

took some photos

The ladies in those chairs weren’t in a hurry to have their picture taken.

Like Pinball one of the most important persons there was a lady who did repairs, She gave me an interview

One lady who didn’t consent to an interview at this time makes infant dolls in her “reborn nursery” The dolls are so realistic she took to keeping her baby car seat in her vehicle as police kept thinking she had kids in the car without carseats.

But I didn’t spend a lot of time there because the clock was ticking and there was only so much more pinball to play. Before I knew it the time had come to do closing interview with Michael and Emily

They gave all the credit to their excellent team which demonstrated how fast you can pack up a machine and gave some advice on how to do so although the first minute of the video or so was a tad blurry

Talk about someone ripped

At this point there wasn’t much left in the free play room so I headed to the extra ball lounge, most years those machines get moved in here but because of the 2nd show they stayed where they were. I and my son kept playing until that fatal moment that comes during every Pintastic, that sad event where someone taps you on the shoulder saying “last game”.

That’s the moment when it’s time for the final interview of the show speaking to Gabe one more time

So we ended Pintastic not knowing where we would be next year but as I prepared to leave I saw one final sight that brought a smile to my face and caused me to turn on the camera one last time.

That’s how good the Toy Story 4 Pinball Machine was. It was so good that despite 4 machines available to play and the crew being there the whole time, they didn’t get their chance to play the game until the show was over and every other player was gone.

Never be afraid to give voice to your political views

Posted: June 30, 2022 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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It is obvious to everyone that we live in a dangerously polarized political climate.  The left side of the political spectrum has demonstrated a remarkable hostility to anyone expressing political views that conflict with their Marxist ideologies.  All too often progressives. and other leftists, greet individuals espousing different political beliefs with anger, verbal abuse, and even threats of violence.

I have experienced this personally far too many times.  About ten years ago I came out of the closet politically as a Libertarian to my best friend of over twenty years, who is an ultra-liberal, in a public place.  My friend had no problem at that time with my confession.  Another person who overheard our conversation did take extreme offense.  After my friend left, that other person got in my face and berated me about my political views, going as far as to threaten me with violence.  My friendship with my best friend came crashing down several years later, months after we became Facebook friends, because he could not handle me posting my beliefs on social media.  He turned every post I made into an all-out war, full of ugly personal attacks. I never returned the favor because I had no problem with him sharing his political beliefs.

Since then, I have lost many close friends for the same reasons.  A startling number of friendships never got off the ground because they could not tolerate my right-wing beliefs.  This led me to be cautious when I comes to sharing my political beliefs, until I discern that that individual is a fellow right winger.  I have now realized that that was a major mistake.  I let these intolerant liberals intimidate me into silence.

Over the past weekend I was in the middle of a large group of individuals, with mixed political views, when the person behind started bad mouthing Biden.  Thus began a very boisterous political discussion between two outspoken right wingers.  I shared my Libertarian views with my new political comrade.  He agreed with my views because it turns out that he is a fellow Libertarian. 

A woman I knew to be a staunch progressive, who was sitting quite a distance away, approached me with a great many questions.  She really liked what I had said.  It had caused her to reexamine her political belief system.  It may take many more conversations, but she may end up becoming a fellow Libertarian.

I will never hesitate again when it comes to sharing my political beliefs with anyone.

How the NeverTrump Left See Themselves

Posted: June 30, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Yesterday as I was pointing out the collapse of the Jan 6th committee latest tall tale I had an exchange online with a fanatical NeverTrumper who was insisting Trump had been the worst president in history and that had brought the nation to chaos and how ashamed I should be for still backing him.

Now there are plenty of people who make a living pushing this drivel but there are also a lot of people who desperately want and need to believe this, as I put it yesterday:

the people who fancied themselves as the “Resistance” during the Trump Years who will shortly be facing rolling blackouts, who can’t find basic items that were once common, who can’t pay for gas and whose retirement savings have gone away so want this to be true, in fact they need it to be true because the alternative is to acknowledge that they did this to themselves

I suddenly thought of the Classic Movie Stagecoach which launched John Wayne as a Superstar, namely the scene when the passengers run out of ammunition and Hatfield (John Carradine) who joined the stage to offer his protection to Mrs. Mallory (Louise Pratt) realizes he has only one shot left

The left sees itself as Hatfield, willing to pull the trigger on America, willing to justify all of the troubles that the Biden Administration has brought upon us to save the country from the ravages of Trump.

But it goes farther than that. The left lived though the Trump years and their primary complaints during that time were first world problems of being embarrassed by Trump mannerisms and blunt speech. Even the COVID stuff, the real problem came not from Trump but from his mistake of trusting Fauci who used his position to put the country through hell and empower the left while deifying himself.

In short imagine if the attacking apaches in the scene above where in fact just kids playing cowboys outside with cap guns but Hatfield in a panic kills Mrs. Mallory anyway.

That’s where the left is and that is why they will clutch at any straw, any word and statement, no matter how outrageous, no matter how fanciful, no matter how unbelievable about Donald Trump. That’s why there is no public outcry over the imprisonment of Americans held over a year without trial over a trespassing charge.

The moment they drop their pretense of Trump being a monster is the moment they have to acknowledge the reality of what they have done, to the country, to the norms of justice and to themselves. That is the moment that they have to see themselves in the light of truth.

I suspect that for tens of thousands on the left, that sight is simply too much for them and they will pay any price to delay that moment for even one more day.

The Left’s “I So Want it to be True” Caucus

Posted: June 29, 2022 by datechguy in News/opinion
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There are a lot of sad things that the left obsession with Donald Trump and the NeverTrump crew’s obsession with justifying their support of an administration that has brought us from power, prosperity and energy independence to impotence, rescission, shortages of basic items and soon to come rolling blackouts.

But the saddest was seeing people I had once respected looking at yesterdays testimony and acting as if it was the epiphany of a lifetime that proved Donald Trump unfit for office.

The claim itself that the president was grabbing the steering wheel to try to steer his limousine to the capital to join the crowd entering it was patently false on its face as any person who doesn’t get their info from TV movies would know even before word that the secret service was ready to testify that it wasn’t true.

But it didn’t matter, the usual suspects and the NeverTrump crowd were declaring the “bravery” of the witness and that people would “remember where they were” when she testified etc etc etc.

The real comedy was this:

For those who don’t know the “Uncle Gus Show” was a TV show on WMUR Manchester when I was six or seven which had a game were there would be a line of kids who would whisper a message to each other and then compare how it started to how it ended.

That there was a huge build up to this and secrecy around this testimony suggests after the fact that the secrecy was to keep people from laughing her off the stage before the act began.

Now this this was an actual normal congressional committee with proper representation of both sides of the aisle this witness and this testimony would not have made it past the planning stage as the majority would not that it could not stand up to anything resembling scrutiny.

But this is not such a committee, the only two GOP members allowed on it were NeverTrumpers who have been denounced by their own party and neither of who will be serving in the next congress. It’s job was never to produce facts, it had two purposes in mind:

  1. To damage the Trump brand to the point where he would not be a viable 2024 candidate for President
  2. To distract the nation from our current situation and to provide justification for the nevertrump establishment for supporting the conversion of the United States from a prosperous energy independent world power to an impotent nation with an economy in recession, with shortages of basic items from Tampons to Baby formula whose energy situation is so critical that we have to entreat other nations for help

The really sad thing is the people in Washington, in media etc all actually understand that all of this is show and games, because they know that the targets of this drama, the people who fancied themselves as the “Resistance” during the Trump Years who will shortly be facing rolling blackouts, who can’t find basic items that were once common, who can’t pay for gas and whose retirement savings have gone away so want this to be true, in fact they need it to be true because the alternative is to acknowledge that they did this to themselves, cue Niven & Pournelle:

“First we must cross the river,” Benito was saying.  “Do you believe me now when I tell you that you must not attempt to swim it, or even get wet from it, or must you try that too?”

“What happens if I just dive in?”

“Then you will be as you were in the bottle.  Aware and unable to move.  but it will be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and you will be there for all eternity knowing that you put yourself there.”

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Inferno 1976

The alternative to this show for the left is knowing that they put themselves and our country in the mess it’s in. That frankly is too much for them.

Closing thought via instapundit:

 “If the Ds are doing so awesome with the abortion issue, why did they change the news cycle with the bogus Trump steering wheel stupidity?”

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