(no subject)

[stormdog]

It was a long day at my aunt and uncle's house yesterday, spent mostly playing with my uncle's collection of arcade machines. Amont my favorites are a couple of 70's pinball machines and an absoulutely beautiful bowling machine from the mid 60's. I really love the old electromechanics on things like that. Hundreds or thousands of wires arranged like a rat's nest of telephone wires, connecting cities of DC motors, giant capacitors, and many other beautiful antiquated components that bang and spark and clatter... One of his pinball tables, called Bank Shot, has particulary neat sound effects. As the ball careens of the various targets and bumpers, what sound like tubular bells resonate in the air with each contact, and anyone with a good ear could tell that they were not digitized sound effects. These were the real thing. Why doesn't anybody make such neat stuff anymore? I was greatly impressed the amazing sharpness of the two vectored graphics machines he has too, namely Space Wars (which is a perfectly 60's machine, right down to the Kennedy Mission Control style buttons and the bakelite finish) and an Atari one called Battle Zone, which is kinda fun. The picture resolution on Space Wars was phenomonal, and the effects were so crisp and bright... You'll never see that on a color monitor. A black and white one only has one gun to draw the screen with, whereas a color one has to align three, and can never do so quite perfectly. There's just something really neat about the feel of vectored graphics too. It's a really neat change of pace from most stuff out there. My uncle tells me that Space Wars is, in fact, the first ever arcade machine based on vectored graphics, and that Atari ripped off the concept when they produced Asteroids, which he also owns.


My uncle also has a nifty old juke box that he's loaded with a wide selection of 45's, most of which I'm not interested in. I did enjoy playing with it a bit as I played some pool with my brother and his girlfriend. The music did make me wish that wooisme was there to dance with me. We've still never had a chance to dance, a situation that would be nice to remedy sometime. It was a long, mostly uneventful, day, and as a result of my mother not noticing what time it was, we finally left about 11 o' clock at night. I got home and exhaustedly collapsed in bed, from which I finally rose at about 8:30 today, muttering at the buzzing alarm clock that had been going off for half an hour.

I talked to my grandparents a bit, telling them a little about Andrea. I am also clear to go use the forge today, which I'm heading out to do after this... I ate too much, I played on the trampoline, I ogled my uncle's nifty stereo setup, and I missed Andrea. There are times I just ache to be with her. Only four more days now...