Kontextmaschine

27th March 2023

Post reblogged from look, okay, these things happen sometimes with 225 notes

You might not be all that surprised that I like pinball. It’s a pointless, fruitless contraption of annoying sounds and bright lights, with a bunch of half-broken metal inside. That’s more or less the crown prosecutor’s description of me from last spring. I heard they spent like a day in a whole-office brainstorming session just to come up with that one, but I digress.
The point of pinball is, like all great human endeavours, to rack up an arbitrary score by playing the game. To this extent, you pay money for a limited number of chances. A better writer than me could make this some sort of metaphor on life itself, but I’m not going to resort to that kind of trickery. No, I want to talk about actual pinball.
Here’s the thing about a game that mostly consists of bouncing a steel ball into stationary objects, which trigger sensors and relays. That stuff breaks down, and it breaks down all the time. Although you may imagine all mechanical objects as existing in a perfect state of repair and a zero-percent-humidity vacuum, the real world is completely filthy. Dirt and hair get into things. Grease reacts with the plastics and becomes some kind of nightmare tar that has to be removed with industrial paint-stripping equipment. Screws pop out. The playfield flakes off and warps. Complex electronics seize up somewhere deep inside and begin to act, in the words of Alan Turing, “fucking haunted.”
So that means that the operator of a pinball machine has to be constantly maintaining it. Keeping an eye on all the bumpers. Being good enough to play it and hit all the features, check to make sure the multi-ball bonus works. This is the kind of thing that I like to do, but unfortunately I was born a couple years too late to become full-time employed maintaining pinball machines across America, driving a $500 Plymouth Barracuda, seeding secret second and third families whenever I find a small town that I particularly liked. Instead, I get to look at my friends’ pinball machines and go: that looks bad. You should replace that part. And then they say: I can’t, because nobody makes that part anymore. And then I spend a year meticulously constructing an exact replica of that part, only for the next thing in line to break.
All this is to say that pinball is keeping me from doing even basic maintenance on my fleet of terrible cars, which I’m sure is appreciated by the citizenry at large. Stick that in your ass and smoke it, Your Worship.

Tagged: pinball can confirm