Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/23/arcade-introduces-hands-free-pinball-as-covid-precaution.html
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Who has the same kind of reflexes in their feet as their hands?
I love over-engineered solutions as much as the next mutant, but maybe next time: box of disposable gloves?
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Yeah, Now about that air in the enclosed space issue…
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Our friend Umberto offers a modest proposal:
From Foucalt’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco (USA, 1988):
You don’t play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it’s swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine wont’ catch on and say Tilt. You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it’s the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the law of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the partner’s response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one’s own: the Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.
May help prevent COVID, somewhat iffy vs. the clap, problematic with respect to gender.
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Moreover, you can’t play pinball without nudging the machine. A lot of non-pinheads assume this is “cheating” but it isn’t. The legs are engineered to shift and the play fields are designed with this skill in mind. You’ll never be good at pinball until you get good at the art of shoving that machine around without tilting.
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The WSLCB already shut them down. Typical Add a Ball fashion, skirting the rules.
15 minutes from my house. I gotta go check this out!!
I dunno, the over-engineered solution got them free advertisement with the local news, seems like a win to me.
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