2015 Jan 18 | Arcade Expo

Ogii's sister gave us this calendar for Christmas. It's quite funny.

They're picking up all of the Christmas trees and other crap on the sidewalk.

Amp rocket on a Tesla.

I opened up my BIO charger to see if I could see why it wasn't charging, but everything looks fine. I mailed it off to them and they said it was the power supply and would be $80 to fix. I'm sure I could find a cheaper power supply somewhere else, but it might not have the correct connection or something, so I guess it's safer to have them replace it.

Ooh, I love carrot cake, and this is a huge one for $8 instead of the usual $26. However, it's in the "expires today" section, and I'm not going anywhere that I could take it and have other people eat it, so I guess I'll leave it here for someone else.

Usually the self-checkouts on this side, 9, 10, 11, and 12, are open; this time the ones on the other side are. I wonder if there's a reason they switched it.

A young male hummingbird. It's a bit hard to see when he's looking up...

... but when he looks down, you can see the red on his throat.

This red head is pretty aggressive.

It's crazy how their wings can do that.

Two males on the same feeder.

I haven't seen this guy before.

We taped over the holes that face away from us because otherwise the birds hide on the opposide side and we can't see them. We figure if we're feeding them we should be able to watch.

Nobody in line at the post office. That doesn't happen very often.

Some geese at Westlake.

A lot more over there.

Spraying new water in.

Uh oh, you never want to see helicopters hovering above the road in front of you...

... because it means there was a pretty big accident, along with the slowing traffic and the cop flying along the side.

At least we're still moving.

I've never seen this before. They blocked off the highway and had us go over the little median to the exit lanes.

This guy was videotaping or taking pictures. However, he was also driving horribly, while I was at least driving well.

Going across the median. You can see the idiot out of line and trying to get ahead of everyone else.

Lots of fire trucks.

And lots of cops. Apparently a semi caught fire under the bridge and shut everything down.

We ended up driving through this residential area.

And finally back onto the highway.

Mountains and palm trees.

This is so annoying. Dumb Windows 8. I only means I have to type in my password twice, but why?

I caught the cold that's been going around all of southern California. I was going to stop by a pharmacy on the way to work to grab some cough drops, but I figured I'd go to the one at the medical tower instead. Bad choice; they were still closed.

It's pretty easy to rent movies on YouTube now. Sometimes they still have connection problems where it has to pause, but usually it's pretty good.

How can the new ones be cheaper than any of the used ones?

Loaded up on cough drops now.

Out to lunch?

Have to wait for a train every once in a while, but they're usually much shorter than in the Midwest.

There are buses that take people to the casino and back. They are usually in the Asian neighborhoods.

And one going to Vegas.

Kendra brought fresh fruit from her tree to poker.

Kendra went all-in with AK, I called with 56. She hit a king; I hit a straight flush.

Table 1.

Table 2.

The winners. Lisa and I got to heads-up, I had QQ, the flop came 334, we both went all-in, and she had K3 for three of a kind. Then she turned a K for a full house, so she won and I got second. Fun game.

Colton Wicks, one of my classmates, opened up a new optometry office, and it looks awesome.

Hmm, usually when I get to the 5th day, I get a piece of clothing. This time I got 7500 coins.

Maybe they're out of clothing items?

We drove east two hours to Banning for an Arcade Expo. This room had a ton of pinball machines.

And the other was filled with arcade machines. Here is a series of Donkey Kong games.

There were a few others rooms, too, including one for movies.

They had a lot of technicians going around fixing games, too, which was nice.

Some very old pinball machines.

Monster Bash, my favorite pinball.

This was a two-person pinball machine, similar to the plastic one we had as kids, but it wasn't working.

Ogii playing Medieval Madness, which was really fun.

An old shooter.

Tons of arcade games.

Cool painting on the wall.

There was a tournament going on.

Maybe these were for the tournament?

Explaining the rules of the tournament.

This guy was obviously really into the games; he had wrist wraps and gloves.

Four-player Gauntlet.

Three-player Off Road.

Ogii and I playing Karate Champ.

A crossbow game.

A diving gun game.

Aw, Arkanoid is broken.

This was cool. It's like those claw games to grab prizes, except you pick up toy metal cars and put them in the bin.

A multi-player ice hockey game.

An antique.

Hercules, a huge pinball game. People had to reach to hit both flippers at the same time.

This Terminator game was all electronic; the ball and everything else was computerized.

Ooh, I love Sea Wolf. Usually you don't see it with a periscope, though.

Old movie posters.

The Simpsons.

I always hated Q-Bert.

A music-making app for your phone.

Aw, Varkon was down. It's a pinball game inside a videogame, and only 90 units were produced.

I remember playing something like this in high school on the computer.

Always hated Centipede, too.

This woman was recording her game using this little tripod.

A hugely blatant rip-off of Top Gun.

Some of the pinball games had three flippers.

This was the only one I saw with four.

Repairing a game.

A world record from the 80s.

This door was fun.

I always hated the controls on this game; they're so spread out.

I remember playing this in the arcade in high school. Great music.

A bunch of sit-down racers.

I played this on the NES a lot, but I couldn't remember how to do half of the stuff now.

Always loved Frogger.

Another repair.

They had cameras set up so you could watch the games on monitors above the pinball machines.

WAGs (wives and girlfriends) of players. Actually, most of the women were playing, too.

I could never quite get the ball up this left ramp; it was infuriating.

Billy Mitchell, who had many video game high scores including the first perfect score in Pac-Man, was there. I was just standing in this corner and an organizer asked me to take a picture of them with his cell phone. I did, and he kept showing it to everyone and telling them how amazing of a picture it was and how they were going to use it for their official photos.